Joined July 2011
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17 Nov 2025
"Whenever I return to the Maasai country, on the marches of southern Kenya and Tanzania, I find it at once both a thrilling and unsettling experience... a remote frontier, an inaccessible highland of nomadic warriors in whose company one still sees spears and bows and the fluttering red shuka garments"
16 Nov 2025
The homogenisation of culture begins with the loss of language, writes Tristan S. Rapp | @Hieraaetus
quillette.com/2025/11/16/whe…
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Tristan S. Rapp retweeted
Jun 13
Neolithic Europeans built the largest settlements on Earth.
Within them were enormous megastructures whose purpose remains one of the great mysteries of prehistoric Europe.
Were they temples, assembly halls, elite residences, or something else?
Please like and share! Cheers!
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Jun 13
Appreciate the finding that before the rise of vertebrates, the world was dominated for millions of years by giant, several-meter long scorpions. Very Lovecraftian, "antediluvian horrors" vibe. Would've been disappointing if the primordial Earth was ruled by wide-eyed fuzzballs.
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Jun 13
Why yes, this is largely how I would expect the first, primeval forests in an epoch of enormous predatory arthropods to look.
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Tristan S. Rapp retweeted
The Upper Lune Valley, Cumbria
ALT The Upper Lune Valley, Cumbria
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Jun 6
If politics is astrology for young men, 23andMe is astrology for Americans
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Jun 6
You could take almost any newspaper horoscope and swap out the references to zodiac signs with ancestry percentiles from various European countries and it would read just about the same.
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Jun 3
Reminder that everyone knows what 'indigenous' means, & that anyone making a big deal out of denying the appellation to a group - any group - is almost certainly an inveterate racist. Nobody has ever been strongly invested in denying a group's indigeneity for non-suspect reasons.
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Jun 3
That yes, a Welshman is native to Wales, and yes, a Keralan is native to Kerala, and no, this does not mean a Keralan can never set foot in Wales, nor that a Welshman can never set foot in Kerala - these are just base acknowledgements before adult conversation can even begin.
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Jun 2
Feels somehow very wrong that Mount Brocken in Saxony, the center of so much European witch- and devil-lore, is now topped with a huge stomping telephone array.
Not exactly going to eulogize the witches or call this a "de-sacralization," but it's a visceral intrusion of the mundane into a place of such folkloric significance.
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Jun 2
There are actually a number of locations around Europe with associations as classic locations of witches' sabbaths. The 'Bald Mountain' ppl may know from Disney's Fantasia is the Slavic version, in this case an actually mythic locale, but in the Danish translation of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain it is rendered as... Bloksbjerg!
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Jun 2
For those who have played The Witcher III, the place you go to fight Imlerith is called, yes, Bald Mountain - and is of course drawing on this tradition as well.
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Jun 2
Americans obviously like this narrative for self-flattering reasons, but, well, no - initial move of Anglos to the US was centuries before Europe's civilizational zenith & the primary inflow since was hardly from the elite. Old Europe didn't sail to America, it died in the Somme.
May 29
The thing that you need to understand is that for hundreds of years, the people who were scrappy, innovative problem solvers…left
They came to America
The people left in Europe can’t install AC because they’re descendants of a people who couldn’t buy boat tickets
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Jun 2
This narrative is so patently false that it's hard even to concisely dismantle without just sort of gesturing to every page of a history book on the 1700s-1900s.
It's true that America has always been an unusually dynamic society, but Europe's sclerosis has different causes.
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Tristan S. Rapp retweeted
Jun 2
One of the most beautiful animals on Earth.
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