Mary Harrington Profile picture
Nov 14, 2023 10 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Famous Dictators and Twink Death: A thread

1: Saddam Hussein

Verdict: young Saddam looks like the kind of dork who wrote romance novels

Older Saddam looks like he wrote romance novels and got people to read them (fact: he actually did this)

Twink Death Survival Rating: 7/10
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2: Muammar Gaddafi

Verdict: Gaddafi may have been propping up North African regional stability with brutal repressive measures, which with hindsight was actually quite useful (thanks, David Cameron), but he lost his looks doing it

Twink Death Survival Rating: 3/10
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3: Idi Amin

Verdict: Coming to power on a wave of horrific bloodshed and racist expulsions doesn't seem to improve a guy

TDSR: 3/10
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4: Vladimir Putin

Verdict: young Putler looks like the kind of guy who tortures puppies, older Putler looks like the kind of guy who tortures humans, which isn't exactly nice but at least means picking on someone your own size

TDSR: 6/10
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5: Josef Stalin

Verdict: The expropriation, starvation, and terrorisation of millions unambiguously improved this guy's looks

TDSR: 9/10
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6: Nicolae Ceausescu

Verdict: no getting round it, twink death hit hard here

TDSR: 2/10
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7. Francisco Franco

Verdict: twink devotees will most likely stan Young Franco, but there's something avuncular about the General, despite being a dictator which is bad and wrong obviously

TDSR: 8/10
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8. the Austrian painter

Verdict: he always looked like he kept his mother's body in a deep freeze

TDSR: n/a
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9. Mao Zedong

Verdict: Old Mao is kind of iconic, despite (or maybe because of) having destroyed millennia of Chinese tradition and caused the starvation of millions. But twink Mao was definitely more handsome

TDSR: 5/10
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10. Fidel Castro

Verdict: sorry, but there's a reason he still commands such a special place in the AWFL heart (especially Canadian AWFLs, or so I hear). Some guys never stop being handsome

TDSR: 10/10
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More from @moveincircles

Dec 31, 2024
2024 was the year we got used to everything being extremely weird

In honour of having left normal behind forever, here's my top 10 "no really, we're in a simulation" moments from the 2024 news feed 👇
10: The Rocket Catcher

A scene straight out of a sci-fi movie from @elonmusk's SpaceX. Spacecels indisputably outperformed tech doomers in 2024

9: Suicide Adverts on the London Tube

Ahead of the vote on legalising euthanasia, on which the Labour government was absolutely definitely completely neutral, there were adverts all over Westminster Tube station for killing yourself in silk pyjamas Image
Read 13 tweets
Mar 5, 2024
Periodically someone who hasn't actually read me will say I want to ban modern medicine, send women back to high maternal mortality, blah blah

I don't. I'd be dead myself if it weren't for modern obstetrics. But we need to distinguish between restorative and meliorist medicine
Restorative medicine holds to a Gestalt understanding of what human "normal" looks like, including normal human development, morphology, sex dimorphism and so on. On this model, we only intervene when something is wrong with "normal" and medicine can help restore it
Meliorist medicine rejects the idea that normal is a thing, or sees it as best as a baseline for theoretically limitless upgrades. For this model, medicine can intervene even in normally healthy bodies, based only on individual whim. There is no end to the possible interventions
Read 7 tweets
Feb 5, 2024
“Cooking” describes two distinct skill sets, one coded female and the other male

Calling them both “cooking” is like saying street fighting and fencing are the same skill because both involve combat
Family food is female-coded. You make family food with children underfoot and conversations ongoing, while juggling several other tasks

Excellence in family food is something everyone will eat, that you can make to budget in the available time, and with minimum washing up
Fancy cooking is male-coded. You do it without interruptions, take as long as you like, and use as many pans as you want

Excellence in fancy food is haute cuisine
Read 6 tweets
Nov 16, 2023
It's not so much that the realignment betrayed as that it was a roaring success. It's just not the realignment we thought we were getting unherd.com/2023/11/nigel-…
Upheaval that, we were promised, would return democratic accountability has just seen the second unelected Prime Minister appoint as Foreign Secretary a man who isn't even an MP. Real power rests with a network of courts, quangos, czars, insiders, and sometimes murkly funded NGOs
The vaunted return to a politics of place and belonging has delivered instead a radically deracinated and dematerialised politics of placelessness, digitally convened via clicktivism and manifesting offline as jarringly transcultural transnational meme-causes such as BLM
Read 4 tweets
Nov 6, 2023
Who could have predicted that a generation which grew up micromanaged and surveilled by parents, daycare workers and teachers would reach adulthood with a model of good governance that is remote, totalising, and unaccountable
We stopped forming young people for deliberative democracy two generations back and it’s far, far too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube now
“Anti-woke” academics often talk as though the shift toward soft therapeutic totalitarianism in university is the fault of ideologies, administrators or radical faculty

It’s not; the demand comes first and foremost from young people themselves
Read 4 tweets
Oct 9, 2023
I want to propose a new award: the Winston Smith Prize for Political Euphemism

Of the top of my head, in recent contenders must surely include

"underage sex work"

"special military operation"

and

"armed migrant"

Anyone else got entries?
In the Meat Lego category:

"top surgery"

"gender affirming"

and

"fertility equality"
Also special mention in the Self-Contradiction subcategory goes to

"mostly peaceful"

and

"remote classroom"
Read 4 tweets

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