Unsettlered

For the AO tennis this past week and a half I have been fairly permanently connected to my Melbourne VPN so that we can watch Channel 9 not ESPN in Spanish, and this means I have also been seeing the Aussie version of the Guardian, and this has been a true eye-opener.

On some levels it’s more demented than the British one. You have to ask yourself, why is this big island right down there at the bottom of the APAC region with serious regional strategic issues of its own to confront, so totally obsessed with the Levant?

It’s long been clear to me that this obsession is fed, in several rather obvious instances (Australia, Norway and Nordics in general, Ireland etc.) — not in the first instance by antisemitism — though that eventually kicks in as the fuel to keep it going in the face of factual rebuttal — but by a form of projection coupled with a diversion. For, these are white people who want you to understand that they are not that sort of white people, e.g. colonial oppressors.

The phenomenon is especially intense down under where parts of the popular culture possess a surface patina of proletarian coarseness. I suppose the general idea is that nobody will take you for ‘The Man’ if you go about performing the cheeky/chippy pleb routine, and they have always had us stuck up Poms to project onto long before Israel turned up.

In the latter context, of course, this is a nation for whom the term ‘settler colonist’ might be a more obviously domestic sore point, and that might explain the intensity of the convictions that one sees being performed in the Aussie Grauniad. (The ‘look away’ element to the Irish obsession with the Levant is undoubtedly their own history of religious sectarianism, intolerance and violent gangster terrorism.)

Meanwhile, Trump’s covetous approach to Greenland has suddenly (re-)raised awareness that Scandinavians don’t actually deserve the free pass they have generally been getting when it comes to colonisation, enslavement and ‘oppression’ in general — as in the map below which suggests that they have always been downstream of the main problem.

In the USA there has been a veritable race to adopt more 'progressive' white identities cherry-picked from the Old World, with Irish still the favourite as it comes with permission for a certain amount of charming over-indulgence.

It is usually the case that the more affluent the individual, the more frantic the need to project with certain postures becomes.

Elsewhere, anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism seems to replace white guilt as the main driver, but this is just another manifestation of chippiness, either inverted or straight-up.

Et tu, Brute?

 

"I had rather be a dog than such a Roman."

 

 

Chinky Nosh in Tapachula

The traditional ‘local’ food of Chiapas features as many Chinese dishes as more familiar favourites like tacos (Mesomamerican-Levantine).

Much of it is sold buffet-style around the centre of Tapachula in the form of a choice of guisados (this one cochinillo) served with rice, for less than $5.

Chinese migration and settlement in this state, particularly 1870-1940, followed a well-trodden route. Most came originally to provide cheap labour for the railroad and coffee plantations, but soon upscaled into retail and regional commerce and thereafter shifted into politics.

A major bump in the road came with the Revolution, which came packaged somewhat explicitly with ‘Mexicanisation’, which in practice meant a good deal of xenophobia and sinophobia in particular. Chinese properties were ransacked or stolen; massacres occurred, the kind of pogroms that Jews have regrettably often had to factor in as the price of doing business this way.

Like others, the Chinese had found a niche which was lucrative, but vulnerable. Societies like Mexico lacked a robust middle: there was a pronounced gap between the wealthy and the impoverished, which an organised group of determined ‘middle men’ might fill to pretty much everyone’s benefit.

These gaps may not always be purely economic. When I first arrived in Belize it was obvious that the Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic populations disliked each other intensely. Another chasm that needed spanning? Cantonese migrants have certainly assumed control of much of the country’s retail and other trading industries.

When I first shipped up in Antigua too, when there were only a handful of restaurants and ‘general stores’ in the town centre, and roughly half of these seemed to be Chinese-owned, the significance of this community was a little more salient than it is now.

The Chinese story in these parts has a less well-known earlier component, for they first came as facilitators of the great transfer of treasure from Asia to Spain, via Manila, an overland crossing of New Spain (Mexico) and then onward across the Atlantic after a rendezvous in Havana with other galleons.

Trial by Combat

 

I may have mentioned before that one of the things that has surprised me about AI is the cultural biases it has already internalised. 

And that when it comes to the Middle Ages, Grok in particular has the sensibility of a not very sophisticated American tourist.

So I knew it was going to be fun asking it to illustrate a striking but not very well-known event which took place on the pavement outside Westminster Hall in London in June 1380.

Does Grok comprehend that the current Palace of Westminster, including ‘Big Ben’, was built by the Victorians? Of course not. On other searches it has readily rendered Tower Bridge in medieval scenes as ‘London Bridge’.

Anyway, the Westminster incident I am referring to is a trial by battle between a knight and a squire that the former had accused of treason, in the presence of the teenager King Richard II and a raucous crowd of onlookers, some seated within purpose-built wooden lists.

The issue related to the surrender of a little place called Saint-Sauveur to the French after a year-long siege in 1373. The knight, Sir John Annesley, holding a claim to this town via his wife, insisted that the squire, Thomas Catterton, had taken a bung from the French and thus committed treason, but lacked the right kind of evidence…documents, witnesses and so on.

No problem, let’s have a big public joust under the jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry to sort this out.

The two men dueled judicially with lances on horseback, then with swords and daggers, to the point of complete exhaustion, and still the matter remained unresolved.

The larger and more ungainly of the pair, Catterton, then tumbled and Annesley seemingly concluded that he could surely now proceed to victory, WWE-style by falling on top of his opponent and pinning him to the ground.

But he had been sweating profusely beneath his helmet and could not see so well through his visor and when he launched himself at Catterton, he missed.

Catterton, at this stage basically Cattertonic, managed somehow to roll over on top of Sir John and then passed out. Neither ‘party’ appeared able to move. Stalemate. Nothing like the joust in ‘El Cid’, this.

The young King ordered his retainers to lift the stricken men in armour, but Sir John, still conscious, pleased to be put back in the same position where he had been ‘winning’.

As this was about to be done, Catterton, at that moment supposedly recovering, collapsed sideways off the chair upon which he had been placed and no amount of water or wine would revive him.

Richard issued an on-the-spot verdict in favour of Annesley with Catterton’s life declared forfeit, but he expired the next day anyway.

(In the end I have appended some of the less ludicrous images with which Grok responded to my promptings. In one of them the medieval crowd once again looks a bit like a mob of modern-day Gunners fans.)

 

 

Draining Ye Olde Swampe

 

 “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” > John Bull.

The parallels between England’s so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and contemporary populist rebellion are rather striking.

These men, in the main from the counties of Kent and Essex, were perhaps our original would-be swamp-drainers.

Their loyalty to the executive, their anointed King, 14-year-old Richard II, was absolute. Indeed, any of their number who refused to proclaim unswerving fealty to the monarch was likely to be done in forthwith.

Their primary enemy was the ‘system’, specifically government ministers and the MPs who sat in the House of Commons, plus anyone adjacent to the process of legislation and taxation, lawyers in particular.

The Commons were in fact a core group chosen from the middle orders, such as the landholding classes i.e. people who did useful things with land as opposed to using it as an excuse to run off across the Channel in order to bash the French, which is what the Lords did. (This was called Chivalry and it was basically a bottomless financial pit.)

As the latter activity became ever more fruitless and costly in the late 14th century, so the Commons started voting for measures like the Poll Tax which went down particularly badly with the lower orders.

When the Kentish mob under Wat Tyler finally got to voice their grievances in person to the young King at Smithfield (“smooth field”), it was clear that the goal was to simplify society, removing all laws and jurisdictions — such as those of Lords and churchmen — between the people and the crown, which the peasants, who saw themselves as the ‘true commons’, understood as a radical leveling of the social order, yet which the young Richard had already intuited as an opportunity to bolster his own direct sovereign power and a route to the kind of authoritarian rule which would later on lead to a coup and his demise.

They also reiterated the key demand of the Essex group, the abolition of serfdom, even though by tradition there was no serfdom in Kent and actually very little in Essex. In this lies one of the most important lessons that History has for us: the people who most clearly yearn for freedom are those who have had more than a whiff of it.

Prior to this meeting the mob had burned down the King's uncle John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace and, on the other side of the Thames, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London crib at Lambeth Palace. As they did this, they had seemingly been at great pains not to be seen to loot, happier to smash things up very demonstrably than help themselves to any loose valuables.

Subsequently they had also managed to storm the Tower of London, and with clear echoes of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol, they did things like taking turns to lie on the King’s bed.

They even demanded kisses from the King’s mother Jeannette who had a bit of a reputation in the land, which she had never quite shaken off.

Oh, and they also removed the heads of Archbishop Sudbury of Canterbury and Robert Hales, Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, not by reason of their elite ecclesiastical roles, but because these men were Chancellor and Treasurer in the government respectively, and thus traitorous members of the hated ‘establishment’ (swamp).

The peasants had also been sidetracked into a burst of xenophobic rage, taking the lives of many inhabitants of the capital’s Flemish Quarter “without judgment and without cause” according to a monk at Westminster Abbey, with mutilated bodies piling up around the streets.

Anyway, the revolt ended with the King making promises he believed he could keep and surely wanted to, but in the end could not, because the Lords and the Commons came together to rather brutally re-establish the ‘natural’ order of things.

One reason that left wing ideologues struggle a bit with the medieval period is that this ‘natural’, oppressive order of things lacked the modern protection mechanisms that are usually cited nowadays: a standing army, cops, Fox News, indeed any kind of media or propaganda system beyond the messages pumped out by the Church and these did not really take the form that said ideologues would like to imagine.

They are left with ‘deference’, which does seem a bit wishy-washy, and was rather obviously absent in 1381, except with regard to Royal authority.

To a certain extent, these events were the result of the ‘class struggle’ which Marx (well, early Marx) envisioned as the prime driver of History. He would later shift emphasis to the more impersonal dialectical mechanism, but the truth is that something had happened in England which his theory could not quite accommodate, something tremendously random.

Four decades previously, roughly half the population of England had perished from The Black Death. This ‘great dying off’ had radically adjusted the overall economic situation, setting up opportunities for the now scarcer labour force to improve pay and conditions, even reduce their working hours.

The Commons, the landholding and commercial middle orders, stood most to lose from this sudden social adjustment, precisely at the moment that they were being asked to foot ever larger bills for the failed foreign escapades undertaken by Gaunt and the other Lords.

It would seem that the Commons were becoming genuinely envious of the gains made by the ‘true commons’ and frustrated by the non-domestic focus of the elites, so their representatives at Westminster duly imposed a regressive tax on everyone over the age of 15, three times more onerous than any prior equivalent, and this basically tossed a match into the big box of fireworks.

(Below, Grok's best effort of depicting the scene at Smithfield. Richard is usually shown on horseback. The peasants look like Arsenal fans.)

 

'The Mayab'

I am aware of the plethora of really bad analogies that have attached themselves to the situation in the Middle East. 

And in spite of that I am going to put one of my own out there, based largely on a historical counter-factual which derives from my own geographical location and its often troubled history.

You may find reasons to object to it. If you so, say why, because I would be genuinely fascinated to know about them and debate them.

Here we go....

Iberian Catholic colonisers arrive in Central America and establish a measure of control. But the Maya in particular put up a persistent pattern of resistance and eventually the conquerors conclude that they have little choice but to send the majority of the Maya away and into exile around the world.

Centuries pass. The empire lingers on in one form or another until the early part of the twentieth. 

At the moment it finally collapses, a group of modern powers from outside the region intervene, partly, but not completely, for selfish reasons, their basic aim being to oversee a transition to a new era of relatively stable nation states based on ethnic and cultural identity.

There are pressures within and without. Those who predominantly identify with the colonising Catholic culture are not sure if they want their own sovereign states or whether they want to form their own ‘imperial’ blocks. They fight it out for a while.

Meanwhile, the remaining Maya in the region express a clear desire for their own sovereign territory which will consist of a fraction of their ancient homeland, the Mayab. They declare an intention to invite members of the Mayan diaspora to return there and help build this new society where Yucatec Mayan will be the main language and they will worship their ancient deities.

The international community decides that they can have the Peten region and the southern part of the Yucatan peninsula for their new state. Within this territory some 40% of the population will be non-Maya, either mixed blood mestizos or individuals of European descent who have been broadly content with the colonial culture, if not the empire itself. Let’s call them Iberians.

Their property rights are not under threat, but they will have to adapt to living within a sovereign Mayan state.

It is already a well-known fact internationally that non-Mayans will be more secure inside a Mayan state than vice versa, which is one of the reasons that the need for a Mayan state was so pressing in the first place, as well as the fact that while discussions about the new lines on the map continue, many Mayans residing in Europe start to experience a terrible persecution.

The international community really ought to have done more for the other non-Catholic ethnic groups in the region, but in the end caved in blackmail from the resource-rich Iberian League, and allowed them to assume control of 97% of the former empire. Within these Iberian states much of the former colonial system would persist and minorities would suffer, and none of them would show any inclination to follow a path of liberal democracy.

Anyway, at the very moment the new Mayan state declares its independence, some of the non-Mayans inside it and those beyond the borders get ready to rise up and murder all the Maya. The mere existence of Mayan self-determination is a profound offence to their Catholic God, they announce. 

With help from the neighbouring ‘post-colonial’ Iberian states they begin a war of extermination, but the Maya have had enough of their nonsense and are better organised, and thus achieve an unlikely victory.

At this point several hundred thousand Iberians are forced to abandon their homes and become refugees. This occurs in part because the Maya no longer feel safe living next door to people who want them dead, but also because they were told to get out of the way by their invading allies.

When the war ends, nearly all the Maya who had been living outside the Mayab in Central America are also displaced and most of them come to live within the new Mayan state. They number more than the Iberians who lost their homes as a result of the war, yet almost nobody remembers this.

Nor really that many Iberians continue to live inside the Mayab and enjoy civil rights there that no other Iberians are able to enjoy outside of it.

However, the displaced Yucatec Iberians are never in turn absorbed by their co-religionists in the neighbouring Iberian states. Instead they are told to hold position as long-term political pawns in 'camps' for as long as it takes (even if this is forever), because the Iberian League wants the world to know that they did not in fact lose this war, they are simply awaiting their eventual God-given victory. From the late 1950s onward they pervert the UN body set up to assist the refugees, so that it is fully on board with the underlying ideological project.

For decades the Mayan state is repeatedly attacked and repeatedly triumphs against its aggressors. After one of these intense wars, the Mayab takes back control of the northern Yucatan. They do not formally integrate it into their nation however, as their plan is to trade it back to the Iberians in return for lasting peace: the so-called two state solution. But it is thereafter referred to as ‘occupied Yucatan’, which effectively disguises the real blame for the on-going situation.

The sad truth is that the Iberians don’t want peace. In the 1960s they change their name to Yucatecos and demand ‘freedom’ for the whole of the Yucatan peninsula ‘from the gulf to the sea’ including the Peten. They don’t want their own state, they simply want to put a definitive end to the affront posed by the Mayan state.

They realise that in the English-speaking world there are some particularly dumb students who can be persuaded to see the Mayans who returned to the sovereign Mayan state after their long exile as ‘settler colonists’ who stole the Yucatan rather savagely from the poor oppressed Iberians, and duly leverage their support.

They are also getting a lot of help from another regional power with its own distinct ethnic base, the Inca, who have become Catholic fundamentalists and desire nothing more than to see the elimination of the Maya. 

'Occupied Yucatan' now has a measure of self-government, even international recognition. Half of it is run by a crazy fascist mafia financed by the Inca, and the other half by a corrupt mob that pays out cash rewards to any scumbag who murders a Mayan.

And that’s it. The analogy could be extended from here, but you get the general drift. People who chant ‘Free Palestine’ imagine themselves to be bravely anti-colonial, when in fact they are precisely the opposite.

The Yucatecos lost the war. They need to finally accept this, then accept the peace and the territorial deal that comes with it, and all the surrounding Iberian powers need to be on board, including the Incas.

They will have their own state, but this state needs to be able to live alongside the Mayab and function within an international order where the legitimacy of everyone’s sovereignty in the region is both recognised and protected.

Yucatecos should be free to travel around the Mayab, and Mayans around the Iberian world, without fear of violence or repression on either side. 

The Battle of St Giles's Fields

Name a battle associated with King Henry V. (They don't get much easier than that, do they?)

But one year before Agincourt in 1414 Henry assembled an army at Clerkenwell and marched west to confront the Lollards at roughly the present location of that cutesy, hidden urban green oasis known as Phoenix Gardens, which featured rather heavily in the romcom Last Christmas.

The loser that day was Sir John Oldcastle, a former MP and long time friend of the young King, who had escaped from the Tower of London following a conviction for heresy, and had then decided to organise a full-on rebellion. It is said that Sir John was the chap Shakespeare had in mind when he created the character Falstaff.

Inside the battlefield zone today a Palladian-style parish church from the 1730s holds the name of St Giles-in-the-Fields and stands in the late afternoon shade of Centre Point.

This is where, some six hundred years before its construction, a leper hospital had been established by "Good Queen Maud", Henry I's wife Matilda of Scotland (1080-1118, grand-daughter of the King Duncan offed by Macbeth) at a location believed to be at the midpoint between London and Westminster. Today it is not quite Bloomsbury, not quite Soho, not quite Covent Garden and not quite the West End.

Wherever you find a church of St Giles in England it is typically at a location outside the old medieval walls. He has always been the patron saint of people with disabilities, but lepers were for long a particular specialisation, and Anglo-Norman Christians had apparently learned a trick from the ancient Israelites when it came to positioning facilities for those suffering from that disease, 'outside the camp'.

Anyway, back to the battle of St Giles's Fields of 1414. Oldcastle was leading a force of religious and political radicals, in a way proto-Protestants who presaged similar movements and their societal impact two centuries later.

The Lollards were against the doctrine of transubstantiation, against priest confession, against clerical celibacy and against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while they compared the Pope to the Antichrist and had secretly translated scripture into English.

That they were against capital punishment too didn't help them that much after their defeat to Henry. Sir John had managed to escape after the rout but was captured and returned to the same area, where he was duly hung and barbecued above a wood fire at the same time.

This parish would later be home to Patient Zero in England's Great Plague of the spring of 1665, one of a pair of Frenchmen living at the end of Drury Lane, where Pepys would see a door marked with a black cross for the first time.

But not before it was ground zero for another rebellion, in 1570, this time by Catholics under Anthony Babington against the reigning Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I. He had solicited a letter from Mary Queen of Scots expressing her tacit approval for his plot and this would lead to her execution on 8 February 1587.

By that period the priory was surrounded by narrow streets, containing inns, brothels, butchers, watchmakers, booksellers, belt-makers, justices of the peace and nobility. Maybe not so much different from now, though undoubtedly lacking all those shops selling saxophones and electric guitars in 'Tin Pan Alley'.

Black Legend

A string of esteemed British writers came to Mexico in the last century and, with the exception of Sybille Bedford, could barely conceal their sniffiness to the verge of contempt for the place: Greene, Lawrence, Huxley, Waugh, and Somerset Maugham, the last of these quipping, when asked what he thought of the country by Frieda Lawrence, “Do you want me to admire men in big hats?”

Leonora Carrington, the English writer and surrealist painter who settled in CDMX's Colonia Roma, observed that she "felt at home in Mexico, but as one does in a familiar swimming pool that has sharks in it."

I was however surprised by how willing American travel writer Paul Theroux was to add himself to this rather long list when I read the account of his relatively recent Mexican excursion, On The Plain of Snakes...

"The Mexican border is the edge of the known world, only shadows and danger beyond it, and lurking figures—hungry, criminal, predatory, fanged, fanatical enemies—a malevolent and ungovernable rabble eager to pounce on the unwary traveler. And the Policía Federal officers are diabolical, heavily armed, stubborn and sullen one minute, screaming out of their furious congested faces the next, then extorting you, as they did me."

 

To a certain extent he is knowingly exploiting the obvious caricature there in order to reach a specific no-passporty, north of the border audience, but in other ways, one becomes aware, he is also THAT gringo...

"It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm."

Maybe it makes an important difference if you enter from the south. Theroux notes how just 50 yards across the northern frontier things have turned 'improvisational'.

There's a certain abruptness to the other borders too, because Mexico is after all, Mexico, but of a rather different order. The south of course has more indigenous Mexicans and it is these people who have seemed to most unsettle the anglophone authors. Huxley: “Under close-drawn shawls one catches the reptilian glitter of Indian eyes.”

It's as if this land is also the edge of known humanity. Paul Bowles served up similarly garish depictions of the wily natives, but largely in a Muslim country, and they have name for this 'delito', Orientalism, and so today he has been at least semi-cancelled, but Mexico remains fair game for these apprehensions of lurking, wicked otherness, in the mainstream foreign press as well as literature. 

Theroux again: "From the mutters and guarded warnings, I became aware—as anyone would in the sinister rustling of these whispers—that there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico’s prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms."

Now, I have been shaken down in the past by Mexican cops, and in my own experience of travel there I have concluded that it is near impossible to visit the country without experiencing at least one really negative interaction with one of the locals, and so it was this time too.

But I'd say the same thing about France, frankly, and so I am wary of this tendency to stoke the 'Black Legend'.

Great Fire

 September 4, 1666 — the Great Fire of London.

Perhaps ironically, when we look at it from our own precisely contemporary perspective, this enormous conflagration was the prime instigator of the modern practice of home insurance. (Prior to 1666 only the concept really existed.)

Samuel Pepys famously saved his wine, some important documents and his Parmesan cheese from the ‘infinite fury’ of the fire by digging a big pit in the ground outside, prior to evacuation.

I wonder how many people in LA were aware of this option?

 

 

Foreign Filibusterer

Outside the US Capitol, Filibustering has been a (mainly 19th century) pastime for wealthy Americans inclined to meddle abroad, and it has rarely ended well.

Meanwhile, Signore Guido Fawkes discovered in 1605 that England was already one of the earliest modern states with an apparatus to protect itself from foreign riff-raff inclined towards plotting and insurrection.

Since then, many other nations have acquired similar self-defence mechanisms. I would argue that today, the UK, the USA, Russia, China and Israel are the stand-out five which possess a professional service dedicated to watching over their interests, internal and external, that anyone from outside would generally not want to fuck with, on principle...except perhaps someone who works for one of the others.

Musk is steadily moving onto the thinner ice.

 

 

"God loves a cheerful giver"

The Middle Ages need, in the first instance, to be understood on their own terms, not ours.

The other day someone waylaid me on the interwebs rather like that anachronistic anarcho-syndicalist peasant played by Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“…because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”), suggesting that the Tithe (Diezmo, in Spanish), introduced to by King Edgar in the 10th century, was a uniquely British form of oppression, whereby the Church extracted its one tenth share of the crop just so that it could indulge in ‘bling’.

A satisfying double riposte ensued, for not only could I refer to the ancient near-eastern history of the Tithe, I could simultaneously torch some of this person’s ‘Jesus was Palestinian’ presumptions: the word derives from Hebrew and the procedure was a key part of Jewish religious teachings, recommended in the New Testament by the Big J himself as an important part of spiritual discipline, and there are other Old Testament biblical descriptions of how it is supposed to work, binding the Israelite community together, funding festivals and supporting the Levites.

Edgar became King at precisely the moment when the monarchy was seeking some spiritual and symbolic fairy dust in order to move on definitively from the era when the man on the throne had been little more than a barbarian war-band boss.

The Church did not use the quota it gathered in order to indulge themselves in luxuries, instead most of it went into Mission-support, including the care for the sick and the needy, and the already very needy rarely had to pay the full 10% of this tax, which was nowhere near as regressive as later medieval poll taxes.

So in a sense, a precursor to National Insurance, which means that in some ways the early medieval English enjoyed better social care than modern Americans!

(If there were abuses to speak of, they tended to occur over on the Continent, where the Bishops sometimes ‘leased’ the Tithe rights to secular lords.)

This book will be going straight into our loo. One can either read it cover to cover, or dip in all over, rather like Rayuela.

In the A section, I learned that Abad (Abbot) is an Aramaic word for Father (Jesus referred to his viejo as 'Abba') and also that the Abbey of Fontevrault was at one stage run by an Abadesa.

Imagine, a woman in charge of all those repressed males.

Deuteronomy 14:22-29

"You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year"

De-Platforming

With Gringolandia seemingly on the cusp of adiosing Tiktok, not far south of the border they have been approaching the problem from the other end, removing influencers one by one.

Two that have lately closed their accounts, so to speak, are Justin Paul, 'El Pinky' and 'El Gordo Peruci'.

And now flyers like this one are being dropped by small plane over the Culiacán area, inviting users to terminate their relationship with a range of content creators, kind of literally.

The issue seems to be that many of these prominent public figures have acted as 'prestanombres' e.g. collaborated via DM with Los Chapitos, a spin-off cartel run by the offspring of El Chapo remaining in Sinaloa.

 

'Relaxed' Hate Speech Rules

There's a bit more to this, I believe, than tech bros realigning out of self-interest with the incoming Orange Blob.

The Wokies themselves have some of the blame to share.

The protections that they offer have been exposed as partisan. They have an in group and an out group for their fact checking and sometimes the facts involved are evidently not even facts.

Significant sections of society have been left high and dry, exposed to constant abuse, most notably a subset of Jews and feminists.

Once it became clear that these checks were as partial and political as they were moral and essential, an outcome like this became that much more likely.

When you become complacent about allowing others to be openly slurred in a supposedly tolerant society, do not be all that surprised when you are suddenly surrounded by trolls yourself.