Tear down the moldy drywall, tear up the rotting floorboards, strip everything down to bare wood and brick and build anew only on what is structurally sound
It's too hard, it's too expensive, you'd have nowhere to live in the meantime
It'd almost be easier to just burn all of it down and build a new house
Everyone tells themselves they'll fix up the fixer-upper but it's a sucker bet, a money pit, a losing investment throwing good money after bad
Most people just end up living in the rotting moldy house breathing in the stink and the spores until they can Febreze it enough to fob it off on some other desperate sucker
It's all just a scam, in a long chain of scams, an endless search for a greater fool
This world we live in isn't just a fixer-upper that never gets fixed up
It's worse than that, it's the worst case scenario
This is a Grey Gardens hoarder house
This house is filled with garbage that NEVER GETS THROWN OUT
Never mind ripping up the floorboards, the owners of this place never even picked up their trash
There's a thick layer of garbage in every room of this place, old wrappers, dirty dishes, soiled clothes
Everything teems with vermin and stinks of neglect
There's all this fucking STUFF here that was carelessly left here by long-gone precursors for some purpose now long forgotten
Everyone looks at the mess trying RI figure out how much of it is garbage and how much is valuable and gives up in despair
No one ever actually succeeds at even throwing out a little bit of it, much less making good on the promise to organize it all in some rational way
Everyone just gives up and ends up turning into a slob who adds to it
This endless clutter of monuments age memorials and history
I don't know that I actually do worry that if I had kids I'd raise them ignorant of their history
I worry about the exact opposite
If I had kids I almost certainly *would* pass on the legacy of everything that has made me who I am today
And nobody deserves that shit
Whenever I get in a despairing mood I don't think about Thanos-snapping all the *people* away
Almost the opposite
I wish I could wipe all the memory in this goddamn world
Erase all the hard drives, burn all the books, crumble all the statues and paintings to dust
Have everyone wake up innocent dumb animals again, start the process over
They'd probably inevitably recreate all the bullshit sooner rather than later but at least it'd slow it down, at least it'd create the *possibility* of making a different choice
Everyone's so damn worried about "maintaining continuity", all our political talk revolves around our worship of this moldy old shitty piece of paper we refuse to just rip up and throw in the bin
All this talk of the preciousness of "legacy", of the memory of the ancestors
Well shit the cold hard truth of the world is you end up maintaining continuity whether you want to or not
The ancestors will have their way with you, have in fact had their way with you since before you were born, and whether you choose to honor them has no bearing on this fact
Such is life in the world of cause and effect
It's the opposite - the idea of a blank slate, a fresh start, a true revolution - that is truly precious, almost nonexistent
We really are a race of psychotic hoarders
Fantasizing about the nightmare of being out on the streets with nothing - imagine if this house burned down! Imagine how much history would be lost! - while the weight of our accumulated trash threatens to bury us
Can you blame people for getting into doomsday cults and praying for the nukes to go flying
Burning down the house is always an irrational act, sure, and yet when you're looking at years of old newspapers piled high because the last owner thought they "might need them someday"
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The goal of trying to objectively measure competence and put truly competent people in charge of the things they're competent at is called "technocracy", and Nazis fucking despise it
Opposition to technocracy is central to populism and therefore fascism (populism's worst form)
The loose collection of shitty memes that make up this thing we call fascism orbit this gravitational center of "normal people" and "common sense"
The core of the fascist aesthetic is this idea of good, decent, ordinary Americans/Germans/whatever throwing out "elites"
There is absolutely no reason to believe that the process that led to 280k dead so far will slow AT ALL as winter sets in and in fact every reason to believe it will keep on accelerating
Regardless of what happens on Election Day, nothing about this can change until January
It's so bad that even Deborah Birx, who's spent this whole pandemic being as much of a self-preserving job-protecting coward as she possibly can, lost it and started yelling at her bosses about how deadly the next wave is gonna be
Probably falling on her sword uselessly
It's this kind of thing that justifies my lifelong kneejerk emotional dislike of "optimism"
One reason it's gotten so bad is people are so fucking eager to believe we've "turned a corner" and "it must be over by now"
I hate being the annoying realism guy but pitches like this always remind me of the meta Seinfeld joke where he tries to make a show about having a guy sentenced to be his butler after getting in a car accident with him
Japanese TV executive: "And is this punishment... customary, in your society?"
George: "No! That's the whole source of the humor!"
The theme of Au Revoir Les Enfants, a movie more people should see honestly
There are movies about committed Nazis, and movies about survivors and resisters, but not many movies about bystanders, which in reality the vast majority of people would be
People think a lot about Anne Frank's family in the attic, and they think about the Nazis who arrested them and the snooping snitch who called the Nazis on them
But not the many, many people who just went to work at that factory every day and just didn't care
What gets me about Au Revoir Les Enfants is that Père Jean isn't any kind of "movie hero"
He's a flawed person, he makes a really bad mistake and gets himself and his charges caught, he tried his best and his best was simply not good enough
To be fair, this is after he got fired by his publisher after repeatedly demanding they deliver a new set of pencils to his house, preferably sending an attractive young woman to do it, a demand he believed they only refused because the company was run by greedy Jewish misers
I don't wanna like downplay his bigotry or come off as excusing it
But he's not this image people have of a kindly fatherly children's book writer with a hidden dark side
He was like this colossal piece of shit asshole
Dr. House if House were British and wrote books
He was a bigot because he lowkey hated everyone and if he came to highkey hate you in particular he'd unhesitatingly reach for whatever weapons presented themselves to hate you with greater force and let his hate do more damage
He got taken in by the Jews for Jesus sales pitch, which sucks, but is also targeted narrowly at Jewish people and contains a bunch of crap that makes no sense to you if you're not Jewish
They baited this trap for unhappy vulnerable Jews and this stoned Gentile just wanders in
Like you're playing an FPS and you're trying to take down a helicopter with an anti-vehicle rocket and you somehow kill someone who's not in a vehicle
Like he just jumped up in front of you at the exact right time