Dutch Minister of Asylum and Migration Marjolein Faber and Deputy Prime Minister Fleur Agema are great examples of Pantsuit Deportation Politics, very un-intimidating cuddly and not weird EU Social Democracy HR ladies sensibly and sophisticatedly opting out of EU Migration Policy
POV: Your asylum application has been rejected and you are being deported back to Bomalia but in a progressive, sophisticated and not weird incel-like way
Deputy Prime Minister of The Netherlands and ‘Far Right’ PVV (Party for Freedom) Member Fleur Agema
Your School Crush and First Love that you are ‘meeting in a bar for drinks’ 15 years after you last saw her because your first marriage to another woman fell through and you ran into her again in a store while you were visiting your hometown and you thought why not give it a go?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Sneako inexplicably being indulged by world leaders like the Prime Minister of Malaysia now - as well as major third world thinkers and personalities. Like it or not Sneako represents a unifying force in the Ummah, the Ummah love him. Sneako could become leader of a new Caliphate
This is kind of law Bukele needs to keep enacting to take his game to the next level - from boring competent technocrat to full on classical platonic Philosopher King. Ban random hairstyles, ban certain musical instruments, genres of art, forms of poetry etc ‘for the public good’
My advice to Bukele recently has been he needs to level-up, he can’t just sit on his laurels. One of main problems here is the human capital problem. Can you de-choloify a country just by banning a certain kind of goofy haircut? Lots of work still to do
Rio is such an attractive city because it has an undeniable energy. A host of factors conspire to suck that energy away though (the poverty, the crime etc) - and while they half-succeed they have not quite yet fully succeeded
Thread 🧵
Going to complain a lot in this thread but want to preface the complaining by saying I really enjoy spending time in Rio. I love it, Zona Sul (Leblon, Ipanema, Copacabana, Leme) especially - I don’t think there is a more magical stretch of city on the planet, it’s a Final Fantasy location
Okay, Rio has many many problems but aesthetically, culturally - in the Atlanticist so-called sense ie Girl From Ipanema Bossa Nova mid century effortless cool Chico Buarque bodybuilders on Copacobana women with big boobs playing beach volleyball capirinhas in Leblon ‘Nietzschean Lusotropicalism’ - it is a very special place
Easy somewhere like Brazil to live in a bubble despite the obvious problems the place has. It’s possible with a modest amount of money (especially if your income is foreign) to almost totally avoid the country’s third world aspects barring maybe the occasional homeless person you have to sidestep on the street
Have said this before but third world living can be very easy if you’re relatively rich by local standards. Actually had been melting into that bubble for a while, a few months… was having a really nice time. You might drive past some favelas in an uber occasionally but once you do that a few times you sort of ‘get over’ their favela-ness and it doesn’t faze you so much. Or it becomes background noise at least, you forget you are in the ‘third world’
One day I thought I would get intercity bus because the flight between cities would cost an extra $350 (since there are few low cost airline carriers travel between cities in Brazil via air is disproportionately expensive. See also eg Canada here). Also don’t mind long road journies - trip would supposedly take about 11 hours, not the end of the world, Brazilian buses aren’t terrible, nice to rest and gaze out the window…
Sat down by window seat. Suddenly a large family of indigenous-looking people gets on. I’m not sure exact indigenous group they were… Guarani, Tupi… could have been Bolivian even… All very stout, very pre-Columbian features. Maybe you’ve seen that meme image of mexicans where all the mexicans look like Shrek and Fiona (ogre form), you know rotund bodies and jeans and hair fades and gold chains - kind of like this
They’d bought up several rows of tickets for themselves including in rows with single passangers. First thing they did when they went to sit down was set up a circular encampment all turning inwards to face each other, immediately beginning to talk loudly among themselves in a large ring formation around the aisle that took up a third of the length of the bus. This entire area became ‘their space’, a whole comunidade established; kids would run up and down and it squealing, food and luggage and bedding was passed along it
They would eat obnoxiously stinky food constantly too. All kinds of packages being ripped open; the smell of milho frito em óleo de sarjeta, capybara coxinhas etc perpetually wafting into your face. Tinny music played over phone speakers, voicenotes recorded in shouting tones, babies wailing and not being disciplined… constant chatter for most of the trip
Was remarkable how unfazed they were by the concept of the bus being a kind of shared space, you could have been at a village quinceañera for all intents and purposes. Yeah we’re on a public bus with all these strangers it’s reunião de família time. Was surprised they didn’t bring a goat on board… look I’m being a bit crass here I don’t want to be too crass but you try not noticing this when it’s happening right next to you on long bus journey
Real nightmare ride in all, was close to losing it for a while before I did my breathing exercises. Okay obviously I know these behaviours exist, they’re very common, have written about this many times before this is just what certain kinds of people ‘are like’ but as I said thing for me was I got lulled into a false sense of security despite knowing all this, having experienced it many times. Had nice lifestyle for a few months - it makes you drop your guard. Forgot this could happen, almost would have paid the extra money to avoid it all it was that unpleasant. Because you are not in contact with ‘it’ you forget ‘what things are like’, the hate does genuinely leave your body, you feel yourself getting more liberal again as experience of ‘what people are capable of’ fades in your mind. But then place yourself in an environment like that and it comes rushing back and you think “oh yeah”. Don’t want to draw too many comparisons to people’s priors vis-a-vis their political preferences here ofc…
Here’s some audio of wailing noises on the bus. Just variants on this for hours on end
Isn’t that London is now a hellhole, actually it is very nice in many parts - is more that it is undergoing a process of (avoidable) ‘enshittification’ where quality of life on certain metrics gets slowly worse over time. So easy to tolerate but things are still worse than before
London in the summer, wow. And maybe even you man clapping some naija or argentinian or punjabi ting you don’t even mind the real big change you’re having too much fun and who can blame you! But fact remains many QoL metrics degrading even if people often too hysterical about it!
Orban loss leaves Czech Republic model of right wing populism the most sustainable populist model in Visegrad. You may not like it but this is what sustainable Euro-populism looks like