🇬🇧 ABOUT ‘BRITISHNESS’ AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ‘BRITISH’ TODAY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF APATHETIC LATINAS 🇬🇧

When you tell people in Latin America (also Asia etc) that you are British in most cases the only things they will know about Britain are “oh wow Harry Potter, Ed Sheeran, Bowie, Adele, the Beatles” etc. They will tell you that they want to go to London to “visit Abbey Road” and that their favourite song is ‘Let it be’, that they think David Beckham is “very handsomest” and maybe very occasionally they might even have heard of Top Gear

In most cases there is clearly a significant time delay where none of the ‘new stuff’ has reached them yet. By ‘new stuff’ I mean ‘Yookay’ of course. Went to a bar in a certain Latin American city a few months ago which was British rock band themed; as in the Who, Oasis, Led Zeppelin etc. Full of slightly swarthy guys dressed like they lived in Manchester circa 2003. Was really a remarkable sight, felt a twinge of pride. Don’t @ me with stupid ‘uh actually’ comments because you go to a ‘great bar in Bristol sometimes’ but notable ‘to a certain extent’ that this kind of authentically ‘British’ grungy-indie culture has disappeared from public life in Britain today. Where are these kinds of bands anymore? Probably maybe they exist but you don’t hear about them as much. Though the Yookay juggernaut seems to have marginalised them somewhat it isn’t as if ‘the concept’ itself is unpopular - see eg the success of the Oasis Reuinion Tour

Anyway, this is what happens; people have these preconceptions about a place and there isn’t an incentive to update them so you for your part get to be play act as a ‘Cool Britannia’ transplant, as in - Britain has the reputation it did 20 years ago, you are from the Britain of 20 years ago and in your head maybe you can pretend a little bit that you’re still living there too. This is what many ‘apathetic latinas’ think ‘Britishness’ still is. It’s a great identity leverage, works wonders - ‘00’s legacy Britishness’ is genuinely a big asset (use your imagination as to how) which is why it’s frustrating to see it being squandered back in Britain

Made a point to ask some Latinas if they knew Central Cee, Stormzy

“Who?”

Most of them knew Dua Lipa at least but she is slightly less ‘Yookay-coded’

Can’t really expect everyone the world over to be ‘up to date’ on developments in your specific country ofc - mostly people don’t really care to bother updating ‘what they know’ about some far off place they’ve never been to even if it is / was nominally one of the cooler far off places they’ve never been to. Still, for me what you notice about it is that it is ‘nice’ to have people fawn over your country and then again for an increasingly antiquated version of it that you are sometimes nostalgic for. You enjoy it. You know like a guy who has this shirtless photo he took a few years ago that he looks great in and he looks at it and goes “yeah I was so peak back then bro” but then he let himself go and nowadays he’s actually a disgusting fat slob

Knew at least three Argentinian women who moved to Camden (on their Italian passports) specifically because of that kind of Amy Winehouse alternative vibe, because they liked that kind of grungy 90s-00s Indie aesthetic. One woman, before she moved to London, the ‘Kaiser Chiefs’ had come to do a gig once in Buenos Aires and she got one of the band members to sign her arm with a marker pen, then she got a tattoo over the signature - so now she has a permanent tattoo of the guy’s signature. Actually attractive woman too. Incredible British soft power, making Leeds of all places seem glamorous, can you imagine? What is the equivalent of this today? One of them still lives in London, though she got engaged to an Italian. Another moved to Italy and the third one recently moved back to Argentina

Asked the one who moved back, “why did you move back?”

“I don’t really enjoy London as much as I used to so I just decided to go home”
Actually it isn’t entirely true that there are no Latinas (or Asians etc.) who are ‘up to date’ on Britain as it is today. Have met some who have been there recently or have been to Europe more generally and have made a few comments to the effect of “when I went to London I just saw people from India, Arabia”. Some comments that were even more blunt, won’t repeat. You can say “come on it isn’t all like that” and you would be right but it’s the fact that they would say that to you in the first place. They tend to have far less scruples about saying these things too because it isn’t particularly taboo for them. Why would it be? ‘Britishness’ is still an asset thankfully because they are running the same ‘Cool Britannia’ script, but in that the “people from India, Arabia” are registered in their mind as ‘less authentically British’, there is that compare and contrast exercise. “Oh you had an Indian as your leader right?”

My impression is they are less inclined to perceive the ‘new stuff’ as authentically British. Not to make a value judgement here on that, just how it is perceived

AFRICAN SLURS FOR OTHER AFRICANS

Thread of slurs in African languages used for other Africans 🧵 Shanqalla

WHAT IS ‘ETERNAL SEPTEMBER’?

Useful term to conceptualise repetitive, asinine or low-level ‘discourse’ online, especially in formerly ‘more intelligent’ spaces experiencing a mass influx of new participants - “Eternal September”. The term originates in the early history of the internet and describes a fundamental shift in how online communities behave once they are exposed to continuous mass participation. It first emerged in the early 1990s in reference to Usenet, one of the first large-scale online discussion systems. For many years, Usenet experienced a predictable annual cycle tied to the academic calendar. Each September, new university students gained access to the internet and began posting, often unfamiliar with established norms of online conduct, known as then as ‘netiquette’. Older users would spend several weeks correcting mistakes, sharing community ‘lore’, pointing newcomers to FAQs and enforcing community standards. By October, most new users had either adapted or left and the community returned to a relatively stable equilibrium

This pattern ended in 1993 when commercial internet providers, most notably America Online, opened Usenet access to millions of subscribers. Unlike universities, these services added users continuously rather than seasonally and provided little guidance on existing norms. The influx of newcomers became constant and overwhelming, far exceeding the community’s ability to socialise them. As a result, the corrective phase never ended. September became permanent, giving rise to the phrase “Eternal September.” While the term originally referred to this specific moment in Usenet’s history, it has since become a broader metaphor for what happens when an established online culture is inundated by perpetual growth. Maybe you can think of parallels here!

At its core Eternal September describes the breakdown of shared norms under conditions of unbounded scale. Early online communities were small enough to rely on informal social enforcement. Participants recognised one another, reputations mattered, bad behavior carried social costs etc. Norms such as staying on topic, avoiding repetition and not wasting people’s time with your dumb stupid retarded priors posts were essential to keeping discussions usable. Because growth was slow and predictable, these communities could absorb newcomers without losing coherence. Eternal September marks the point at which this balance collapses - as the number and rate of new participants make informal governance (broadly-defined) ineffective

The consequences are the loss of this kind of ‘historical memory’ are both cultural and structural. As newcomers vastly outnumber long-term participants, veteran or ‘oldhead’ influence diminishes and the incentive to teach these norms erodes. (4chan used to have the motto “lurk more” for this purpose). Experienced users grow fatigued from repeating the same talking points, always making corrections etc and often disengage, taking the community’s memory and knowledge with them. Norms that once defined the place are diluted or replaced, the ‘Coca Cola Effect’ runs riot - often shifting toward simplicity and immediacy rather than depth or rigour. On social media platforms lowest common denominator influencers grow more than more reflective, intelligent influencers etc. The culture adapts to what requires the least shared context, often at the cost of quality or nuance

[1/2] Although coined for Usenet, the Eternal September dynamic has recurred throughout internet history. Forums, open-source projects, collaborative platforms, social media etc. all struggled with the tension between growth and cohesion. Wikipedia, for example, though first conceived as a libertarian open project now exists in a state of continual Eternal September - with new contributors arriving daily who may be unfamiliar with its complex norms. In response, it has developed extensive rules, moderation systems and bureaucratic processes, its scale forcing communities to replace its old informal libertarian culture with formal governance. (Wikipedia is also infamously now very left-leaning please note!)

Modern social media represents, (many would say particularly on X,) Eternal September at an unprecedented scale. Entry barriers are minimal, participation is frictionless, cultural onboarding is largely nonexistent. Algorithms, rather than experienced community members, determine visibility and influence, often rewarding content that is emotionally charged or easily consumed. In this environment the perpetual influx of new users is not a problem to be solved but a design assumption. Eternal September becomes the default condition rather than an exception

Eternal September marks a turning point in internet history insofar as it symbolises the transition from small, self-regulating communities to the global mass medium it is today. Whether seen as a loss, an inevitability or a necessary phase, it broadly demonstrates conceptually that without deliberate mechanisms for governance and cultural transmission, perpetual growth inevitably transforms what a community is and how it functions. Many parallels here in real life too…

[2/2]

BEST OF YOOKAY AESTHETICS 2025

End of Year Thread of the best ‘Yookay’ images from 2025 🧵

THE BEST FILMS OF 2025

2025 was a big year in film. Here are The New York Times’ Best Movies of 2025: Movies that entertained and awed, but that also pushed boundaries and championed social justice causes 🧵 ROBERT EGGERS’ PERIOD HORROR WITH ONLY WHITE PEOPLE IN IT

New period horror from Robert Eggers that somehow only has white people in it. As in, there is not a single non-white person in it. How the hell did Robert Eggers get away with it? Also starring Pedro Pascal

WHAT IS THE ‘COCA COLA EFFECT’?

Have noticed recently the mass appearance of AI in the memetic ecosystems of third world countries, as in quoted tweet below - AI songs, AI posters, AI social media posts etc. are increasingly ubiquitous. A possibly unique feature of this AI cascade in the third world is just how prevalent this AI is in third world public life, I would say anecdotally much more so than in western countries. You wonder, why does nobody seem to care that there is this (as many would consider it) AI ‘slop’ so-called everywhere? What is happening?

Think part of this AI prevalence functions in a similar way to how other aspects of “modernity” already have. It’s difficult to describe this downstream effect but let’s be reductive about it and call it the ‘Coca Cola Effect’. Many people in the third world drink a lot of Coca Cola. Why? Because Coca Cola is much better than anything they had before. Have talked about this before - remember walking into a supermarket into a certain African country and finding rows and rows of shelves stacked with Coca Cola. A really really disgusting amount of Coca Cola. Thought, who is drinking this much Coca Cola? Well, it turned out the locals were - because they like drinking Coca Cola. Coca Cola is fun, enjoyable and easy to drink, it ‘tastes nice’, it is ‘accessible’, why would you not drink Coca Cola instead of water? There isn’t much else available to drink, the choice is obvious

This isn’t a value judgement, it’s easy enough to see because people vote with their feet (and stomachs) - especially where there isn’t really any extant social pressure or framework to be particularly discerning about what you consume. They enthusiastically adopt western things because those things are often a genuine improvement on what was available before, if there even was a native alternative. AI is going to do the same thing for a lot of entertainment etc. most likely for exactly the same reason. Many people think of it as janky unreliable ‘slop’ but (even outside of those occasional times when it can be good - which are often largely because of the tastes and discernments of the individual people using it as a creative tool) in the case of eg music it’s far more interesting and stimulating sonically than most of their own music - or is at least an adequate replacement for it insofar as it meets consumer demands vis-á-vis ‘the kinds of things they already actually like’ ‘at their level’. You can see it already with AI art. They genuinely like it and think it’s good and compared to what was available it often is

If an American or European restaurant used AI to design signage and a menu and a visual identity unless it was ‘really really good’ it would be pretty suspect, maybe even ‘low status’ so-called. But if a third-world restaurant did it it would be a level of polish and professionalisation far beyond what they would normally be expected to do you might even be impressed. I remember in a certain Latin American country a few months ago I saw a motorbike rental company that had made posters advertising in a ‘Studio Ghibli CHATGPT’ aesthetic. ‘RENT A BIKE’ and then it was some anime Latinas driving motorbikes through a tropical Ghiblesque beachside town. Thought, that’s very cool. Even when this eg AI signage isn’t done professionally it still generally looks ‘fairly decent’ or at least ‘basically fine’ as compared to the other signage in its surroundings

To the ‘Coca Cola Effect’ again, Coca Cola as sugary, unhealthy sludge but it tastes nice so it is better than brackish, warm bottled water. The ‘Coca Cola Effect’ is the preference for products or attitudes that are in some important way ‘better’ than existing products or attitudes even if those products or attitudes are considered ‘lower status’ or ‘slop’ by more discerning people

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2003552025058201792

If you want to reconcile with ‘modernity’ so-called you have to confront the ‘Coca Cola Effect’ and recognise that ‘modernity’ is in many important ways much better than what came before - principle that even applies to eg the issue of TFR

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

Keep hearing AI music being played in public spaces in Latin America. Thought I was imagining it at first but it kept happening again and again and again; clunky, nonsense lyrics with an AI cadence. Imagine you are in a shabby supermarket in some boderline-favela surroundings trying to buy a Coke Zero and then you hear this being played through speakers in English in a robotic autotune voice:

“Oh wow, mysterious lady on the dance floor,
Oooooh, oh my goodness, uh huh,
You’re moving so bold,
My internal monologue is awkward and cold.
I would like to engage in romantic events,
Consensual, mutual, adult intents.
From across the room, girl, this isn’t a parade
No, no,
Let me put my hands on your hips baby, we’ll end this seductive charade”

Think they must be YouTube searching something like ‘Pop Music 3 Hours Taylor Swift’ or ‘NUEVA MÚSICA AMERICANA 10 HORAS ÚLTIMOS ÉXITOS’ and then just pressing play. “Yeah that sounds about right, that sounds like what English language music normally sounds like.” Assume it isn’t a licensing issue because it’s not like anybody cares what some random Guatelombian tienda is playing

In a way too it really contributes to the ‘vibe’ of the environments you often find yourself in - there is dilapidated barrio and then there is dilapidated barrio con las vibraciones de MIX MUSICA DE MODA 2024 LAS MEJORES CANCIONES ACTUALES 2024. It’s such a shabby inauthenticity it somehow wraps back round again to being a kind of actually authentic cultural expression (for better or worse)
Checked to just to confirm and many of these videos do feature AI music

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

>am anticolonial human rights lawyer
>some place called mauritius(?) asks for some islands for anticolonial reasons
>don’t know anything about ‘mauritius’ or ‘chagossians’ but they’re brown people so sounds about right
>give them islands
>islanders start calling it colonisation

https://twitter.com/BritishOverseas/status/2000904730831413739

Here is the distance from the Chagos Islands to other Indian Ocean island nations:

• To Maldives: ~500 km (south)
• To Seychelles: ~1,880 km (east)
• To Mauritius: ~2,150 km or more (north-east/north)

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…