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ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩
@kunley_drukpa
ʟᴇᴠᴇʟ-ʜᴇᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴘʀᴀɢᴍᴀᴛɪꜱᴛ || 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 || འབྲུག་
Apr 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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 Image See:
Mar 31 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
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 leastImage Malls as ‘third spaces’ more generally Image
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Mar 31 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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 Image See:
Mar 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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 Image 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
Mar 29 • 5 tweets • 5 min read
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 itImage
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Mar 25 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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 Image 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?” Image
Mar 20 • 6 tweets • 5 min read
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 internallyImage 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”
Mar 13 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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 Image 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 Image
Mar 10 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
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? Image China passed a previous ‘Ethnic Unity Law’ in 2020. This new 2026 proposal further formalises it. Extracts below from Tibetans reacting Image
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Mar 9 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
‘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 Image If you were Cuba’s president would you accept the deal?
Mar 8 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
White House Latin America Policy 2026 Image The Cuba KONAMI Code is there to press. Complete control of the Americas under the star-spangled lusotropical USian banner is within easy reach
Mar 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I love Brazil 🇧🇷 Image 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 Image
Mar 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
British Islam AKA ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids Islam’ About British ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids’ Islam and why it is more extreme than Islam in other parts of the world
Mar 4 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
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 Image ‘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 identifierImage
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Mar 3 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
‘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 Image ‘Mr. Beast Islam’ and Dubai Airport
Mar 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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? Image 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
Mar 2 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Idea of ‘Dubai’ sends certain kind of person apoplectic. Suggest it can offer real quality of life improvements for many British migrants, a red mist will descend and you will be subjected to rant about lack of real culture or importance of paying tax. They hate seeing others win Image If you are a lower-middle from Scunthorpe and you could choose to live either in Scunthorpe or in Dubai why in many cases would you not choose Dubai. Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson are not currently resident in Scunthorpe either if you want to make the ‘culture’ argument Image
Mar 1 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
“Incoming missile barrage from American cruisers, they’re targeting critical infrastructure”

“Hit Dubai again”

“Israeli rockets are raining down on Tehran”

“Hit Dubai again”

“New intel that the shelling hitting Isfahan is being signed-off by the Saudis Sir”

“Hit Dubai again” Image
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Mar 1 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
“I want Iran to go back to how it was before the Islamic Revolution” Image A surprising but not unwelcome comeback for these two Image
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Feb 27 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you wanted to dissolve the identities of old nation states so that you could more easily turn them into patchwork vibey moodboard states for a new C22nd patchwork political meta blasting them with mass migration, globoslop culture and nobodycaresanymoreism a good way to do it Image Still difficult to say how resistant to hypermodernity tribalism-maxxed societies are… even a group like the Somalis possibly less durable than you would think if you subject them to nobodycaresanymoreism over very long sustained periods
Feb 26 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Bhutan opening up to nomad visas and skipping political crises of the C21st, going to straight the C22nd patchwork political meta where the international class just live wherever they want and all countries are vibey moodboards now rather than nations in the old Westphalian sense Image In this nobodycaresanymoreist model legacy countries are an ‘aesthetic’, not coherent places as such. Eg you want to move to the Yookay patchwork state because you like the old Harry Potter aesthetic that it used to have historically. You can sort of get that in some parts there