THE BEST FILMS OF 2024

2024 was a big year in film. Sequels dominated but a new cultural turn explored reactionary themes. Here are The New York Times’ Best Movies of 2024: Movies that entertained and awed, but that also pushed boundaries and championed social justice causes 🧵 DIDN’T IRELAND USE TO BE A SHITHOLE?

Moving and thought provoking award-winning drama set in Old Ireland (1980’s). Cillian Murphy stars as an Irishman who must navigate the relentless awfulness that was Ireland - paedophile priests and no migrants. We learn how shit Ireland was

Tomb of Saladin in Damascus Syria. Often difficult to know what to do with yourself when you visit the tomb of genuine world historical figures, you feel you need to show reverence - I walked around it a few times. You can see in the corner the janitor dumped a vacuum cleaner box Saladin’s tomb is in a small mausoleum at the back of Damascus’ famous Umayyad Mosque, not really advertised. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you read about it beforehand. Mentioned to me casually, “oh yeah we’ve got Saladin out in the back if you want to go have a look”

NIGERIANS REACT to British Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch saying that she identifies as a Yoruba not a Nigerian and using the phrase “our ethnic enemies”

Thread of 🇳🇬 Nigerians reacting 🧵

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1867194490097951218

Who had Argentina tracking for most powerful European-Majority Country on the planet by 2100 on their Bingo Card?

https://twitter.com/marionawfal/status/1866665425234166089

Actually Competent Politics - don’t see that often anymore

Syria not just a literal battleground but a ‘battleground of ideas’ - now THIS is Praxis

https://twitter.com/mikediplockre/status/1865133380418826562

It’s the Institutions stupid!

https://twitter.com/citybureaucrat/status/1865122183065792834

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT - Compilation Megathread of International ‘Social Contract’ Memes from every Country 🧵


The French Social Contract - The Original ‘Le Contrat Social’ Meme

Women and especially middle-aged women as ruthless enforcers of social norms, curtain-twitching HR naggers as the backbone of society who uphold norms even if those norms are maladaptive. Change the norms to adaptive ones and you will have an iron grip on a ‘well-ordered’ society

https://twitter.com/slatzism/status/1860368432195051627

Call it a kind of ‘Karen Nationalism’ or ‘Pantsuit Enforcing’ - hate the HR ladies all you want but their perennial societal role is as a piece of value-neutral norm-enforcing social technology, they are a weaponised longhouse waiting ready for the taking

https://twitter.com/slatzism/status/1860396915768070276

‘The Bullet Train Model of Economic Development’

Pro-Tip for Developing Countries - just build a few bullet trains and shiny skyscrapers and you will appear rich to outsiders. It is that easy - you can still be actually poor but the shiny trains will convince people you are rich

https://twitter.com/mikediplockre/status/1859751866399326375

The ‘shiny’ Elizabeth Line makes London feel 20% wealthier than it actually is

https://twitter.com/aethelbread/status/1859879318668841321

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’)

LEBANESE WOMEN AND THE LEVANTINE ‘HOT WOMEN ZONE’

Some countries you visit and you notice the women there are unusually attractive. Many countries have some attractive women, many more have lots of ugly frog women, very few have large numbers of unusually attractive women. This might sound ‘goonbrained’ but it is something you do notice and pardon my French “get a feel for”. In this way, one of if not the most unusually attractive women ‘zones’ is, in my experience, the Levant

How so? If you go out to a fairly normal bar or club in Beirut you will generally be in for a very bonerific time. The local Lebanese women are very attractive. You may not even necessarily have gone out with this kind of thing ‘on your mind’ but you really can’t help but notice. You are in the bar cradling your whiskey (very cheap even for the prestige brands thank you hyperinflation) and then just in front of you… wow!

Here is my proposed ‘Levantine Hot Women Zone’ - it extends from Lebanon and Syria up to the Caucasuses - Armenia, Georgia, famously Circassia then Azerbaijan and back down into parts of Iran. If it extends into Israel, I think it’s marginal - depends on the subgroup… maybe there are parts of Tel Aviv that come close… Palestinians and Egyptians and Peninsular Arabs again a little too semitic to really ‘hit the look’. Turks and Greek women can have this sub-Gold Chain Race Levantine look but maybe their hit-rate is a little lower. Often quite attractive but in a slightly different way - ‘Med-ish’, Minoan, the braided chignon etc. So you have a rough idea of the boundaries

You see these women in Damascus, in Beirut, in Batumi the mythical Colchis… we are half in the Orient and it is oriental but it’s refined enough to not always be “for you my friend good price” oriental. It’s the Orient of the Nestorians and Palmyreans and the Alawites, Medea and Lucian and Tigranes and St. Paul and Mesrop Mashtots, the former asiatic provinces of Rome and Byzantium… you know what I mean. Elegant and ‘entrancing’ but not in a beaky way women who are often very educated and fun to talk to in playful manner, in many cases incredibly friendly and hospitable especially if you are ‘relatively exotic’ relative to their norms

Travel Tip - there really genuinely are very few places in the world like this so if you are ‘in the area’ I recommend you take the chance to ‘hit up the bars’ In Beirut I recommend going to Gemmayzeh (Maronite Area) or Hamra (Liberal Muslim Area). Just ‘hit up the bars’ - the wine bars - and have a few drinks and people are pretty friendly so it is easy to start talking. As I say many of the kinds of people who go to these bars, use the dating apps etc are very educated and speak English - often very boheme, there will be very little in the way of a cultural gap between you and them

As an aside, this is also one of the great tragedies of a country like Lebanon - an appreciable part of the population are clearly very sophisticated and westernised people and so it’s a great shame that they have had to endure their country being destroyed (by ‘Lebanonisation’) in the way that it has been

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

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

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


Others are calling those who worry about ‘Somalification’ racist

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

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.

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

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

It is 2035. You are at a cafe in Vienna - the same cafe Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud went to - with your Girlfriend. She says “Crazy that the long 20th Century that started in this Cafe is finally over now that they did Remigration. The end of history but for real this time”

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1840484272236593515

“It’s so insane that Fukuyama was right in the end just he was like four decades out from when History was actually going to end. What were we thinking with all that immigration? But like you iron out those contradictions in liberal democracy and turns out you’re basically fine”

Large ‘Trashhole’ in an Egyptian neighbourhood, small sinkhole had opened up in the road and was overflowing with garbage. People passing by seemed unfazed by the Trashhole, cars were parked haphazardly around it. A group of older men were sat nearby on plastic garden chairs casually smoking -

Asked “what happened here?”

“There was a sinkhole and the street collapsed in on itself … maybe one year ago”

“Did they not repair it?”

“No, no money”

“Why is it filled with trash?”

“Some people just throw their trash in there to get rid of it”

“Do people ever come and clean it out?”

“No” Some goats next to the Trashhole

A VISIT TO THE PYRAMIDS 🧵

Longer Thread on Thoughts on a visit to the Pyramids at Giza in Egypt

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1837594193616908798

APPROACH

Counterintuitively, or maybe not, the Pyramids look most impressive from a distance, from the road as your taxi takes you to the complex entrance. There is something quite compelling in the juxtaposition between the huge necropolis structures and the ramshackle third worldism of the Cairo surrounds. The still construction projects litter-strewn expansive new General Al-Sisi highways around the base, the backdrop of the Cairo slums. The slums themselves, with their trademark ‘Egyptian’ unfinished exposed facades of cheap redbricks and sloppily applied concrete, stretching into the distance. There is a large elevated carriageway that passes over the slums on the way to the Pyramids from the North and from the car window you can look down on the bustle and then you can you look up and see the pyramids out way afar - by comparison they appear otherworldly. The ruins of a great advanced civilisation and the squatters now living in the foothills of those ruins. You could say “that is what it literally is” I don’t want to be crass or gratuitous about it, rude, I wouldn’t want to go that far some parts of Cairo are very nice, you know, but just to say this is the impression one can form

STARMER: “HUGE MISTAKE” TO LINK CAUSE AND EFFECT

“Causality does not occur in reality.
It is a mental construction due to the repeated and constant conjunction between the event we call cause and that we call effect. This is the problem of induction” said the Prime Minister

https://twitter.com/politicspollss/status/1836809652161683902

STARMER: “I AM A HUMEAN”

“As Hume wrote in his Enquiry, that the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation that it will rise. That’s my governing philosophy, I do not believe actions have consequences”

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

https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1834674289502834852

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

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1834593144161100045

CONVERSATION WITH A QATARI ABOUT QATAR 🇶🇦

Extended Conversation with a Qatari friend in Qatar about how he sees the world 🧵

“What do you think about all of the migrant workers in Qatar? There are a lot”

“Oh yeah well we just have them to do jobs we don’t want to do”

“Does it bother you having them around?”

“Eh, you know it’s like background noise. I don’t really care, they are just here to do these jobs don’t they?”

“Do you think a migrant worker who lives in Qatar for long enough can become Qatari?”

“Haha what do you see me? And I live in Africa I will become Black? Haha. No, come on”

“You know they think like this in Europe and America. What do you think about that?”

“We think you people fall for scams too easily haha. I don’t know whatever it’s your country but you know, it’s like when we buy African football players and make them play for Qatar haha whatever you know, it’s whatever. Whatever you say, sure if you say so. But we understand it like this you know”

“Do you have any friends who are migrant workers?”

“No. No I don’t really talk to them. I have one friend he is an expat he is Italian from Milan but that is different”

“How is it different?”

“He’s Italian”

“Which group is the worst?”

“For me, Egyptians. Always trying to scam you. Low class. They have these, uh, crocodile tears. Fuck off!”

“What do you think of South Asians? Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis?”

“I guess they are poor many of them want to come. Beyond that I don’t know I don’t think much. Some of them are very fat some of them are very skinny”

[1/3] “Do you think the way Qatar is now, it’s good for Qataris?”

“Yes I would say so”

“So you like Qatar now? You like the skyscrapers and all this?”

“Yes of course. Yes we like this, we like the way it is now. We like the way it looks. Brother our grandfathers lived in houses of clay. Me I personally think it is good, there’s no doubt”

“Do you feel like all this modern development has made you lose your traditions and heritage?”

“What? No, how can we lose our culture did we lose it down the sofa? Where did you read this?”

“I mean, some people online will say this luxury makes you decadent and unislamic”

[scoffs] “I don’t think so”

“Are you religious?”

“Ahaha, what are you asking? Brother I am not perfect which man is but yes I am a Muslim yes of course”

“Do you take drugs or alcohol?”

“You know you are not supposed to, you know this. But some of us we don’t care, but it’s not open you know. Sometimes at parties at a person’s house. Sometimes we go into the desert for these parties”

“Do people have sex before marriage here? Officially you can’t stay in a hotel with a woman here unless you have a marriage certificate”

“Some do but it’s not an open thing, sometimes they shame a girl if they catch her they will call the women whores and nobody wants to marry them. Well that isn’t true but they will gossip that they are a whore. But the younger generations they don’t really care so much”

“How do you meet women here as a young man? Is it all arranged by relatives?”

“This still happens but no they go and meet them like same way you do”

“How is that?”

“Like tinder, at a mall, through friends”

“I didn’t see many Qataris on tinder here, it’s mostly lots of Filipinas and then Korean and Russian Air Hostesses”

“Brother those Russians are fucking hot”

“Yes, it would be great if you could have sex with them”

“Ahaha brother you are a ladies’ man. I see it” [pointing and grinning] “There are many whorehouses here you know, but I think they will service you for free haha”

“Just imagine”

“Have you ever had sex with a Russian woman?”

“Yes”

“Hahaha yes high-five brother” [high-fives] “Brother why don’t you marry a Qatari girl? They will like you and their father will also like this. Convert to Islam brother and you will have four wives. It is done!”

“Inshallah”

“It is done!”

“Is it true rich Qataris fly Instagram models out to Qatar so that they can shit on them?”

“Bro! Oh my God. I think some of them do maybe”

“Is it true that in Arab Culture sometimes older men have sex with boys and they don’t consider it gay?”

“Bro! What are these questions bro! Sometimes it happens but I don’t know, maybe not so much anymore. Bro it didn’t happen to me though I swear. I’m not gay what the fuck”

“It doesn’t count as gay if you are the one who gives it?”

“Something like this”

[2/3]