** Church organ music intensifies…

 "I do renounce him." 

Priest: and all his works?

 "I do renounce them." 

Spoken like someone who’s never lived in a Soviet apartment. f’ing lol.

There’s just nothing quite as bleak as that same falling apart brutalist concrete block after block after block after block.

From first hand experience I can tell you all the romance of communal living goes right out the window when they shut down the centrally heated water for the summer for “maintenance” because if you shut it down in the winter, you’re f’ed.

All that “to every man as he needs” fantasy isn’t real life. All my fire escapes had rusted off from the 3rd floor up to the 10th. So good luck with that in an emergency lol (major Russian City center on the Volga in 2009). Two things can be bad at the same time. Just because the US has a massive social safety net dysfunction, doesn’t mean the CCCP was kind to its citizens.

People can suck everywhere.

My favorite part of this AEI op-ed (look up the fellows of this august think tank institution if you have a minute) is that the author lists no notes, references, or citations for a single claim in the piece. Now that’s how you do it! Start a Hudson Institute it Heritage Foundation and once you’ve got the banner to put behind a panel of prestigious sounding fellows, bam! You’ve got the patina of credibility! Back it with a couple hundred million in tax-cheat lobbying endowments and you’ve got a stew going baby!

So big okonomoyaki then? I mean it does look like it would taste good.

For those who would like a book recommendation, that explores reading history through this lens, take a bit and read Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind: A Hopeful History” https://archive.org/details/humankindahopefu0000breg

The author dives in deep on why the Lord of the Flies trope is so persistent and why people believe it more, the richer they are. TLDR: dopamine is a hell of a drug.