REVIEWING RIO DE JANEIRO TODAY 🇧🇷

Rio is such an attractive city because it has an undeniable energy. A host of factors conspire to suck that energy away though (the poverty, the crime etc) - and while they half-succeed they have not quite yet fully succeeded

Thread 🧵 Going to complain a lot in this thread but want to preface the complaining by saying I really enjoy spending time in Rio. I love it, Zona Sul (Leblon, Ipanema, Copacabana, Leme) especially - I don’t think there is a more magical stretch of city on the planet, it’s a Final Fantasy location

THE THIRD WORLD STRIKES BACK 🇧🇷

Easy somewhere like Brazil to live in a bubble despite the obvious problems the place has. It’s possible with a modest amount of money (especially if your income is foreign) to almost totally avoid the country’s third world aspects barring maybe the occasional homeless person you have to sidestep on the street

Have said this before but third world living can be very easy if you’re relatively rich by local standards. Actually had been melting into that bubble for a while, a few months… was having a really nice time. You might drive past some favelas in an uber occasionally but once you do that a few times you sort of ‘get over’ their favela-ness and it doesn’t faze you so much. Or it becomes background noise at least, you forget you are in the ‘third world’

One day I thought I would get intercity bus because the flight between cities would cost an extra $350 (since there are few low cost airline carriers travel between cities in Brazil via air is disproportionately expensive. See also eg Canada here). Also don’t mind long road journies - trip would supposedly take about 11 hours, not the end of the world, Brazilian buses aren’t terrible, nice to rest and gaze out the window…

Sat down by window seat. Suddenly a large family of indigenous-looking people gets on. I’m not sure exact indigenous group they were… Guarani, Tupi… could have been Bolivian even… All very stout, very pre-Columbian features. Maybe you’ve seen that meme image of mexicans where all the mexicans look like Shrek and Fiona (ogre form), you know rotund bodies and jeans and hair fades and gold chains - kind of like this

They’d bought up several rows of tickets for themselves including in rows with single passangers. First thing they did when they went to sit down was set up a circular encampment all turning inwards to face each other, immediately beginning to talk loudly among themselves in a large ring formation around the aisle that took up a third of the length of the bus. This entire area became ‘their space’, a whole comunidade established; kids would run up and down and it squealing, food and luggage and bedding was passed along it

They would eat obnoxiously stinky food constantly too. All kinds of packages being ripped open; the smell of milho frito em óleo de sarjeta, capybara coxinhas etc perpetually wafting into your face. Tinny music played over phone speakers, voicenotes recorded in shouting tones, babies wailing and not being disciplined… constant chatter for most of the trip

Was remarkable how unfazed they were by the concept of the bus being a kind of shared space, you could have been at a village quinceañera for all intents and purposes. Yeah we’re on a public bus with all these strangers it’s reunião de família time. Was surprised they didn’t bring a goat on board… look I’m being a bit crass here I don’t want to be too crass but you try not noticing this when it’s happening right next to you on long bus journey

Real nightmare ride in all, was close to losing it for a while before I did my breathing exercises. Okay obviously I know these behaviours exist, they’re very common, have written about this many times before this is just what certain kinds of people ‘are like’ but as I said thing for me was I got lulled into a false sense of security despite knowing all this, having experienced it many times. Had nice lifestyle for a few months - it makes you drop your guard. Forgot this could happen, almost would have paid the extra money to avoid it all it was that unpleasant. Because you are not in contact with ‘it’ you forget ‘what things are like’, the hate does genuinely leave your body, you feel yourself getting more liberal again as experience of ‘what people are capable of’ fades in your mind. But then place yourself in an environment like that and it comes rushing back and you think “oh yeah”. Don’t want to draw too many comparisons to people’s priors vis-a-vis their political preferences here ofc… Here’s some audio of wailing noises on the bus. Just variants on this for hours on end

Isn’t that London is now a hellhole, actually it is very nice in many parts - is more that it is undergoing a process of (avoidable) ‘enshittification’ where quality of life on certain metrics gets slowly worse over time. So easy to tolerate but things are still worse than before

https://twitter.com/spectator/status/2043569914477224272

London in the summer, wow. And maybe even you man clapping some naija or argentinian or punjabi ting you don’t even mind the real big change you’re having too much fun and who can blame you! But fact remains many QoL metrics degrading even if people often too hysterical about it!

Orban loss leaves Czech Republic model of right wing populism the most sustainable populist model in Visegrad. You may not like it but this is what sustainable Euro-populism looks like

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2043424850157408710

🇨🇿

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1837956562054258954

‘AFRICAN TIME’ AND WAITING FOR AFRICAN BUSES 🇲🇼

Bus stations are probably best place in Africa to experience ‘African Time’ - or at least the version of it where there is a sort of endless waiting for something to happen. What is important here is that in Africa many buses won’t leave until they are completely full. If you ask a bus driver “what time is the bus due to leave?” the answer will be “when it is full” and often in a confused tone as if the question was conceptually difficult to understand. So a lot of the time when you go to take a longer distance bus you have to go off vague hearsay that “it normally leaves about 6am”. Then you have to go to the ‘bus station’ - usually less a bus station more a busy dirt yard with a few Coca Cola vendors and corrugated shacks - a bit before that alleged departure time and sit down on the bus and wait the hour or two for it to fill. Reason you don’t go later when it is probably more full is that even though 80% of the time it fills up slowly the other 20% of the time it fills up quickly and then it leaves and then you miss the only bus of the day. Very time consuming way to travel, wastes a lot of time

Wanted to travel by bus with friend between two cities in Malawi once so went to the dirt yard where the buses were. There was one bushvan bus heading to where we wanted to go but it was mostly empty excepted two people. Just had to suck it up because that’s how buses in Africa work. Go and sit down - an hour passed, two hours, three. No AC and hot sun sat in the dirty shantytown station. Bus was filling up at a rate of about three people an hour. After eight or so people had gotten on the original two people who had been sitting inside the bus since the beginning suddenly just got up and left. An African woman said they worked for the bus drivers pretending to be customers so that when customers were deciding whether to invest several hours to sit and wait for a bus to fill up they could look inside and see their bus was ‘already’ half full. Then when the fake passengers did get up and leave the real customers would have wasted so much time in the bus already that, sunk cost, it would be better just to wait a little longer instead of leaving and investing the time in finding another. A uniquely African kind of scam

Wasn’t even as simple as the bus seats being full here either. As soon as the main seats were occupied the driver started putting down stools and trying to cram extra customers onto the bench seats. He wouldn’t leave until the bus was completely full. Told the driver that we would pay him the cost of a couple of extra seats if he left without waiting for the bus to fill up completely since it was taking so fucking long. He seemed enthusiastic about the prospect of taking more money but the concept of leaving without a full bus seemed to confuse him - as in he genuinely did not understand what we were asking. Unsure what he thought we were going to pay him for but the promise “we will pay for extra seats so we don’t have to wait until the bus is full until you leave, you can just leave” and “being able to leave without every seat full” was like trying to square a circle in his mind

As it turned out we spent so long explaining the concept of ‘leaving without a full bus but you make the same amount of money’ to him that more customers entered during the time it took and it ended up being redundant. Of course he was still expecting the money so we had to explain why we weren’t going to pay him anymore. But he didn’t understand that concept immediately either and it ended up being even more of a waste of time just to convey the point

[1/2]

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1958907093853118705

Had been waiting in the bus for five hours at this point and were almost about to leave but there was still one more problem. A lot of African bus syndicates had touts who officially were supposed to roam around the ‘bus station’ so-called and try to convince customers to get in their bus. If they did this successfully they would receive a commission for all the people they brought aboard

Whenever we looked out the window while we were waiting the touts would all be sat on plastic chairs, smoking and playing cards together on a plastic table. Nobody was trying to find customers, they could not care less. Commented on what the fucking point of them was to each other multiple times and joked about doing the tout job ourselves since it would probably be quicker

When the bus did eventually fill up there was another delay when the driver went over to the touts and told them they weren’t going to get any commission since they didn’t bring anybody aboard. Immediately angry shouting, then a physical fight broke out between the driver and one of the larger, more aggressive touts. Huge crowd materialised out of nowhere to watch, a bit of staring milling as a large circle of people suddenly formed around them. They wrestled for about a minute before some other Malawians broke the fight up. Then about another half hour more of shouting before the driver, visibly in an angry huff, climbed into the van and finally started the ignition

[2/2]

With America’s hispanicised future now increasingly ‘locked-in’ it’s possible that even if the US does continue with a space programme that that space exploration might also become increasingly hispanicised too. Not impossible the moon bases of 2076 look something like this

https://twitter.com/ascendedyield/status/2039089069842423868

See:

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2038837993079705960

SHOPPING MALLS AS THE BEST PLACE TO MEET ARAB WOMEN 🇰🇼

Concept of shopping malls as ‘third spaces’ in the Arab world and especially the Gulf sounds funny but makes sense when you think about it. Gulf countries often get called giant shopping malls in the desert (which they sort of are) but at same time the mall is also a more important social institution than you might first think. Major example: under their brand of conservative Islam where else are you supposed to meet people of the opposite gender?

Was in a mall in Kuwait with an Arab friend. You would see packs of young people - not unusual or weird anywhere in the world of course but a lot were sort of slouching against walls, just watching people walk past. Monitoring milling. Friend told me to look up - there was a group of young men leaning on the balcony of the floor above hunched together grasping sugary milkshakes and scanning the floors below, pointing and murmuring to each other. This was a very common sight he said. Difficult to meet young women in any capacity outside of very socially mediated spaces so all the young men would come to shopping malls to leer. There are social spaces like ‘diwanayahs’ or ‘majlis’ were people could meet and talk, play FIFA together etc in these countries but these are mostly sex-segregated

Two hijabed-up girls walked past and the men stared down at them, murmuring to each other again with a flash of excitement on their faces. Friend claimed that sometimes these girls would come to these shopping malls knowing that the boys would be there waiting for them and then deliberately walk around arm-in-arm in a flirty way to ‘tease them’. Whole set-up was a kind of parlour game where the coquettish hijabis had some plausible deniability, which of course made the young men go mad. Was thrilling to be in these spaces with women without any oversight, doubly so if ‘they clearly wanted it’

Asked if anything ever came of it, if any of the guys any got any action out of it. He said it did happen but the culture was a bit reserved about that so for some of the younger guys especially it was months of giggly “no I’m too modest we can’t do anything like that oh my god you’re so naughty” even if they did get a bit of hand-holding out of it. There was some ‘pre-martial’ shagging going on but it was important generally that other people didn’t find out, same as with eg drinking alcohol

Said a lot of young men must be sexually frustrated. He said they were. Asked if it was true that they would sometimes hump each other as a release, he said it did happen but it wasn’t regarded as gay because it was just a release. Some older young men would go to migrant worker prostitutes too now. Seems to be important for healthy gender relations the ‘third space’ malls exist at the very least

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2038433096320663920

Malls as ‘third spaces’ more generally

Good choice to place the presidential library in Miami. Miami may not be the spiritual capital of the old heritage America but it will be the spiritual capital of the new lusotropical America. Trump really the inaugural president for a new era in American history Miami represents

https://twitter.com/erictrump/status/2038773279788331022

See:

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2026095470120960165

Number of Kantian scholars killed in Iranian air strikes suggests real reason for conflict is Trump’s strong dislike of Kant. Trump clearly regards US missiles as a direct refutation of Kant’s critique of pure reason and the distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself

https://twitter.com/fuckedupyogis/status/2034717858383511809

What did you think completing the system of German Idealism meant? Essays? Vibes? Hegel couldn’t do it. Schelling couldn’t do it. Fichte couldn’t do it. Reinhold couldn’t do it. Maimon couldn’t do it. Hormuz shutdown is pure dialectics

LESOTHO - FINAL FANTASY SKY KINGDOM 🇱🇸

Here is genuine travel advice: Africa does not have the best food or nightlife or the most attractive women but it does have (I think) almost always the most memorable travel experiences, mostly because it is so relatively dysfunctional and unknown. Just trying to do things, trying to travel somewhere is an odyssey. Then the environments and people too, it’s very unmediated - you’re dumped in the deep end from the get-go. If you want a trip you won’t forget pick an African country or two, rent a car and then just drive between four or five destinations. It is difficult not to have an ‘adventure’

Not suggesting everywhere on the dark continent is secretly Wakanda, actually it’s mostly the opposite a lot of it is a ‘shithole’ so-called. What Africa does have though is a kind of untouched-ness. This is maybe a type of orientalism - the equivalent term for Africa (used by the Congolese writer Valentin Mudimbe) would be ‘Africanism’ - but it’s difficult to otherwise describe the appeal. If you look at a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting and think “that looks exotic” it’s like that but for Africa; shantytowns, ‘heart of darkness vibezzz’, Kagame’s new Rwanda and all. Not a value comment on the culture(s), just its existing as a totally different place and aesthetic to explore

Very underrated country in this way is the mountain near-ethnostate Lesotho. Not a developed country but it is a very Final Fantasy country that hits a lot of the ‘Africanism’ tropes in the best kind of way. Effect is something like what if we did a version of Nepal or Bhutan or Tibet but it’s in Africa? I’m not going to say Lesotho has as sophisticated a culture as those places but what you do get there is distinct in same way

The entire state is mountainous - it even snows in the winter - so the environment obviously produces a different kind of country. Also to this, the state formed as refugees fleeing lowlander Nguni groups during the Mfecane (ie the Zulu expansion and its consequences, many dead). Its cities, like its capital Maseru, are basically just rows of corrugated huts with traditional huts peppered in sorry to say (I don’t want to insult Sotho readers too much I like the Sotho) - but against the backdrop of the higher altitude landscape and the aesthetic uniqueness you will really not see anywhere else like it in the world. Sorry for trivialised description but you play a game and you arrive in a fantasy ramshackle frontier town full of dwarves wearing bicornes, effect is like this. There’s a certain appeal despite the squalor

The Sotho, Lesotho’s main ethnic group, are some of the most Final Fantasy Africans on the continent. They have a very Final Fantasy look in their traditional Mokorotlo straw hat and Basotho blanket. The Mokorotlo hat looks like a wizard or mage’s hat and the blanket is worn as a sort of cloak, decorated in bold patterns and colours. You often see men herding livestock dressed like this on the mountainsides, sometimes they combine it with a cane and wellington boots, ride around on horses. It’s very commonplace too, not a forced dying tradition

The Sotho also have a lot of Final Fantasy dialogue. Eg had driver who when asked about life in Lesotho would talk about male initiation rites and mystery cults

“Eh when you are becoming a man, you must go into the mountains and live on your own. And then you must learn the ways of the Sotho people. Eh and you must study the secret knowledge the elders pass onto you. Eh and you must do this, and then you must return and offer the father of a woman ten head of sheep or goat. So that he will accept your offer of marriage. And then you will become a man”

“What is the secret knowledge you learn?”

“Eh we are sworn to a vow of secrecy, me I cannot tell you this”

This is great stuff. All the priors in the conversation are Final Fantasy priors and you don’t have to bother with the baggage of your own cultural presuppositions, easy to have fun with it

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2038028358156439794

Final Fantasy Africa

Thais will hate it but Thailand like Bali and the UAE can become one of first proper post-national states; what equal opportunity ‘no borders for decent human capital’ taken to its logical conclusion looks like ie legacy national culture and a large non-citizen ‘expat’ population

https://twitter.com/akarlin/status/2034460469709430937

Difference with Thailand vs eg Canada for ‘Actually Existing Post-Nationalism’ in a fuzzy Westphalian world is Thailand is open to Western migration ie isn’t asymmetrical. This sentiment is something like “if an African can move to Europe why can’t a European move to Africa?”

WHAT CUBA IS LIKE AT THE MOMENT AND HOW LIKELY IT IS TO COLLAPSE 🇨🇺

With rolling blackouts in Cuba and Communist concessions towards opening up the country’s economy you could credibly think the Havana government is on the verge of finally collapsing. In retrospect, based on my time there last year, there was a read of the situation where there was always an inevitability that things were eventually going to come to a head, since the situation was so bad already

Let me just describe the conditions in 2025. Havana itself, in the downtown and especially near the tourist area yes it is quite dilapidated, litter strewn everywhere etc - but also it was basically fine in the sense you can get everything you need as a tourist; a nice AirBnb, a nice meal, internet and even money despite the island nominally being disconnected from the international banking system. Watch out for scams but you won’t really be in any physical harm, it isn’t unsafe - it just smells and none of the women look anything like Ana de Armas except maybe if you go in two or three very specific highend bars and restaurants

Thereafter though Cuba excepting tourist areas like Varadero (which were basically fine) was a mess. For example, many cities you visited outside of Havana the lights would almost always be out at night. You walk around and there are a few houses with electricity but they’re running their lights on a generator. So you have a majority of the population sitting around in darkness every day after the sun sets at about 6:30pm. Then of course nobody has any money because of communism. A large but necessary black market for everyday goods. You get really rural (difficult because of the fuel shortages) and there were even apparently problems with diseases like cholera and typhoid because of sanitation and infrastructure problems. This is on top of the epidemics of tropical diseases that exist in Cuba. Some 10-15% of Cuba’s entire population left since 2020 alone

Thought at the time firstly what a shitshow and then secondly how impressive in a roundabout way it was the state hadn’t imploded yet. But you know that’s to the point - you can have blackouts for weeks on end, the return of pre-modern diseases in the countryside or whatever but the whole thing can still just limp on. Indefinite ‘Enshittification’ so-called

On top of this the Trump admin’s recent Venezuela intervention cut the limited oil supply Cuba already had and the Iran strikes signalled they may possibly be prepared to remove Cuba’s leaders. Does this mean the regime is going to come to an end soon? As far as I am concerned the state Cuba is in presently is indefensible but of course now it seems like they might get oil supplies from two major latino socialista countries - Sheinbaum’s Mexico and Sanchez’s Spain. Which is a revealed preference obvious ideological commitment from those countries given just how materially irredeemable actually existing Cuban communism is (which we knew they had anyway but still)

Don’t want to predict whether communism in Cuba definitely will or won’t fall but will say it is not impossible that it doesn’t fall yet as dire as the situation is simply because ‘these things’ can unfortunately just go on indefinitely. You have some Mexican or Spanish oil, you open the market up to some modest reforms and suspicion is despite everything you can last a while longer yet

At the same time, I visited Assad’s Syria at the end of the Civil War, before the surprise Al-Jolani blitzkrieg - and while the country seemed totally exhausted it did also seem possible at the time Assad had ‘won out’. Turns out though all it needed for ‘regime change’ was a little push. Nobody had any energy for a fight anymore so they just gave up and rolled over. I say little push, in the Syria case more like a heavily armed and highly motivated militia. Maybe in the Cuba case too, who knows. Point being despite the conditions it is unlikely to collapse of its own accord internally

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2033658002851467766

There was woman in this city below - which had gone for weeks without electricity - who when I told her Havana and Varadero were functional got upset and said those places “weren’t real Cuba” and that they “kept the lights on there just for tourists because they need their money”

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1955418581727875483

Enjoyable thing about places like Iran or Russia is they are only countries who will create longwinded intellectual and cultural genealogies for enemies out of reverse orientalism, or occidentalism. Discussions in civilisational terms you won’t see anywhere else outside the right

https://twitter.com/canderaid/status/2032134748139593897

Famous example of this occidentalism was the former Iran President assuming Americans read Tocqueville because Tocqueville was the lens his own conception of America was filtered through from a distance

China announces new law to formalise further the project of ‘Sinicization’ to ‘promote national unity’. Few countries prepared to top-down systematically integrate their minorities with their majorities like this. Which model of integration is most likely to work?

https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/2031274663683219495

China passed a previous ‘Ethnic Unity Law’ in 2020. This new 2026 proposal further formalises it. Extracts below from Tibetans reacting

‘THE ART OF THE DEAL’ has a major flaw in that it doesn’t include a chapter on securing deals by threatening to drop missiles on people if they don’t accept your deals. Hopefully new editions of the book will fix this - it’s a very powerful and underused negotiating technique

https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/2031113104252170304

If you were Cuba’s president would you accept the deal?

https://twitter.com/deitaone/status/2031130427943952506

White House Latin America Policy 2026

https://twitter.com/theinsiderpaper/status/2030407195586908500

The Cuba KONAMI Code is there to press. Complete control of the Americas under the star-spangled lusotropical USian banner is within easy reach

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2016559474387935402

I love Brazil 🇧🇷 Lights are from the infamous ‘Rocinha’ favela. You might think they spoil the view of Ipanema beach but actually in a way they contribute to it; you look out and you really get full-on Brazil, full-on Lusotropicalism all included in just the one vista

British Islam AKA ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids Islam’

https://twitter.com/yiddishisaiah/status/2029025776285196322

About British ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids’ Islam and why it is more extreme than Islam in other parts of the world

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1782131397286646251

Islam in the 21st Century has seen the emergence of two new major aesthetic and ideological forms of the religion - ‘Mr. Beast Islam’ and ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids Islam’. Both exist along the same spectrum but represent two very different evolutions for Islam under hypermodernity

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2028960243913195577

‘Mr. Beast Islam’ is the aesthetic and ideological evolution of Islam especially in the Gulf - in wealthy, increasingly liberal, demographically secure and competently governed ‘Basically Fine’ often previously quite hardline Islamist states

‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids Islam’ is the aesthetic and ideological evolution of Islam especially in Islamic diaspora populations in the liberal west - often from poorer migrant backgrounds with less sophisticated versions of Islam in societies where as deracinated minority populations they cling to increasingly hardline interpretations of that Islam as an in-group identifier

‘Mr. Beast Islam’ is one of the main aesthetic and ideological variants of Islam today. It represents the development Islamic forms have undertaken in the wealthy Arab Gulf and so, downstream of that, will be the form that Islam takes in many places in hypermodernity

https://twitter.com/adambeneden/status/2028018411109027896

‘Mr. Beast Islam’ and Dubai Airport

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2028007186324935077

Some commentators will critique people who move from their British provincial towns to places like Dubai as ‘Rootless Cosmopolitans’. Sorry we live in Hypermodernity we are all ‘Rootless Cosmopolitans’ now. With so many forces aligned against you what incentive is there to stay?

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2028549841802957087

Point I make sometimes recently with ‘Nobodycaresanymoreism’ - if you are person inclined to believe in the inveterate bonds of community, nation, ethnos etc. you might be disappointed to find that in some cases many people actually have a revealed preference for hypermodernity

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2027423371311341609