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https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1677724055745462275

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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

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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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@kunley_drukpa

Aug 23

“MY APARTMENT IN NIGERIA IS CONSTANTLY ROBBED” - what it is like to live in a poor part of a Nigerian city 🧵

In Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’ the author spends time in Nigeria and decides to try living in an African neighbourhood instead of an expat one. He describes how he is constantly robbed until a witch doctor helps him protect his apartment with enchanted totems

“The apartment that I rent in Lagos is constantly broken into. It happens not only when I am away for a longer stretch of time- even if I am going on a short trip to a nearby town, to Abeokuta or to Oshogbo, I know that upon my return I will find the window popped out of its frame, the furniture turned upside down, the cupboards emptied.

The apartment is located in the center of town, on the island of Lagos. The island was once a staging area for slave traders, and these shameful, dark origins of the city have left traces of something restless and violent in its atmosphere. You are made constantly aware of it. For instance, I may be riding in a taxi and talking with the driver, when suddenly he falls silent and nervously surveys the street. "What's wrong?" I ask, curious. "Very bad place!" he answers, lowering his voice. We drive on, he relaxes and once again converses calmly. Some time later, we pass a group of men walking along the edge of the road (there are no sidewalks in the city), and at the sight of them the driver once again falls silent, looks about, accelerates. "What's going on?" I ask. "Very bad people!" he responds. It's another kilometer before he is calm enough to resume our conversation.

Imprinted in such a driver's head must be a map of the city resembling those that hang on the walls of police stations. Little multicolored warning lights are constantly lighting up on it, flashing, pulsating, signaling places of danger, sites of attacks and other crimes. These warning lights are especially numerous on the map of the downtown, where I live. I could have chosen to live in Ikoyi, a safe and luxurious neighborhood of rich Nigerians, Europeans, diplomats, but it is too artificial a place, exclusive, closed, and vigilantly guarded. I want to live in an African street, in an African building. How else can I get to know this city? This continent?

But it is far from simple for a white man to move into an African neighborhood. To start with, the Europeans are outraged. Someone with my intentions must be deranged, not in complete possession of his mental faculties. So they try to dissuade me, warn me: It is certain that you will perish, and the only thing still in doubt is the precise way this will happen--either you will be killed, or you will simply die of your own accord, because living conditions are so dreadful there.

But the African side also regards my plan with scant enthusiasm. First of all, there are the technical difficulties--live where, exactly? This kind of neighborhood is all poverty and overcrowding, wretched little houses, clay huts, slums; there is no fresh air, and often no electricity; it is dust, stench, and insects. Where can you go? Where can you find a separate corner? How do you get around? What do you do? Take, for instance, something as basic as water. Water must be brought from the other end of the street, because that's where the pump is. Children do this. Sometimes--women. Men? Never. And here's a white gentleman standing with the children in the line for the pump. Ha! Ha! Ha! This is impossible! Or let's say that you have found a small room somewhere, and you want to shut the door to work. Shut the door? This is unthinkable. We all live together in a family, in a group--children, adults, old people; we are never apart, and even after death our spirits remain among the living, with those who are still in this world. Shut yourself alone in a room, in such a way that no one can enter? Ha! This is impossible! "And besides," the natives explain gently to me, "it is dangerous in our neighborhood.”

[1/5]

There are many bad people around here. The worst are the boma boys--gangs of debauched hoodlums, who attack, mug, and rob--a dreadful swarm of locusts that ravages everything. They will quickly sniff out that a lone European has come to live here. And to them, a European is a rich man. Who will protect you then?

But I held firm. I didn't listen to the warnings. My mind was made up--perhaps in part because so often I had felt irritated with people who arrived here, lived in "little Europe" or "little America" (i.e., in luxury hotels), and departed, bragging later that they had been to Africa, a place that in reality they had never seen.

And suddenly, an opportunity arose. I met an Italian who in a back alley not far from Massey Street owned a little warehouse of farm implements. Like many whites who were gradually liquidating their enterprises here, he had closed his business. The two-room service apartment above it was now vacant, and he was all too happy to rent it to me. He drove me there one evening in his car and helped me carry up my things (the metal stairs were attached to the building's exterior walls). It was pleasantly cool inside, he had turned on the air conditioner that morning. There was also a working refrigerator. He wished me a good night and quickly departed. He was flying to Rome early the next morning--after the latest military coup, he was afraid of further unrest and wanted to take some of his money out of the country.

I began to unpack. An hour later the lights went out.

I didn't have a flashlight. Worse still, the air conditioner had stopped, and in addition to it being completely dark, it now quickly became hot and stuffy. I opened the window. In swept the stench of rotten fruit, burnt oil, soap, and urine. Although the sea was somewhere nearby, you could detect no breeze in this enclosed and congested alley. It was March, a month of crushing heat, when the nights often seemed hotter and more stifling than the days. I looked out the window. Up and down the street below me, on woven mats or directly on the ground, lay half-naked people. The women and children were asleep; several men, their backs leaning against the walls of the clay houses, stared at me. I didn't know what their gazes meant. Did they want to meet me? Help me? Kill me?

I decided that I could not endure until dawn in these sweltering rooms, and went down. Two men rose; the others watched, motionless. We were all sweaty, deadly tired; merely existing in this climate is an extraordinary effort. I asked them if this kind of electrical outage happened often. They didn't know. I asked if something could be done about it. They conversed among themselves in a language I did not understand. One of them disappeared. Minutes passed--fifteen, thirty, forty-five. Finally he returned, bringing two young men with him. They said that they could fix the problem for ten pounds. I agreed. Soon, the lights were back on inside the apartment, and the air conditioner was working. Several days later--another outage, another ten pounds. Then fifteen, twenty.

And the thefts? In the beginning, I was filled with rage each time I returned to my ransacked apartment. To be robbed is, first and foremost, to be humiliated, to be made a fool of. But with time I came to understand that seeing a robbery as a humiliation and an affront is an emotional luxury. Living amid the poverty of my neighborhood, I realized that theft, even a petty theft, can be a death sentence. To steal is to commit manslaughter, murder. A solitary woman had her little corner in my street, and her sole possession was a pot. She made a living buying beans for credit from the vegetable vendors, cooking them, seasoning them with a sauce, and selling them to passersby. For many, this bowl of beans was the only daily meal.

[2/5]

One night, a piercing cry awoke us. The entire alleyway stirred. The woman was running around in a circle, despairing, frenzied: thieves had snatched her pot, and she had lost the one thing she depended on for her livelihood.

Many of my neighbors here have just the one thing. Someone has a shirt, someone a panga, someone a pickax. The one with a shirt can find a job as a night watchman (no one wants a half-naked guard); the one with a panga can be hired to cut down weeds; the one with the pickax can dig a ditch. Others have only their muscles to sell. They count on someone needing them as porters or messengers. In all these instances, the chances of employment are slim, because competition is enormous. And further, these are frequently only odd jobs--for one day, for several hours.

Thus my alley, the adjacent streets, and the entire neighborhood are full of idle people. They wake in the morning and search for some water with which to wash their faces. Then, those with a bit of money buy themselves breakfast: a glass of tea and stale roll. But many people don't eat anything. Before noon still, the heat is difficult to bear--one must look for a shady spot. The shade moves hourly with the sun, and man moves with the shade--following the shade, crawling after it to hide in its dark, cool interior, is each day his only real occupation. Hunger. One badly wants to eat, but there is nothing to be had. Making matters worse, the smell of roasting meal wafts from a nearby bar. Why don't these people storm the bar? After all, they are young and strong.

One of them, apparently, was unable to control himself, for suddenly, a cry resounds: it's one of the street vendors shouting--a boy snatched a bunch of bananas from her stand. The victim and her neighbors set off in pursuit and eventually catch him. The police appear out of nowhere. Policemen here carry large wooden clubs, with which they brutally beat offenders, striking them with all their might. The boy is lying in the street now, cringing, curled up, trying to shield himself from the blows. A crowd has gathered, which occurs here in the blink of an eye, since these legions of the unemployed have little to do besides waiting for some event, some commotion, some excitement--anything to distract them, to help pass the time. They press closer and closer, as if the dull thud of the clubs and the moans of the victim afforded them genuine pleasure. With shouts and screams they encourage and incite the policemen. Here, if a thief is caught, people immediately want to tear him apart, lynch him, chop him into pieces. The boy is groaning, already he has let go of the bananas. Those standing closest throw themselves on the fruit, tear the bunch apart.

Then everything returns to normal. The vendor still complains and curses, the policemen leave, the battered, tortured boy drags himself to some hiding place--sore and hungry. The onlookers disperse, returning to their places under walls, under roofs--to the shade. They will stay there until evening. After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stupor, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.

In the evening, the alleyway comes ever so slightly to life. Its residents gather. Some of them have spent the whole day here, tormented by attacks of malaria. Others are just returning from the city. Some have had a good day: they found work somewhere, or else they met one of their kinsmen, who shared his pennies with them. They will be eating supper tonight, a bowl of cassava with a hot paprika sauce, perhaps even accompanied by a boiled egg or a piece of lamb. Some of this will go to the children, who watch the men greedily as they swallow each bite. Every bit of food disappears immediately and without a trace. Everything is eaten, down to the last crumb.

[3/5]

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@kunley_drukpa

Aug 22

ABOUT ‘AFRICAN TIME’

In Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’, about his time in Africa, there is a chapter where he describes his own experience of ‘African Time’ when he enters a bus and has to wait many hours for it to depart -

“We climb into the bus and sit down. At this point there is a risk of culture clash, of collisions and conflict. It will undoubtedly occur if the passenger is a foreigner who doesn’t know Africa. Someone like that wil start looking around, squirming, inquiring “When will the bus leave?"

“What do you mean, when?” The astonished driver will reply. “It will leave when we find enough people to fill it up."

The Europeans and the Africans have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equably and without relation to anything external”.

The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must need deadlines, dates, days and hours. He moves within the rigor of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat - time annihilates him.

Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is a man who influences time, its shape, course and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).

Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even non-existence, if we do not direct our energy towards it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview. In practical terms, this means that if you go to a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find no one at the appointed spot, asking “When will the meeting take place?" makes no sense. You know the answer: “It will take place when people come”. Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting.”

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1744017316231188749

From the ‘AFRICAN MASTERTHREAD’ - you can read more stories like this below

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1744017316231188749

Some might say ‘they were waiting for the bus to depart for so long because the owner wanted to maximise profit’ - in which case I encourage you to take a bus journey in Africa. Very difficult to understand this different kind of relationship with time without experience yourself

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@kunley_drukpa

Aug 21

https://twitter.com/samuli_salminen/status/1958462257051980284

🇫🇮 New Finnish Study on the Net Financial Costs of different immigrant groups. It replicates the findings of the famous Danish and Dutch studies - almost all immigrant groups are net costs to Finland. Migrants from the Middle East and North Africa are the biggest financial drains

https://twitter.com/samuli_salminen/status/1958462257051980284

In Finland even western migrants are rarely net fiscal contributors

Finland’s data almost perfectly replicates Denmark’s

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@kunley_drukpa

Aug 15

Are Somalis the world’s number one rattlers?

They are such talented wind-up merchants it almost loops back round to being a soft power

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1845424771208470891

Apart from the many content ‘collabs’ my accounts have with them for which I am grateful I have come to in a certain kind of way respect their temerity. Did you know there are only 35 mil ethnic Somalis worldwide? Even vs eg South Asians they massively over-index as provocateurs

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1845424771208470891

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