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.

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🇨🇦 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.

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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

THIRD WORLDISMS - A GUIDE

A Masterthread of posts about ‘Third Worldisms’ - Behaviours or Customs typically seen in the Third World that in recent years are becoming increasingly common in the First World because of both migration trends and declining social trust 🧵 CHANGING PUBLIC NOISE LEVELS - Different cultures may have different expectations about appropriate public noise levels, what level of eg speakerphone noise intrudes into the private space etc, which can produce a culture clash

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1715857080920228154

‘YOOKAYIFICATION’ - THE NATURE OF CHANGE IN MODERN BRITAIN

🧵 What is ‘Yookayification’? This is the process of change under which Britain transforms aesthetically, culturally and demographically into its (possible) successor state ‘The Yookay’ - that is, a Britain so heavily influenced by the effects of mass immigration that it makes a kind of sense to consider it a distinct political and cultural entity to the Historical Britain.

What does this transformation look like in practice? For example - a town whose demographics experience near total turn-over in the space of several decades, the interpolation of new cultural forms or vocabulary into the culture or language (ie influences from Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, Yoruba, Somali, the West Indies etc.), the normalisation of different kinds of and standards for behaviour that depart from historical customs etc. etc. This is not to make a value judgement about the nature of the transformation, more instead to describe how this kind of nation re-defining change happens at scale over longer stretches of time under the duress of a critical mass of ‘foreign influence’ so introduced into already existing communities. What you could expect to see as a part of a real life process is a patchwork of ‘Yookayification’ across Britain as immigration continues to unfold - some places that have already been transformed into something else entirely because that is where earlier waves of immigration moved into, other places which are more familiar holdouts of the historical Britain. Large cities the first to experience the changes, then a ‘spreading out’ of that change to the centralised organs of culture (the media, politics etc.) and physically to larger towns, then to villages and rural areas. In many places initially a Bosnia, Malaysia, South Africa, Lebanon etc. type parallel communities living arrangement between groups - but over time the changes becoming more thorough and entrenched nationally until they become so established they constitute a settled fact. There is a historical precedent for this in British History - the Roman and Saxon Invasions and the Celtic and Brittonic Holdouts. Wales, Scotland, Ireland, their languages and cultures representing the pre-Saxon Britain which for centuries ‘held out’ against England before being eventually absorbed into it. At some indeterminate point in the future after the mass movements of people, a final consolidation and the older polities and cultures can no longer be said to properly exist in the same way that they used to.

But this is how cultural change will often happen historically. It is true that there is both a certain artificiality and a lack of world historical precedent for the kind of movement of peoples that Britain and the Western World are now experiencing - in the diversity of those peoples, the scale of the migration, how alien the groups are to the historical norms of the countries they migrate to - but the model for how change is affected is historically very familiar. That is, large movements of people catalysing monumental cultural resets. The Ottomans into the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans, the Pax Hellenica and Pax Romana, the Great Migrations at the Fall of Rome, the Saxons into Sub-Roman Britain, the Kushans, the Ghazanvids, the Mughals into India, the Europeans into the Americas, Oceania and Africa, Brazilification, the Russification of Eurasia and Siberia, the Turkic Tribes into Iranian Central Asia (Turkification), the Sinicization of the Middle Kingdom Periphery, Arab traders into Indonesia and Malaysia, below the Sahel, the Sea People, the Hyksos in Egypt, Hurrians and Gutians into Mesopotamia, the Bantu Expansions, the Indo-European Expansions - and so on. These are all examples of world historical movements - or invasions - of people that brought sweeping changes to the places and cultures they arrived in. This is the kind of scale to understand ‘Yookayification’ at.

[1/3] Old cultural forms and groups dissolved and disintegrated and then recombined and synthesised into those incoming forms and groups, new types and expressions of civilisation created. A jarring and disjointing sense of uncanny valley as non sequitur new cultural forms wear the skinsuits of historical forms. Sometimes there is a greater deal of continuity between those historical forms and groups, the changes are less pronounced and disorientating, other times less so. It is true again there are further unique features of the ongoing mass movement of peoples into Britain which make it distinct from other historical mass movements of people listed above - its being into a state with a strong centralised government, the existence of mass media and the internet, the global ubiquity and prominence of the English language, the far-reaching effects of American culture dominance etc. - but there are many more features which are still importantly comparable to these historical examples.

About Timescales - Past a certain historical juncture descriptive claims about this once emerging new country in which its once emerging new features are decried as for example ‘woke’ or ‘alien’ lose much of their punch. To wit, if you have a polity that in the space of a century has become 50% immigrant-descended then describing those immigrants as members of that polity or at least as existing in that polity isn’t ‘woke’ or even ‘assimilationist’ - it’s merely descriptive. You can have a state with world historical levels of eclecticism that is consolidated and established enough that its existence is a ‘mere fact’. That is, its cultural expressions and representations of itself represent a ‘mere fact about the world’. Describing Ottoman Constantinople as Ottoman in the 16th Century isn’t ‘woke’.

How long does it take for this kind of change to become historical fact? For it not to be a merely contingent and reversible state of affairs? A few decades? A century? Two centuries? A millennia? This is the Sorites Paradox of Identity, what Identity is by its nature. It can mean such and such, it might have always have meant such and such (at least for as long as people can remember) but then enough historical contingencies accumulate until it suddenly can’t really be said to mean such and such at all and now means something else entirely. English might have used to mean English but because of the series of events X, Y and Z it no longer means English in quite the same way. The old conception of identity becomes historical, no longer living. But then perhaps it gets revived, like Hebrew, Bulgarian, Polish, Serbian, Greek. But more likely, probably it does not. It depends how much the people left around who still care about it - who will be fewer and fewer in number the further away they are in history from the change - ‘want’ it.

A few hundred years from now, after centuries of hypothetical ‘Yookayification’, perhaps there is a hypothetical revivalist national movement - but it will look less and less like the thing it is trying to revive the more distant from the present it is. Sometimes in History, these Independence Movements have succeeded. Many other times they have not. To contextualise this - Does it make sense to push for a Brittonic Nationalism Revival? We could say we want to (nebulously) return to ‘before’ the Saxons arrived. “Saxons are an alien host on our people.” Maybe this makes a certain kind of very performative sense in Wales but even there it would be a type of ‘larping’ - it is even more farfetched to imagine returning to a ‘pre-Saxon’ England. ‘Saxon-ness’ is culturally and genetically interwoven with the English people. You can’t expunge the one third ‘Saxon-ness’ from your DNA. ‘Saxon-ness’ in the English people is a settled historical fact.

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PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF PALMYRA

Parts of the ancient city of Palmyra were infamously destroyed by ISIS during its occupation. A short picture thread of what it looks like now after its liberation 🧵 After ISIS’ defeat Palmyra had been mostly just left alone, derelict. There was a small garrison of Syrian Army Officers around on account of some ‘bandits’ in the desert but beyond the novelty of holding Palmyra for its own sake there was little reason to try to occupy it again

PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF DAMASCUS, SYRIA 🇸🇾

Thread of pictures I took around parts of Damascus during the Syrian Civil War just before the fall of Assad. There were lots of obvious signs of dysfunction and tension - but lots of signs of normalcy too despite the ongoing war 🧵 The central Damascus bazaar, the Al-Hamidiyah Souq, tastefully festooned with Assad bunting. The souq is one of the ‘Great Bazaars’ of the Middle East, like Istanbul or Cairo. Always very busy during the day. Got told it was a ‘tourist trap’ even though Syria then had no tourists

PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF LUTON, UK 🇬🇧

I recently visited Luton - a working class town near London infamously home to both the Tate Brothers and Tommy Robinson and one of the towns in Britain most transformed by immigration - to see what it looks like today 🧵 Luton was one of the towns earliest effected by large scale immigration. It’s against this background that Robinson’s EDL first emerged, the working class living on the frontlines of a changing Britain. My TLDR impression of Luton is that this change has now largely happened

Somalians have a reputation for being the most vicious of British Ethnic Gangs and will swarm or ‘Zerg Rush’ at very minor perceived insults. Here a London ‘Mali Gang’ has kidnapped a woman and made her read out an apology for the crime of… “making fun of Somalians on TikTok”

https://twitter.com/queenarraweelo/status/1878873928208433293

Yookay Man describes “Beefing with the ‘Malis”

https://twitter.com/mythoyookay/status/1877822089119375618

HOW CULTISH WAS THE CULT OF ASSAD? 🇸🇾

One of the most striking aspects of visiting Syria during the Civil War was just how prevalent Bashar Al-Assad imagery was. Assad’s face was everywhere - probably the most of any Leader of any country I have been to excepting perhaps North Korea. A little hard to have a sense of his ubiquitousness without having actually been there at the time but it very often felt like Bashar was staring down you from every visible surface. This is not a metaphor for the paranoia induced by Assad’s Secret Police (Mukhābarāt) by the way, which was another dimension to Assad’s Kingdom - I just mean the Assad imagery alone. A total assault, physically and psychologically - the man on the street constantly bombarded with images of Bashar Al-Assad. Assad, Assad, Assad, Assad, Assad - Assad’s picture everywhere

To be fair to Assad, though I can’t really speak to his personality beyond what I’ve seen and read and heard about him, he didn’t seem particularly vain by Dictator standards. At the time, Syria was still technically at war and there is a lot to be said for ‘memetically’ shoring up your own side with these kinds of propagandistic ‘signifiers’ provided the effort doesn’t become radicalising in itself because of its obnoxiousness (see eg British NHS rhetoric). Though of course propaganda doesn’t always need to aim to endear the viewer to its subject, implicit threat in its ubiquity too can also achieve ends even if it isn’t inherently as stable long term. In a sectarian developing country like Syria too, the kinds of demographics it has, the steely blue-A10-eyed Alawite imagery may not have necessarily needed to have any more nuance beyond ‘Look at me - I’m the big bossman’. I can’t say exactly what Assad was ‘going for’ but in all in that way probably ‘The Cult of Assad’ was more political expediency than vanity even if there was maybe perhaps some ego in it. A certain kind of detractor of these type of regimes likes to psychologise the ego component of these kinds of phenomena but for me in the setting of an ongoing Civil War that was one of the least interesting things about it

[1/2] Another dimension, with the extra context of all the internet memes about Assad especially it was difficult not to find the imagery sometimes funny. Not to trivialise the situation but it was almost as if Assad was smiling, grinning, laughing, waving down at you wherever you went. The images sometimes had a certain playfulness to them, Assad was very rarely completely stern-faced, it often seemed like he had a little knowing twinkle in his eye. Unsure if that was intentional, if Assad deliberately wanted to project an image of being a ‘fun chill guy’. Probably not. But if he did it did half-work and not in a hugely quirked-up self-parody way, a little more muted but still ‘fun’ - the world’s first ‘ironic’ dictator. The imagery didn’t feel entirely OTT serious like in say North Korea, Turkmenistan etc. Again not to trivialise it and you know, this is all my speaking as an outsider, but this was a recurring thought I kept having - difficult not to ‘notice’

What did the average Syrian think about Assad’s ubiquity? Did they ‘buy into the cult’? Of the real life Syrians in Assad-controlled areas I asked (ie. not internet Syrians who always have very outspoken opinions about it - some may appear below this post to tell me they only said what they said because of fear of the Secret Police, threaten me etc.) there was a full spectrum:

•“It’s fucking stupid”
•“I really hate it”
•“He’s just the President so he must put his picture everywhere”
•“I don’t like it but I support Assad”
•“It’s a bit much but it is a war”
•“I don’t really think about it”
•“It’s fine”
•“Yeah Assad is great, I like it”
•“It’s funny”

[2/2]

You are a Utopian Socialist in the immediate decades following the end of World War 2 in charge of revitalising poor Post Industrial towns like Rotherham in Northern England. How do you bring about the Socialist Utopia?

A) Modest Economic Development
B) Import lots of Pakistanis

https://twitter.com/lokijulianus/status/1875945147365794221

Everybody wants ‘The Utopia’ but sometimes getting to ‘Basically Fine’ is a challenge enough

REVIEW OF SYRIA’S NIGHTLIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR 🇸🇾

One of the most surprising parts of visiting Syria towards the end of the Civil War under Assad was how active the nightlife was - and not just how active it was but how ‘good’ it was ie in Damascus at least Bars, Sisha Places and Nightclubs full of lots of well-dressed and attractive Syrians partying

Have already written about the ‘Levantine Hot Women Zone’ (see attached below - ie that there seems to be a specific region in the Levant where the women, for some reason, are very very attractive in a slightly oriental but not oriental oriental way) but - and this surprised me but maybe it shouldn’t have - the Syrian women in the various venues were almost without exception very attractive. Not to be too lewd or flippant this is a very mature and sensible account but this was a very very striking aspect of the experience, it is genuinely quite rare to be in a place where almost all of the women around you are that attractive let alone a majority Muslim city nominally in the middle of a Civil War. Another thing too, most were visibly westernised, many with no hijabs and so on, they could have slotted straight into an Ibiza club night - something you again wouldn’t necessarily assume in Syria of all places but maybe it makes a certain kind of sense, or for the more upper crust of Syrian society who go to these kinds of venues at least. It was an interesting contrast versus the ISIS British Pakistani Jihadi John or mountain goatherder types you could see around the rest of the country anyway. Trite to say but an important dynamic in Syrian society

Often it was like being in a bar and club street in a Western country except the women were inexplicably better looking and friendlier (to foreigners at least). Lots of dancing, smoking, drinking. People really liked taking shots. In terms of music everything from contemporary electronic, dance, house, EDM and trance to lounge, Arabic lounge and reggaeton etc and in one place even UK Grime. People often throw out the casual platitude that even in war ‘life goes on’ but there is going on and then really going on. One of the best nightlife places I have ever been in my life. Say what you want about Assad but they were throwing some great parties under him. Maybe it was the war that gave them that little extra special edge, who knows DAMASCUS NIGHTLIFE ANECDOTES

The Syrian Australian Woman

One evening met a Syrian woman who lived Australia in the bar. Very westernised woman, very educated, good-looking, very easy to talk to -

“I live in Australia I’m from Australia but I’m also from Syria”

“So you’re Syrian?”

“I’m a Syrian from Australia”

“What are you doing in Syria? Does it bother you that the war is still ongoing?”

“I fly back to Syria every year to see my family, stay in Syria a while. Recently I’ve been working on some art installations”

“Can you do that in the middle of a war?”

“Yes I’ve been do it most years when I can”

“Did it you do it the year Damascus was under siege?”

“No not that year but most other years”

“And you can genuinely just come in to Syria during the war?”

“Yeah Sydney to Dubai then to Beirut then cross the border. Sometimes they had flights to Damascus airport”

Asking lots of logistics questions like that and she was very insouciant about it given her immediate surrounds. Have not seen her since, though not just because of the logistics questions. Maybe on the next visit to Australia…

The Sudanese DJ

(Note: This story may or may not be true - I was told this by multiple people.) There was a Sudanese man, (not an Arab Sudanese an African (Nilotic) Sudanese,) who after apparently fleeing the Sudanese Civil War somehow had found his way to Damascus apparently illegally and then again somehow had taken to DJing in the Damascus Nightclubs. He was very good at DJing and in his exoticness had became enough of a local celebrity that nobody really cared that he was there illegally. He would have special sets during the height of the Civil War and people would go and see ‘The Black African DJ’. “Come and see the DJing Black Man.” There are hardly any black people in Syria despite its proximity to Africa (many of those in Syria seem to hang out around Damascus bars) so this was genuinely a novelty for a lot of Syrians - including the wealthier more liberal ones who went to Damascus nightclubs

Door Checks

There aren’t just nightclubs, which is one thing, but high end nightclubs too. Was really taken aback on first encounter.

“Sorry you can’t come in”

“What?”

“You’re not dressed formally enough”

Just assumed that because Syria was still in the middle of a Civil War they would be more lax about dresscode at nightclubs. Not the case. “No it’s a high end club you have to dress well”. It makes sense but with all the barbed wire and armed military police around you you let your guard down