This area of Manchester is demographically like a mini Israel-Palestine - a large neighbourhood of Jews rubbing right up next to a large neighbourhood of Muslims

https://twitter.com/bbcbreaking/status/1973681293830271451

x.com/augustderosa/s…

x.com/augustderosa/s… x.com/augustderosa/s…

“This was the one thing we didn’t want to happen”

Read 5 tweets

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 23

https://twitter.com/chungchingkwong/status/1970388650077888848

“Let me explain to you how your country is cruel and inhumane even though you accepted me in as an asylum seeker”

https://twitter.com/chungchingkwong/status/1970388650077888848

“Why didn’t you have the moral courage to nuke Beijing?”

‘3. Failed to respect our right to self determination’

This one is especially egregious since Deng Xiaoping made a point of parking the PLA a few hundred metres across the border in Shenzhen

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 23

https://twitter.com/archiebland/status/1970386462530015329

I am mentioned in a new Guardian article which speculates on the origin of the term ‘Boriswave’ and attempts to explain the ‘destabilising’ influence of the ‘extremely online right’ so-called in British politics

https://twitter.com/archiebland/status/1970386462530015329

Who are the ‘extremely online right’?

“A lot of it is a game for them”

Read 4 tweets

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 16

ENSHITTIFICATION - WHERE IS THE BOTTOM?

Have had the opportunity to visit a fair few so-called shithole countries now that are different degrees of both shithole and captured by some ideology or the other. Common feature of many of these places is that their obviously ‘downtrodden conditions’ have thus far not seemed to have prompted any significant attempts to ‘properly fix things’.

Take the example of Cuba, which this account has talked a lot about. Visit a country like Cuba and its systemic issues fairly quickly become obvious - people are poor and apathetic, there is little to no economic or infrastructure development, what reserves the government does have are used frivolously or lost to corruption, politicians have demonstrably stupid priorities. Etc. A mostly competent (and pragmatic) hypothetical leader who wasn’t wedded to the existing communist ideological structures could go quite far in fixing many of these issues. Easy. But that doesn’t happen - that leader never emerges. Decade on decade conditions deteriorate slightly. There is more trash on the street than there used to be, there are more frequent power outages, the size of the communist monthly rations decreases slightly. Conditions aren’t unbearable but they are worse than they used to be. Surely things can’t continue like this any longer?

Was walking around that country thinking ‘this is a failed state, what is going on?’ Asked some Cubans, “do you think there is going to be a revolution or coup of some kind to overturn this soon?” “What? No.” This will be the reaction more often than you would hope… So where is the bottom? You can have entire cities with continual blackouts, people living on $40 a month and even then the revolutionary talk is still ‘capeshit’ so-called. People just ‘get by’. Which is not to say that revolutions never happen but that often the kinds of conditions that do produce these movements are not in every instance inevitably predicated on these conditions alone.

It seems like prima facie sound theory that if conditions deteriorate sufficiently under a given ideology that that ideology is therefore disproven, disbunked. Quot Erat Demostarum… it’s over... But then define ‘disproven’, theory isn’t ’real life’. Economic growth is down, censorship is up, crime is up, polarisation is up, people may even be being assassinated - so what? Reductively, if the chance of being mugged in a city increases from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100 over three decades there are still 99 in 100 people ‘un-mugged’. Maybe a decade later the rate increases further to 1 in 50. In response people begin installing electric fences and hiring private security - and this collectively is enough of a deterrent that robbery rates decrease back to 1 in 100. Quality of life has degraded but conditions are still ‘liveable’. These are exaggerated very simple numbers but you take the point that the new standards become normalised. Things are not yet urgent enough to motivate ‘the revolution’ even if it seems like they ‘ought to’ on paper, however you define ‘ought to’.

The still-extant communist countries are good examples in a way. North Korea as a country is ‘a bit of a meme’ but you can make the same point with it. How has a country with such obvious systemic issues as North Korea survived? It just has. Okay it is a little more complex than that but it still turns out you can fairly indefinite sustain juche hermit kingdoms. Doesn’t matter that it wouldn’t be particularly great to be North Korean - there is no coming correction to these conditions, ‘nothing happens’, life continues in North Korea regardless. In North Korea (and incidentally in Cuba too) in the 1990’s there was widespread famine. Did this result in the collapse of the state? No. You might say that many of the old communist countries did fall in the end - most recently in September of 2025 Nepal’s socialist government was even ‘couped’. Not to say such things can’t happen, just that often they don’t.

[1/2]

The above are examples of extreme declines in quality of life. In a wealthier more established country like Yookay née Britain, Canada or France etc. by comparison what ‘enshittification’ means in practice is slow decline in quality of life across various metrics but where that decline is not so precipitous that people’s lives become unbearable. For most people life will be some degree of Basically Fine even with this gradual decline over time. It is nowhere near as bad as Cuba or North Korea or any other failed or failing state you can think of and it may even be the case that the decline is nonlinear - there may be periods of recovery or technological advancements that improve life in many respects.

Enshittification is the gradual lowering of standards and in this way it can often be melodramatic to paint any individual instance of lowering standards as a catalyst or flashpoint for ‘something needing to be done urgently’ - including even acts of political violence and especially where conditions are otherwise relatively Basically Fine. “Something is definitely going to happen now.” Maybe but also maybe not. Maybe even probably not. Maybe even definitely not. Many people in the west live Basically Fine lives and this kind of often exaggerated rhetoric, especially when it is at odds with their personal experiences, is not always convincing.

One unique feature of ‘the situation’ in western countries vs elsewhere is the world historical large scale ethnic change. This kind of inevitable ‘felt dispossession’ can motivate political change but ‘felt dispossession’ does not always mean commensurate significantly degraded material conditions, conditions that have been unbearably de-Basically Fine’d - at least directly even when the ‘ethnic conflict’ is low-level however defined or when it results in certain kinds of ‘third worldification’. You can still visit a bubble tea shop, a new Ethiopian restaurant with the best injera bread you ever had, go to a park and throw a frizbee with your cockapoo dog in London, Toronto and Paris. Broader purchase is that it helps to be realistic about the actual conditions of a place if this is where you seek change from, how desperate things actually are with respect to how Basically Fine most people’s lives are.

There are many arguments against mass immigration but for me the most impactful one has been on moral and aesthetic grounds. The rightwards shift in western politics is in this way often more than anything else about identity. This is a kind of enshittification to be sure but it is much more abstract and less perceptible, less immediately concrete to detractors than say bin strikes. It is true that standards of living fall because of mass immigration but it is not necessarily true that they will always fall precipitously because of it to the degree it will always motivate unanimous and conclusive pushback. If there is righteous anger over immigration the kernel of that anger will tend to be over the cultural and population change (even if it is not consciously understood as such) - as it often is in different forms in other civil conflicts in developing countries worldwide. Though, while you are waiting for that anger to somehow manifest in the form of competent motivated actors there is still a lot more ruin in your country left than you might think… Efforts towards change may be more productive where they help people conceptualise the degree of transformation - though even here this is often something a person will just instinctively either care about or not.

Not that nothing happens in the sense of it emphatically changing to a far worse, unbearable new norm - but that when it does happen it often happens imperceptibly over a long enough time span such that at the end of that glacial-paced happening only comparatively can something have properly been said to have happened. That may now be more likely to motivate change but actual change still requires galvanising initiative.

[2/2]

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1956771727867859384

See:

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1956771727867859384

Read 4 tweets

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 16

https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/1967377911146500366

DE-CODING THE FAR RIGHT LANGUAGE OF THE CHARLIE KIRK SUSPECT

With the Charlie Kirk suspect now in custody seized communications have revealed a troubled, fanatical man deeply steeped in the worldview of the fringe extreme right. Here is what the memes he often referenced mean 🧵

https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/1967377911146500366

The suspect once wore a tracksuit and took a picture of himself squatting in it - a reference to ‘Slav Squat Pepe’, a popular meme Neo-Nazis often share to suggest that they ‘Feels Bad Man’ about the lack of Russian intervention in their own country’s domestic populist politics

The suspect had hundreds of images of naked men saved on his phone, a reference to ‘Khalimov-posting’ - a type of Far Right in-group signalling where users would share pictures of ‘CHADS’ to indicate to other users that they were interested in meeting up for casual homosexual sex

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