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@kunley_drukpa

Feb 16

https://twitter.com/hoeflatoor/status/2023242697977270434

You would think Singapore of all places would be safe from replacement migration dynamics but reports are that the Mainland Chinese migrants there are now displacing the older Singaporean Chinese and so ‘Chinese-ifying’ the country. Is it really just the same shit everywhere?

https://twitter.com/hoeflatoor/status/2023242697977270434

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1787984487533465774

Lee Kuan Yew cautioned accepting too many migrants too quickly even if they are from the same ethnic background. Even with the limited number of Mainland Chinese arrivals they may still have arrived too quickly

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1787984487533465774

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2020231435530240203

Thing that strikes you is how often this Majority-Minority displacement dynamic comes up - again and again and again it is a huge driver of Politics capital P in many many places in the world, to different degrees. Little facile to say but history really is a story of migration

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2020231435530240203

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@kunley_drukpa

Feb 15

Video of singer holding concert during Brazil’s Carnaval going viral because of the difference in audience demographics - the centre is the paid concert tickets the sides are free

x.com/kunley_drukpa/…

x.com/kunley_drukpa/… x.com/kunley_drukpa/…

x.com/kunley_drukpa/…

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@kunley_drukpa

Feb 14

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2022733947659067518

Every time I see a favela - especially where it’s a large one that stretches off into the distance - it’s always like staring into the abyss a little. See versions of ‘The Slum’ in many places in the world but have never quite gotten used to it, makes me feel existentially sick

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2022733947659067518

If I could describe Brazil 🇧🇷 in one image it would be this

https://twitter.com/considerelwin/status/2022801198638662017

Today’s ‘Timeline’

https://twitter.com/considerelwin/status/2022801198638662017

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@kunley_drukpa

Feb 14

FAVELAPUNK AESTHETICS AND STUPID HAIRSTYLES 🇧🇷

As dystopian as Brazil’s favelas are it is difficult to not be drawn to their aesthetics as a ‘punk’ manifestation of, what could you say… globoslop culture. Just the concept of ‘The Favela’ it makes me a little existentially sick - but it’s almost because it makes me feel existentially sick that I became obsessed with favela culture in the same way I am obsessed with ‘Roadman’ culture. I use the word ‘globoslop’ here in the sense that, as have made the point many times before, it is ‘basically’ a version of the same thing IE a very accessible non-discriminatory lower common denominator culture - maybe you could say more generically ‘urban’ culture. By the way when I describe these culture like this this isn’t to say I emphatically ‘hate’ these cultures, more describing how they’re so pervasive at the lower levels of multiethnic, multicultural societies

Favela culture specifically has had a lot more time to mature than Roadman culture - I say mature in the sense of develop unique aesthetic variations (actually there are sub-divisions of favela culture too eg Carioca funk, Mandrake etc). Can talk about the history of the favelas another time but this culture has been around long enough that it is kind of aesthetically its own thing. You know all the Roadman globoslop cultures in Europe; in Germany, France, the Netherlands they all kind of look the same… ie basically just Moroccans or Nigerians in Niketech

Brazil though has a fun unique favelpunk flavour and I want to specifically talk about the stupid hair the favela people have here to show this. There is one famous rapper who is a good representative of the ridiculous hairstyles favelaoids have called ‘Oruam’, a skinny tattooed-up pardo guy… really the guy looks like a character out of THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997), William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER, a Mega City One inhabitant from Judge Dredd etc… something like this - some kind of grimy sci-fi dystopia where they all have preposterous lurid hair. Imagine this guy in a Brazilian football t-shirt and shorts and a pair of havaianas threatening to rob you with a gun. Pure favelapunk, you can’t look away

There is one favela person hairstyle I see around occasionally, really sends me. I know it’s a favela style because the middle class Brazilians will recoil and say “oh it’s favela people hair” when I describe it to them (they say the term ‘favela people). Am talking specifically about ‘Hedgehog’ hair, I don’t know what its Brazilian name is (possibly ‘corte do jaca reflexo alinhado’) but it’s a kind of polka-dot colouring of the hair

This is what they do to produce the style - they put a plastic cap on with holes in it on their head and then they spray or dye the bits of hair that poke through. So the end result is so kind of spotty hedgehog hair style: white or blonde or blue or red or green dots on top of black hair. It’s almost always the younger pardos with it, you will not see a white Brazilian with this hair. If you go into a shitty McDonald’s or something you might spot a group of these MC Latroncinio guys sitting at the back being loud, yelling or playing phonk for whatever reason

First few times I saw it I could not stop staring, I thought I had seen it all before. It’s such a stupid hairstyle but at the same time they all seem to be so unselfconscious about wearing it. This is another thing about favelapunk globoslop culture, actually it’s a bit disarming at first too - even though they look stupid they seem to take themselves very seriously. Same way Roadmanism is absurd when you first encounter the subculture but then they keeping taking themselves seriously and then the whole thing eventually sticks. It’s an organic kind of no cultural guardrails Yookayfication-Lusotropicalification culture formation… as weird and non-sequitur as it looks at first this is how these new syncretic cultures form. The Lusotropical future will be very colourful

Anyway I love Brazil 🇧🇷

Rappers have always had stupid hairstyles but they get away with it because they’re celebrities. In certain poorer (not all of course) parts of Brazil though the culture seems to be many people just have stupid hairstyles

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1901719717280100703

About the particularist and universalist formation of Roadman culture

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1901719717280100703

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@kunley_drukpa

Feb 13

BRAZIL 1 GERMANY 7 - THE DAY BRAZIL DIED 🇧🇷

Was speaking with Brazilian friend, talking about the ‘decline’ of Brazil - ‘decline’ as in Brazil’s fall from the cool ‘Girl from Ipanema’, ‘Oscar Niemeyer’, ‘Chico Buarque’ mid C20th Brazil to the Brazil it is today. ‘Decline’ in the sense of increased crime, favelisation, inequality, decreased soft power, freedom of speech etc

Accepting that framing he said a lot of change started with the incompetence of the ‘Retard Right’ military dictatorship but crystallises with the New Republic, especially under the Worker’s Party - really institutionalised Third Worldism so-called. Coming up to 40 years now of various kinds of left policies

I said is there a symbolic moment for that. He thought about it and said maybe the 2014 Brazilian World Cup

You may or may not remember… this was one of the most shocking results ever - Brazil was destroyed 7–1 by Germany in Belo Horizonte, a humiliating defeat and the worst in World Cup history for Brazil. It ended their campaign on home soil and became a symbol of national trauma

I remember watching this game and I am not even particularly big on football, had not been to Brazil in 2014 either. Was in Morocco at the time. Morocco has a big milling culture where people will just sit around on plastic chairs on the streets. Because it was the World Cup large groups of people would gather outside cafes or restaurants or houses where someone had a TV to watch the matches whenever they were on. So you would just be out walking around the cities and there were enough screens set up that you could follow the progress of pretty much every match. If there was an especially exciting goal scored you would hear cheers from down the street

8 July 2014 - the infamous Germany Brazil match. Just on the street and suddenly Germany score. And then they score again. And again. Moroccans were starting to pull off from their usual business and watch the screens. Was that dramatic - sounds like an exaggeration but really was like a movie, people stopped what they were doing to watch. I got really hooked at that point too, remember it vividly

And Germany just kept going and going. Teutonic mechanised precision, repeatedly slamming the ball into the goal. Watching it at the time really it just felt like watching someone get raped, some of the Moroccans you could tell felt like this too - looking at each other and shaking their heads. Was a sense someone needed to intervene, we were watching an entire nation die on screen

My Brazilian friend:

“I think in the 60s Brazil had a good balance. It was kind of a mystical Latino country, in the creative sweet spot inbetween Northern European Protestantism and African… what could you say… between the Apollonian and the Dionysian”

“Haha. And that changed as the government got more Third Worldist so-called?”

“You know we had some nice pardo players before, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Pele was black… this was fine, good actually but then it was like… it became too Africanised. The country became too Africanised - I mean in the sense of disordered. Politically, demographically, culturally… the standards dropped. The best football players in the world today, Messi, Ronaldo they’re Latino”

“You mean it lost that kind of Latino flair? In Spanish they say ‘Duende’, means like Latin flair and passionate intensity” [Don’t know Portuguese equivalent, maybe ‘Alma’]

“Maybe, yes. Was like there was no magic anymore. It gets replaced with… the disorganised mess of favela culture. Sure it has some ‘soul’ in a way but it’s chaotic, can’t coordinate. Brazil at the time, it was really putting its entire transforming national identity behind that team. Ok we’re a new more egalitarian Brazil not the elitist ‘Girl from Ipanema’ white European-coded Brazil we used to be. This is the new Brazil of the Pardo. You can look at the ethnic make-up of Brazilian teams over time, it changes… And then the German machinery sweeps in and obliterates it”

The real struggle for Brazil now is whether it can overcome Lula’s PT-Reich

If you are 🇧🇷 Brazilian 🇧🇷 please leave a comment below corroborating or qualifying this

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@kunley_drukpa

Feb 13

LEARNING TO LET YOUR STANDARDS GO 🇧🇷

Spend too long somewhere like Brazil you start to catch yourself slipping a little into the warm embrace of Lusotropicalism. I mean in the sense that you start to act more and more like a local, the Hajnali stiffness begins to melt away a bit. Here’s one way this happens - there is a sentiment in Brazil; ‘Já tô chegando’. Means something like turning up to things late or arriving late without guilt

Of course not all Brazilians but there is a stereotype that Brazilians always turn up to things 15 minutes late because of this ‘Já tô chegando’ - it’s Brazil, nobody cares it’s fine. No rush. This attitude existing broadly because Brazil is Brazil. To be sure, some Brazilians, again, will be offended by lateness but fair to say many others will not be assuming it is non-egregious lateness. Actually this is something I have always been predisposed to anyway, turning up ‘a little’ late - so when you get the green light to indulge that disposition it’s not that you intentionally lean into it but you’re less preoccupied with the Northern European gold standard over time

Really this is the Lusotropicalification of you own mental space. Maybe it is just the path of least resistance to embrace the Lusotropicalism, Brazil is after all the best worst country in the world. Imagine how good it could be with a Basically Finest government. You don’t want to go back to Yookayian hollowed-out legacy industriousness culture with Babel-maxxed dystopian clown customs characteristics you could stay in Brazil, being as it is ‘a version’ of the same thing. This is a ‘Bronze Age Pervert’ point - in hyper-Yookay you have these nagging puritan Protestant social mores on top of the dysfunction of Brazil. In Brazil you have the dysfunction of Brazil but you don’t have these nagging puritan Protestant social mores and at least the weather is nice

Met an American friend in Brazil, turned up about ten minutes late

“Been here for ten minutes man”

“It’s just five minutes”

“It’s ten minutes”

He seemed a little bothered by it, had almost forgotten that in ‘his culture’ this kind of thing was considered rude. Time and tide wait for no man

Also above when I say ‘not all Brazilians’, I want to stress this is not all Brazilians - this is just Brazilian concept that some have explained to me. You can see this when you describe ‘Já tô chegando’ to say someone from São Paulo. They sort of huff and puff; “we are Pualistas we’re not like those frivolous macoco Cariocas from Rio de Janeiro who turn up two hours late for everything and can’t go two days without cheating on their partner oh no not us”. My experience with them is this isn’t always true but still it makes me laugh, it is funny to say it as a ‘troll’

Anyway I love Brazil 🇧🇷

Incredible how Brazil does it

That’s Lusotropicalism for you

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