
Obaid AlZaabi
10.6K posts

Obaid AlZaabi
@Obaidsview
Emirati Thinker and Doer


🇨🇳 NEW: Chinese cities are rolling out AI-powered robot barber kiosks that scan customers in 3D and cut hair with millimeter precision for just 60 yen per session.

Ever notice how when some men suddenly come into large amounts of money, they start pretending to have a money snake, aka ubhululu/umamlambo/inyoka yemali? Even when they don’t start such rumours, they allow them to fester because this generates fear, which keeps people from asking questions. They do this because this ambiguity helps to explain away sudden wealth in unequal communities, discourages scrutiny, especially when the money is ill-got, but even when it’s not, it also creates mystique and fear and it protects secrecy around actual income sources. Another reason is that in the townships and rural areas, unexplained prosperity attracts pressure with relatives asking for help, neighbours demanding to be plugged, witchcraft, jealousy and criminal targeting. So a rumour about occult wealth becomes useful because if people think “Don’t ask too many questions, that guy has something dark behind him”, they stop probing. What you then get is that the new money mogul never explicitly says, “I have a money snake.” He just doesn’t deny the accusation; instead, he acts mysteriously, avoids explaining business operations and usually cultivates fear intentionally. That opacity protects him from accountability. It’s harder to ask “What exactly do you do?” “Where did the tender money come from?” “Why are there no visible businesses?” “How did you suddenly buy twelve taxis and a Ferrari?” because the conversation shifts from economics to the supernatural, and most people simply don’t want that smoke. This is not new; Khotso Sethuntsa perfected this technique decades ago. (x.com/i/status/16590…) Oral histories are full of him boasting about supernatural powers, yet he also had documented political ties to Afrikaner elites and the Apartheid Nationalist Party. Sethuntsa ran shebeens, transport, and property, but the myth of the seven snakes in jars under his bed made people afraid to ask how a Black man in Apartheid South Africa could own so much. He just claimed his wealth came from a deal with a White sangoma in the sea, and that was it. Sethuntsa understood that the snake mystique protected the real sources of his influence and money. Decades later, people still whisper about his snakes rather than his actual economic networks. Now, the money snake is almost always associated with men in these narratives. Women who accumulate wealth suddenly are more often accused of prostitution, ukuthwala, or being izangoma, selling sex for money. But the idea is the same. In a 1999 paper titled Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction, Jean and John Comaroff note how South Africa has seen a “dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends”. The Comaroffs referred to this as “the occult economy”, which they linked to the deployment of supernatural explanations to handle the baffling realities of postcolonial capitalism and argued that postcolonial capitalism, especially after Apartheid ended in 1994, feels deeply mysterious to everyday people, because in the “New South Africa”, people were promised that freedom would bring wealth, yet severe structural inequality remained. So, when sudden, massive wealth appears without a clear trail of hard labour, as is often the case with winning a tender, pyramid schemes, or sudden investments, it looks and feels like magic. The Comaroffs call this “the enchantment of capitalism”. They make the point that under global financial capitalism, money flows are highly abstract, with electronic transfers, shares, bonds, offshore accounts, and government tenders. So if a community cannot see the physical factory or the sweat of a man’s brow, the wealth becomes “abstract” and mysterious. It is notable that for White people, wealth was never seen as magical; it has always been seen as merit, inheritance, hard work, or good business sense. The same abstraction of offshore accounts, share portfolios, and trust funds that looks opaque to Black eyes is culturally coherent to White middle-class investors. So, for Black people, the snake myth fills a gap: a way to narrate wealth that has no visible labour, but in a context where the official explanations are themselves unavailable or implausible to poor observers. To this end, the authors argue that because (Black) people cannot trace the real economic roots of the wealth displayed in front of them, they try to make it concrete by using the language of the supernatural. Meanwhile, by letting the paranormal rumour flourish, the new money moguls use this as a shield. They replace a potentially dangerous legal/political question with a terrifying supernatural one. The Comaroffs describe this as a symptom of South Africa as a postcolony where the lines between legitimate business and magical speculation have completely blurred, at least for most Black people and that an occult economy is born out of “the appeal to mystical mechanisms for producing wealth ... mechanisms that defy standard economic laws”. This is because under Apartheid, Black wealth was systematically blocked; after 1994, sudden accumulation by a few looks doubly suspicious. In this sense, we can say the occult economy is not “irrational” but a rational response to a violent, racially stratified transition to neoliberalism. Now, this is where it gets tragic: The myth is not harmless. As the Comaroffs warn, the belief that money has to be coming from mystic sources becomes self-fulfilling, as eventually people go out and seek magical means through ritual murders, tokoloshes, etc., when real accumulation fails. We have all heard of how desperate people, seeing no structural way out of poverty through hard labour, attempt to replicate the myth. So the “strategic” silence often spills over into actual occult practices, further entrenching the link between inequality and supernatural belief, which incentivises real ritual murder. Now, I keep making the point that allowing the rumour to flourish cultivates fear; however, when someone does push through the fear, like a disgruntled relative, a journalist, or an ex-associate, the snake narrative may collapse into violence when the rich man kills the questioner, which is then interpreted as being done to “feed the snake”. This protects the mogul from being viewed as a mobster or a corrupt actor; instead, he remains a terrifying, untouchable mystical figure. That’s why you often see such men also cultivating political patronage, just like Sethuntsa before them, because the snake rumour shields them from the poor, while they keep politicians to protect them from institutional investigation by SARS, the Hawks, SIU, etc. In summation, we can say that what looks like mythology is, at its core, a governance mechanism that protects big money from scrutiny while leaving communities to explain their own dispossession through the only way made available to them: ancient folklore. If you like reading this sort of heterodox thought on a variety of topics, I’d appreciate your support. Please feel free to subscribe to my Patreon for exclusive essays that don’t make it to the public feed. Your subscription keeps this work going. Link in bio. Thank you for reading.

The average healthy, well-adjusted teenager can scarcely go a few hours without thinking of sex or the opposite gender. Marry your children as soon as they get sexual urges if you don't want them to be repressed or become whores and porn addicts.










Many Egyptians are bitter that their country’s plight has forced it to sell prized assets and land to Gulf investors. The Emiratis see them as ungrateful. Still, neither side will let the quarrel spiral too far economist.com/middle-east-an…


Divorced her husband, two years later crying about the decision. I have no sympathy for people that play the victim in the chaos they create. Do you?

The whole hardcoreness of the dating community has been kind of killed off. I once hung out with this little clique of PUA enthusiasts in Australia, and this was their standard routine for a night out: 7pm: Meetup at an isolated park on outskirts of the city to do bioenergetic exercises which included jumping up an down, stomping (grounding), stretches, screaming to open throat etc 7:45pm: Motivational pep talk by one of the more experienced guys 8:30pm: walk to club, warm up sets on the street with passing groups of girls 9:00pm: Hit club queue, hit on girls in the line to try and connect with them later in the bar 9:30pm: Enter bar, nonstop sets, try to create a little hub/large group somewhere in the club 11:30pm: If not going great move to club 2, hit on girls on street + the line of club 2 2:30am: If no pull, spill out onto the street, hit on girls outside bar or smoking area 3am: These guys would then literally work the cab rank, try to invite themselves into cabs with groups of girls leaving until 4am for "afterparty" (the more skilled guys would very often pull this off, and end up in a cab heading to some chicks house or the pad of one of the guys who had good logistics) If that didn't succeed, guys would head to a 24hour pancake joint in the city at 5am for a chat and debrief on what went wrong etc. This is the kind of hardcore extreme energy that a lot guys getting into the game now can't conceive of





A similar incident took place some time later. Again, during one of his night patrols of the city's streets, 'Umar passed by a group of women who were engaged in a lively discussion. The question they were busy discussing among themselves was as follows: "Which young man in Madeenah has the handsomest face?" After one of the women replied, "Abu Dhuaib," Umar went out in search for the said young man. Upon finally finding him, "Umar to saw that Abu Dhuaib was a very handsome young man. And so 'Umar said to him without hesitation, "Leave, for. you will never live with me in my city." The young man replied, "If you feel that you must banish me, at least allow me to meet up with my cousin, Nasr Ibn Hajjaaj." The two young men were both members of the Banu Saleem tribe. Umar granted the young man's request, allowing him to go and live with his cousin in Basrah.


@Empty_America My theory as of about 30 seconds ago: Especially in the colonial era, Arab elites were refined in ways the British recognized and wild in ways the British coveted.








