MY, THAT’S AN AWFUL LOT OF BAD LUCK IN RECENT YEARS: This account shows how South Africa has decayed in just a decade, and it’s a warning to us all.
I’ve been seeing this account in my feeds for months, and there’s a reason why.
People are fascinated with the ruins of once-thriving civilizations.
— Jozi vs Jozi (@jozivsjozi) February 12, 2026
That’s a timelapse of Booysens Train Station in Johannesburg from 2014 to 2025. Within 11 years, what was once a clean, functional rail station was stripped for parts and reclaimed by nature.
This is happening all over South Africa, and you can see it on Google Maps:
Click over for many, many before and after photos.
Exit quote: “Understand, this is an experiment in race-based Marxism. It is no different than what woke groups like BLM want to do. America is at the beginning of the same experiment. We saw it in the late 2000s in Detroit during the financial collapse. Entire city blocks just disappeared as everything broke down.”
Classical allusion in headline: “Bad Luck” and the Evanescence of Imperfection.
This colloquy of gloom reminded me of a famous observation from the writer Robert Heinlein.
“Throughout history,” Heinlein wrote in 1973, “poverty is the normal condition of man.”
“Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.”
Then comes the kicker: “Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.”
“This,” Heinlein added, “is known as ‘bad luck.’”
Of course, Heinlein was speaking ironically with that last bit.
The issue was not “bad luck” but virtue-fired stupidity.
All those “right-thinking people”—the people with the socially certified ideas, the kinder, gentler, mask-wearing, anti-fossil-fuel types—are on the ramparts, proudly toppling the atavistic instruments of their prosperity.
Very soon now, they will look around at the wreckage their good intentions have wrought and wonder who is to blame for the poverty, the chaos, the ruins that lay strewn where once, not so long ago, a vibrant civilization stood, supported by a mighty economy.
I don’t know if I’d necessarily call South Africa in 2015 “a vibrant civilization,” but its physical infrastructure didn’t appear to be descending into collapse back then, either.