Shisha Bar. Note the chairs are all positioned outwards facing the road. Cafe culture as a ‘step-up’ from low level milling? You go and sit in a cafe and smoke hookah and you sit there for hours on end just looking out at the street to see what is happening and how the life is

This really smelled. You can imagine the smell. It escaped out onto the street and had suffused the whole area around the butchery

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@kunley_drukpa

Oct 3

Why does almost nothing in the Congo work properly? A Chinese Businessman tries to explain to a local Congolese Man

Chinese Workers in the Congo trying to build a new road complain about how incompetent their Employees are

These clips are from ‘Empire of Dust’, a Documentary about a Chinese Company hired to build a road in the Congo that is the origin of the ‘It’s all so tiresome’ meme and which has become a Cult Classic for its candid depiction of incompetence in Africa - available here:

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 30

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1840484272236593515

It is 2035. You are at a cafe in Vienna - the same cafe Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud went to - with your Girlfriend. She says “Crazy that the long 20th Century that started in this Cafe is finally over now that they did Remigration. The end of history but for real this time”

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1840484272236593515

“It’s so insane that Fukuyama was right in the end just he was like four decades out from when History was actually going to end. What were we thinking with all that immigration? But like you iron out those contradictions in liberal democracy and turns out you’re basically fine”

Vienna in the roaring (20)20’s

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 26

Large ‘Trashhole’ in an Egyptian neighbourhood, small sinkhole had opened up in the road and was overflowing with garbage. People passing by seemed unfazed by the Trashhole, cars were parked haphazardly around it. A group of older men were sat nearby on plastic garden chairs casually smoking -

Asked “what happened here?”

“There was a sinkhole and the street collapsed in on itself … maybe one year ago”

“Did they not repair it?”

“No, no money”

“Why is it filled with trash?”

“Some people just throw their trash in there to get rid of it”

“Do people ever come and clean it out?”

“No”

Some goats next to the Trashhole

Lots of trash on the streets in Egypt, have more pictures but almost feels too gratuitous to share them. Racist just by virtue of you having taken a picture of it, like you’re being ‘mean’. Needless to say this kind of Third Worldism is upsetting if you see in your own country

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 23

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1837594193616908798

A VISIT TO THE PYRAMIDS 🧵

Longer Thread on Thoughts on a visit to the Pyramids at Giza in Egypt

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1837594193616908798

APPROACH

Counterintuitively, or maybe not, the Pyramids look most impressive from a distance, from the road as your taxi takes you to the complex entrance. There is something quite compelling in the juxtaposition between the huge necropolis structures and the ramshackle third worldism of the Cairo surrounds. The still construction projects litter-strewn expansive new General Al-Sisi highways around the base, the backdrop of the Cairo slums. The slums themselves, with their trademark ‘Egyptian’ unfinished exposed facades of cheap redbricks and sloppily applied concrete, stretching into the distance. There is a large elevated carriageway that passes over the slums on the way to the Pyramids from the North and from the car window you can look down on the bustle and then you can you look up and see the pyramids out way afar - by comparison they appear otherworldly. The ruins of a great advanced civilisation and the squatters now living in the foothills of those ruins. You could say “that is what it literally is” I don’t want to be crass or gratuitous about it, rude, I wouldn’t want to go that far some parts of Cairo are very nice, you know, but just to say this is the impression one can form

THE TOUTS - “For you my friend, good price”

A lot is said about how the Pyramids today are overcrowded, covered in trash, how you will be constantly hassled by touts on a visit. To a certain extent this is true but they are ‘The Pyramids’ so you persevere. I don’t think these features are so bad as to make the whole experience intolerable, you shouldn’t exaggerate, but they detract from it. You just ‘cope’ with these things during your visit

To give an example, you could easily form the impression that there is some school nearby running very oversubscribed ‘accredited tour guide’ courses the amount of ‘accredited tour guides’ who will tell you that they can offer you ‘accredited tours’ as you enter the Pyramid Complex - “for you my friend good price.” How do you become an accredited tour guide? Are there exams? These people respawn every 60 seconds or so too after you defeat one, another one will pop out of the sand at you like in a random encounter type encounter. You can brush these people off fairly easily but as a remark on the environs I think it is one of the most dense ‘being approached by ‘for you my friend good price’ touts’ places on the planet that I have ever been to, excepting maybe India

One technique is to walk around with your headphones in, or pretend to be on your phone, walk around with your chest puffed out ‘walking with purpose’. “Just be confident.” This seems to put some touts off pestering you, not all of them because Egyptians are quite rapacious (maybe even more so than Indians who this technique can quite effectively dissuade) but at least some of them

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@kunley_drukpa

Sep 19

https://twitter.com/politicspollss/status/1836809652161683902

STARMER: “HUGE MISTAKE” TO LINK CAUSE AND EFFECT

“Causality does not occur in reality.
It is a mental construction due to the repeated and constant conjunction between the event we call cause and that we call effect. This is the problem of induction” said the Prime Minister

https://twitter.com/politicspollss/status/1836809652161683902

STARMER: “I AM A HUMEAN”

“As Hume wrote in his Enquiry, that the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation that it will rise. That’s my governing philosophy, I do not believe actions have consequences”

https://twitter.com/karlmckracken/status/1836868242205463014

Starmer the Humean

https://twitter.com/karlmckracken/status/1836868242205463014

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