My whole hobbyhorse is that even though Future is the most obviously and traditionally scary Ghost (being among other things an aspect of the Reaper), the other two Ghosts in canon are *also* scary af and people don't play them that way nearly enough
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Past is not a hot girl, or an adorable child, it's some kind of strange androgynous emotionless being of blinding light Present is the most human one, but he's unsettlingly rapid-aging in real time, until at midnight Scrooge realizes he's an old man at death's door
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(Owen Meany is right, of course most of us think the scariest Ghost is the one who knows what's going to happen, the inevitable consequences coming down the pike But, shit The older you get, the less scared you are of that And the more you're scared of his opposite)
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I suppose you could say: The future is the ghost that scares the young, the past is the ghost that scares the old, the present* is the ghost that scares us all. *Or maybe I'm the only one disturbed by Ignorance and Want and the implication that they are always just "there".
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Replying to @Overlord_Mikey
The interesting thing to me about the story is that Scrooge's fiancée diagnoses his problem when he was young as thinking *too much* about the future His vice of greed is really born of fear That's why it's just avarice, greed for money, not gluttony -- he's not having any fun
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
Dickens was attacking a specific mindset in 19th-century Britain (one that's still with us today), the whole Protestant work ethic idea that saving money = virtue and the wisest, smartest, best people are "millionaires next door" who have millions in the bank they don't touch
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
The whole irony that if Scrooge were a "worse" person he'd be a better person If he just blew that whole fortune on booze and sex and big dinners and shit Then people would be getting paid for those things, and they'd be able to pay their rent and buy groceries
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
So the whole deal with why the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come is able to fuck him up so hard is that it reveals he was *wrong*, he's *played himself* He's spent his *whole fucking life* preparing for the Future -- Past showing him the full terrible cost of that -- and *failed*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Overlord_Mikey
Scrooge is a stand-in for austerity economics, not moral stinginess, even in Dickens’s time. The Zemeckis/Carrey Christmas Carol captures this well imo, as well as the scariness of the spirits.
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Replying to @ticketdust @Overlord_Mikey
Yup, the whole story is a very harsh attack on the idea that "national debt" is a problem that we need to tackle, and that we should do so by increasing the "household savings rate" Also indirectly an attack on deflationary policy and "sound money"
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Bitcoin freaks have filled the Internet with smug references to having "low time preference" and the message of the Three Ghosts in A Christmas Carol is very much one defending "high time preference"
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Buy the thing on your list *today*, *right now* -- for yourself or for another -- because tomorrow it might not be there, or you, or them
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ticketdust
I've seen people be dismissive of Tiny Tim because they think it's just "be nice and be charitable" - which I mean it technically is, but there is so much more. Tiny Tim's death is only contrasted with Scrooge's BECAUSE Tiny Tim made other people HAPPY in his short life.
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