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ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
@kunley_drukpa
Jul 8, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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‘Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream’ has made some incredible tweets over the years. Short thread 🧵 https://t.co/jZLFU9UTJl
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More from @kunley_drukpa

ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Mar 29
LESOTHO - FINAL FANTASY SKY KINGDOM 🇱🇸

Here is genuine travel advice: Africa does not have the best food or nightlife or the most attractive women but it does have (I think) almost always the most memorable travel experiences, mostly because it is so relatively dysfunctional and unknown. Just trying to do things, trying to travel somewhere is an odyssey. Then the environments and people too, it’s very unmediated - you’re dumped in the deep end from the get-go. If you want a trip you won’t forget pick an African country or two, rent a car and then just drive between four or five destinations. It is difficult not to have an ‘adventure’

Not suggesting everywhere on the dark continent is secretly Wakanda, actually it’s mostly the opposite a lot of it is a ‘shithole’ so-called. What Africa does have though is a kind of untouched-ness. This is maybe a type of orientalism - the equivalent term for Africa (used by the Congolese writer Valentin Mudimbe) would be ‘Africanism’ - but it’s difficult to otherwise describe the appeal. If you look at a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting and think “that looks exotic” it’s like that but for Africa; shantytowns, ‘heart of darkness vibezzz’, Kagame’s new Rwanda and all. Not a value comment on the culture(s), just its existing as a totally different place and aesthetic to explore

Very underrated country in this way is the mountain near-ethnostate Lesotho. Not a developed country but it is a very Final Fantasy country that hits a lot of the ‘Africanism’ tropes in the best kind of way. Effect is something like what if we did a version of Nepal or Bhutan or Tibet but it’s in Africa? I’m not going to say Lesotho has as sophisticated a culture as those places but what you do get there is distinct in same way

The entire state is mountainous - it even snows in the winter - so the environment obviously produces a different kind of country. Also to this, the state formed as refugees fleeing lowlander Nguni groups during the Mfecane (ie the Zulu expansion and its consequences, many dead). Its cities, like its capital Maseru, are basically just rows of corrugated huts with traditional huts peppered in sorry to say (I don’t want to insult Sotho readers too much I like the Sotho) - but against the backdrop of the higher altitude landscape and the aesthetic uniqueness you will really not see anywhere else like it in the world. Sorry for trivialised description but you play a game and you arrive in a fantasy ramshackle frontier town full of dwarves wearing bicornes, effect is like this. There’s a certain appeal despite the squalor

The Sotho, Lesotho’s main ethnic group, are some of the most Final Fantasy Africans on the continent. They have a very Final Fantasy look in their traditional Mokorotlo straw hat and Basotho blanket. The Mokorotlo hat looks like a wizard or mage’s hat and the blanket is worn as a sort of cloak, decorated in bold patterns and colours. You often see men herding livestock dressed like this on the mountainsides, sometimes they combine it with a cane and wellington boots, ride around on horses. It’s very commonplace too, not a forced dying tradition

The Sotho also have a lot of Final Fantasy dialogue. Eg had driver who when asked about life in Lesotho would talk about male initiation rites and mystery cults

“Eh when you are becoming a man, you must go into the mountains and live on your own. And then you must learn the ways of the Sotho people. Eh and you must study the secret knowledge the elders pass onto you. Eh and you must do this, and then you must return and offer the father of a woman ten head of sheep or goat. So that he will accept your offer of marriage. And then you will become a man”

“What is the secret knowledge you learn?”

“Eh we are sworn to a vow of secrecy, me I cannot tell you this”

This is great stuff. All the priors in the conversation are Final Fantasy priors and you don’t have to bother with the baggage of your own cultural presuppositions, easy to have fun with itImage
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Final Fantasy Africa Image
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In Maseru Sotho friend says let’s go to a ‘nice bar’. Arrive at bar it’s a corrugated iron roof large shack, outside on the dusty forecourt people have started fires in rusty old barrels. Go inside, they are holding big karaoke night singing songs from eg Westlife and Spice Girls
Read 5 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Mar 25
Thais will hate it but Thailand like Bali and the UAE can become one of first proper post-national states; what equal opportunity ‘no borders for decent human capital’ taken to its logical conclusion looks like ie legacy national culture and a large non-citizen ‘expat’ population Image
Difference with Thailand vs eg Canada for ‘Actually Existing Post-Nationalism’ in a fuzzy Westphalian world is Thailand is open to Western migration ie isn’t asymmetrical. This sentiment is something like “if an African can move to Europe why can’t a European move to Africa?” Image
Very possible to get a country to the level of Basically Fine like Thailand or… now El Salvador. Nothing wrong with such places. But they often have hard cap on how broadly ‘innovative’ they can be with the populations they have. My view is if traditional nation states are now totally impossible in the age of the airplane there is nothing too egregious about these places importing small western migrant populations to make migrant distributions a bit more fair
Read 4 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Mar 20
WHAT CUBA IS LIKE AT THE MOMENT AND HOW LIKELY IT IS TO COLLAPSE 🇨🇺

With rolling blackouts in Cuba and Communist concessions towards opening up the country’s economy you could credibly think the Havana government is on the verge of finally collapsing. In retrospect, based on my time there last year, there was a read of the situation where there was always an inevitability that things were eventually going to come to a head, since the situation was so bad already

Let me just describe the conditions in 2025. Havana itself, in the downtown and especially near the tourist area yes it is quite dilapidated, litter strewn everywhere etc - but also it was basically fine in the sense you can get everything you need as a tourist; a nice AirBnb, a nice meal, internet and even money despite the island nominally being disconnected from the international banking system. Watch out for scams but you won’t really be in any physical harm, it isn’t unsafe - it just smells and none of the women look anything like Ana de Armas except maybe if you go in two or three very specific highend bars and restaurants

Thereafter though Cuba excepting tourist areas like Varadero (which were basically fine) was a mess. For example, many cities you visited outside of Havana the lights would almost always be out at night. You walk around and there are a few houses with electricity but they’re running their lights on a generator. So you have a majority of the population sitting around in darkness every day after the sun sets at about 6:30pm. Then of course nobody has any money because of communism. A large but necessary black market for everyday goods. You get really rural (difficult because of the fuel shortages) and there were even apparently problems with diseases like cholera and typhoid because of sanitation and infrastructure problems. This is on top of the epidemics of tropical diseases that exist in Cuba. Some 10-15% of Cuba’s entire population left since 2020 alone

Thought at the time firstly what a shitshow and then secondly how impressive in a roundabout way it was the state hadn’t imploded yet. But you know that’s to the point - you can have blackouts for weeks on end, the return of pre-modern diseases in the countryside or whatever but the whole thing can still just limp on. Indefinite ‘Enshittification’ so-called

On top of this the Trump admin’s recent Venezuela intervention cut the limited oil supply Cuba already had and the Iran strikes signalled they may possibly be prepared to remove Cuba’s leaders. Does this mean the regime is going to come to an end soon? As far as I am concerned the state Cuba is in presently is indefensible but of course now it seems like they might get oil supplies from two major latino socialista countries - Sheinbaum’s Mexico and Sanchez’s Spain. Which is a revealed preference obvious ideological commitment from those countries given just how materially irredeemable actually existing Cuban communism is (which we knew they had anyway but still)

Don’t want to predict whether communism in Cuba definitely will or won’t fall but will say it is not impossible that it doesn’t fall yet as dire as the situation is simply because ‘these things’ can unfortunately just go on indefinitely. You have some Mexican or Spanish oil, you open the market up to some modest reforms and suspicion is despite everything you can last a while longer yet

At the same time, I visited Assad’s Syria at the end of the Civil War, before the surprise Al-Jolani blitzkrieg - and while the country seemed totally exhausted it did also seem possible at the time Assad had ‘won out’. Turns out though all it needed for ‘regime change’ was a little push. Nobody had any energy for a fight anymore so they just gave up and rolled over. I say little push, in the Syria case more like a heavily armed and highly motivated militia. Maybe in the Cuba case too, who knows. Point being despite the conditions it is unlikely to collapse of its own accord internallyImage
There was woman in this city below - which had gone for weeks without electricity - who when I told her Havana and Varadero were functional got upset and said those places “weren’t real Cuba” and that they “kept the lights on there just for tourists because they need their money”
About ‘Enshittification’
Read 6 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Mar 13
Enjoyable thing about places like Iran or Russia is they are only countries who will create longwinded intellectual and cultural genealogies for enemies out of reverse orientalism, or occidentalism. Discussions in civilisational terms you won’t see anywhere else outside the right Image
Famous example of this occidentalism was the former Iran President assuming Americans read Tocqueville because Tocqueville was the lens his own conception of America was filtered through from a distance Image
Same kind of endearing effect as ‘The Japanese Version of Europe’
Read 5 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Mar 10
China announces new law to formalise further the project of ‘Sinicization’ to ‘promote national unity’. Few countries prepared to top-down systematically integrate their minorities with their majorities like this. Which model of integration is most likely to work? Image
China passed a previous ‘Ethnic Unity Law’ in 2020. This new 2026 proposal further formalises it. Extracts below from Tibetans reacting Image
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Which in your opinion is the most effective model of integration?
Read 5 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Mar 9
‘THE ART OF THE DEAL’ has a major flaw in that it doesn’t include a chapter on securing deals by threatening to drop missiles on people if they don’t accept your deals. Hopefully new editions of the book will fix this - it’s a very powerful and underused negotiating technique Image
If you were Cuba’s president would you accept the deal?
Sense of it being done out of ‘completionism’ rather than any particular ideological commitment. You know like when you want to 100% a video game, collect all the collectibles and unlock all the achievements... In many ways a more noble sentiment than ‘ideology’ in-and-of-itself
Read 4 tweets

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