Mary Harrington Profile picture
Nov 14 10 tweets 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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

Nov 6
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
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
Sep 17
The lesson for young women from the Brand scandal is the same as it was with Silvio Berlusconi unherd.com/2023/06/the-bu…

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It’s a bitter and ugly lesson, and I wish it were not so, but a great many scandals have come and gone and the lesson is unchanged

A great deal of the time, so-called sexual liberation mostly “liberates” pretty young women from the guardrails that used to keep them safe
Meanwhile high-status predators benefit from a kind of wilful unseeing that lets their actions go noticed but unpunished.

And of course we can extend the definition of “status” well beyond just being rich and powerful
Read 7 tweets
Sep 13
Remarkably consistent data from prisons across the Anglosphere showing around 50% of trans-identified male prisoners are sex offenders 👇
Around of Wisconsin trans-identified prisoners are sex offenders dailysignal.com/2023/08/24/exc…
Just under half (44 percent) of Canadian trans-identified male prisoners are sex offenders dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
Read 4 tweets
Sep 1
Thinking again about the France vs America food discourse, it strikes me that one thing which I haven’t seen is much discussion of the class component
France has homestyle and country cuisines but also haute cuisine which you basically can’t make at home as it’s too fiddly for family meals
India also has an haute cuisine: some Mughal dishes take literally days and zillions of fiddly processes, no one except hobbyists and professional cooks have that much time
Read 9 tweets
Jun 30
I sometimes get accused of being a doomer or tech determinist. I’m not, though I do write more often about the dark side of tech than its potential. So this week’s newsletter is more optimistic
Much of our innovation is aimed at evading the limits of our nature - but here and there I see people trying a different approach reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/the-sorcerer…
The matchmaking startup @KeeperMatch is one example: a “family formation service” based on relationship science and with normative sex differences baked into the software. They told me it’s working for their users so far
Read 4 tweets

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