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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   34881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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South Africa : The Ultimate Red Pill

There's been quite a lot of speculation on what Elon Musk's red pill moment was. Some have said it's that the government interfered with his space launches. Others have said its because his kid transitioned from male to female. But it's hard to write the story of Elon without considering where he grew up: South Africa.

South Africa is a cautionary tale. It's the ultimate failure of the progressive experiment.

The decline of South Africa since the end of apartheid has been as stunning as it was predictible. At one point, a small population of 3 or 4 million white South Africans was able to build a suprisingly advanced society. They performed the first human heart transplant. They had nuclear weapons!

But over time, international pressure against apartheid mounted and South Africa became a pariah state. In 1994, the apartheid government caved and allowed blacks full participation in democracy. Optimism was high. F. W. de Klerk, the last white president, even ran for another term. He got 20% of the vote.

The man who won the office with 63% of the vote, and who de Klerk would share a Nobel Peace Prize with, was Nelson Mandela. Today, Mandela is often compared to Gandhi or MLK, but that is not an accurate representation of his earlier years when he viewed himself as a guerilla in the model of Che Guevara. Fortunately for his image, he was arrested in 1962 and imprisoned until 1990, largely avoiding personal involvement in his party's genoicidal rhetoric of "Kill the Boer" and the infamous use of the South African necktie which involved placing a tire around a person and then burning them alive.

Neverthless, as President, Mandela managed to be mostly conciliatory towards whites. The Truth and Reconcilation Committee was an effort to bury the hatred of the past, and was largely viewed as succesful at the time.

But the rot had already started. Mandela's term saw the imposition of huge amounts of welfare spending and affirmative action. There was an influx of illegal immigrants from poor countries nearby, but an outflux of whites and coloreds. As a result, the percentage of whites in South Africa fell from 13% in 1995 to just 7% today.

After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population. After him came Jacob Zuma, a polygamist, who would rehash the "kill the Boer" song during a 2012 rally.

Today, South Africa is in shambles. The passenger rail system, which once served 600 million annual journeys, is now essentially defunct. The electricity grid is teetering. Life expectancy and GDP per capita have been stagnant for 40 years, while nearly every other country in the world has seen staggering increases.

Worse, though, is the fate of rural white farmers who have been subject to attacks in which they are tortured for several hours and then murdered. Almost none of these attacks are prosecuted, meaning the farmers can be murdered with impunity. In fact, the government of Cyril Ramphosa, the current president, has proposed seizing white-owned farms without compensation, echoing what happened in Zimbabwe.

It was in the context of all of this, that today the Trump administration said it will grant asylum and a rapid path to citizenship for white South African farmers who flee to the United States. Furthermore, the government will cut off all aid to South Africa.

This will likely hasten South Africa's decline, and it's an acknowledgement that there is no longer anything there worth saving. South Africa is a failed African state, no different than many others. But despite everything, I'm not sure what could have been done differently. Apartheid is morally reprehensible, and at the same time it was the only way to keep South Africa from falling apart. That's all in the past now. It's time for the elves to get back on their ships and sail back to Valinor. And pity the ones that stay behind.

I'm not satisfied with them leaving, unless to Namibia or something. That would be the death of the Afrikaner people. And really—how many peoples are there left upon the face of the earth who are better than they?

I'd be happier to see a stronger push for separatism, whether that be cape independence, or an Orania-style volkstaat. But any effort will be hard to win people over and coordinate and maybe slow. I don't know how much time is left. It helps, surely, that the private security outnumbers the military, and just the sheer size of the country. And the Solidariteit movement is good. Any victory will have to come through institutions that are not the government. But the white population is just so spread out that it makes it hard to do things.

I have a proposition for you: We hand all political power in the US over to the blacks. As a white guy, you'll probably be forced to live in a designated area an hour outside a major city, where you'll be forced to take a bus in every day to do manual labor for ten bucks an hour. You will be barred from most public accommodations, and will have to get official permission before traveling anywhere outside your home; even going to work will require you to present proof that you actually have a job. Your own political power is nonexistent, and the government doesn't even pretend that you have anything resembling civil rights. The tradeoff is that the United States sees unprecedented GDP growth. Do you take this bargain?

Add some context to this hypothetical scenario:

1/There is whole huge continent out there, that is 99.9% white with whites in power, with numerous countries, and most of them are infernal hellholes of starvation, plague and war with absolutely nothing resembling any "civil" or "human" rights.

2/ You do not know it, and if someone told you, you would refuse to believe him. You believe that all wealth of the country was created by white laborers working for ten bucks a hour, and if the black bloodsuckers exploiting you went away, you will be fabulously rich and live like people in Hollywood movies.

Oh so it's Dubai? Sounds like a good deal if it's not your own homeland.

I like my own nation-state better in principle but being a wealthy guest worker can be a lot better than nationalistic misery. It depends how much wealthier you become.

I'd say at the point where you compare no electricity and rampant robbery and murder to any sort of modern life, the latter wins.

In this thought experiment, how do you square 'unprecedented GDP growth' with 'ten bucks per hour'? Cost disease still exists even if all the high-paying jobs are taken by the negro overlords (although if we're trying to be realistic, at least make them Chinese or something).

As a white guy, you'll probably be forced to live in a designated area an hour outside a major city

You mean like a suburb? You make it sounds as if commuting an hour by bus is some god-awful fate rather than a normal commute in countries with public transport.

even going to work will require you to present proof that you actually have a job

Pretty easy.

You will be barred from most public accommodations, and will have to get official permission before traveling anywhere outside your home

These are the only two that genuinely sound bad.

Your own political power is nonexistent, and the government doesn't even pretend that you have anything resembling civil rights

For most individuals in democracies, they have no political power. Depending on what you mean by civil rights, that could also be said to be true.

as if commuting an hour by bus is some god-awful fate rather than a normal commute in countries with public transport

I had a former coworker who worked in our Korean office. Such a cutie with a great personality. But she worked very long days and explained it takes over an hour to get from the office to her home. Poor woman had no free time. Still single in her mid thirties.

Not to be a eugenicist, but something valuable was squandered. I think somehow her great contributions to project management could be realized along with having enough time to live a life outside of work. More housing closer to work. Faster public transportation, at least if housing must be far away and many workers don't drive a personal car to work. Some combination of these things are desperately needed in Korea.

The common complaint by new urbanists types is that Americans live in single family homes and drive cars to work. But I go to other countries and my coworkers do neither of those things and are so much worse off than me.

You make it sounds as if commuting an hour by bus is some god-awful fate rather than a normal commute in countries with public transport.

It's both.

In this thought experiment, how do you square 'unprecedented GDP growth' with 'ten bucks per hour'?

In this thought experiment, the growth is unprecedented compared to other white countries. Compared to rich blacks who live in big houses, drive big cars and sit in comfy offices doing nothing, your life of menial labor is rather miserable, always had been and always will be.

Okay so the average GDP per capita in the EU is $40,000 today. In exchange for being ruled over by a small group of Africans who earn more than us and limit our movement and freedoms, the UK can quadruple its GDP per capita to say, $160,000? (the real life gap between SA and Nigeria) Honestly it sounds like a pretty good deal. British people get to live amongst ourselves, and with our newfound wealth we can just build strong communities in the limited parts of the country we're allowed to live in.

Although I'll be honest, this is a tricky hypothetical because it requires me to change too much to really make it analogous. Like, do Europeans in this hypothetical world commit tons of crime and corruption while the Africans are smarter, more law-abiding, more organised and better able to run things? Are the real life IQ differences flipped or are you just making one group smarter or dumber?

If you want better (but even more provocative and inflammatory) analogy, here is it.

Imagine the world looks as it is, except there is one large country looking like something from far future (Star Trek future, not Mad Max future).

In this land, ordinary menial laborer has big house affordable elsewhere only to millionaires, flying car and personal holodeck entertainment. Even basic health care can treat nearly all illnesses and diseases, including old age. The land is orderly, crime and violence is something unheard of.

What country is it?

It is Israel. Great Messianic Kingdom of Israel from Nile to Euphrates. It is Jewish land, but Gentiles can live there if they know their place.

As Gentile laborer, you live in Gentile community, travel to work and back in your flying car on specially designated Gentile flight tracks, and have to obey and defer to your Jewish bosses. While you have mansion and flying car, every Jew has Versailles sized estate and personal starship. And this is how it always will be. You and your children will be always laborers, will never rise up above their station. This is how G-d wills it.

Will you sign up for this deal?

Alternatively, if the Messiah decides to add country where you live to the Kingdom and bring the Messianic Order there too, will you fight, protest or welcome your G-d ordained overlords?

To maintain the analogy, you can leave any time and start something new elsewhere with your savings. I imagine there would be a constant trickle of people trying that, but if it keeps failing... whites accepting that theyre not on the Cosmic Task anymore is going to be a big change either way, who knows how it ends. That doesnt really depend on living there though, just the existence of that state.

Aside from the difficulty of squaring 'menial labour' with flying cars and personal holodecks (do I wear a mech suit while stacking shelves or something?), I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.

Using this for an analogy is like saying "imagine if it's just like the alien reptiles ruling America now, except they're ruling the world instead". The question is secondarily an analogy about South Africa, and primarily a way to preach to the unbelievers about how the alien reptiles are taking over America. You should not be violating "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" by sneaking your inflammatory claim in as "oh, this is the real world part of an analogy about something else".

The hypothetical scenario is "imagine you live in country organized on racial principle, where master race is in charge, and you are not the "master race", the hypothetical question is: "how big hike in living standards would you accept in exchange for perpetual subservience (for you and all of your descendants)?"

Im' pretty sure that that link you gave for Great Messianic Kingdom wasn't made up just for your analogy. You don't just get away with sneaking things like that through just because you're making an analogy about something else.

Isn't this just the deal I already have to accept in the US, except I don't even get a flying car? I'm working at one of those estates tomorrow.

That still sounds like a pretty sweet deal. What am I missing?

The evidence seems to be accumulating that the reversed hypothetical doesn't work, i.e.

We hand all political power in the [country] over to the blacks

and

the [country] sees unprecedented GDP growth

cannot occur together in the world as it actually exists. Politically awkward questions then arise about how this should impact policy in black-majority and indeed black-minority countries.

Yeah to add on: this actually happened in South Africa. They indeed did not experience unprecedented GPD growth. Their formerly functioning power generation and train networks are degrading. Regular power outages and lack of transportation are the new norms.

Americans blacks will not do that. They’d probably make it impossible for not-connected whites to get government jobs, but not in a way that’s clearly distinguishable from corruption.

We hand all political power in the US over to the blacks. As a white guy, you'll probably be forced to...

I know that black Americans are more racist have a stronger in-group bias than whites, but do you really think that's the most likely outcome given those premises?

Not OP, but no.

If anything, I'd argue that black Americans having the highest in-group bias disguises the fact that Americans as a whole, black Americans included, really aren't that racist.

Supermajority black places in America tend to suck either because they're super rural literal plantation country equivalents to the crappy left-behind parts of Appalachia (The black belt in Alabama is like this.), or because they had/have sufficiently severe crime problems that all middle class people including the black middle class fled the place.

If anything, judging by hiring patterns alleged and observed I'd be fascinated to see where various immigrant groups rank in terms of in-group bias. Alas, the famous graph had small sample sizes for even black and Hispanic Americans and the Asian-American sample was so small as to be useless.

If anything, I'd argue that black Americans having the highest in-group bias disguises the fact that Americans as a whole, black Americans included, really aren't that racist.

They tend to be very good at absorbing black migrants from a different ethnicity in a way that other groups might struggle with (including those blacks in their own countries*). But it's just taken for granted that those people are the in-group, even by people criticizing the AA in-group bias.

A legacy of the focus on race I suppose.

* Or outside of them, sometimes.

Funny thought: replace "blacks" with "AI" and you have one of those take-off scenarios.

If the alternative under my own stewardship is essentially complete societal collapse, I'd give it some thought. I know black South Africans/expats who preferred conditions under Apartheid. This stuff all presupposes that the natural state of human society is affluent middle-tier Western Democracy, not that it takes serious work and effort to establish and maintain such a thing.

Same, although i have to admit that there likely is a fair bit of selection bias going on seeing as I'm only meeting the people who emigrate.

No, of course not. Nowhere did I say that apartheid was good. Nowhere did I say that blacks benefited from apartheid. What I said about apartheid was this:

Apartheid is morally reprehensible, and at the same time it was the only way to keep South Africa from falling apart.

Now, 30 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is falling apart. There is extreme corruption, extreme discrimination against whites, and murder and torture whites without prosecution.

I don’t think “they had no choice” is a fair assessment of the situation. Even assuming you take ‘retreat to the Western Cape’ off the table, there were other options.

For example, in Namibia and Botswana, in Zambia too to an extent whites kept a lot of land and even political influence. Even today it’s likely most of the good arable farmland in all three of those countries is operated by white farmers. But the white populations were far smaller there.

The goal should have been something like modern-day Indonesia, China or the Philippines, where Chinese minorities control the vast majority of the economy and are very disproportionately wealthy and powerful, but in which native resentment is managed and they still have some ownership of the political system. 85% of the richest people in Thailand, 90% in the Philippines, somewhere in the region of 80-90% in Malaysia are Chinese. In Indonesia, the Chinese are 2-3% of the population but have more than 70% of private wealth in the country.

There are rare, every-few-decades incidents of sporadic violence against the Chinese minorities, but rarely anything like a medieval pogrom or even something on the level of the LA riots more than once or twice a century (excluding the highly volatile postwar period which saw the social order upended entirely, there was mainly 1969 in Malaysia and 1998 in Indonesia, which were both localized).

Only one African nation actually considered trying this plan in earnest - Rhodesia. But its proponents were overthrown in the democratic vote by fearful whites under Ian Smith who began the process that led to the civil war, and by the end of that enough resentment had built up that it was impossible.

GDP graphs of mentioned african countries. Botswana sure has a good thing going, not much else to see. If whites in Namibia or Zambia are noticable better off for their approach, this would have to come out of increased inequality rather than higher productivity.

I think this is a good argument.

But, to state the obvious, the level of violence in South Africa society is on the order of 10-100x that of Thai, Filipino, or Malay society. The risk of pogroms and anarcho-tyranny is simply much higher in South Africa.

And market dominant minorities haven't worked as well in Africa. Consider, for example, the fate of the Indians in Uganda.

And market dominant minorities haven't worked as well in Africa. Consider, for example, the fate of the Indians in Uganda.

The Lebanese and Indians were disproportionately, visibly powerful in business as I was growing up in the 00s . The Lebanese had Islam and Arabophilia going for them I suppose. The Indians seemed fine without it.

I wonder how it's going with the Chinese now...

Consider, for example, the fate of the Indians in Uganda.

Perhaps. There were also the Arabs of Zanzibar, as per Addio Africa. But consider also the Lebanese in Nigeria, who have been remarkably powerful for decades now and still haven’t been pogromed. Consider also that whites are still happily market dominant minorities in much of Southern Africa, including (to an extent that might - but shouldn’t - surprise you) in Zimbabwe, many of which have seen no substantial or organized anti-white violence in decades. A white man would have become democratically elected president of Zambia a few years ago were it not for the law on needing (as I recall) both parents born in the country to be eligible.

Like all peoples Africans can be whipped up into violent ethnic hostility, but I don’t think their ethnic resentment is particularly strong. I have always felt that both Indians and Chinese are educated into more soft-resentment for Europeans than Africans, who in my experience mostly don’t think about white people at all. Even in South Africa, there is more racial hostility between Zulu and Xhosa, between native Bantus and immigrants from Central Africa, and between black and Indian South Africans than there is between black and white South Africans.

A fact I find fascinating is that until (IIRC) 2021, every member of a Zimbabwean Olympic swim team was white.

Better to rule in hell or serve in not hell.

Still think there was some better compromise between apartheid and current state.

It's kind of obvious what the Afrikaaners could have done- retrench and become a local majority, probably in the western cape, then break up the country. They didn't, because they wanted bosskaap, and you can't have bosskaap without an oppressed black majority.

It kind of echoes slavery in the United States that way doesn't it? Being evil is often so incredibly short-sighted. Cheap labor is NEVER worth it in the long run.

The Oranians stress only using their own labor for just this reason. Exploiting cheaper, outside labor, succumbing to Mammon's siren song, corrupts morally and leads to generational destruction like a Gothic novel.

I started working for a new company about six months ago, and three of my colleagues are white South Africans. There's been a noticeable influx of white South Africans to Ireland in recent years, and I'm curious at what point we'll stop calling them "ex-pats" and start calling them "refugees" (even if that's not how they'd describe themselves, even if they conspicuously go out of their way to flaunt their antiracist bona fides, even if their motives for leaving the country are functionally indistinguishable from those of refugees).

One of these South African colleagues was explaining to me that, because the police are so useless, any white South African who can afford it lives in a private gated community; because power outages are so common, everyone who can afford it has solar panels and a backup generator. While nominally a liberal democracy, the country has essentially devolved into a Wild West libertarian/anarcho-capitalist state.

Apartheid was a system created to serve the Boer / Afrikaans community at the expense not only of the blacks, but also the Anglo whites, cape coloured, Indians and Chinese.

No other European colony in Africa had a formalized system of racial segregation and internal passporting as developed and extensive as South Africa. Not Rhodesia, not Namibia, not even the Belgian Congo (although violence against the natives there was often more brutal, to be clear). Apartheid served the specific function of providing huge amounts of low cost agrarian labor to serve the pastoral Afrikaner homesteading and farming fantasy. The larger scale and more industrial agriculture seen in what what are today Botswana, Zambia etc (where white farmers are still commonplace) both had less need for laborers and could employ natives at market rates from inside the community.

Apartheid happened as a racial affirmative action movement tied to a specific ethnoreligious tribe who believed they were owed South Africa by God. This is immediately apparent if you read DF Malan and other founding figures in the Purified National Party, hardcore Dutch Reformed Calvinist isolationists who despised the British Empire, involvement in overseas conflicts and who were deeply opposed to industrial capitalism from a socially conservative perspective.

They believed that the nation given to them by God was under hostile foreign occupation, by Anglos, and that they were oppressed domestically by an English, Jewish and Indian mercantile elite that ruled the cities, ran every major newspaper, controlled the stock exchange and ran almost all corporation. Enough Afrikaner elites had previously joined the above group to run the country, but a combination of the depression and rising Afrikaner ethnonationalism eroded their support, leading a substantial fringe (often those most associated with the church itself) to found the breakaway movement that would eventually gain support, merge back with the establishment Afrikaner movement and then implement apartheid in the late 1940s. Malan came at the right time, because the mercantile elite in South Africa had experienced a drastic reversal of fortunes in the depression which crippled almost all export-driven businesses (much of the economy), leaving them vulnerable.

Apartheid was designed to entrench an existing state of affairs that served the Afrikaner population. Urban whites would not compete with urban blacks (who were also migrating rapidly to cities) for jobs, while rural Afrikaners could continue to employ black laborers cheaply because they could no longer take higher paid roles in and around the cities. Lastly, Smuts and his predecessors had presided over the mass immigration of white Anglos and others from the British Empire, who were seen as taking jobs and opportunity away from Afrikaners. An irony of fate is that without the Afrikaner nationalism that produced apartheid, there would likely be many more white South Africans today.

The ‘benefits’ accorded to the white population from apartheid were therefore not evenly realized. Rural and suburban Afrikaners benefited from labor so cheap that even a postal worker could employ a cook, a nanny, a pool boy and live the lifestyle of the American or Australian upper-middle class. But the urban PMC dealt with economic stagnation (apart from a brief period in the late 50s and early 60s), high labor costs, an entrenched Afrikaner elite who cared little for economic progress until the Cold War made it necessary, sclerotic institutions and then, as apartheid became less internationally acceptable, with sanctions, lower quality domestically made goods, and international opprobrium, which the rural Afrikaners in the north couldn’t care less about.

Of course, neither Musk, Sachs nor Thiel are Afrikaners; Musk is Anglo, Sachs presumably Jewish, Thiel German who spent some time in Southern Africa in his youth. But SA political dynamics are still affected by the gulf between Anglos and Afrikaners, and Anglos care little about what happens to random Afrikaner farmers in the north or about ethnonationalist Afrikaner projects like Orania.

If they created what was of value in the country, then it’s not “affirmative action”, it’s justly securing the fruit of one’s labor with the knowledge that other peoples may not or do possess the same high trust genes and culture adaptive for great nation building. The Bantu had the opportunity to develop their own things in their own areas that rivaled Afrikaner development, but they were not able to do this, and aren’t able today. Neither are Indians, it would seem, from reading about experiences in India. Perhaps, much like soil-rich produce, you need high-fertility farming communities outside of urban areas in order to sustain the very spark of the civilization so prized, lest the less-trustful urban genes proliferate.

It’s not really about the Bantus, it’s about the economic relationship between the Afrikaners and the Anglos which over time created a great deal of resentment. The opposition to English immigration was because Afrikaners weren’t even thinking about black people voting, but about the Anglos, for example.

Clearly the Anglos possessed the genes for great nation building. But they were economic competition and had different economic interests, and a long history of ethnic hostility toward the Afrikaners (which was certainly reciprocal).

The enmity the Afrikaner’s feel towards anglos might have to do with the whole war waged against them and then being the first population ever to be put into concentration camps (the first coining of the term) where tens of thousands of boers died, in what amounted to a genocide. Strange that you left that part out

Obviously, but there are specific reasons for what happened from the 1930s to late 1940s that go beyond that.

This is pretty bleak: Adjusted for inflation, South Africa's GDP per capita is up less than 7% since 1974.

Is this a troll? This is the worst misunderstanding of economic statistics that I've ever seen on /r/themotte.

That may be the worst graph I've seen recently. It's denominated in "Local Currency", which makes it look like 68342 USD is less than 73284 South African Rand. It isn't. The US is around 20x as rich, and had roughly 20x the growth rate.

That's not even the worst graph available on that page. This is.

It gets better. And better. Unfortunately the data for Venezuela ends in 2014 when they transcended economic reality.

Is the singularity just a fever dream of Ray Kurweil?

Not in Zimbabwe.

"To be fair", I wouldnt have known thats what LCU means either. What is rather strange is seeing SA above USA even today, and not at least checking that.

The left-wing lack of attempt to rehabilitate South Africa bears a resemblance to "real communism has never been tried", eugenics, the sexual revolution, "defund the police", and many other progressive projects.

We have two of two countries that turn into complete shitholes 20 years after the moment white rule is replaced with democracy. South Africa and Zimbabwe. It's not rehabilitation to state a fact that the countries were better ran during the opression times.

No one is rehabilitating South Africa. But the people there don't deserve what is happening to them.

I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.

I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.

Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.

Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".

If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.

You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.

The other poster basic response was “shut up, you Nazi!” Perhaps we ought to be modding that poster.

That is not an accurate assessment of the content of the post in question. It may be a accurate assessment of the poster's intention, but they did not actually demand that anyone shut up, they did not (directly) call anyone a Nazi. They drew a comparison between positive descriptions of Apartheid South Africa and positive descriptions of Hitler elsewhere, and they offered a link to make it clear what they were talking about. It's not a particularly good post, but it is a fair one.

I don’t even know what you mean by drawing a distinction between the content of the post and the intent of the post.

A is like B. Bs are Zs. Therefore seems likely that you are also a Z if you push for A. This is all the more clear when Zs are universally hated.

What other point outside of trying to tar your opponent is there to bringing up Nazis? It is an attempt to poison the well.

Calling the post a fair one suggests you are being way too formal and not understanding the basic nuance here.

Formality is how standards are maintained, and I understand the basic nuance just fine. I am not claiming that the post in question was a good post, much less that the argument it made explicitly was a good argument, and even less that the argument it implied was a good argument. I am claiming that it is fair play by the rules of this forum as I understand them, and that the reply I modded was not.

You are not allowed to call someone a Nazi out of the blue here. If they say that they're a huge fan of Hitler, you are allowed to say "I think you're a Nazi, because of the statement you just made." If they say things that imply they're a big fan of Hitler, you're allowed to say "your statements indicate Hitler fandom for these reasons." You can even do this here while being objectively wrong, so long as you appear to be actually trying to make an effortful argument backed with evidence. Yes, this means that pretty much anyone can, with sufficient effort and hedging, call pretty much anyone else here a Nazi. The solution to this is to give consideration to those who argue well, stunt on the ones who argue poorly, and to ban those who don't bother to argue at all.

And sure, this applies to accusing people of wanting Red Army soldiers to gangrape German women too. But you have to actually make an argument, show your work and bring evidence. A bare accusation doesn't cut it.

I have to concur with Steve here; Upsidedownmotter is clearly just as uncharitable. Noting the Weimars republic obvious failures does not make you a Kaiserlicher, noting post-apartheid SAs failures does not "rehabilitate" apartheid SAs, and the insinuation has been a reliable tactic to shut critics up.

No, the post above is not as uncharitable. @upsidedownmotter is drawing a comparison between a post written here and arguments elsewhere, and provided a link to the argument in question. You are free to disagree with that comparison, and you can think their argument is wrong, and you can make an argument in reply, but "the argument above seems similar to this other argument I've seen elsewhere" is comfortably within the rules, and "I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too" is very far outside them when the person being responded to has not mentioned anything about soldiers, rape, or German women.

Gonna do anything about the goading, post-deleting obvious troll he's replying to? Or does the affirmative action policy cover that behavior

People are allowed to draw unpleasant comparisons between arguments made here and arguments made elsewhere. Even if you or I think those comparisons are obviously wrong, we do not mod people for being obviously wrong because being obviously wrong is not against the rules. "paraphrasing uncharitably", "straw-manning", and generally putting extremely repugnant words in other peoples' mouths is very explicitly against the rules.

They've already been warned about deleting top-level posts, their excuses were rejected, and if they continue to do it they will be banned.

No part of this interaction involves anything resembling "affirmative action."

He's been warned to stop deleting posts or he'll be banned.

And you've been warned to stop goading mods and making things up. The last few times we've let pass, but the ankle-biting will stop. Now.

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the ankle-biting will stop. Now.

Clamping down on blunt feedback to the mods is a pretty serious change in norms around here, and a very negative development -- you should stop.

Here are the last couple directed at me. I even think he was directionally correct on the latter! Do you think it was helpful?

Amadan might be thinking of non-mod examples.

Probably not helpful per se, but I'm thinking of the oldish days in which mods were expected to put up with blunt-to-the-point-of-against-the-rules commentary on their decisions as part and parcel of the awesome power they wield. I'd probably need to go pretty far back on the reddit sub to find examples, and don't really know where the norm came from (LessWrong?) but it struck me as a pretty good norm. As with the "free-speech vs hate-speech" issue, "criticizing the mods is only allowed if you aren't a PITA about it" is not really a stable equilibrium.

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There's a difference between blunt feedback and ankle biting. If you want to question or criticize a mod decision that is of course allowed, but posting things like "What" or whining that we don't ban leftists and claiming we practice "affirmative action" is something Steve does constantly and has been told to stop. Just as we almost never mod people for reports, even people who constantly write spurious reports, but we had to tell him to stop writing reports calling people subhuman and talking about how leftists deserve to die. If you make it your goal to abuse the system and annoy us, yes, we're going to tell you to stop.

I guess I'll try to provide blunt feedback then. I apologize in advance for bringing in unrelated posts.

My entirely subjective opinion: In the span of a week, this thread is the second instance of very obvious bait going completely unnoticed without so much as a warning, even as a powermod explicitly shows up and participates in the discussion (without the modhat, given, but as the ban policy of the Motte is still the main topic in both cases I believe it counts as "speaking officially").

The first instance I believe has been given, frankly, a lot of leeway for a top level post that came out swinging with a thinly-veiled implicit accusation and hasn't (again, in my opinion) significantly improved the mode of communication or strength of argument in the following replies.

More bluntly, I find the (rather visible) pity/condescension towards leftist unpopular points of view distasteful for a powermod, especially given the place's supposed focus on robust argumentation - at risk of being antagonistic, I would definitely not call that poster's median post "doing a good job of representing a point of view that is rare here" unless that was a polite euphemism. As I understand you're trying to keep it balanced as all things should be or something, but this is exactly how you get the affirmative action accusations.

The second instance here is, well... I won't deny that @jeroboam's post is against the rules, but considering that he was rather obviously baited in a much less subtle way (really, argumentum ad Hitlerum in current_year?), I think a "proper" modhat warning would've more than sufficed, especially seeing as the bait itself remains unnoticed.

Notably, both posts were downvoted to hell - I hesitate to point this out, seeing as nobody likes getting dogpiled and updoot total isn't a very reliable metric (certainly a very gameable one), plus as you note downthread we're not a democracy so by itself this means jack shit. Still, it might serve as a very rough approximation of community reception when/if you ponder if it really is the children who are wrong.

FWIW I'm on record as a simp or the moderation here and haven't really felt any disconnect until now, but this is probably the first time I distinctly nootice a real lapse in vigilance, and especially disagree with your convenient blunt-feedback/ankle-biting distinction. The two are one and the same, cavalier dismissal of [thing you don't like] is not the way, and I sympathize with having to expend effort to separate wheat from the chaff every time you get more [things you don't like], but such is the way of the janitor.

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You like to blame things on other people, but your entire recent posting history is telling everyone they're wrong in their criticism of your moderation. And I know you take pride in being broadly disliked because you think it means you're pissing off everyone evenly, but how can you look at the responses and see them as demonstrating community support for your tactics?

I don't expect this will get through to you. It'll just be another round of blaming everyone else.

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Maybe they do deserve it? Democracy means getting what you voted for and what SA is voting for is national suicide.

It certainly shows the limits of democracy and the danger of letting your ethnicity become a minority within one

The right-wing rehabilitation of South Africa bears a resemblance to the rehabilitation of Hitler among some on the right.

I mean its the same need that drives communists to insist the modern CCP is definitely a legitimate extension of the socialist project. People who believe in failed ideologies need something to cling to.

Is it failed? Is SA better off today as opposed to in 1990? Is Europe better off today (or in 2021) compared to 2000?

Most modern western communists hate the CCP for selling out. If they sympathize with China it’s, as with their Russian sympathies, because of anti-western “anti-imperialist” politics more than anything else.

Actual full support for the modern CCP is limited to a subset of Marxist-Leninists, including actual Maoists.

Look around the falling European Union that’s rapidly islamifying and witnessing a rapid decline in quality of life. I mean, rape gangs are kind of a red pill on the whole thing.

The right simply has to point out that liberalism is brining about a decline in health, safety, freedom, and standards of living. Everywhere. Liberals have to keep coming up with excuses as to why it keeps happening.

So far, in many countries, Liberals can also still simply point out that Liberalism is the law, and you're stepping outside of it by suggesting that Islam, Immigration or Social Progress (TM) is a problem.

Making criticism of liberalism illegal: How liberal is that? Which state first made “hate speech” a crime again?

In much of Europe, the police are more keen to arrest people who criticize Refugees especially Islamic ones, and speak against trans no matter the context. In liberal countries where there’s more protection for free speech, the punishment mostly comes down to being black listed and fired.

I feel like this image sums up European policing pretty well

/images/17414671084180462.webp

I understand neither the preceding comment, nor this one apparently agreeing with it. Thirty years ago wrongthinkers all knew that South Africa was a generation or two away from becoming Just Another African Shithole, and they've been very visibly proven correct on that point.

Where's the need for rehabilitation? Where even is the substantial disagreement? Is anyone out there still hopeful for the future of the Rainbow Nation? I was under the impression that we had long since reached the point where the forces of goodness and tolerance mumble some excuses and look away.

Many of those same wrongthinkers also had very low IQ estimates for places like Malaysia (and, a couple of decades earlier, even China) that genuinely have seen huge economic development and increases in population prosperity since then, though.

There were Asian examples of successful societies at the time, though(at least Japan and probably also Singapore depending on the exact era). Where is the example of a successful black society? AFAIK they all have non-black minorities which perform critical roles in making their society successful.

(and, a couple of decades earlier, even China)

source?

Many of those same wrongthinkers also had very low IQ estimates for places like Malaysia (and, a couple of decades earlier, even China) that genuinely have seen huge economic development and increases in population prosperity since then, though.

Okay, but so what? Is some of that incorrectness going to rub off on South Africa and reverse its inevitable decline into shitholery? All this tells me is that it's possible to refute the wrongthinkers, but some groups just don't seem capable of doing so.

What are these very low IQ estimates?

I thought the early estimates were something like 85 and we've now moved to something like 88-90, which is on par for estimates of Sicilians and some 10 points ahead of India. That does not seem like a massive change, nor constitute an estimate of 'very low IQ'.

I was under the impression that we had long since reached the point where the forces of goodness and tolerance mumble some excuses and look away.

It's probably like HBD that way. The intellectual elite knows its true even if they'll never admit it. But normies are 20 years behind. Know any liberal boomers? Ask them what they think about South Africa. Now keep in mind that America is mostly still run by liberal boomers.

After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population.

Hey, all these people were saying the US was following in the footsteps of Brazil and South Africa, but I never believed it until now:

In the fifth chapter of the book, titled "HIV Heresies," Kennedy writes several times that he is neutral on the whether HIV causes AIDS. "From the outset I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS," he says at the beginning of the chapter. Later on, though, Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS" and there are numerous mentions throughout the chapter of HIV infection not being the sole cause of AIDS.

Despite assertions that he is not taking sides, Kennedy spends much of the chapter on HIV presenting arguments made by Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and perhaps the most influential HIV "denier." Duesberg has argued that HIV does not cause AIDS but is a "free rider" common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures.

In "The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy sums up Duesberg’s theory as follows:

“Duesberg and many who have followed him offered evidence that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers. They argued that the initial signs of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrate—poppers—a popular drug among promiscuous gays.”

Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS

°

Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS"

Even the obviously hostile second hand source written to gin up fear about lenacapavir possibly maybe potentially being banned by Kennedy you found for your smear by association admits that Kennedy believes HIV is a cause of AIDS.

Kennedy is doing the same skeptic thing he's been doing for years, on a variety of topics. I'm sorry to say this, but I don't think he is ever going to learn that skepticism is evil and dangerous and bad and killing people. He's too much of a monster, I mean he literally growls instead of speaking.

To me it is interesting why Kennedy while believing the scientific evidence, delves so much into speculations that are known to be without strong evidence?

In a way, it could be healthy skepticism. We can benefit by examining our beliefs once in a while. Science changes, new evidence appears and sometimes people forget to update. But it doesn't seem what is happening here.

Maybe it is just that his tribal consciousness has become stronger with age that now it supersedes his rational thinking.

Most people are very tribal. They don't think deeply and just repeat what their tribe leaders tell them. Only a rare person is looking for truth. That is a hard work and requires to be in constant defiance towards the rest of the society who is very tribal. At the end you get tired and decide to live like everybody else, have an easier life and even make some profit.

The US is in practically no danger of a HIV running rampant, though, so it's kind of irrelevant. Yes, we'll lose some sodomites and drug addicts. We have people demanding fentanyl be allowed to run rampant for the same purpose on this very forum.

I think that HIV is rather irrelevant in the US because most people, including drug addicts have correct beliefs about it. They will try to use clean needles when injecting to avoid getting infected and so on.

I just look at this from public health point of view – if beliefs are causing people to make wrong health choices, then how can we change those beliefs?

Atul Gawande writes in detail how polio vaccination programs worked in India. The organizers knew that some people have beliefs that polio vaccine is causing disease or making people infertile etc. They also knew that shaming people or forcing vaccine doesn't work. If someone refuses, calmly explain why vaccine is beneficial and move on. In one episode the supervisor who otherwise was calm about all problems, got angry to vaccinator who berated a mother for refusing to vaccinate her child. He said, “she was listening to you before but now she will not listen at all”.

This approach was slow but successful, polio was eradicated in India. One has to be very stoic by allowing people to make wrong choices and then empathising with them when bad things happen without the slightest reproach.

Somehow we forgot all this and during covid acted very irresponsibly by forcing people to get vaccinated, by shaming them officially etc. Child vaccination rates predictably are going to fall and it will be hard work to improve them again.

With HIV beliefs in Africa, it's probably because we don't have vaccine against HIV so they never had contacts with field workers like that. Those people with HIV in Africa who happen to be involved in programs that provide treatment, quickly understand how all this work. But there is no a systemic reach like going from home to home to vaccinate or treat everyone.

The leaders could do that but they are tribal leaders. They have no capabilities to think or act rationally. It requires deep political scheming to entice them to implement such programs. The WHO is often accused to be working for China and other dictators but I don't see a way how they could not be. Otherwise those dictators are not going to listen to them.

This isn’t germane to the discussion. If you don’t like RFK Jr fine. We aren’t discussing RFK Jr but feel free to take potshots at your local political opposition.

Can someone explain to me why it's a matter of controversy that HIV causes AIDS?

IIRC, many people dramatically worsened after taking the earlier, largely ineffective treatments for HIV such as AZT.

Even if AZT created marginally longer life spans, it had severe side effects that took place immediately, so people might reason that it was actually AZT that was killing them. And, in some cases, it was AZT that was actually killing them. It's possible, though perhaps not likely, that it killed more people than it saved.

There's a lot more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis

It's not totally out of left field, and it's not unreasonable for a person to have considered this in the 1980s.

Of course, this is totally different than Thabo Mbeki, who had a totally different belief system that made no sense, lived in the era of effective HIV treatments, and who presided over a country where 25% of adults were infected with HIV.

The comparisons that the original poster made between RFK and Mbeki seem motivated more by Current Thing than by an actual analysis of the AIDS epidemic or South Africa. It's a bit disappointing.

IIRC, many people dramatically worsened after taking the earlier, largely ineffective treatments for HIV such as AZT.

There's a lot more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis

I don't understand why this isn't out of left field. The article seems to list about four different hypotheses (it's AZT, no it's poppers, no it's opioids, no it's sodomy), and most everything (except I guess AZT) was a thing before the AIDS epidemic. Given that AZT is a treatment for AIDS and nobody gets AZT without having AIDS, it doesn't pass the sniff test that the causality actually runs the other way.

Of course, this is totally different than Thabo Mbeki, who had a totally different belief system that made no sense, lived in the era of effective HIV treatments, and who presided over a country where 25% of adults were infected with HIV.

The comparisons that the original poster made between RFK and Mbeki seem motivated more by Current Thing than by an actual analysis of the AIDS epidemic or South Africa. It's a bit disappointing.

What is so disappointing about it? RFK also lives in the era of effective HIV treatments, so you can't let him off because AZT is not good. He was writing those things in 2021. Surely we're way past the "not unreasonable to consider this" time window you describe.

In any case I encourage you to discuss with the poster directly rather than taking potshots in a grandchild comment.

I suspect because people can be HIV positive for years even untreated and not show symptoms of AIDS. Most people are used to things like colds where exposure leads to symptoms in less than a week. So a germ that causes a disesase years out leads to people doubting that that is the true cause.

I’m going to add another comment to reflect on something. One of the biggest blackpills shall we say is that even in South Africa among the white population there, you will be find die-hard progress “woke” types. Which impressed upon me that there are a large fraction of people for whom no amount of readily observable evidence will ever be enough to quash universalist-egalitarian-Marxist type thinking.

There’s also that case of Amy Biehl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Biehl

Quite disturbing situation. They sided with their daughters killers, granting amnesty and even employing them after to work on South African poverty. Basically the biological devotion of cuckoo bird parasitism in human form. I wonder how the Biehls feel about how their efforts were entirely wasted, given the current situation? Probably they live in a state of denial, as that’s how they lived their life it seems

I wonder how much of this out group bias is genetic?

I think it’s mostly environmental. Look at the huge amounts of energy and money invested in socializing youth into these ideas

I have some English relatives in Johannesburg who are very much in favor of Killing The Boer. There's a definite racial hatred element born out of the English conquest and Boer resistance.

My vague understanding is that the English supported the overthrow of the government on the assumption that they would profit by remaining the wealthy managerial caste of South Africa. Of course, you'd need to read a history book by some awful racist for that sort of thing to get mentioned without reading between the lines.

I understand there'd be some friction between English and Boer, but you'd think that by 1965-ish and on, both whites and blacks in South Africa would draw much less of a distinction between the two.

This is the fundamental problem with white identity politics. Different tribes of whites don't necessarily trust each other more than any given tribe of nonwhites. And it's hard to see why race should be the dividing line above all else.

There is still a lot of resentment, you can’t understand South Africa without understanding it.

During the Second Boer War, the British invented the concept of the concentration camp and rounded up a sixth of the Boer population (including women and children) into conditions of disease and famine.

One may as well ask why Palestinians and Israelis are killing each other despite being so ethnically similar.

or Paddies and Orangemen.

I have a vague understanding that the English supported the overthrow of the government on the assumption that they would profit by remaining the wealthy managerial caste of South Africa.

I mean they weren’t wrong. Whites are even wealthier than ever. But i guess they didn’t foresee the rapid crumbling of all basic infrastructure

Whites are even wealthier than ever.

Have any numbers on that?

Admittedly this was something I recall reading but based on a cursory google search, it looks like I was wrong at least when it comes to income. Not sure about wealth I can’t find any numbers on that

/images/17414784825724988.webp

Are those [racial group] in [percentile] or [percentile] among [racial group]?

I think the former but not sure

To add color to this analysis, Peter Thiel and David Sacks also grew up in South Africa, but significantly less time in their childhood compared to Musk. Nevertheless, the adults that raised them probably imparted their own opinions, world views, and aspirations to these future billionaires.

To add color

Heh.

Apparently it’s common for people in SA to have a prison style cell door to their sleeping quarters in case of home invasion. I can’t imagine the effect on the psyche that it must have to lock yourself into your bed every night, knowing your surrounded by people who want you to painfully die.

I’m surprised we still haven’t invented tech that makes home invasion impossible. Like, how do we not have auto-turrets that can shoot intruders? Or various other traps that can maim or disable? Or is it just the cruel government once again making this impossible and the tech already exists?

Hard to imagine never being able to leave your window open at night.

A situation like that wouldn't have unguarded windows. They'd be tiny or have ghetto bars.

A lot of places in SA were built decades before the security situation got this bad, so you get a lot of "standard suburban house surrounded by razor wire and spike walls"

Definitely ghettobars on everything though

/images/17415594020163004.webp

Talk security theater. A blanket defeats that sort of razor fencing. But I suppose they have motion sensors, cameras and a neighborhood armed security team.

Fences aren't meant to stop people, they're meant to mark "the gate people who belong there walk through" and "the barrier people get shot for climbing over with blankets".

All of my security is behind an initial screening layer that wouldn't stop anyone, but anyone who does come through it sets off alarms rather than "someone coming down driveway" notifications.

The windows can be left open but they must be barred I imagine

At least in the US, the courts have sadly made booby traps illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney

I agree with the court on this one, there specific language was that using deadly force to defend a vacant property is unreasonable, which seems like the correct judgement to me.

I heard about this. There are plausible ways to make booby traps that are disguised as something else I’m sure though

The wealthy in urban and suburban areas already do live in compounds with armed private security on automatic call (and not mall cops, we're talking neighborhood swat teams). That's a better solution than booby traps as long as you can rely on the security force.

There's a lot South Africans on off-grid solar forums, because they need full coverage camera setups to stay powered when the grid's out (or attackers cut it). Often hundreds of watts of IP cams wired to PoE injectors and a PC running blue iris.
I've said before that cameras are the most important thing after a gun and a basic fence. If you don't have advance notice you're dead.

The south african private security industry is larger than the military and police force combined, if I remember correctly.

Its not really better than booby traps for security. Its better than getting drug out of your house by the cops then raped for eternity in prison because your booby traps were successful.

In other words, such things are illegal.

I really don't think it is. Booby traps, steel doors, fences, land mines, etc. are just delaying tools. Unless they're covered by fire they're hardly an obstacle at all.
If your booby traps are diy you get your head blown off because of a bad Linux update on the PC running KillDriver1.07.5(final)b(7).bin.
If your booby traps are standard models the robbers know the auto-turret only tracks 23.5 degrees vertical so there's a blind spot between your roof and the tree by your perimeter wall etc. etc. These guys are already using Ali-express broad-spectrum jammers to take out non-hardwired security systems, they're not just drunken nogs with rocks.

You need 4 things in a security system: identify, delay, fix, eliminate. Booby traps only do the 2nd or 4th of those.
If your front door land mine goes off, how do you know it got all of them? What do you do now? Even if you're sure the bird bath zyklon sprayers got the stragglers, you still need a team to sweep and confirm.

With a response team attackers know they could be surrounded and counter-attacked at any second. They're not advancing slowly and carefully against a passive system, taking 10 to disarm traps. They're in a race against time to get something done before they lose the initiative.

Drones are an alternate active response that people should be looking into. Tethered drone with a grenade is going to be the cheapest flexible response tool available.

You act like criminals are Seal team 6 going after Bin Laden. In reality they are low intelligence cowards looking for easy opportunities to make a quick score. They dont have the time or patience to think about a 23.5 degree vertical. If one of them steps on a bear trap going up to your front door they don't redouble their efforts and look all around for bear traps, they run away like scared dogs. Even better, if your bear trap wakes you up, now you are the sniper.

A security system against these sorts of people doesnt need "identify, delay, fix, eliminate" it needs "scare, delay, notify". If a drop trap breaks one guy's leg, activates a bedside alarm that wakes you up, and gives you a minute to actually wake up, it has more than done the job.

Robbers aren’t that brave. If they think there’s a solid chance one of them dies in any given invasion, they simply won’t do it.

Booby traps used to be very common in South Africa. Now they're pretty strictly outlawed (by SA standards of law enforcement) after enough cases of guys getting into their car, forgetting to press the right button, and decapitating themselves with their own shotgun trap.

My favorite South African security quirk was that some tricked out sports cars have an undercarriage mounted flame-thrower to deter carjackers. It’s like something out of Mad Max film.

It's essentially the 1994 video game Quarantine, if anyone remembers that.

That game had so much character it's mysterious to me why it never got a remake.

As Ross Scott's video about it suggests, it's quite tedious, not to mention glitchy.

Any prominent cases make it in the news?

Those automatic paintball turrets you can find on YouTube aren't inherently limited to using paintball guns, and the software used to identify friend/foe has been production-ready for a long time.

The tech exists. (Semi-)automatically killing/maming people really isn't that hard. It's different levels of illegal, depending on locality, but the real problem is false positives.

Most people just don't want to live in a mine field, no matter how many fancy hightech safeties there are.

I mean facial recognition tech has been around for awhile. There’s got to be a way to capitalize on AI and other advances to make your home a fortress

Paging Nassim Taleb. We've got a naive empiricist on our hands.

I just think necessity is the mother of invention, and there are few things more necessary than security

Most people are more likely to be smoked by their booby traps than to have them successfully repel a home invasion.

Sure, but there's always false positives, the only question is how low the rate is.

And your kids are going to live with you for 18 years, so you need quite a lot of 0s to make reasonably sure the turret isn't going to blow their heads off by accident.

It's a difficult problem. Maybe one brings over a friend. Maybe they wear silly monster masks.

Probably more than 18 years- in ultra-security-conscious environments being around friendly military age males is a high priority.

I am not trusting AI to recognize my face 100% of the time.

Why not have separate countries? My understanding is there are some (or we’re) largely white areas of SA. Why not divide SA in 1994 between the white and non-white?

They're trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania

Apartheid was originally supposed to genuinely divide SA into separate countries, but the white areas wanted the cheap labour to keep flowing. The current momentum for that, such as it exists, is around Cape secession, which would create a plurality Cape Coloured state (mixed-race, Khoisan/White/Indonesian/Xhosa ancestry - also, the official term, none of the connotations of 'coloured' in the US). Generally Cape Coloureds get along with whites, vote for the white liberal party, and local governance is much better, still a fair bit of corruption but more skimming off the top than ruining everything. Huge problems with drugs (mostly methamphetamine and meth cocktails) and gangs in the Coloured community, but more as street crime rather than controlling officials. South African ethnic and political divides can't be fitted into a neat black/white divide, even if it looks that way from the outside.

It is interesting that two things seemed to have doomed SA: immigration and not having enough kids. Keep in mind the black population in SA is not ancient (in fact the Afrikaans predate most of the black population).

Seems to me there is a message for modern western nations and they are failing it.

in fact the Afrikaans predate most of the black population

Eh, that's not quite true. The bantu populations were already in South Africa, just not in the western half. I guess it is true in the sense of ethnogenesis—e.g. Zulus as Zulus, instead of a variety of Nguni tribes—but they were still around.

The bantu populations were already in South Africa, just not in the western half.

"Just"? If you paste South Africa into Europe it stretches from Estonia to the western border of Germany and Austria

Sure, I don't mean to downplay that.

Afrikaaners are probably above replacement today. What TFR do you want, 5?

For a long time the Afrikaners were quite happy with Bantu immigration (which did, to be fair, predate by some decades Dutch settlement) because it was a source of cheap labor. This is also why they didn’t all retreat to the Western Cape when they had the chance.

But this is the same argument today for letting in the 3rd world — cheap labor.

Yes, apartheid SA was not actually a based dissident right state. I bet they cooked with seed oils too.

but the white areas wanted the cheap labour to keep flowing.

Missed opportunity. They could’ve easily got cheap labour by creating work visas

But seriously: apartheid-era South Africa attempted to do pretty much exactly this. The plan was to establish separate, independent, sovereign states for blacks to live in, with blacks being allowed to enter white South Africa only temporarily as "guest workers". A fun bit of historical trivia: by the end of apartheid, the South African government had declared 4 such "black homelands" to be independent*, and had deemed some others "self-governing", with an eye towards eventual independence. As far as I know, this is one of only 2 cases of a post-WWII nation-state willingly separating from, and granting sovereignty to, a part of its territory (the other being Singapore's expulsion from Malaysia in 1965, though I suppose the Velvet Divorce could arguably count as well).

Related to the foregoing, apartheid South Africa also had a kind of internal passport system which allowed blacks to be present in urban areas only with government permission, which was generally granted only for purposes of employment by a white employer.

*a claim recognized by no other national government, nor by the UN

They wanted to establish some white enclaves at the end of apartheid, iirc, but the ANC wouldn't have any of it.

Wonder with the benefit of hindsight if they’d do it all again but resist caving to the sanctions

So basically, it's similar to what the Chinese do today, except without the eventual sovereignty part.

“We wanted workers, but we got people instead” —Max Frisch

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program” —Milton Friedman

You should visit Qatar sometime

The Khaleejis were smart, but it hasn’t been very long. If the laborers actually rebel en masse, they are powerless. (The US isn’t going to fire on tens/hundreds of thousands Indian and Pakistani laborers to preserve Gulf Arab rule, especially given the importance of the relationship with their countries of origin). They do cycle them out, invest heavily in surveillance, take precautions, but it’s not not dangerous.

The danger isn't rebellion. The danger is the softening of attitudes by the Gulf Arab elite that lead to gradually more and more rights for guest workers until it alters the demographics of the country.

Modern demographic inversions are almost always non-violent and gradual.

This is the people group that notably doesn't have an underclass of descendants of slaves, despite importing more than 2x as many slaves and the most prolific nation in the Atlantic, because they were brutal enough to sterilize them before they sold them for labor. I suspect they're culturally quite innoculated against that particular threat.

The US isn’t going to fire on tens/hundreds of thousands Indian and Pakistani laborers to preserve Gulf Arab rule,

Why bring the US into this? Qatar can just hire mercenaries that will happily shoot up these labourers, who will then instantly surrender (remember these are Indians - Britain ruled them with much worse control and military superiority for centuries)

From where and how fast? When 200,000 people storm your palaces you really don’t have a lot of time to react, and the biggest mercenary groups are strongly tied to state actors like Russia and Ukraine who won’t want to involve themselves in that kind of conflict.

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You can't have separate countries for them in SA for the same reason Reds and Blues can't cleanly separate in the US- very Blue areas in the US are extremely strategically dependent on the Red areas.

That's a core part of Blue political anxiety (and female anxiety in general, for that matter)- at any moment, the Reds could just say "no, fuck you", start demolishing the power lines, shut the gas off, and ruin the water supply. By the time the Blues can raise a city militia to stop this their ability to pose a threat to the Reds will have been destroyed- cities don't produce their own food, water, or power.

Hence, apartheid- Blues need to make sure Reds are so poor and so uneducated that unless a foreign country was donating materiel strictly for ideological reasons they'd have nothing to sell. It helps if you're a resource economy because being labor and being able to direct labor are two very different skillsets (again, standard "rules for rulers" stuff- just a lot more distributed amongst the population of Blue white South Africa).

Where are the natural resources buried? Blues know, but not Reds.
How do you extract those resources? Blues know, but not Reds.
Can you trade for foreign war materiel? Blues can, but not Reds. (Hence the foreign embargo on Blues.)

The reds would probably win a civil war(at, to be clear, absolutely ruinous human cost). But the source of Blue anxiety is not a civil war scenario; it's the red political victories which they suppose will lead to an authoritarian regime because they can't pass an ideological turing test.

Blues need to make sure Reds are so poor and so uneducated

The standard theory is that as Reds get rich and educated, they overwhelmingly turn Blue all by themselves. It's not like this is unique to the US, either - the educated are high-openness globalists just about everywhere. How do you figure this would be the result of a deliberate Blue ploy, like "make sure" seems to suggest?

Because we can see with our eyes how educated nationalists and other red sympathetic counter-elites are persecuted.

"We would be honored if you would join us" is a good and necessary strategy to prevent rivals from popping up, but it's always second to a control mechanism to prevent people that refuse from attaining any dangerous level of power.

In fact politics can be understood today as that mechanism of integration breaking down (because of the higher need for control due to acceleration of change) and techno-capitalist elites figuring out they can get a better deal out of the nationalists than the globalists and thus coalescing as a red sympathetic counter elite despite being more naturally aligned with globalism historically.

Here's a map from 2011.

There are no large contiguous area with a white majority, although perhaps in 1994 it would have been different.

Really 1948. It was the Apartheid government that facilitated mass movement of people between black and white areas of SA, because they believed they could keep blacks on the pass system forever.

The pass system?

Blacks moving outside of their ethnic homelands were obliged to carry a dompas(internal passport) in order to work in white areas.

Huge self own.

Semi related... the Cape area was largely uninhabited when the Dutch showed up, with just a few thousand hunter gatherers and pastoralists spread out over a huge area. (For a fun project, see how much badgering it takes Claude or ChatGPT to admit that). At the time, the entire population of the South Africa was only about 200,000 people.

Would you subscribe to the implied general principle, though? If a few million Africans snuck into one of the more deserted parts of Wyoming and built a thriving colony there, do you recognise their claim to sovereignty?

Yeah, I think people who have lived on a land since 1652 have some rights. If some Africans snuck into Wyoming and lived there for 370 years, I think I'd feel pretty strongly they have a right to be there.

Turnabout...

Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?

In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even.

The Bantus were in Eastern South Africa (the bit where most of the modern population live) in 500 AD, the first Boers arrived in the 1650s. They were there for a good thousand years before the Dutch turned up. The Khoisan (or rather, their partial descendents the Coloreds) are still there in the West.

Yes. Thank you for the clarification. The Dutch beat the Bantus to the Cape but there was a small Bantu population in other parts of South Africa before they arrived.

Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?

No, I think I stand by the rules I outlined here - the Bushmen have no claim against the Bantu except where their lands were directly taken by the latter. That being said, I think a lot of people instinctively subscribe to some sort of notion where sovereignty can be passed more easily the more similar conquerors and conquered are, so for example intra-European border shifts are accepted in ways in which Ottoman conquests in Europe were not.

Ready to have your mind blown?

Bantus and whites are more closely related than Bantus and Khoisan!

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The Cape was first settled by Europeans in the early middle of the (still ongoing) wave of Bantu migration to Southern Africa, sure.

Do you have any good sources for this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion

The population that was actually native to the cape region were the Khoisans

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