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?
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Impressions from recent visit to Stockholm and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵
This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Stockholm as it is today and the extent to which Stockholm is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Stockholm is a modern, pleasant, high human capital city which to a large extent lets it shrug off its large recent migrant influxes
For a city that spends nine long months in the dark Nordic winter Stockholm is probably about ‘as good as you can get’. Well-organised, developed. Actually the Nordic capitals are very grand, pleasant if cold. Not sort of slightly grotty like Berlin, Brussels, Eastern Europe etc
The year is 2050. Changing demographics have Latinamerica-fied your politics - like in Latin America western countries are now condemned to neverending lurching between two ideological extremes that then only further radicalise in reaction to each other. Which side do you choose?
America will fulfil its destiny and become the penultimate Latin American country in the Americas, before Canada which will first become a Subcontinental country and then a Latin American country after the Latinos move up into it from America. Trump is the first American Caudillo
This is the politics you get if you de-Basically Fine-ify your society with decades upon decades of Ideology-maxxing
HOW NATIVES THINK - WHY MANY PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK SO IRRATIONALLY 🧵
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was an early 20th century French anthropologist writing before many of the taboos academic anthropology has accumulated today. In his book ‘How Natives Think’ he explores why so many people - and for him especially so many ‘non-civilised’ peoples - seem to be so superstitious. He tries to explain what it is that is happening inside the minds of (he calls them) ‘natives’ when, for example, they appear to have difficulty understanding causality in anything other than in terms of spirits or djinns. Though the work is not without its critics (eg it has been called reductive, eurocentric and generalising) it is an interesting example of taboo-free study on the ubiquity of a kind of magical thinking or djinnbrain
Lévy-Bruhl’s core claim is that so-called “primitive” peoples do not think illogically as such, but instead according to different rules. Reasoning is primarily shaped by emotion, symbolism and collective belief, not contradiction or empirical causation
That is, their thinking is guided by collective representations - shared mental images (like totems, taboos, spirits) that have a deep emotional force. See: the power of djinn in some societies (ie Djinnbrain). These guide thought and action without needing justification
New Article in the Telegraph on ‘The Yookay’ and my @MythoYookay page. “The "Yookay" now has a wider implication too: to suggest … we are now a new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain”
Impressions from recent visit to Zagreb and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵
This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Zagreb as it is today and the extent to which Zagreb is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Zagreb is not as interesting VS Croatia’s coastal areas but it less touristy, a good ‘local’ city. Guest workers recently started to arrive
Don’t think visitors will ever really be blown away by Zagreb but it’s not a bad city. Very similar in layout and look to smaller capitals of other smaller Eastern European cities, eg Bratislava, Ljubljana, Sofia, Belgrade, Vilnius and so on. Wealthier than some of those at least