BBC Journalist asks Danish Politician how Denmark is able to maintain trust in its Democracy - “Give voters what they want. If they want lower immigration lower it” Advanced Techniques for Expert Democracy-Heads (Experts Only) to maintain trust in your Democratic System

• Release all data for transparency, even if the findings are uncomfortable
• If voters want lower immigration, lower immigration
• Don’t allow foreign ghettos to form

https://twitter.com/lucaajw/status/1930259960287400426

☸️ THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM OF SIKKIM

In the C19th and 20th large numbers of Nepali workers were settled in the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, over time becoming a majority - this demographic change providing the impetus for the eventual dissolution of the historic Sikkim state 🧵 Sikkim, once a sovereign Himalayan kingdom, saw its tenability as a state dramatically contested by waves of Nepali migration - initially as labourers, but then as dominant political actors who transformed the state’s demographic and political character, eventually dissolving it

PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF LEICESTER, UK 🇬🇧

I recently visited Leicester - one of the cities in Britain most transformed by immigration and the infamous location of a recent series of intercommunal riots between its Hindu and Muslim communities - to see what it looks like today 🧵 Leicester received more migrants before other British cities because of its textile industry and an influx of Ugandan Asians, creating chain migration incentives. Aside from its infamous community unrest also in recent years Richard III’s body was discovered under a carpark here

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - TBILISI 🇬🇪

Impressions from recent visit to Tbilisi and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Tbilisi as it is today and the extent to which Tbilisi is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Tbilisi is an underrated city where issues affecting the rest of Europe are still novel, politics is more balancing EU & Russia influence

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - PRAGUE 🇨🇿

Impressions from recent visit to Prague and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Prague as it is today and the extent to which Prague is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Prague is a fun Basically Fine city but it can suffer from overtourism. A very limited number of guest workers are now starting to arrive

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - BELGRADE 🇷🇸

Impressions from recent visit to Belgrade and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Belgrade as it is today and the extent to which Belgrade is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Belgrade is a tidy and organised city in an ongoing construction boom. It is a very overtly nationalistic place without much migration

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - LISBON 🇵🇹

Impressions from recent visit to Lisbon and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Lisbon as it is today and the extent to which Lisbon is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Lisbon has experienced a visible migrant influx and a decline in the public space. Lisbon still often magical but in future may see changes

Two Australian women from the urban ‘Eshay’ subculture (the Australian equivalent of Roadman) explain their favourite slang terms in Multicultural Sydney English “You gronk dog”

New Article published in The New Statesman about ‘The Yookay’. Article makes some attempts to be descriptive but I wanted to make a few comments on it and respond to some of the misconceptions in its framing 🧵 Author describes ‘cackling satirists’ ‘racialising’ critiques of change. It being racialised so-called is inescapable because that is the nature of the change, by normative historical standards this kind of change is remarkable. An ontological point not in and of itself ‘racist’

THOUGHTS ON THE ‘YOOKAY’ AESTHETIC - WHY MODERN BRITAIN IS SO AESTHETICALLY DISORIENTATING

🧵 Britain’s ongoing demographic transformation has in recent years made unavoidable in increasingly larger parts of the country what I and others have called the ‘Yookay Aesthetic’ - a historically novel aesthetic fusion between the aesthetics of disparate new migrant groups, the aesthetics of the worldview that facilitates their immigration into Britain (called variously ‘neoliberalism’, ‘late liberalism’, ‘immigrationisme’, ‘wokeness’ and ‘gay race communism’) and the aesthetics of the Historical Britain receiving the migrants. Its relatively recent aesthetic reification as a distinct new ‘thing’ has produced a fair few quite pronounced emotional reactions and I wanted to comment on why that is, the particular elements of the emerging ‘look’ that people find so provocative.

Many people have remarked that one of the most defining qualities of the aesthetic is how jarring the effect it produces is, its incongruity. The incongruity is something like this - a Samurai in front of the Pyramids, an Aztec on the Great Wall of China, a Bedouin in the Sistine Chapel. The non sequitur effect is jolting, disorientating. Not because it is inherently impossible for distinct worlds to ever ‘cross over’ but because we have such established and normative standards for what we expect to constitute those worlds that the effect when they do meet is discombobulating. That discombobulating effect is of course not a fact about the world, about their inherent incompatibility - the value judgement that the encounter is incongruous or incompatible is an intersubjective one - but it doesn’t emotionally diminish that discombobulating intersubjective valuation. The effect is further compounded too if in response to an aesthetic regarded as unappealing or ugly. Doubly so if there is the dimension of dispossession, the felt feeling of displacement at familiar aesthestics of home and place transmogrified into something that appears conspicuously alien.

The ‘Yookay’ in its birth pangs is a very tonally inconsistent phenomenon. Often a slap-dash blend of incongruous non-sequitur mishmash culture and aesthetic forms - the roadman in the balaclava, puffer jacket and thobe, the old Tudor building adorned with Urdu signage and draped in Palestine flags, Deliveroo riders congregated below a WWI war memorial playing Punjabi music aloud on speakerphone, large populations of Eritreans or Bolivians or Papuans appearing suddenly on the streets of Aberdeen or Aberystwyth etc. Early stage ‘Yookay’ represents a great, undifferentiated throwing together of the world in one place on top of an old and established British culture - whatever its final form it is still something that is very much in the process of being created and consolidated. You have some emerging staples already, the Roadman, the ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids’ brand of Islam, MLE etc. but those new forms as a whole aren’t yet fully, properly settled. There is no historical weight to our encounters with ‘it’, we are unsure how we are supposed to respond to something so novel and incongruous by any normative standard which is still in so much flux. You are asked to engage with these new fusion forms as serious, authentic cultural expressions but you can’t help but meet those cultural expressions as jarring non-sequiturs. Their incredibly recent historical contingency is inescapable. Often too the new forms are not especially aesthetically ‘pleasing’ which only compounds the incongruity, how dispiriting people find them. “What the hell is going on here? What kind of weird mishmash is this?”

[1/3] Of course you can become accustomed to these things over time, they are strange and novel now but they could become less so and far more quotidian and established in the future. They can also appear more strange to Brits than to immigrant diaspora groups, who might already be sentimental and nostalgic about these new forms - particularly where they live in fairly insular communities and have less references for what Historical Britain used to look like or less sentimental attachments to that older idea of Britain. A new aesthetic form that tends to repulse Brits especially when it is accompanied by a strong felt sense of loss might not do so for other groups. See eg, the spread of religious forms like Islam. Where the forms evolve next becomes a tussle between these two kinds of opposing reactions.

A qualification on this emotional response that further clouds our reactions to this novel non-sequitur aesthetic - when I created the ‘Yookay Aesthetics’ page I had expected a reaction to the content but I hadn’t expected the page to grow quite as quickly as it did, for there to be quite as strong a reaction to it as there was. At its core ‘Yookay Aesthetics’ (@MythoYookay) is (and this is my subjective value judgement) a ‘dark comedy’ page and so in its unavoidable in these kinds of curating exercises bias it will tend to prioritise more outrageous or absurd content, though it also has as its remit the aesthetics of the emerging New Britain in all its manifestations whether commonplace or novel in their rarity, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Admittedly tonally inconsistent in that way, much like the ‘Yookay’ itself. For the record and in that sense, it is not supposed to be an “everything this account posts is bad” account. It is an aesthetics account. There is no commentary because implicit or overt judgements often cloud an unmediated aesthetic response (‘is’ vs ‘ought’) but, still, that hasn’t stopped people attempting to read commentary into it - so I wanted to say a little more about the the nature of the reactions people have had to it.

I coined the term ‘Yookay’ in 2023 (probably you can find earlier distinct uses because it is a fairly intuitive comedy transliteration) and it floated around in memes and posts for about a year before it became more conceptually consolidated in 2024. Again, the page is a satire page but I think there is also some merit to the exercise of just exhibiting the aesthetic because it does constitute a real and growing presence in Britain that is mostly otherwise unexplored but which will continue to gradually redefine more and more of the country.

‘Yookay Aesthetics’ gets three main criticisms, the first is that it places a lot of emphasis on the subject of race, the second is that it is depressing, the third is “actually, this image elicits the opposite response in me to ‘the one you were (the detractor claims) trying to provoke’.” I think the effects the images create that invites these criticisms all stem from a similar place. On the first criticism, because the nature of the change in Britain is inescapably race-based it is difficult for the subject to not in some way be race-related. Some people say, does race really matter? You be the judge. Let me say though that this change is happening because for many the answer is that it does not matter - or they at least think it does not matter. Thinking it does not matter in the abstract without a full understanding of what that change entails and then thinking it does not matter after the fact of the change having happened are of course two meaningfully distinct beliefs. Suffice it to say that either way even if a person wants to insist the change is unremarkable the material nature of the change would in any other set of historical circumstances be considered remarkable - even era defining. I don’t think it is inherently ‘bigoted’ to observe these shifts and the aesthetic changes that accompany them, some people will doubtless disagree though.

[2/3]

🇨🇦 THE MULTICULTURAL TORONTO ACCENT: A THREAD

High levels of immigration into many western countries are creating new fusion dialects - one of the most distinct is MTE Multicultural Toronto English, an emerging new urban dialect in Toronto Canada. A short thread with examples 🧵 “Two Two’s”

GHIBLI YOOKAY

Compilation Thread of Ghibli Edits of Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ 🧵

“Bro I went Turkey and Saudi, they’re not even fasting bro what is happening the Ummah has fallen this is certified haram”

“Calm down. You live in England”

“Bro they didn’t choose deen they’re on a mad dunya ting. Djinn possession 100%”

“You can’t even speak English properly”

https://twitter.com/thatcheffendi/status/1908107464563622362

About Ibn Khaldun-maxxing on the peripheries

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1891519285459374368

Nice to finally see someone with the balls to take on Big Vanilla and the powerful Madagascan Lobby

https://twitter.com/chrisrugaber/status/1907870405706076585

Vanilla is not even native to Madagascar yet they have an 80% global market share what is going on. A location from a Final Fantasy game pretending to be a country as a front for a criminal ‘Vanilla Industry’

THE YOOKAY AS COMEDY

A short collection of images from Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ which capture the tragicomedy of a rapidly changing Britain 🧵 COMING SOON

Emerging feature of the Public Space in recent years especially after COVID is its increasing ‘Ninja-fication’ or Balaclavaisation. More and more people covering part or all of their face. You can expect this trend to grow now there is no stigma against it in the post-masking era

https://twitter.com/freebubbletroll/status/1902687120520585475

Many Roadmen actually use the 🥷 Emoji to mean Roadman

ASSIMILATION, DEASSIMILATION AND ROADMEN - WHAT INTEGRATION ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

🧵 ‘Integration’ and ‘assimilation’ are often taken as a given as critical for any society seeking to welcome in migrants in order to ensure that the society retains its cohesiveness. But what does integration realistically entail for the historically large numbers of migrants arriving into today’s hyperdiverse Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’? What this looks like (at best) under an ideal theoretical model (aside - nobody can agree on what constitutes ‘ideal’) and what this looks like in real, material world practice are two distinct realities.

We might say we want migrants to integrate into ‘British Culture’. It is a little facile to ask maybe, but what actually is ‘British Culture’? What does it actually mean to identify as British? What is the British Identity? In very broad strokes, there is a historical dimension to that identity, there is an ethnic dimension to that identity and there is a cultural dimension to that identity. There is some overlap between these categories. Historical in the sense of the identity existing in historical continuity with what has historically existed in the country, (Alfred, Shakespeare, Cromwell) ethnic in the sense of a certain version of it being broadly tied to a particular ethnic group (Anglo-Celtic) and cultural insofar as it is constituted by particular behaviours and an assumed shared knowledge base (some of it quite ‘high level’ eg a certain cultural polite indirectness).

Taken together for migrants without this background (ie most of them) integration into these identities is collectively quite a difficult barrier to overcome. Perhaps not for a small number of (motivated) individuals but on the whole for the mostly unmotivated and occasionally antagonistic majority, especially in their being an ever-increasing majority in constant flux, it is probably unrealistic to expect full integration if there is much integration at all.

Is there then actually any kind of shared ‘British’ culture for immigrants to realistically assimilated into? Many will tend to just retain a version of the culture they migrate from, sometimes they affix ‘British-‘ to a new double-barrelled identity. For those who have been in Britain longer, especially those generationally divorced from their home cultures, any emergent ‘on the ground’ culture would have to account for the interactions between many different groups ‘thrown in’ together in urban environments with a retreating historical British culture - Afro-Caribbeans, Nigerians, Somalians, Moroccans, Albanians, Bengalis, Kurds, Congolese, Ecuadoreans etc.

This is why for many migrants integration into a kind of British culture looks something closer to Roadman-ism rather than Richard Curtis, Paddington Bear, Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster. The assumed knowledge and motivation required to proficiently arrive at ‘Britishness’ - especially when there are hardly any actual British people to be found in your day to day life and most of the social media you consume is preoccupied with your community and culture and separated from (an increasingly fractured and decentralised) mainstream British media - is normally too great to overcome. If you live in an urban environment sometimes mediated by exposure to the gang culture experience this is the culture you will be exposed to. Roadman-ism, MLE, Drill - for disaffected hyperdiverse urban youth this culture is, ironically, more inclusive, malleable and in some senses aspirational.

[1/4] What is a ‘Roadman’? The term can refer specifically to a person in a gang (poetically ‘on the road’) but it also has the broader sense of ‘Urban Youth’. ‘Hoodie’ has also sometimes been used interchangeably though the connotations are not quite the same. There is some overlap with ‘Chav’ but that subculture is increasingly anachronistic and is in many places being subsumed into the Roadman culture. Chav is also White British-coded whereas Roadman is multi-ethnic and in that way is more inclusive. It is also similar to the urban culture that exists in other countries, eg in the US Hood culture, in Germany ‘Talahon’, in France ‘Racaille’ and in Australia ‘Eshay’. It is interesting that some version of this kind of culture is close to universal in western countries, in the main probably because of its being non-exclusive and its low barrier to entry. Roadman-ism then is the British manifestation of that (in many respects African American origin) culture with particular ornamentations unique to the interactions between the extant British culture and the particularly British migrant settlement patterns.

What are those unique features? The substrate of this new urban culture and its distinct Multicultural London English sociolect is of Jamaican / West Indies origin - since Afro-Caribbean migrants (‘Yardies’) were the first group to settle in these environments, (often replacing cockneys,) the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’. ‘Mandem’, ‘Innit’, ‘Wagwan’, ‘Ting’, ‘Blud’, ‘Batty’. Etc. Thereafter, when subsequent incoming groups moved into those urban environments the Yardies were the established, ‘on the ground’ culture they would encounter. For new arrivals the ‘Yardie’ culture would be ‘the culture’ of your immediate lived experience and the environs that you integrate into. This is why MLE etymologically as a sociolect has so many patois origin terms vs eg African Language terms from the now much more numerous Africa African origin migrants. (Some of whom acquired English as a second language and acquire it from contact with MLE, which further reinforces it.) Afro-Caribbeans are themselves being increasingly displaced by new groups and are in many ways now almost a legacy group but in this way their contribution to the ‘New Culture’ is as a kind of Proto-MLE.

South Asians are also a major formative group - particularly Pakistanis and Bengalis because of the cultural assertiveness of the brand of Islam they bring with them - and many Arabic terms have entered into some versions of MLE. Because South Asian communities tend to be more self-segregating and self-contained where Yardie culture intermixed more it wasn’t until somewhat recently that their brand of Islam in its capacity as an actual religion filtered into Roadman environments - even though there were other kinds of cultural and aesthetic overlap before. That is, the influence of the particular British subcontinental ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids’ Islam they established is growing within Roadman culture because the two communities now interact more both because of their growing numbers and because of the increasing prominence of new ‘crossover’ Muslim migrants from new, different migrant groups.

[2/4]

TOP TEN YOOKAY PERSONALITIES

Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ is home to many colourful characters. Social Media has allowed lots of these figures to bypass traditional media channels and rise to fame off the back of online followings. Here are ten of the most interesting 🧵 AKHMED YAKOOB

Lawyer famous for his popular social media reels and attempts to enter British Politics in aid of Gaza. As a lawyer, he is known for dubious defences of questionable clients including terrorists. His motto is “There is a defence for every offence - remember that!”

CONVERSATION WITH A BANGLADESHI ABOUT HOW THE INFLUENCE OF BANGLADESH’S DIASPORA IN THE WEST WAS MAKING BANGLADESH MORE CONSERVATIVE 🇧🇩

While travelling in Bangladesh I started talking with a middle class Bangladeshi friend about the reputation British Bengalis had in Bangladesh itself. He told me that apart from being ‘disruptive’ in general British Bengalis had a reputation for sometimes being even more theologically extreme than local Bengalis - at least in their worldview even if not in practice. Many Bengalis he said, mostly from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, either as first generation immigrants or in the more deterritorialised second or third generations, would find that in a British environment because of more liberal policies of tolerance for more divergent kinds of beliefs so-called and less mainstream society cultural barriers against full throttle embracing them, it was easier to fall into more ‘extreme’ versions of Islam than was traditional in Bangladesh. By this he meant - he said to me - that even though Bangladesh was nominally Muslim before they used to practice Islam ‘less seriously’ or at least not exactly to the letter.

The Bengali diaspora would pick up what you might call more Salafist or Wahabbist versions of Islam from the Middle East, from Saudi, Egypt, Syria and then as that combined into their own more conservative ‘peasant’ communities (most came from poorer parts of Bangladesh) that would ‘feedback loop’ into their ‘less-informed’ interpretations Islam because of their ghettoisation and cultural isolation in Britain and so become more and more radical, the Online Dawah Bros etc. being themselves from these communities as one of the most visible examples of this ‘extremity’.

One of the other reasons he thought the British communities produced a more radical version of Islam was because they were so deracinated. The second generations onwards who had not know anything other than being a minority in poorer post-industrial towns of Britain would fumble around looking for an identity and Islam, especially where it coincided with their ethnic identities, was a very welcoming outlet. You might make comparisons with the same kind of online subcultures other groups fall down - weebs, nerd-dom, tumblr identities like LGBT identities, parts of the online right etc. A version of ‘purity spiralling’ a big aspect of it too.

Sometimes these people would return to Bangladesh for longer periods, other times they might even move back more permanently. Often too, they would return with much more wealth than they had left with and so would become bigger focal points for the communities that they returned to if they were not already. This had the effect that they were also even more of an authority on Islamic matters, having been more radicalised, having been on Hajj etc. And so, because of this import, for example, full burkhas were now common in parts of Bangladesh that they were not before. Prayers were more ordered to be strictly observed, liberal cultural reforms were culturally rolled back and so on.

My particular friend was fairly secular and educated by Bangladeshi standards so he was of the opinion that these back-migration driven changes were for the worse - they went against traditional Bangladeshi society and liberal improvements in recent decades in his mind - but he did think it was notable how quickly a lot of Bangladeshis in Bangladesh embraced them. 5Pillars, which is run by British Bengalis, is a good example of how deracination can lead to people “going off the deep end a bit”

PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF ALEPPO, SYRIA 🇸🇾

Pictures from my visit to Aleppo. Aleppo is a city of major historical consequence but it was badly hit during the war and large parts are bombed out. In one sentence I would describe the city as ‘still standing but clearly exhausted’ 🧵 A street-level view of the rubble in a heavily bombed out part of the city. Some buildings still partly retain their structure but others have collapsed in on themselves. The debris not yet cleared because there is just too much of it - stretching on for miles, a sea of rubble

THE YOOKAY AS ART

A short collection of photographs of Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ which have some artistic merit or which best capture the changing nature of Britain - of the process of ‘Yookayfication’ 🧵 Scheduled Departures