“The more colour-coordinated the Bookshelf, the worse the content will be”
“I have decided to do some investigation into photos of Bugwoman bookshelves, or #Bookshelfies as these vacuous NPCs call them”
This Thread was first posted by Mencius Moldbugman
Mencius Moldbugman’s Iron Rule of Bookshelves: The more colour-coordinated the bookshelf, the worse the content will be.
Real readers read books to learn, Bugpeople use books as decoration and for social status points.
Colour-Coordinated Bookshelves mostly belong to “Book-Obsessives”. Most of these "Book-Obsessed" Bugpeople are women. The vast majority of their books are emotional pornography AKA chick-lit. This pink selection is the female equivalent of a man showing off vintage retro nudes.
Needless to say, geek culture and fake book idolatry go hand in hand.
Expect lots of adult graphic novels, Neil Gaiman, Harry Potter, self-help books, George RR Martin.
Don't expect: hard sci-fi, Russian classics, anything written before 1998, Bible.
Aspiring Bugwomen authors tend to write Young Adult Fiction or Fantasy because they think it is easier to write, plus it's currently trendy. Instead of working on their craft they hope that surrounding themselves with similar books will help them instead. Heh, women...
Often these adults know deep in their hearts that reading children's books is embarrassing, which is why there exists an industry for kid's books with "mature" covers in an attempt to add authenticity to their shallow geek culture.
Often these book collections are used as a replacement for religion. When hard truths and old religions are removed from the shelf, expect lots of "spiritual but not religious" whimsy... and lots of Harry Potter.
You will never find anything of value in these bookshelves. Just decor, Bugperson narcissism, and hijacking a once intellectual pursuit for social points. It's literature as a tool for masturbation.
Every. Single. Time.
As far as I know, this thread is not archived anywhere - if you know of an archive link please reply below. This thread has been recreated through existing screenshots.
During a visit to Singapore in 2011, Tony Blair is asked the million-dollar question - “Why are you so committed to multiculturalism? Why introduce division into your country like that? Isn’t it better to be homogenous like Japan?”
YMMV how much of an ideologue you think Blair actually is but his professed reasoning here is ‘post-ideological’. His steelman position is that some mass migration is an inevitability in an increasingly globalised world and it is better to pragmatically embrace it than prevent it
He also maintains that embracing immigration allows you to select for talented human capital and that for all the doom-mongers decrying the inevitability of low level political conflict that will arise from immigration actually places that accept it will likely be basically fine
Tony Blair talks about how much he admires and learnt from Lee Kuan Yew and his Pragmatic style of Government - and how he decided to go and see Lee in Singapore despite how disliked Lee was by Blair’s political and ideological allies
Lee just asked, “why are you here?”
“Don’t look upon Government as a branch of politics, look upon it as its own professional discipline”
Lee Kuan Yew’s Mostly Competent Pragmatism and Tony Blair’s Mostly Competent Pragmatism with Gay Race Communist Characteristics two versions of highly competent pragmatism
Lee Kuan Yew at about the same time, roughly around the height of Blair’s popularity, explaining why Britain had declined - for all of Blair’s Lee Kuan Yew-esque Pragmatism Blair had some well-documented ideological blindspots
Driving in the Third World often feels like playing a real life version of Mario Kart - the roads are narrow potholed obstacle courses full of comedy characters driving comedy vehicles who swerve around as if driving on ice or avoiding banana peels. Third World roads are frequently unpleasant death traps because of certain systemic problems that they seem to have in common, you’d can’t just drive down them like a regular highway and mentally switch to autopilot - you have to be constantly attuned to your environment around you to avoid accidents
Some Common Features of Third Word Roads:
• The roads are single lane, (probably because it’s too expensive to build more lanes but there might be other reasons,) which means the major highway between a Country’s two major cities will be filled vehicles packed up right next to each other with very little room for overtaking - mostly endless caravans of trucks driving very slowly for hundreds of miles
• People drive at either 20mph or 90mph, there’s very little inbetween. You’ll either be overtaken by cars speeding past you like they’re racing the Monaco Grand Prix or you’ll be stuck behind a truck that you could probably cycle quicker than. There is often officially a speed limit but it might as well not exist unless Police are nearby in which case it only sometimes exists if they feel like shaking you down or trying to get you to you appear in court unless you give them some money to buy lunch
The highlight of Kenya’s National Museum is small ethnographic section that feels as if it were curated by Arthur Gobineau. Panels detailing Kenya’s ethnic groups that read like they were nonchalantly written by a C19th race scientist. Would you ever see this in a Western museum?
Map of distribution of ethnicities in Kenya and the appearances of Swahili peoples of Zanzibar, Lamu, Mombasa and Pate
Cannot recall many of these kinds of displays in museums in Europe - but then, why would Kenyans in their own country have the racial hang-ups Westerners have?
There is a great room which is just paintings of all of Kenya’s different ethnicities in their traditional clothes and environments next to small plaques detailing a few of their ‘racial characteristics’. Really Hakanian, Nemetsian experience. Highly recommended
Migrant Houses in Rwanda - Thread about My Visit 🧵
Overall:
• The houses are nice, especially by African standards
• Rwanda is safe and one of the best African Countries
• There are not that many, only enough for a few hundred migrants
• Since probably not many people will be sent there the developers are trying to sell most of them
The houses are located about 15 minutes outside Kigali city centre. They’re not so far out it takes too long to get into the centre. Kigali though is spread out along a series of hills each of which is its own self-contained neighbourhood or suburb. The development’s ‘hill neighbourhood’ is called Karama. It doesn’t have every modern amenity but you can get them easily if you want
Kigali itself is obviously an African city and so has some of the features that go along with that, but as African cities go it’s arguably close to the best on the continent - which is high praise. It is safe, clean and modern by African standards, not a Third World Shithole city. In terms of ‘safety’ you’re really not going to have a problem here, you can walk around at night as a woman. Pretty much everyone I met spoke English fairly well. I would even say that it would be ‘racist’ to say Rwanda as a country is unsafe, Paul Kagame’s mostly competent pragmatic government has done a very good job given the country’s genocide was just 30 years and given that it is in Africa
Singapore is a successful multiethnic society but its success requires authoritarianism and stable demographics. It was born out of Lee Kuan Yew’s pragmatism, making the best of extant demographics - but Lee said he could have made Singapore even better if it were more homogenous
PRAGMATISM 101: There is not really any pragmatic reason to introduce these groups to your society. Ideological reason (masquerading as a very very dubious moral one) maybe, but in terms of mostly competent pragmatic government it doesn’t make much sense, especially when doing so beyond a very limited number increases their (famously very assertive in the case of Islam) cultural foothold where one did not exist before and so brings a well-documented set of new problems. Even if you insisted you needed their labour for whatever reason you would be better off with more culturally similar groups for that purpose - or you would at least be sensible to import them on work visas and not create pathways to citizenship. If you expect that you could manage the extra diversity that you continue to insist on with more authoritarian forced assimilation (grant that you even succeed in this) you are obliged to ask - in what way would that actually make society better? It isn’t clear