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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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
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
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
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