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 price
The Written Text - Voicenote distinction is a major, well-documented cultural divide between the West and the Global Sourh

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1728833815567843629

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 later

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2001427175246008358

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 unchecked

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 attacks

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1998827827882336653

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

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 🧵

https://twitter.com/mukzafc/status/1996919170072539340

‘Somali Manifest Destiny’

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 🧵 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

“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”

https://twitter.com/jblunt1018/status/1990045775418814472

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

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1770406464680607932

BEST OF R/LEGALADVICEUK 🧵

r/LegalAdviceUK is a reddit subreddit where people ask for legal advice about their problems. Because of the levels of dysfunction in Britain (AKA ‘The Yookay’) today they often read as parody. Here is a thread of some of the more absurd recent posts “Caste-based discrimination at my workplace”

ON STUPID HIGH CRIME LEVELS IN A ‘TOTAL MESS’ COUNTRY LIKE GUATEMALA 🇬🇹

When you visit a ‘Total Mess’ Central American country like Guatemala or Honduras, formerly El Salvador, you get a lot of people spontaneously materialising out of the aether to tell you “don’t go outside in the cities they aren’t safe” “don’t walk anywhere at all it isn’t safe” “don’t go out at night there are dual machete-wielding werewolves on the streets” etc. This danger is a bit exaggerated on a personal level, I often find these claims of danger exaggerated anyway, if you are a moderately sized male you will be basically fine walking around many slightly dangerous places at night. Walk with a swaying gorilla gorilla gait so banditos know you are the big bossman, make shrieking gorilla noises to ward them off too if you want, no problem. Obviously though the slums, barrios, favelas etc, yes you would be retarded to go into. Really just needs a good spider sense to intuit where is it and isn’t okay to go.

Either way, it is true there is a lot of crime. You do think, how is there this much crime? It isn’t even like in the west, Yookay, were crime is overlooked for asinine human rights reasons. What exists in a place like Guatemala is a special type of state that ‘some’ have called the ‘Mafia-Corporation Complex’. This is a kind of state where corruption has become so endemic that gangs are basically intertwined with the structure of the state - they are almost an extension of the state itself because they are so enmeshed in its political patronage networks that the state’s formal institutions (customs, immigration, judiciary, police etc) become penetrated, manipulated and co-opted. Rule of law is weak and impunity is high so gangs function as a kind of parallel state structure.

What is the ‘corporation’ part here? In a ‘Total Mess’ country like Guatemala crime-groups will run extortion, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal logging, mining, money laundering, whatever etc. through legitimate businesses. Legitimate businesses (or hybrids) facilitating that money-laundering then obtain government contracts through corrupt channels and / or get kickbacks for serving as fronts. This is de facto state capture (where state institutions serve private illicit interests rather than public good and governance is undermined) which vis-a-vis crime results in a huge spike in violence & insecurity (where criminogenic markets incentivise high homicide rates, arms proliferation and the formation of gangs to control competing territorial claims).

The high levels of gang violence then have downstream effects across society - in the creation of a culture of crime among more ‘normal people’ that is both more incentivised and less commonly prosecuted (on top of the regular incentives that exist already) and in actual physical space where physical territory disputes encourage more crime. In Guatemala some of these gangs are even transnational and associated with the Mexican cartels which leads to state capture by international networks of interests and violence; everything all just so entangled and entrenched that unless you ‘have the balls’ the inducements are really not there to undertake the thankless task of dismantling the ‘Mafia-Corporation Complex’. You would have to upset a lot of people *and* be immune to bribes, threats of violence and fake legal prosecution yourself to begin to fix it. THE POPULIST EFFECT TURBO-CHARGED

When you have a country that is this captured almost all popular politics becomes about fighting crime and corruption. Guatemala is interesting in this way in that it doesn’t have long-standing political parties. Almost every Guatemalan president since the country’s democratic transition in 1985 post civil war has come to power with a different political party - and that party usually collapses or fades soon after leaving office. This is because almost every party comes to power on a populist pledge to defeat crime and corruption - unlike the previous party that promised that - and then immediately fails in its pledge to defeat crime and corruption. Then the next new party promises to defeat crime and corruption and the cycle continues. Actually a lot of the parties making these pledges are corrupt to begin with, have crime ties to begin with, so it isn’t like they are all Bukele-style noble crusaders who fail because they encounter institutional obstacles.

One example - Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales (2016 - 2020), a political ‘outsider’ former much-loved comedian who campaigns on the slogan ‘not corrupt, not a criminal’. Morales rides a wave of populism to defeat the ‘corrupt establishment’. Soon afterward it transpires that Morales’ family is corrupt, that Morales himself was getting kickbacks, taking illegal donations, that he tried to expel an independent UN commission on corruption in Guatemala because it considered recommending removing his legal immunities as president etc.

Many such cases, the cycle just continues…

How many levels of ethnic conflict are you on?

https://twitter.com/officialrnintel/status/1986572659425976683

You did not anticipate that the Somali candidate would lose because you were insufficiently racist

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1724570772528660953

THE YOOKAY AS ART

A short collection of recent photographs of Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ which have artistic merit and which capture a changing Britain 🧵 LIMBO

“I am handing myself in. I am literally an illegal migrant sex offender and it’s a terrible injustice that an illegal migrant sex offender is being allowed to walk free”

“Leave us alone”

“Please arrest and deport me, hold yourself to some standards for your own sake”

“Go away”

https://twitter.com/crimeldn/status/1983602408384008491

Which TV Show would you like to see Kebatu make a guest appearance on after his second release from prison?

I am featured in the latest issue of GQ Magazine in an article about the ‘New British Right’

https://twitter.com/josiahgogarty/status/1978439576424267840

GQ commissioned some ‘Drukpa Kunley’ inspired art for the article

This area of Manchester is demographically like a mini Israel-Palestine - a large neighbourhood of Jews rubbing right up next to a large neighbourhood of Muslims

https://twitter.com/bbcbreaking/status/1973681293830271451

x.com/augustderosa/s… x.com/augustderosa/s…

“Let me explain to you how your country is cruel and inhumane even though you accepted me in as an asylum seeker”

https://twitter.com/chungchingkwong/status/1970388650077888848

“Why didn’t you have the moral courage to nuke Beijing?”

I am mentioned in a new Guardian article which speculates on the origin of the term ‘Boriswave’ and attempts to explain the ‘destabilising’ influence of the ‘extremely online right’ so-called in British politics

https://twitter.com/archiebland/status/1970386462530015329

Who are the ‘extremely online right’?

ENSHITTIFICATION - WHERE IS THE BOTTOM?

Have had the opportunity to visit a fair few so-called shithole countries now that are different degrees of both shithole and captured by some ideology or the other. Common feature of many of these places is that their obviously ‘downtrodden conditions’ have thus far not seemed to have prompted any significant attempts to ‘properly fix things’.

Take the example of Cuba, which this account has talked a lot about. Visit a country like Cuba and its systemic issues fairly quickly become obvious - people are poor and apathetic, there is little to no economic or infrastructure development, what reserves the government does have are used frivolously or lost to corruption, politicians have demonstrably stupid priorities. Etc. A mostly competent (and pragmatic) hypothetical leader who wasn’t wedded to the existing communist ideological structures could go quite far in fixing many of these issues. Easy. But that doesn’t happen - that leader never emerges. Decade on decade conditions deteriorate slightly. There is more trash on the street than there used to be, there are more frequent power outages, the size of the communist monthly rations decreases slightly. Conditions aren’t unbearable but they are worse than they used to be. Surely things can’t continue like this any longer?

Was walking around that country thinking ‘this is a failed state, what is going on?’ Asked some Cubans, “do you think there is going to be a revolution or coup of some kind to overturn this soon?” “What? No.” This will be the reaction more often than you would hope… So where is the bottom? You can have entire cities with continual blackouts, people living on $40 a month and even then the revolutionary talk is still ‘capeshit’ so-called. People just ‘get by’. Which is not to say that revolutions never happen but that often the kinds of conditions that do produce these movements are not in every instance inevitably predicated on these conditions alone.

It seems like prima facie sound theory that if conditions deteriorate sufficiently under a given ideology that that ideology is therefore disproven, disbunked. Quot Erat Demostarum… it’s over... But then define ‘disproven’, theory isn’t ’real life’. Economic growth is down, censorship is up, crime is up, polarisation is up, people may even be being assassinated - so what? Reductively, if the chance of being mugged in a city increases from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100 over three decades there are still 99 in 100 people ‘un-mugged’. Maybe a decade later the rate increases further to 1 in 50. In response people begin installing electric fences and hiring private security - and this collectively is enough of a deterrent that robbery rates decrease back to 1 in 100. Quality of life has degraded but conditions are still ‘liveable’. These are exaggerated very simple numbers but you take the point that the new standards become normalised. Things are not yet urgent enough to motivate ‘the revolution’ even if it seems like they ‘ought to’ on paper, however you define ‘ought to’.

The still-extant communist countries are good examples in a way. North Korea as a country is ‘a bit of a meme’ but you can make the same point with it. How has a country with such obvious systemic issues as North Korea survived? It just has. Okay it is a little more complex than that but it still turns out you can fairly indefinite sustain juche hermit kingdoms. Doesn’t matter that it wouldn’t be particularly great to be North Korean - there is no coming correction to these conditions, ‘nothing happens’, life continues in North Korea regardless. In North Korea (and incidentally in Cuba too) in the 1990’s there was widespread famine. Did this result in the collapse of the state? No. You might say that many of the old communist countries did fall in the end - most recently in September of 2025 Nepal’s socialist government was even ‘couped’. Not to say such things can’t happen, just that often they don’t.

[1/2] The above are examples of extreme declines in quality of life. In a wealthier more established country like Yookay née Britain, Canada or France etc. by comparison what ‘enshittification’ means in practice is slow decline in quality of life across various metrics but where that decline is not so precipitous that people’s lives become unbearable. For most people life will be some degree of Basically Fine even with this gradual decline over time. It is nowhere near as bad as Cuba or North Korea or any other failed or failing state you can think of and it may even be the case that the decline is nonlinear - there may be periods of recovery or technological advancements that improve life in many respects.

Enshittification is the gradual lowering of standards and in this way it can often be melodramatic to paint any individual instance of lowering standards as a catalyst or flashpoint for ‘something needing to be done urgently’ - including even acts of political violence and especially where conditions are otherwise relatively Basically Fine. “Something is definitely going to happen now.” Maybe but also maybe not. Maybe even probably not. Maybe even definitely not. Many people in the west live Basically Fine lives and this kind of often exaggerated rhetoric, especially when it is at odds with their personal experiences, is not always convincing.

One unique feature of ‘the situation’ in western countries vs elsewhere is the world historical large scale ethnic change. This kind of inevitable ‘felt dispossession’ can motivate political change but ‘felt dispossession’ does not always mean commensurate significantly degraded material conditions, conditions that have been unbearably de-Basically Fine’d - at least directly even when the ‘ethnic conflict’ is low-level however defined or when it results in certain kinds of ‘third worldification’. You can still visit a bubble tea shop, a new Ethiopian restaurant with the best injera bread you ever had, go to a park and throw a frizbee with your cockapoo dog in London, Toronto and Paris. Broader purchase is that it helps to be realistic about the actual conditions of a place if this is where you seek change from, how desperate things actually are with respect to how Basically Fine most people’s lives are.

There are many arguments against mass immigration but for me the most impactful one has been on moral and aesthetic grounds. The rightwards shift in western politics is in this way often more than anything else about identity. This is a kind of enshittification to be sure but it is much more abstract and less perceptible, less immediately concrete to detractors than say bin strikes. It is true that standards of living fall because of mass immigration but it is not necessarily true that they will always fall precipitously because of it to the degree it will always motivate unanimous and conclusive pushback. If there is righteous anger over immigration the kernel of that anger will tend to be over the cultural and population change (even if it is not consciously understood as such) - as it often is in different forms in other civil conflicts in developing countries worldwide. Though, while you are waiting for that anger to somehow manifest in the form of competent motivated actors there is still a lot more ruin in your country left than you might think… Efforts towards change may be more productive where they help people conceptualise the degree of transformation - though even here this is often something a person will just instinctively either care about or not.

Not that nothing happens in the sense of it emphatically changing to a far worse, unbearable new norm - but that when it does happen it often happens imperceptibly over a long enough time span such that at the end of that glacial-paced happening only comparatively can something have properly been said to have happened. That may now be more likely to motivate change but actual change still requires galvanising initiative.

[2/2]

DE-CODING THE FAR RIGHT LANGUAGE OF THE CHARLIE KIRK SUSPECT

With the Charlie Kirk suspect now in custody seized communications have revealed a troubled, fanatical man deeply steeped in the worldview of the fringe extreme right. Here is what the memes he often referenced mean 🧵

https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/1967377911146500366

The suspect once wore a tracksuit and took a picture of himself squatting in it - a reference to ‘Slav Squat Pepe’, a popular meme Neo-Nazis often share to suggest that they ‘Feels Bad Man’ about the lack of Russian intervention in their own country’s domestic populist politics

“MY APARTMENT IN NIGERIA IS CONSTANTLY ROBBED” - what it is like to live in a poor part of a Nigerian city 🧵

In Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’ the author spends time in Nigeria and decides to try living in an African neighbourhood instead of an expat one. He describes how he is constantly robbed until a witch doctor helps him protect his apartment with enchanted totems

“The apartment that I rent in Lagos is constantly broken into. It happens not only when I am away for a longer stretch of time- even if I am going on a short trip to a nearby town, to Abeokuta or to Oshogbo, I know that upon my return I will find the window popped out of its frame, the furniture turned upside down, the cupboards emptied.

The apartment is located in the center of town, on the island of Lagos. The island was once a staging area for slave traders, and these shameful, dark origins of the city have left traces of something restless and violent in its atmosphere. You are made constantly aware of it. For instance, I may be riding in a taxi and talking with the driver, when suddenly he falls silent and nervously surveys the street. "What's wrong?" I ask, curious. "Very bad place!" he answers, lowering his voice. We drive on, he relaxes and once again converses calmly. Some time later, we pass a group of men walking along the edge of the road (there are no sidewalks in the city), and at the sight of them the driver once again falls silent, looks about, accelerates. "What's going on?" I ask. "Very bad people!" he responds. It's another kilometer before he is calm enough to resume our conversation.

Imprinted in such a driver's head must be a map of the city resembling those that hang on the walls of police stations. Little multicolored warning lights are constantly lighting up on it, flashing, pulsating, signaling places of danger, sites of attacks and other crimes. These warning lights are especially numerous on the map of the downtown, where I live. I could have chosen to live in Ikoyi, a safe and luxurious neighborhood of rich Nigerians, Europeans, diplomats, but it is too artificial a place, exclusive, closed, and vigilantly guarded. I want to live in an African street, in an African building. How else can I get to know this city? This continent?

But it is far from simple for a white man to move into an African neighborhood. To start with, the Europeans are outraged. Someone with my intentions must be deranged, not in complete possession of his mental faculties. So they try to dissuade me, warn me: It is certain that you will perish, and the only thing still in doubt is the precise way this will happen--either you will be killed, or you will simply die of your own accord, because living conditions are so dreadful there.

But the African side also regards my plan with scant enthusiasm. First of all, there are the technical difficulties--live where, exactly? This kind of neighborhood is all poverty and overcrowding, wretched little houses, clay huts, slums; there is no fresh air, and often no electricity; it is dust, stench, and insects. Where can you go? Where can you find a separate corner? How do you get around? What do you do? Take, for instance, something as basic as water. Water must be brought from the other end of the street, because that's where the pump is. Children do this. Sometimes--women. Men? Never. And here's a white gentleman standing with the children in the line for the pump. Ha! Ha! Ha! This is impossible! Or let's say that you have found a small room somewhere, and you want to shut the door to work. Shut the door? This is unthinkable. We all live together in a family, in a group--children, adults, old people; we are never apart, and even after death our spirits remain among the living, with those who are still in this world. Shut yourself alone in a room, in such a way that no one can enter? Ha! This is impossible! "And besides," the natives explain gently to me, "it is dangerous in our neighborhood.”

[1/5] There are many bad people around here. The worst are the boma boys--gangs of debauched hoodlums, who attack, mug, and rob--a dreadful swarm of locusts that ravages everything. They will quickly sniff out that a lone European has come to live here. And to them, a European is a rich man. Who will protect you then?

But I held firm. I didn't listen to the warnings. My mind was made up--perhaps in part because so often I had felt irritated with people who arrived here, lived in "little Europe" or "little America" (i.e., in luxury hotels), and departed, bragging later that they had been to Africa, a place that in reality they had never seen.

And suddenly, an opportunity arose. I met an Italian who in a back alley not far from Massey Street owned a little warehouse of farm implements. Like many whites who were gradually liquidating their enterprises here, he had closed his business. The two-room service apartment above it was now vacant, and he was all too happy to rent it to me. He drove me there one evening in his car and helped me carry up my things (the metal stairs were attached to the building's exterior walls). It was pleasantly cool inside, he had turned on the air conditioner that morning. There was also a working refrigerator. He wished me a good night and quickly departed. He was flying to Rome early the next morning--after the latest military coup, he was afraid of further unrest and wanted to take some of his money out of the country.

I began to unpack. An hour later the lights went out.

I didn't have a flashlight. Worse still, the air conditioner had stopped, and in addition to it being completely dark, it now quickly became hot and stuffy. I opened the window. In swept the stench of rotten fruit, burnt oil, soap, and urine. Although the sea was somewhere nearby, you could detect no breeze in this enclosed and congested alley. It was March, a month of crushing heat, when the nights often seemed hotter and more stifling than the days. I looked out the window. Up and down the street below me, on woven mats or directly on the ground, lay half-naked people. The women and children were asleep; several men, their backs leaning against the walls of the clay houses, stared at me. I didn't know what their gazes meant. Did they want to meet me? Help me? Kill me?

I decided that I could not endure until dawn in these sweltering rooms, and went down. Two men rose; the others watched, motionless. We were all sweaty, deadly tired; merely existing in this climate is an extraordinary effort. I asked them if this kind of electrical outage happened often. They didn't know. I asked if something could be done about it. They conversed among themselves in a language I did not understand. One of them disappeared. Minutes passed--fifteen, thirty, forty-five. Finally he returned, bringing two young men with him. They said that they could fix the problem for ten pounds. I agreed. Soon, the lights were back on inside the apartment, and the air conditioner was working. Several days later--another outage, another ten pounds. Then fifteen, twenty.

And the thefts? In the beginning, I was filled with rage each time I returned to my ransacked apartment. To be robbed is, first and foremost, to be humiliated, to be made a fool of. But with time I came to understand that seeing a robbery as a humiliation and an affront is an emotional luxury. Living amid the poverty of my neighborhood, I realized that theft, even a petty theft, can be a death sentence. To steal is to commit manslaughter, murder. A solitary woman had her little corner in my street, and her sole possession was a pot. She made a living buying beans for credit from the vegetable vendors, cooking them, seasoning them with a sauce, and selling them to passersby. For many, this bowl of beans was the only daily meal.

[2/5]

ABOUT ‘AFRICAN TIME’

In Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’, about his time in Africa, there is a chapter where he describes his own experience of ‘African Time’ when he enters a bus and has to wait many hours for it to depart -

“We climb into the bus and sit down. At this point there is a risk of culture clash, of collisions and conflict. It will undoubtedly occur if the passenger is a foreigner who doesn’t know Africa. Someone like that wil start looking around, squirming, inquiring “When will the bus leave?"

“What do you mean, when?” The astonished driver will reply. “It will leave when we find enough people to fill it up."

The Europeans and the Africans have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equably and without relation to anything external”.

The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must need deadlines, dates, days and hours. He moves within the rigor of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat - time annihilates him.

Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is a man who influences time, its shape, course and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).

Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even non-existence, if we do not direct our energy towards it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview. In practical terms, this means that if you go to a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find no one at the appointed spot, asking “When will the meeting take place?" makes no sense. You know the answer: “It will take place when people come”. Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting.” From the ‘AFRICAN MASTERTHREAD’ - you can read more stories like this below

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1744017316231188749

🇫🇮 New Finnish Study on the Net Financial Costs of different immigrant groups. It replicates the findings of the famous Danish and Dutch studies - almost all immigrant groups are net costs to Finland. Migrants from the Middle East and North Africa are the biggest financial drains

https://twitter.com/samuli_salminen/status/1958462257051980284

In Finland even western migrants are rarely net fiscal contributors

New Dominican Song ‘Let Trump Deport Her’ (Que Me La Deporte Trump) in which a man sings about how he hopes Trump will deport his ex-wife after she leaves him and runs away to America Song name is ‘Que Me La Deporte Trump’ by Sandro Reyes