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
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
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
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
5: Josef Stalin
Verdict: The expropriation, starvation, and terrorisation of millions unambiguously improved this guy's looks
TDSR: 9/10
6: Nicolae Ceausescu
Verdict: no getting round it, twink death hit hard here
TDSR: 2/10
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
8. the Austrian painter
Verdict: he always looked like he kept his mother's body in a deep freeze
TDSR: n/a
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
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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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
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
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
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