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@kunley_drukpa

Nov 12

HELIOPOLIS - CITY OF THE SUN

Heliopolis the ‘City of the Sun’ also known as Baalbek in 🇱🇧 Lebanon - famous for its Sun Cult. In the Roman Period it was a large and renowned site of worship for a syncretic form of Jupiter known as Heliopolitan Jupiter - Jupiter combined some indeterminate near eastern God, possibly Ba’al, Ra, Hadad etc. who very ‘vitalistic-ly’ embodied the power and force of the sun hence Heliopolis, ‘City of the Sun’

Baalbek is a very impressive Roman Temple Complex, in ‘Asia Minor’ I would say almost ‘up there’ with grander larger sites like Ephesus and Palmyra. The still standing temple of Bacchus is particularly impressive and it strikes you as somewhere that must have been a dynamic place in its heyday before its status as a centre for increasingly esoteric, tired and indulgent late Roman cults was brought down by the ‘cleansing force’ of Christianity. Like many such ancient sites in the Middle East it does have a reputation as being a “for you my friend good price” tout-opolis, perhaps the biggest such tout-opolis in Lebanon and sold as such to me by lots of uninvested Lebanese people - “it’s the must visit tourist attraction in Lebanon, you should go… But they’ll try to scam you be careful”. I didn’t find it particularly bad for touts though, there aren’t really many touts in Lebanon and you are never really hassled by local people anywhere. You can pretty much go wherever you want without trouble even to areas that sound on the face of it off-limits - either because they don’t get many tourists or because they’re all too apathetic. At Heliopolis there were a few touts milling around but they seemed tired and low energy, half-hearted and like they couldn’t particularly be bothered to haggle. Lebanon is a very tired country, even the touts are tired, lethargic. Ironic too given the Sun Cult at Heliopolis was devoted to its antithesis - high energy ‘vitality’

Remember the taxi driver telling me “you should be careful in Baalbek it’s very dangerous”. It didn’t seem very dangerous but he was very adamant about it. The reason he thought it was dangerous was because it was a Hezbollah-y Shia-y area. “They are all thieves and swindlers - and sometimes they blow people up”. That might even have been actually true but I was never ‘accosted’, even half-heartedly. Was told that some Hezbollah members ran tours taking tourists around Baalbek as a part-time job and then diverted part of that income towards Hezbollah. Sounds like a silly conspiracy-ish thing to say but again might have been true who knows, maybe they did need the money. If it was true though the Hezbollah operatives posing as touts weren’t doing a very good job, they were too busy milling and smoking and phone scrolling to take and use my tourist dollars to fund Fajr missiles to fire at Israel. He may have just meant that they were Shia and conflated the two, Shia Islam and Hezbollah apparently the same thing

Baalbek is located in the flatter Beqaa valley in the foothills of Mt. Lebanon. You are very close to the Syrian border there, lots of ‘Afghan Poppy Field Valley’-looking scenery. In that way it certainly looks convincingly terrorist-y, especially too with the occasional Hassan Nasrallah or Ayatollah Khomeini banner hung from a lamppost or building. As I’ve said before one of the entertaining elements of travelling Lebanon as an uninvested visitor is this ‘Factions controlling different areas of the map in a Ubisoft game’-like feel to the place, symbols and iconography always changing as you travel around the country. Again of course a disaster for the Lebanese (see as usual: ‘Lebanonisation’)

Another interesting aspect of the Heliopolitan Jupiter cult was that Jupiter was depicted with different attributes to regular Roman depictions of Jupiter. Long flowing hair, broad shoulders, clean shaven, asiatic motifs… for the Heliopolitans Jupiter was a very dynamic figure

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@kunley_drukpa

Oct 28

CLASS AND IMMIGRATION AND WEIRDLY LARGE AMOUNTS OF SUGAR IN YOUR TEA

Many commentators have been reading class prejudice into the ‘Six Sugar’ Kemi scandal - the emerging revelations that Yoruba Nigerian British Conservative Party Leader candidate Kemi Badenoch puts six sugars in her tea (in Britain putting too much sugar into your caffeinated drinks is considered lower class because ‘gross’) which people are making fun of Kemi for - but it would be more to correct to read it as a more subtle ‘Originally Being From A Foreign Nationality’ difference. It is common in lots of Non-Western Countries like Nigeria (locals will tell you themselves) to add lots of sugar to ‘flavour’ or ‘season’ drinks to ‘give them taste’ and so to ‘stop them tasting flat’

I remember very vividly being in a certain African country and being offered tea and then having several tablespoons of sugar dumped into it. This was unremarked on, it was seen as normal - and in that country it was. Britain especially has lots of very subtle class indicators like this that as a foreigner migrating there you will not pick up on because they’re not really written down anywhere. Migrants will often default to the customs of their own countries in scenarios like this and so will barge past these social subtleties without realising. British people who don’t really understand that migrants have their own inherited customs will not be able to understand it outside their own frameworks that they have - in Britain most ‘like to pretend they are cosmopolitan are not actually particularly cosmopolitan’ commentators will just default back to the class system

Of course, because Britain has such a big immigrant population now you won’t really understand modern Britain if you only understand it in terms of class - but a lot of Provincial Middle Class Britons genuinely do not actually understand that foreigners are foreigners and so haven’t really mentally adapted to the new hyper-diverse Britain (AKA The Yookay) yet. Which is all to say, Kemi does not put six sugars in her tea because she is working class

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1769041392783720853

Previously talked about just how much Coca Cola is available for sale in some African Countries

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1769041392783720853

This isn’t just a Third Worldist Poverty thing it can often genuinely just be the culture

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@kunley_drukpa

Oct 26

New Big Trending Topic on Kenyan Twitter - Many Kenyans are warning about the 'Somalification' of Kenya. They fear Somalians are demographically and culturally displacing them

https://twitter.com/mareh3mu/status/1848976816276418969

Others are calling those who worry about ‘Somalification’ racist

https://twitter.com/mareh3mu/status/1848976816276418969

https://twitter.com/wolfofclapham/status/1850143050669973744

Somalians use the word ‘Jareerification’ to describe the process of their culture becoming more African and Africans use the word ‘Somalification’ to describe the process of their culture becoming more Somalian

https://twitter.com/wolfofclapham/status/1850143050669973744

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@kunley_drukpa

Oct 18

VISIT TO ‘HEZBOLLAH WORLD’ THEME PARK

Picture Thread of a visit to the famous Hezbollah-run ‘Hezbollah World’ Theme Park in Lebanon 🧵

The Hezbollah Theme Park is up in the mountains in Southern Lebanon and as you approach it you will drive through villages with lots of Hezbollah flags everywhere - pictures of Hezbollah and Iranian Leaders including Nasrallah, Khomeini, Soleimani etc.

This is the mountain countryside around Hezbollah World in the southern part of the mountain range that stretches cross Lebanon Mt. Lebanon. Lebanon is a surprisingly mountainous country in this way and if you visit anywhere inland from the sea you will be heading uphill

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@kunley_drukpa

Oct 9

WALKING TOUR OF EGYPTIAN NEIGHBOURHOOD

Pictures from a Walk around a Working Class-Area in Alexandria, Egypt 🧵

Shisha Bar. Note the chairs are all positioned outwards facing the road. Cafe culture as a ‘step-up’ from low level milling? You go and sit in a cafe and smoke hookah and you sit there for hours on end just looking out at the street to see what is happening and how the life is

This really smelled. You can imagine the smell. It escaped out onto the street and had suffused the whole area around the butchery

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@kunley_drukpa

Oct 3

Why does almost nothing in the Congo work properly? A Chinese Businessman tries to explain to a local Congolese Man

Chinese Workers in the Congo trying to build a new road complain about how incompetent their Employees are

These clips are from ‘Empire of Dust’, a Documentary about a Chinese Company hired to build a road in the Congo that is the origin of the ‘It’s all so tiresome’ meme and which has become a Cult Classic for its candid depiction of incompetence in Africa - available here:

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