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ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
@kunley_drukpa
Jun 25, 2024 • 10 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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Driving in the Third World 🧵

Driving in the Third World often feels like playing a real life version of Mario Kart - the roads are narrow potholed obstacle courses full of comedy characters driving comedy vehicles who swerve around as if driving on ice or avoiding banana peels. Third World roads are frequently unpleasant death traps because of certain systemic problems that they seem to have in common, you’d can’t just drive down them like a regular highway and mentally switch to autopilot - you have to be constantly attuned to your environment around you to avoid accidents
Some Common Features of Third Word Roads:

• The roads are single lane, (probably because it’s too expensive to build more lanes but there might be other reasons,) which means the major highway between a Country’s two major cities will be filled vehicles packed up right next to each other with very little room for overtaking - mostly endless caravans of trucks driving very slowly for hundreds of milesImage
• People drive at either 20mph or 90mph, there’s very little inbetween. You’ll either be overtaken by cars speeding past you like they’re racing the Monaco Grand Prix or you’ll be stuck behind a truck that you could probably cycle quicker than. There is often officially a speed limit but it might as well not exist unless Police are nearby in which case it only sometimes exists if they feel like shaking you down or trying to get you to you appear in court unless you give them some money to buy lunchImage
• Because of the large distances involved in much of the Third World, if you don’t overtake these trucks you will be stuck driving behind them at 20mph for hours and hours upon end. This turns driving into a real life Mario Kart minigame where you’re constantly overtaking the endless caravan of trucks on the road. The process goes like this - get stuck behind a truck on the one lane highway, drive at 20mph for 5 minutes waiting for the truck traffic on the other side of the road to clear, speed past the truck, immediately get stuck behind another truck driving at 20mph, repeat process ad infinitum for hours on endImage
• A lot of drivers are very bad drivers and seem to have little to no spatial awareness. This is a problem enough with the bikes that will slalom right up close between vehicles but it can become genuinely fatal when the giant death trucks start swerving around the road. Huge death monsters that will block the road or drive 1/3 of the way in on your side of the road when driving in the opposite direction to you, approaching you. You can either get frustrated by this or you can move out of the way. If you don’t move out of the way the problem is that because these drivers don’t have any spatial awareness they won’t move out of the way either - so they will just indifferently speed into you. Driving becomes a process of giving way to retards on pain of them otherwise scraping your car, which you see happening to others. Quite often too you will have to stop in the middle of the road because a car is speeding towards you in the opposite direction trying to overtake another car - if you don’t stop it’s not impossible it will just drive into you. You can blame the other drivers for being retards for sure but you’re the one driving on these roads of your own volitionImage
• In many Third World countries there are no street lights at night so when it turns about 7pm anywhere outside of a city is going to be pitch black. The only light comes from car headlines which creates a very intense glare which makes the very difficult to drive in the daytime roads even more difficult to drive on. And because a lot of the drivers on the road don’t seem to be cognisant of the existence of other drivers, many will have their headlines on the full beam. Imagine an endless stream of death trap trucks hurtling towards you driving 1/3 of the way into your side of the with their headlights on full blast. Really hellish. If you do this for several hours on end you will enter into a kind of spiritual trance where you are trapped in a kind of mental superposition, your mind halfway in the real world and halfway ensnared in the shadow realmImage
• The roads are often very potholed or patchy, large holes will occasionally just randomly appear in the road without warning. Because you can’t really predict where the holes are going to be, occasionally you’ll be driving at a relatively fast speed and have to suddenly swerve to avoid a crevice in the road that’s come rushing towards you. If you don’t, your car can take a battering. I have acquired flat tires and punctures this way. On some roads, the paved road might even just fall away without warning and you’ll drop off a small ridge onto a gravel road - which might damage your car or even cause it skid. Regardless of how well you drive, drive these roads for long enough and your car is going to acquire lots of minor damages. If you are renting a car especially, these can really add upImage
• Another recurring feature is random Police stops. Depending on the country, there may be more or less of these. The Police will set up along a nondescript part of the road and stop vehicles at random which functionally brings the traffic on the road to a halt. Nominally this is to stop criminals and smugglers or in some places ‘bandits’, but often since the police are retards from the local village dressed up in uniform and vested with more authority than they should probably have and sometimes massive AK-47s it ends up being an excuse to harass people for money or food or even just to pass the time. (Lots of authority figures in these countries mill around in this way, putting a badge on and harassing people to waste time because they don’t have anything else to do.) They might pretend you have the wrong documents or your car is damaged or you have some kind of traffic violation and demand you pay a fine or else they’ll send you to court. Even if they’re not corrupt they might just stop you and tell you to sit around for a while while they ‘inspect’ your vehicle, which evidences how nonchalant people frequently are about wasting your timeImage
How it feels to drive on Third World Toad Turnpike Roads Image
Multiplayer Online Real Life Mario Kart VS Mode Image

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More from @kunley_drukpa

ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Dec 19
USING VOICENOTES INSTEAD OF WRITTEN TEXTS TO DM LATINAS

One thing you notice if you DM with Latinoids is that almost all of them communicate in voicenotes on messaging apps. Why? Just something inside them, some kind of impulse they have, that’s just how they are. Think if you’re a WASPy-Hajnaler this is sometimes quite an alien way of communicating, you get your messages filled with these little podcasts all the time which you have to whip out your headphones for and spend three minutes listening to whenever you receive them. A lot of the time too 80% of this content is just boring filler, they really are incredibly low content density - you could just say what you need to say in 15 seconds you don’t need to waste my time with a full live reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude every other message

My preference is to communicate in text and if someone is really into it ideally walls of text. I struggle to match the Latinoid ‘vitalidad’, the Iberianoid ‘duende’, that constant heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity apparently imbued in every voicenote these people send. No thanks, I prefer my vanilla ice cream, my plain bread and butter toast, my analytic philosophy and my text-only DMs

This kind of natural disdain granted, was somewhat to my chagrin when I gradually discovered that Latina women respond much more enthusiastically to voicenote messaging than written texts. You know, this is the art of being able to put yourself in someone else’s headspace, of being able to build a theory of mind for the ‘other’. When I DM these women if I could I would just write them little funny texts but no it doesn’t quite work like that, you’re speaking to a woman and then again to a Latina woman. You need some spoken ‘impulso vital’

So I started sending more voicenotes, not with any content in particular just sort of riffing for two minutes that doesn’t go anywhere and wastes your time. Really really disrespectful time wasting. Responses on average far more enthusiastic - they genuinely love this stuff. Selling your WASP soul to the devil here, fighting against every natural instinct you have and properly going native by forcing yourself to burble out voicenotes is, pro-tip, a major boost - it really seems to work so… everybody has their priceImage
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The Written Text - Voicenote distinction is a major, well-documented cultural divide between the West and the Global Sourh
Your comments on this… Image
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ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Dec 18
WHAT IS ‘ETHNIC LITTERING’?

An occasional feature of history - mass population transfers of groups from their home territories to other, different and often alien territories for labour or other ideological purposes. This type of motivated transfer of non-sequitur groups is ‘Ethnic Littering’; the process of moving groups into territories where they make no (historical or cultural) sense, ‘Littering’ in the sense that the transfer is frequently careless, short-termist and unconsidered and creates and entrenches cultural, political and demographic problems in the territories these new populations are imported into

These top down transfers (as distinct from colonisation) are rarely reversed and the transferred populations often establish themselves in the new territory over time, sometimes creating novel creole fusion cultures. Where these creole fusions are unsuccessful or only partially successful entire territories are frequently condemned to intractable kinds of low level conflict because of the irreconcilable nature of the groups that have been forced to live up against other post-‘Ethnic Littering’

‘Ethnic Littering’ is characteristic of the motivated mass immigration seen into the west in the 21st century, in Britain for instance it has resulted in the beginning of the process of ‘Yookayification’. There are many other earlier historical examples of ‘Ethnic Littering’ to different degrees though too, eg in Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Imperial China, later the Incan Empire (where under the ‘Mitma’ system groups were forcibly resettled to territories they were not native to transfer their loyalties to the state as well as to spread Inca culture) and also under the Ottoman ‘Sürgün’ system, in Imperial and Soviet Russia etc

One of the most egregious examples of ‘Ethnic Littering’ post-Atlantic slavery was the indentured labour C19th population transfers of particularly South Asians to territories of the European Colonial powers, primarily under the British Empire. In many ways the rationale for importing South Asians to Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, South and East Africa etc in the 19th century is the same rationale for eg importing South Asians to former industrial towns in Northern England in the post war years. A slight difference perhaps in that more recently mass population transfers have also taken on the dimension of a moral dogma, though both historical population transfers represent a kind of ‘Ethnic Littering’. Few of those countries receiving indentured labour transfers then are today properly ‘First World’ and many of those countries are still plagued by eg low level ethnic conflict. Many of those countries are artificial too, like the British and French Guyanas, formerly Dutch Suriname etc in the sense that they are countries with populations almost entirely composed of the now ‘locked-in’ descendants of ‘Ethnic Littering’ historical labour

This is the flipside of ‘You Can Just Do Things’ - you can transport entire non-sequitur groups halfway across the planet for whatever trivial reason and then in two hundred years you will have created a strange new synthetic fusion culture from the resulting mixing. You Can Just Do Things. Why not? Import a load of Kazakhs to Honduras if you want, create an ‘exciting’ new synthetic Kazakh-Honduran creole culture with no attention paid to the types of problems this kind of transfer later creates. It is true to a certain extent that this is how mass population movements have always worked throughout history, ‘human history is a story of migration’ is a truism for a reason - the distinction here seems to be though the motivated arbitrariness of the population transfer, how inorganic and careless it was, the often quite asinine ends it is undertaken for and then the jarring bizarro ‘nations’ with intractable structural problems the process produces centuries laterImage
A term often used to describe this ‘post-act of Ethnic Littering’ creolisation-recombination process is ‘Brazilification’, which has the broader sense of ‘Thirdworldification’ but also the more more specific sense of ‘the mixing of different groups’ in a territory that was once more homogenous. ‘Ethnic Littering’ is then also the act of transferring non-sequitur populations to a territory such that the process of creolisation or ‘Brazilification’ begins, perhaps ‘Thirdworldification’ too if the new mixed culture is too divided or non-cohesive and so not particularly functional. ‘Yookayification’ is a version of this. Brazil of the eponymous ‘Brazilification’ is in this respect the perennial ‘Country of the Future’, ‘something’ like what you get everywhere ‘Ethnic Littering’ runs uncheckedImage
About Belize as an example of ‘Ethnic Littering’
Read 6 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Dec 10
YOOKAY PARALLAX

Quoted article below by a British Muslim writer makes the suggestion that ‘The Left’ should co-opt the term ‘Yookay’ as a positive descriptive term but then goes onto to repeatedly misunderstand what is actually meant by the term. Don’t think this is because the concept is obscure or especially difficult to understand - commentators like Lord Frost have been able to give accurate accounts of what is meant by it. These writers are then either disingenuous and pretending not to ‘get it’ for rhetorical purposes (possible) or, more likely, just do not exist in a conceptual headspace where it is really even possible to ‘get it’. WRT ‘Yookay’ here they are seemingly unable to conceptualise the world historical demographic and cultural change that recent migration into Britain represents

This inability to enter into a different conceptual space was capture by Jean-François Lyotard with his notion of ‘The Differend’ - which refers to a situation where a conflict between two parties cannot be fairly resolved because there is no common language or framework of judgment that both sides recognise. In a differend, one party’s suffering or claim cannot be properly expressed or validated within the dominant discourse, meaning that misunderstanding occurs not because of falsehood, but because of the inability to be heard within the available linguistic or conceptual system. This is a perennial feature of contemporary British political discourse

I have not yet seen a mainstream ‘Left Wing’ person argue “Yes and that radical population and cultural change is a good thing” when they try to critique the concept of the ‘Yookay’. This is strange, because the ‘Yookay’ represents the actual material outcome of their ideological project. This is what you wanted! Instead they often try to pretend ‘Yookay’ doesn’t represent any meaningful change at all and, if they address the account itself, that all the images there are fake or don’t pick out any meaningfully representative aspect of Britain. This is a generous version of the position:

“Britain hasn’t meaningfully changed at all but also all these obviously new cultural interpolations are good things and we are happy that they have been introduced”

The author of the article herself does not even reach this level. She says “we should reclaim Yookay” but then describes ‘Yookay’ as class antagonism erroneously misdirected towards “black and Muslim people”. It is therefore a ‘populist cope’. ‘Yookay’ so-reclaimed to her then apparently means a united multiracial working class front against ‘The Rich’ ergo the ‘Yookay Aesthetic’ will be reclaimed as a ‘good thing’ because it represents anti-capitalist solidarity(?)

I mean why bother at this point? She doesn’t even mention demographic and cultural change as an important component of the concept because to her, again, there hasn’t been any meaningful demographic and cultural change. Any counterbalancing of a ‘Historical Britain’ to the ‘Yookay’ represents, she says, “a fictitious past”

My sense of the concept, and sorry if indulge myself a little here, is that it does ‘pick out’ meaningful changes in national character - and because many of those meaningful changes are (by many subjective evaluations) undesirable the act of documenting them and pointing out that these changes have taken place is read as some kind of attack by ideological advocates of that transformation. Some of these commentators will also leap to “ergo it must be a racist project” to bridge the gap between their idealised visions and the actual reality of that sweeping national change. Here it becomes difficult to describe these changes in strictly neutral terms, let alone negative terms. If commentary on real world imagery and videos (that because they are real necessarily represent some aspect of the real world as it actually is) is not strictly positive you are in danger of having your posting construed as crass and racist attacksImage
Again, would like one person to actually defend the change at a properly intellectual level instead of just denying the demonstrable change represents any kind of change at all. You cannot ‘co-opt’ a term if you are unprepared to honestly address the actual original sense of it
‘Tribune’ was first founded in 1937 as a democratic socialist magazine and its previous editors have included Aneurin Bevin, Michael Foot and… George Orwell. It is now owned by a Tunisian Islamist
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ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Dec 7
MINNESOTA - “SOMALIA’S PROMISED LAND” 🇸🇴

In recent weeks a new meme has emerged on Somali social media in which Somalis claim Minnesota is the promised land for Somalis and invent histories about how Somalis came to settle there. Collection thread of some of these memes 🧵
‘Somali Manifest Destiny’ Image
“A native American Somali man who's ancestors and tribes dwelled the land of Minnesota for centuries .🪶 Fun fact traditional dishes like banana and rice were served in thanksgiving back in those days also”
Read 13 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Nov 18
ON THE THIRD WORLD CITYSCAPE - ABOUT GUATEMALA CITY 🇬🇹

Spent some time in Guatemala City. It isn’t a very interesting city but it is a good example of what an average Central American / Third World city looks like. A thread about the common features of these kinds of cities 🧵 Image
When you fly in above, I don’t want to say the place looks like slum but it does look sort of the next step-up from a slum. Just a sea of corrugated iron roofs. These kinds of cities are not hugely appealing from above. It looks visibly ramshackle Image
There are whole areas of the city that you “just don’t go”. “Aye aye aye… es muy peligroso” you will be warned. “We don’t go there”. This threat is a little exaggerated, you can walk more places than people say you can, but it is also true that there are places you shouldn’t Image
Read 13 tweets
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
Nov 17
“Bro if immigrants scare you don’t ever visit Dubai, 90% of the country are immigrants”

“Those people are guest workers”

“And somehow… they aren’t collapsing.
They’re booming”

“They aren’t eligible for citizenship”

“I might get a UAE passport myself”

“Literally impossible” Image
Image
Another day in upside down world where someone uses an example that demonstrates the exact opposite opposite of what they are trying to argue to argue because they don’t know anything about anything
Have to make some version of this tweet maybe every three months
Read 5 tweets

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