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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Have we had a discussion on South Africa yet?

Recently, Andre de Ruyter, the now-ex CEO of the state owned power provider ESKOM, did an interview that basically said the corruption and everything was so bad that he and ESKOM cannot do their jobs properly. He himself was a target of assassination (cyanide pill in his coffee or something?), and after the interview has been removed from his post (he put in his resignation before the interview). He has since left the country.

There are many reports that the grid can totally collapse soon, despite the "load shedding" that they have been doing. Apparently this may lead to civil war?

Unemployment is apparently 35%, clean water access and supply is apparently unstable. Crime is apparently extremely high. If you go on /r/southAfrica, there are frequent discussions of home invasion and other crimes (70 carjackings a day, 2500 home invasions a day...). One post I saw last week was a question asking "Dogs been poisoned, both dead. Typically how many days before robbery hit?"

See this recent thread for more issues: https://twitter.com/k9_reaper/status/1630436052723720193

Some blame this all on the ruling ANC party, on their policies like BBBEE (from a few years ago: https://www.revolver.news/2021/07/south-africa-riots-looting-critical-race-theory/).

In general, SA's situation is not looking good...

Many people are getting killed in a war, many people are getting killed in a failing African state, both rates are massively contingent on factors that have little to do with severity of relative dysfunction... Comparisons with Ukraine are frustrating because they miss the truly expository part.

Starting on 10th of October 2022 (afaik), Russia has begun a campaign of missile and drone attacks on objects of Ukrainian power grid, from thermal power plants to high-power transformers, forcing local authorities to initiate rationing: industrial entities and the general public were told to limit their consumption. On 11th Oct, Ukraine (normally benefitting from Soviet-era nuclear power plants) has ceased exporting power to EU. Entire regions engaged in what Africans call «load shedding»; phased blackouts were also practiced.

This kept going on for months, with a salvo roughly once a week, as winter was setting in; and sarcastic mockery of Russian efforts gave way to rage, then to dread. In late November, the westernmost Lviv couldn't keep traffic lights and even air raid alarms on – forget amenities like water and heating and public transportation. I've seen irritated Ukrainians lash out at each other in bursts of internet activity, because they felt actual terror in their freezing, disconnected homes, or because a local civil servant has lights in his windows. At some point, virtually all of Kiev turned dark and cold, with non-functioning sewers and most of other infrastructure. You have to understand: Kiev is not some poor bumfuck nowhere from a Borat sketch, it's not even Chișinău – it's «the mother of Russian cities», a beautiful, three-million-strong, properly European, modern megapolis with fifteen centuries of history and Teslas on streets. Not only did Russia push the entire country onto the cusp of indeed being a premodern shithole, but this strategy had exhausted the pool of spare transformer parts across Europe. All this was on top of near-obliterated economy the remains of which serve the war machine, many cities leveled by artillery fire, millions of internal refugees, significant territories (with the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe among other things) occupied, and a range of other maladies.

Everyone who could, procured diesel generators – but you can't really cover a lot with diesels when a country between the size of Texas and France (or exactly like France, if we subtract the the occupied portion) loses its reliable centralized grid virtually overnight (Soviet utilities are actually quite solid so people feel safe to not prepare for them failing); and besides, Russia went after fuel depots as well; and many generators were dedicated to army needs. I did not follow it at all intently, so I am not sure if there are all that many Ukrainians who didn't have to deal with power cuts for at least a few hours almost every day for months – pessimistically for 15+ hours a day; at least no such people are known to me. A friend of mine went through building UPS units from LiFePO4 or lead-based car batteries, with my minor input; others were fiddling with candles and such; it was a whole thing, you know.

Enough – I've probably made a few mistakes already. My point is this: Ukrainian power grid was chosen as a target of priority by a belligerent wannabe superpower (such as there is), and to a large extent taken out of commission. They have fixed it by now, whereas Russia has apparently exhausted its drone and missile supply. They aren't cold, they do not have rolling blackouts and load shedding, I gather there still exist state requests to limit consumption, but – it's basically back to business as usual.

Infrastructure-wise, what is happening to South Africa as a result of its post-Apartheid politics is what Russia had failed to do to Ukraine via a full-scale war. Induced collapse of a complex society, its shattering into pockets of desperation and day-to-day survival. The country is being destroyed and reduced to the state of terminal barbarism. And unlike the case of the war, nobody will be called an Orc or held accountable here. «There is a great deal of ruin in a nation». Oh well. Shit happens.

Come on. That description of Kiev is clearly over the top.

Has your friend posted anything about his battery setup? Building one now, can always use more info about things that did or didn't work. Especially grid and generator charging.

I think you'll find it easy to design a better scheme without constraints of the Ukrainian situation. The most interesting component he ended up using was probably this but he's a bit too busy with AFU-related stuff to report on details now.

Thanks, that sounds like he was working on a serious power system: enough to keep a Heroes 3 PC running 24/7.

Is the SA grid running on Diesel generators for a significant fraction still?

Well, it is now.

Used to have the world's cheapest and one of the most reliable grids due to thermal power plants built right next to big coal fields.

i know little on the condition of south africa. some users who responded to this comment describe further degradation or collapse of the grid as less impactful than i would think, certainly than it would be if the grid collapsed in north america. could anyone shed light on this?

is south africa's grid already so disfunctional total failure wouldn't be much different? are fears of grid collapse overblown? i read in that thread mentions of "loadshedding" where people have power off for chunks of the day. has this always been a thing in south africa?

i'm an often swift critic of the more banal sorts of "everything sucks and it's getting worse" claims but a country restricting power usage for several hours each day is surely declining, and a country with a collapsed grid is surely a failed state.

what might i be improperly assuming or overlooking? poor infrastructure and no infrastructure seem a chasm apart.

We have had consistent load shedding since about November 2022, and its quite clear it has escalated like this due to politics rather than degradation (which has been slow but steady but not as sudden as this). Up until now, you will have two or three weeks of it followed by a two or three month reprieve. It is really having an impact now, and full grid collapse will definitely be too much for us to handle. I and ny family have still been okay, we use gas for cooking and have batteries for routers etc and usually its just a 2 hour tech free gap. When you start losing 8 hours plus a day, it gets difficult. But all our business and lifestyle relies on the fact that it will be coming back on. If i cant work at home, i go to a restaurant or the office, which mostly come with diesel generators in the basement. If one area is offline, you can always move to another nearby, and everything still functions. We hold it together. But if that power never comes back on, it all goes

So how did Afrikaners - themselves subjects of the British crown then, I presume - get to enact limits on immigration from Britain to what is now South Africa? I find that odd.

Fair enough. But I don't think this is sufficient evidence to argue that "It was Afrikaners who campaigned vigorously against white settlement by non-Boers and who therefore ensured South Africa’s present-day demographics".

They also resisted immigration from elsewhere in Europe more staunchly than almost any other Western country.

Even from the Netherlands and Germany?

Your presumption is the problem. Afrikaners were not British. There are two distinct peoples of pallor in South Africa and they even went to war against each other a couple of times inadvertently leading to the creation of the Boy Scouts.

I know the weren't British. But I presume they were under British rule, despite their armed attempts to not be so.

I assume, pre-20th Century, that the solution was armed conflict. Granted, that was before SA became part of the Empire.

Delusional Afrikaners who think that South Africa’s apparently inevitable collapse into total anarchy will finally allow them to carve off their own country sit alongside the EFF gang, the ANC’s most corrupt, shady Indian businessmen and bourgeois white progressive DA supporters as some of the most pathetic and amusing characters in a very colorful country.

...what the hell do you think it's going to happen once economic conditions worsen even more ? Do you think there's going to be less anarchy and more security when people are closer to starvation ?

Things have been mostly decaying since the Apartheid gov't fell. Government is now saying it has "no duty" to ensure reliable power.

Afrikaners mostly have a plan that involves evacuating to Cape Province, and declaring independence there together with the locals. There's already 60% support. (in Cape, for Cape independence)

It's the only part of SA that kind of works because it's only 20% black, has the most whites iirc and coloreds in SA are less bad at governance than blacks.

...what the hell do you think it's going to happen once economic conditions worsen even more ? Do you think there's going to be less anarchy and more security when people are closer to starvation ?

As the saying goes, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation". They can keep getting worse and worse for a very long time without anything you'd call "collapse".

It's been 30 years.

The police already doesn't work. The army's mostly HIV positive.

There's more armed private security than there is police and army taken together.

time without anything you'd call "collapse".

Define collapse. Seat of government taken over by mobs ?

It's been 30 years.

The Soviet Union took longer than that.

Define collapse. Seat of government taken over by mobs ?

Civil war. Effective partition with multiple competing governments owing no fealty to the official one. Inability of the government to collect sufficient taxes to support itself.

Actually it was 25 years. The decline of the Soviet Union started with Brezhnev - Khruschev had the revolutionary idea for communist that economic of a country and some form of free enterprise and free culture are important.

If his reforms were allowed to continue who knows how much different the world would have been today

Actually it was 25 years. The decline of the Soviet Union started with Brezhnev - Khruschev had the revolutionary idea for communist that economic of a country and some form of free enterprise and free culture are important.

If his reforms were allowed to continue who knows how much different the world would have been today

Big K had indeed many revolutionary ideas, all of them stupid.

Starting with denouncing his precedessor who was for thirty year worshipped as living god, undermining whole party and state legitimacy just to win some stupid personal power struggle.

The most hardcore tankies are 100% right about him.

Chinese did it better, they kept big M in the mausoleum, kept his statues and portraits everywhere while doing 180 degrees turn from his policy.

Otherwise, none of his reform had anything with "free enterprise" and "free culture."

Not hunt for abstract art, not renewal of religious persecution, not abolition of machine tractor stations, not destruction of workers cooperatives, not destruction of peasant's private plots, not the maximally demented corn idea.

Set aside this thing, equivalent of waving BB gun at heavily armed and armored cops and saying "Boo, pigs!"

May he be reborn thousand of thousands times as pig on factory farm.

...what the hell do you think it's going to happen once economic conditions worsen even more ?

Nothing. I think nothing will happen.

The frog will boil a little more, but as long as the crime rate keeps creeping up 1% per month instead of 5000% per day, people will just... get robbed more. As long as the electrical brownouts keep extending 1% per month instead of 5000% per day, people will just... adapt to doing their cooking in advance rather than on demand.

When I was in South Africa I noticed a lot of private security stickers on people's houses and plenty of people had generators to make up for the power outages. I'm not sure how affordable either of these are for the average middle class South African, but with access to those things you are somewhat more sheltered from the decline. For people who can afford these things the streets will get less safe and doing business will become more of a hassle, but you can still pick where you travel and where you do your shopping.

So you think a state can completely fail, and a country with a very heterogenous ethnic composition but that's about 70% black, at least will still somehow keep being peaceful and won't devolve into conditions resembling a civil war?

What kind of civil war? Wars involving organized armies with "front lines" and uniformed combatants who follow the orders of politically-oriented hierarchies, and engage in organized "battles" are actually quite rare - particularly so in Africa. Do I think there will be a lot of tribal raiding? That people will cluster together in defensible mottes and skirmish in the bailey that is the rest of the country? Sure. But in order for the bailey to be worth anything, it can't be so bad there that no-one can farm it. Certain minimal levels of productivity will be allowed to remain, because if anyone looks like they might be behaving so badly that the bailey will be ruined, everyone else will gang up on them as hostis humani generis. And because the "legitimate" governmental structures are part of that bailey (e.g. trade, SEOs, access to international credit and markets, intergovernmental aid and relations, etc.), they'll be fought-over too in lieu of groups officially splitting off or declaring a new state or anything like that.

But in order for the bailey to be worth anything, it can't be so bad there that no-one can farm it.

..you know, I think you're overestimating the rationality of people in general.

If you're going to lose access to something because of a defeat, burning it to deny it to the enemy is something most ethnics are ready to do.

If tragedy of the commons happens in peaceful conditions, do you think it is less likely to happen in conditions of endemic ethnic strife ?

The tragedy of the commons is about the slow devouring of a resource no-one wants to sacrifice to upkeep. Im not aware of anywhere in the fact pattern that anyone maliciously destroys the common so others can't have it.

You know these things to.

"Gradually, then suddenly."

Given that whites are the wealthiest major group, and knowing the well established scapegoating mechanism, do you think it's imprudent to have such a plan ?

Do you think the various black ethnics there are too disorganised to ever try to grab everything and take their anger out on their oppressors ?

In any case, while I sympathize with South Africans of British or Bantu or most other origins, I can’t stand Afrikaners whining about the state of their country. It was Afrikaners who campaigned vigorously against white settlement by non-Boers and who therefore ensured South Africa’s present-day demographics. If they had welcomed more Brits, the country might well have a European majority to this day. But the Dutch have always been an obstinate people.

Reminds me of the US south, which was largely populated by the Brits (compared to the more mixed-German Midwest). It was they who insisted on importing massive amounts of slaves to feed their plantations. Had they won the civil war, the US black population would have been >30% instead of 13%. So I don't think it's a Dutch issue. It's just white autism.

It was they who insisted on importing massive amounts of slaves to feed their plantations.

The importation of slaves into the U.S. meaningfully ceased in the early 1800's when it was banned by act of Congress. The increase of slave populations in the U.S. south was overwhelmingly caused by normal demographic expansion - people having kids, who unfortunately inherited their parents' legal status. This is a notable distinction from just about everywhere else in the Americas, where the population of slaves was well below replacement-level fertility (disease and the extreme harshness of work conditions being two major factors) and thus had to be constantly replenished via new imports.

If memory serves, Lincoln even wanted to deport most of the freed slaves back to Africa but was prevented because capitalists lobbied hard to keep their cheap (though no longer free) labour. The more things change...

Ironically, the repatriation/colonization movement was not very successful precisely because most slaves weren't fresh off the boat, but instead were the american-born children (often two or three generations back) of slaves. The dynamics of Liberia (Americanized freedmen recapitulating the southern plantation slave system with the local black tribesmen for generations) demonstrate the inescapable fact of an Amwrican "black" ethnogenesis early on in our history.

Yes. IIRC, the 13 colonies (and later the U.S.) only represented 4% of the Atlantic slave trade.

The number I recall is 6%, but either way its a tiny minority.

I've also read online Afrikaners predicting that the total collapse and (attempted) Rwanda-style genocide of all whites is happening Any Day Now for, well, almost as long as I've been online.

The under-5 proportion of white South Africans is so low that there‘s no point in a Rwandan-style genocide. In a century they will be less than 1% of the country. In two they will be infinitely rare, like seeing a full blooded native on the east coast. Also, the farm murders are clearly not just for robberies and are sadistic nature.

“Our murder rate is higher than the death rate in Ukraine’s current conflict,” he wrote.

From the news.com article. I'm astonished by this, if it's true. But it could be true.

Another article says "There were over 7,000 murders committed in South Africa from 1 July to September 2022."

Now I imagine the South African police aren't the most capable or reliable source of statistics, so maybe we pump that up to 10,000? Higher? Annualized that would be 40,000 deaths per year in a country of 60 million.

Nobody knows how many people have died in Ukraine. I highly doubt the estimates conveniently listed on wikipedia are accurate. Anyway, the UK says 40-60,000 Russians dead and presumably a similar number of Ukrainians plus 9,000 civilians. The number of dead Ukrainians is a guess even amongst this dodgy guesstimate arithmetic. So let's say 110,000+ have died in the war. But that's from a population of 185 million or so, the total of Russia and Ukraine.

So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.

I wonder how the local criminals are acquiring all those guns. We're talking about lots and lots of firearms, after all.

Africa is awash with weapons from a wide variety of sources. The continent has had an absurd number of revolutions, civil wars, truck wars, proxy wars, race wars, guerrilla wars, sometimes even literal gorilla wars, all of them involving the importation of modern weapons since, well, the creation of modern weapons. Weird shit turning up in Africa is an occasional source of angst in the gun culture, as photos of various conflicts sometimes include extremely valuable museum pieces like original stg-44s being treated as beater guns by local forces.

Does South Africa have a small arms industry at all, on a different note? Because I'm sure most African states don't.

They used to, and a bunch of fairly iconic weapons were developed there. I heard recently that one of their major manufacturers went belly-up, and most of the older companies died off years ago.

Yeah, Denel suffered some underspecified hollowing-out, according to this article I found through that Twitter thread posted elsewhere. Tony Neophytou, the most recent South African gun designer of note, may need a new job (and perhaps a plane ticket) sooner than later--or at least someone to pick up his most recent weapon design.

I cynically expect part of the answer to be "civilian gun ownership was regulated into the ground, turning law-abiders into literal felons and shifting gun ownership into the wrong hands." Unless you're hinting at some other cause (leaky borders with war-torn nations? Government elements are in on the organized crime?).

Yes, those seem like probable causes. The cynical answer still doesn't explain how all those guns got there in the first place.

The cynical answer still doesn't explain how all those guns got there in the first place.

What do you think the customs inspection capacity was of the average african country during the 20th century?

Nobody knows how many people have died in Ukraine.

It looks like Russia may have up to 40k KIA, Ukraine 60-120K. Probably closer to 60-80K, though who knows. Up to 30k dead civilians, possibly.

So even if we don't count Russians, we're talking about ~70-100k dead in a country of 30 million, so .. same order of magnitude perhaps.

So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.

I always get ratio'd when I say this, but, well, that's what autism is for, to make me impervious to pro-Ukrainian social pressure.

To wit: have you considered perhaps that Ukraine is not embroiled in "full scale" war in Europe and is instead being subject to a limited and comparatively humane Special Military Operation? Y'know, like that one side keeps saying it is, but everyone just keeps disregarding in spite of mountains of circumstantial evidence (like this)?

Well I don't buy the whole 'Russia inflicting genocide' line and I suppose the war isn't being waged along the whole front-line, mostly in the Donbass. But there have been mobilizations on both sides!

What would a post-45 full-scale war look like if not this? Korea had short, manageable frontlines and intense strategic bombing involving the flattenning of all the North's urban centres. Russia made an attempt at destroying Ukrainian power infrastructure but there's a lot of it to destroy plus missile defence and SAMs preventing unlimited bombing. Is it practical to flatten areas they want to conquer anyway? No.

In my book, if both sides are conscripting then it's a full-scale war. It isn't a total war, that would be finished in a week. I suppose you can ask 'why aren't you considering a full-scale war and total war to be the same' and my answer is that it's a matter of nuclear weapons. If it was a total war, Russia would demand unconditional surrender and start glassing Ukrainian cities if their demands weren't met.

Well I don't buy the whole 'Russia inflicting genocide' line

Russia's stated goal is to reunify the Ukrainian people with the Russian people, destroying an independent Ukrainian identity. That matches the definition of genocide.

By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. ... The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups

Forced assimilation qua taking Ukrainian children is one of the 5 prohibited acts, amounting to genocide in context.

Well they can define genocide that way but unless Russia is actually killing huge numbers of Ukrainian civilians, it's not meaningfully genocidal. When France enforced its own state language and culture on the various regions in the 19th century, that wasn't genocide. Political and social institutions come and go. The Soviet Union messed with a lot of things in terms of political and social institutions, culture, religion and economic existence. Yet we only talk about its genocide or classicide in the context of mass deaths in Ukraine, kulaks and so on.

Forced assimilation conducted in various ways might be bad but it does not fit the core meaning of genocide, which relies upon massed deaths. Why is genocide bad? Because of the massive numbers of civilian deaths! When Theodore Roosevelt raged against hyphenated Americans, he was not calling for genocide in any meaningful way. Wales was not genocided when its identity became part of Britain via military force. Alsace-Lorraine was not genocided by either France or Germany during its long history of conflict.

Imo a lot of what France did to the south would definitely count as genocide today. Not to mention their religious wars.

Yeah, the religious wars would count. Suppression of the Vendee in the revolutionary war too. But what were they doing that was so bad in the 19th century?

But what were they doing that was so bad in the 19th century?

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, France (really shouldn't single out France, a lot of placed did this) banned the teaching of local languages/official use and engaged in a campaign of forced assimilation (basically, to make France "french").

Before modernization, basically every region of France (and pretty much everywhere in the old world) had a regional language and culture. I think under modern criteria the wiping out of these languages and cultures would be considered ~10-15 genocides (although you could make a convincing argument from anywhere between 4 and about 50).

That's the story of pretty much everywhere in the old world during that period (the period does vary a bit, for example, England managed to wipe out a lot of regional languages much earlier).

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Sorry, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Dodging pro-ukrainian sentiment doesn’t make Russian apologetics correct by default.

The Falklands war had something like 3,500 killed and injured, total, and only 3 were civilians. Clearly, the definition of “war” includes “limited and comparatively humane” invasions. Russia killing 40+ civilians per week is above that bar.

Defending it as just or necessary is one thing. Acting like it doesn’t count as a war is unreasonable.

The Falklands war had something like 3,500 killed and injured, total, and only 3 were civilians. Clearly, the definition of “war” includes “limited and comparatively humane” invasions. Russia killing 40+ civilians per week is above that bar.

Is it?

The intensity of fighting is far higher. Falklands was a tiny war, with few soldiers.

If you adjusted the figure to show deaths per week of fighting / 1000 combatants, would it still look as bad ?

Might as well ask the Russians to tune it down to Falklands levels. The problem is that they’re invading at all, not that it doesn’t compare to Iraq or WWII. OP is trying to elide that bit.

The problem is that they’re invading at all

Try to empathize with them.

Russia killing 40+ civilians per week is above that bar.

How's that compare to Afghanistan or Iraq?

I would imagine pretty unfavorably for the period of normal combat operations (though part of that is because the U.S. is way better with precision munitions, as I understand it). To my knowledge (and I could be wrong here) the Ukraine conflict is much less of a partisan war than Iraq or Afghanistan. I would assume far more civvies die in suicide bombings and random attempted mortar attacks on scattered firebases than in trench warfare.

But then again, I haven't served, so I could be very wrong.

No idea. But I’d certainly rate them both as wars, not as Special Military Obfuscations.

This seems like a reasonable answer. @Supah_Schmendrick also offered what seemed like a reasonable answer. The thing is, aren't your two answers contradicting each other? The part you rate as a war is emphatically not the part he dismisses as bloodless, and vice versa.

First of all, we didn't actually declare war in either Iraq or Afghanistan; both were, quite literally, "special military obfuscations". Secondly, the actual war part in Iraq at least was extremely brief. Who can forget the iconic declaration of the end of major military operations in Iraq? After that point, Iraq was definately a "special military obfuscation", as politics for the next several years centered on trying to pretend that our occupation wasn't a bleeding ulcer.

I think the domestic politics of warfare are separate from the object-level question. If you asked a random…uh, let me find an uninvolved country…Belgian citizen, “was the US waging war in 2011?” He’d probably say yes. Not because of some floor on casualties per week, military or civilian, but because we were parked on foreign territory en masse, shooting at people.

Butlerian was trying some sort of excluded-middle argument where not rating as “full-scale war” means the Russians are being very cool and very legal humane. That’s not true. At the end of the day, they’re still parked on foreign territory, blowing up Ukrainians.

I think "limited and comparatively human special military operation" is the consensus view on the Iraq war as well, though. It's certainly not a view I share, but I will not forget how all the rhetoric about war crime tribunals abruptly evaporated the day Obama was inaugurated. This despite the fact that we were, as you say, still parked in foreign territory, blowing up Iraqis.

It seems plausible to me that the Ukraine war is less objectionable than the Iraq war, on account of killing fewer people, of having less disastrous consequences long-term, and of not being so obviously pointless. Iraq set fire to a good portion of the middle east, and the killing is still ongoing.

Hell, I can't even get some interlocutors to stop calling it a "genocide" on the Ukrainian people much less agree that the attack is less than total war. Nothing is ever the middle version of anything, it's always maximally terrible.

I hope the irony in this observation was intentional…

"genocide" on the Ukrainian people

Russia is kidnapping Ukranian children and Russifying them. According to the 1948 Genocide convention, ratified by both Ukraine and Russia, such actions rise to the level of genocide:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Russia is kidnapping Ukranian children and Russifying them.

There are barely any 'Ukrainian' children in the areas Russia has conquered so far.

These are mostly ethnic Russian areas.

How would we distinguish 'Russification' of Ukrainian children, from evacuation of Russian-speaking children from a warzone ?

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

We've got bigger problems than Russia then...

The difference being that you are doing these things to yourself, unlike Ukraine which is getting them forcibly imposed by another.

Partially yes.

Then there are other things that are hard to see as anything other than deliberate policy.

And on top of that you have more subtle things that are hard to prove are deliberate, but you have to keep in mind you're talking to a self-confessed conspiracy theorist.

Unless by "to yourself" you mean to say they're imposed by my own government. In which case: yes, but the people ruling me are hostile occupiers, as far as I'm concerned.

SA has been like this forever, though. Sure it seems a bit worse, but if you sort by top for the past year there's plenty of posts saying "At least I don't live in America" or circlejerking about racism.

I think hoping for anti-white discrimination on a state-level scale leading to a collapse is, frankly, too much to hope for. At best SA will decline too slowly for someone to point directly at racism and corruption at being the source of the problem.

Considering Redditors from the South Africa claim America is in worse shape than South Africa, they’re probably not the best people to get your view on how things are going and given this view it’s obvious South Africa can endure a lot more anarchy and degradation before people start calling it quits on the state.

I think almost everyone knows corruption is a major source of South Africa’s problems, though.

Not going to lie, when I see "SA" I immediately think "Scott Alexander." Maybe I spend too much time in the rat-sphere.

My employer has a Cape Town office with a good number of employees that we speak with regularly. We use ZA (Zuid Afrika) to avoid confusion with our South American operations.

SA has been like this forever, though. Sure it seems a bit worse,

Actually I'm pretty sure that if I go back in time a few decades it is most emphatically not like this.

Sure, a few decades, but people have been predicting its collapse for a while. Instead the populace has simply adapted to making jokes about load shedding, hiring private security companies, etc.

Like anyone else they want to stay home. Has there been a major exfiltration that I'm unaware of?

Yes, there is a moderately sized community of white south african expats in my city alone - and there's enough of them to support an entire import business, several community stores, etc. People have been saying that the country is going to fall to pieces for a while, and they've been correct the entire time. Things in SA are getting worse and have been getting worse in real, serious ways, and it is disingenuous to say that it was "always like this" when you can just go and look at before and after photos.

Difference is that the islands of relative stability were larger and more numerous 30 years ago. Now there is a broader degeneration. You didn't have these massive rolling blackouts, a greater fraction of the railway system was intact etc.

But this is all water under the bridge. South Africa failed because it wasn't racist enough, ironically. Even Apartheid was in many ways a bandaid. The story is similar with Israel. You can only extend and pretend for so long until the past catches up with you.

...what's the problem with Israel ?

..isn't their employment rate inching up to ~50% for men, and 80% for women ?

That doesn't seem particularly dire.

More comments

Some of my relatives are from South Africa or are Zambians who lived there back in the 1990s. It was not this bad at all. In fact, IIRC, they remember the period from the winding-down of Apartheid to some time in the Noughties as a golden age of relative social harmony and optimism.

Now that's a fun place to do exotic dating.

The white SA women be willing and they may be more 'redpilled' than you...

"Truth and Reconciliation" was the darling of progressive legal academics the world over back in the 1990s. I had one colleague who made it the center of a course he taught on "restorative" justice. He's been dead for a while now, so I'll never know what he would have to say about all this, but my impression generally is that academics are most comfortable absolutely ignoring the reality of what is happening in South Africa and continuing to blame colonialism for everything. The fact that they were dead wrong about "Truth and Reconciliation," and it failed, will not be taken as a lesson of any kind.

Wait, is this where Bungie got their spaceship names? That’s a little bleak.

Given ominous sounding zealotry by omnicidal maniacs was always the theme, I think it's a perfect match. Better than Undiminished Entelechy and more subtle than Triumphant Declaration.

Plus, one of the big battles in the lore was in Mombasa on Earth, no? And the sniper rifle from that series bears a resemblence to the South African NTW-20.

High or little charity, Mombasa is rather far away from Joburg.

So, your claim is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission somehow caused the current problems in SA? Because there would be more consistent electricity if all those people never confessed? Or that crime would have dropped even more rapidly during that era than it did, had those people not confessed? I don’t get what the causal mechanism is supposed to be.

So, your claim is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission somehow caused the current problems in SA?

Where did I say that?

I said that "Truth and Reconciliation" failed to do what its proponents claimed it was doing--providing a peaceful path to replacing racial apartheid with multicultural liberalism. One worry of white South Africans circa 1990 was that they couldn't relinquish their dominance, because the inevitable result would be vae victis justice: widespread confiscation of property at minimum and, very possibly, outright genocide. "Truth and Reconciliation" was packaged as the way forward: once everyone had admitted their misdeeds and made their apologies, the country could heal and move on. Certain Western scholars (like my deceased colleague) were especially excited about the possibilities presented by a genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state potentially arising in sub-Saharan Africa.

And to be fair, for about a decade it appeared that this might actually occur! But all along there was ample evidence that most regular people (as distinct from politicians and foreign diplomats) did not regard "Truth and Reconciliation" to have actually reconciled the black and white communities. My guess is that, while I am always annoyed to have words put in my mouth, I can perhaps steel-man your concern, which may be that I look a bit like a Copenhagen ethicist here. Yeah, "Truth and Reconciliation" failed, but its advocates shouldn't be blamed for noticing the problem, much less for trying and, for a limited time, succeeding in making things better.

But notice that I did not blame the "Truth and Reconciliation" advocates for trying, and I don't even particularly blame them for failing. What does bother me is that people praised them even when it became clear that the facts did not support such optimism, and my expectation that people will continue to praise and emulate them, even though we have seen that their approach does not, in fact work. In particular, the failure of "Truth and Reconciliation" generalizes to much of what is done under the banner of "critical theory" in the United States today.

Where did I say that?

Oh, I thought you meant to imply that because you wrote in response to a post about current problems in SA.

I said that "Truth and Reconciliation" failed to do what its proponents claimed it was doing--providing a peaceful path to replacing racial apartheid with multicultural liberalism. One worry of white South Africans circa 1990 was that they couldn't relinquish their dominance, because the inevitable result would be vae victis justice: widespread confiscation of property at minimum and, very possibly, outright genocide. "Truth and Reconciliation" was packaged as the way forward: once everyone had admitted their misdeeds and made their apologies, the country could heal and move on. Certain Western scholars (like my deceased colleague) were especially excited about the possibilities presented by a genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state potentially arising in sub-Saharan Africa.

I think you are conflating a couple of things. Whatever your colleague might have thought (and can I ask what his or her area of expertise was?), the TRC was the solution to a political problem: How to deal with competing claims regarding justice for those who committed apartheid-related crimes while ensuring stability for the new regime. It seems to have succeeded reasonably well in that regard: There have been no coups, elections are held regularly, etc. I am dubious that many people at the time thought the TRC would have the effect of establishing a liberal democracy, except in the negative sense of reducing the chances that the new system and its liberal democratic constitution would be strangled in its crib. It might have been seen as necessary for the development of a liberal democracy, but certainly not as sufficient (at least not by political scientists, which is why I asked about your colleague's expertise). So, we can't know if it was successful in that sense; it is an unanswerable question. One would have to look at a larger dataset and see if the process is associated with positive outcomes.

I thought you meant to imply that because you wrote in response to a post about current problems in SA.

I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. Are you of the view that the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures?

I think you are conflating a couple of things. Whatever your colleague might have thought (and can I ask what his or her area of expertise was?), the TRC was the solution to a political problem...

Law professor. People rarely get political scientists to inform their political solutions; it's always the lawyers who end up writing the documents and holding the tribunals. Before the Great Awokening, critical legal studies' most recent peak was probably the 1990s, when Clinton was appointing federal judges.

I am dubious that many people at the time thought the TRC would have the effect of establishing a liberal democracy, except in the negative sense of reducing the chances that the new system and its liberal democratic constitution would be strangled in its crib.

...really? I mean, I don't have any sense of literally how many people thought this way, but like, consider the first sentence of the abstract of this paper from 2001:

One of the stated objectives of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa was the creation of a political culture respectful of human rights.

Or consider this abstract from 2010:

South Africa’s transition to democracy was met by the global audience with at first, disbelief, followed later by applause. After fifteen years of democracy big questions remain: has a more democratic regime also lead to a more liberal society? And has democracy made for a more peaceful society?

You may well be right that only a select few people--namely, academics--actually believed any of this, but I'm not sure what that actually gets you. The people calling the shots seem to have either believed it, or considered it very important to be perceived as believing it. My point was that people who doubted the critical theory approach from the start were clearly right to doubt it, so your doubt that "many people at the time thought" it would work appears to refer to the critics of critical theory who I am saying were right all along.

It might have been seen as necessary for the development of a liberal democracy, but certainly not as sufficient (at least not by political scientists, which is why I asked about your colleague's expertise). So, we can't know if it was successful in that sense; it is an unanswerable question.

You appear to be asserting that, essentially, we can't know whether Truth and Reconciliation really failed, because maybe it was an essential (and successful!) ingredient, but some other essential ingredient failed. This seems willfully benighted. Truth and Reconciliation clearly did not accomplish what it was intended to accomplish--South Africans are still murdering each other like it's going out of style, and substantially blaming white colonialism for it. So your response is--well, maybe it was successful but something else was missing? No. If something was missing from the program that would have made it successful, then including it in the program would have made the program successful. If this was a "necessary but insufficient" effort, then it was still a failed effort, and that is not remotely "unanswerable." Your response is nonsense on the order of "what do words even mean?"

I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. Are you of the view that the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures?

  1. ? So, now you are saying you meant to imply that the TRC caused the current problems? That is the opposite of what you said before.

  2. Regardless, obviously I am not of the view that the current problems are not reflective of past failures. Rather, I am asking you why you claim that the specific event in question is a cause of the specific problems in question. As I said before, what is the causal mechanism?

Consider the first sentence of the abstract of this paper from 2001: .. Or consider this abstract from 2010:

  1. The second abstract has nothing to do with the purpose or effect of the TRC. It is from a book entitled, "Liberal Democracy and Peace in South Africa: The Pursuit of Freedom as Dignity," a review of which summarize the book thusly: "This book asks whether democracy has made South Africa a more liberal and more peaceful society." It is about the effect of democracy, not the effect of the TRC

  2. Even the first abstract is weak evidence: creating "a culture respectful of human rights" is a far cry from creating a "genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state." As an article written in 1994, about when the TRC was created, put it, the point of truth and reconciliation commissions is to '“allow[] a society to learn from its past in order to prevent a repetition of such violence in the future”; Priscilla B. Hayner, Fifteen Truth Commissions- 1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study,

16 HUM. RTs. Q. 597 (1994), Maybe the SA TRC was an exception, or maybe your colleague's hope and dreams were not representative of those who created the SA TRC.

You appear to be asserting that, essentially, we can't know whether Truth and Reconciliation really failed, because maybe it was an essential (and successful!) ingredient, but some other essential ingredient failed. This seems willfully benighted. ...

Yes, that is what I said. That is the nature of social science when your dataset is N=1. That is why I said, "One would have to look at a larger dataset and see if the process is associated with positive outcomes." All you have done is set forth a hypothesis (and without a suggested causal mechanism, it cannot yet be called a plausible hypothesis)

So your response is--well, maybe it was successful but something else was missing? No. If something was missing from the program that would have made it successful, then including it in the program would have made the program successful.

No, the argument is not that there was something missing from the program. It is that social phenomena are the result of scores of interacting factors. Hence, no single factor is sufficient for a particular social phenomenon to exist. If the success of X is necessary for social phenomenon Y, but not sufficient, then the fact that Y does not exist is not compelling evidence that X failed. A whole lot has gone on in SA since the end of apartheid, from AIDS to Winnie Mandela; to say that because SA is in bad shape today, ipso facto the TRC must have failed, is poor causal reasoning (esp since, if other commenters are to be believed, SA was in better shape just a few years ago

Truth and Reconciliation clearly did not accomplish what it was intended to accomplish--South Africans are still murdering each other like it's going out of style, and substantially blaming white colonialism for it.

  1. As I noted earlier, the murder rate actually fell substantially during the TRC years and after. That is of course not proof that the TRC caused the decline, but it certainly undermines the argument that the high crime rate is a result of the failure of the TRC.

  2. More importantly, you are changing the subject. The high crime rate might well be an indication that it failed at achieving reconciliation (although, unless much of the crime is racially motivated, it is poor evidence of even that). But your claim had nothing to do with achieving reconciliation. It was that the purpose was to create a ""genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state."

I am asking you why you claim that the specific event in question is a cause of the specific problems in question.

I have already told you that I do not regard the TRC as a cause of the specific problems under discussion, but as a failed attempt to solve/prevent them. I don't know how much clearer I can be about that, and I regard your continued insistence on putting words into my mouth as extremely objectionable. All you had to do was like, just, read the words I wrote, instead of some other words you made up in your head for me.

It is especially irritating since, elsewhere, you do seem to actually understand at some level what is being discussed:

The high crime rate might well be an indication that it failed at achieving reconciliation

I agree. Everything else you've written appears to me at this point to just be deliberate obfuscation and performative doubt, and weirdly persistent attempts to insist that I am saying things I have explicitly told you I am not saying, at the level of "so you're saying." I have no patience for that nonsense, so I will excuse myself from the conversation here.

I have already told you that I do not regard the TRC as a cause of the specific problems under discussion

Then perhaps you need to write more clearly. If that is your position, why, when I apologized, saying "Oh, I thought you meant to imply that because you wrote in response to a post about current problems in SA," did you not simply say, "no, I didn't mean to imply that" instead of "I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. Are you of the view that the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures?" Do you see how one might infer therefrom that you are in fact making a claim that the current problems in South Africa are reflective of the failure of the TRC?

And, please don't complain about people putting words in your mouth after you claimed that I said that "the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures."

This is something of a predictable failure mode of progressivism. The essence of Truth and Reconciliation programs isn't a complete dead-end; there are legitimate use cases. Unfortunately, those legal academics pointed to those particular cases and then proceeded to overapply the approach wildly, to disastrous effect.

In the wake of a horrific civil war, where atrocity has been piled on top of atrocity, and--crucially--the overwhelming majority of evidence is absent, there simply isn't much you can do to appease the demands of justice while picking up the pieces. Sure, some or even many of the survivors may have committed horrible acts, but what do you do if you can't prove it? Some may confess, others may not; how much weight can a simple accusation bear? Do you punish the minor evils that you can prove, and let the major evils pass unaddressed? This is a wicked problem.

The Truth and Reconciliation solution more or less acknowledges that achieving even a semblance of justice is impossible in these circumstances, and appeals to truth instead. In exchange for amnesty, the commissions should seek to gather and record as much evidence as can be found as an offering to history. This isn't a good solution, but in extraordinarily bad circumstances, it might be the best on offer. In less bad situations, it's just an excuse to avoid justice, because justice is hard.

"Truth and Reconciliation" was the darling of progressive legal academics the world over back in the 1990s.

It was also sufficiently large in the American public psyche to inspire a professional wrestling faction called the Truth Commission, though it's perhaps indicative that the wrestling scriptwriters seemed to have no idea what a Truth and Reconciliation Committee was:

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

A lot of folks in SA weren't sure either...

It was also sufficiently large in the American public psyche to inspire a professional wrestling faction called the Truth Commission

If memory serves, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg even gave an interview in her twilight years where she praised the South African constitution as superior to the US one. So South Africa was the poster child of global liberalism for the older generation. Having it fail in such a public way is of course embarrassing. Though I suspect the usual excuses of "legacy of Apartheid" will be trotted out in perpetuity and no introspection will be allowed for fear of being called racist.

It reminds me of a comment I’ve heard about Spain, where the left just blames the dictatorship for every problem that happens even if it is their own fault.

I am South African and have always lived in relatively well-off areas. I feel quite safe where I currently live, but have indeed been the victim of multiple crimes. Mugged once at gunpoint, hijacked at gunpoint and held for a number of hours, car stolen, home break-in while away (4 separate incidents, too many car break-ins to bother counting). I don't know anyone personally who has been murdered or attacked (in a black vs white context), and I have only been assaulted by white South Africans (Afrikaner randomly assaulting English kids, a common thing growing up). That's the view from what I can argue is a life lived as carefully as possible. I don't leave my areas unless I absolutely have to, and I lock up everything around 6/7PM at night. Things do feel different since the unrest last year (and impending power grid collapse) however, and I have begun the process to leave the country (having citizenship of another country).

I feel quite safe where I currently live

Dude, this is absolutely not safe. I would hate living like this

Was very thoroughly scolded by security for crossing the street to go to the mall next door. Security guard was impressed that he came back unscathed.

A close relative of mine visited SA around the turn of the millennium. They were about to walk one block to a restaurant when the hotel receptionist ran in panic after them and told them in no uncertain terms to take a taxi if they wanted to get there without being at least robbed and potentially much worse.

Around the same time I visited San Francisco and was surprised to read later that I had apparently stayed right next to ”the most dangerous block in the city” (according to our local newspaper). I never noticed anything during daytime other than the occasional homeless (who back then didn’t bother random passersbies).

Around the same time I visited San Francisco and was surprised to read later that I had apparently stayed right next to ”the most dangerous block in the city”

Me a tourist on the East coast of the US checking into a hotel in inner city Baltimore without a clue a few years back.

I pulled a few retarded moves in Trenton, NJ as well. In my defense, I didn't know crime was that bad neighborhood to neighborhood. I thought there would be obvious markers like lots of police sirens and literal dumpster fires. In retrospect by being relatively unaware of the stark crime rates and how they make hotels in certain places cheaper, I put myself more at risk of Bedbugs than any actual harm given my short stay and reluctance to join a gang.

Don't regret visiting the hoods for cheap Chinese takeout during the day though.

They were about to walk one block to a restaurant when the hotel receptionist ran in panic after them and told them in no uncertain terms to take a taxi if they wanted to get there without being at least robbed and potentially much worse.

I'm a little curious as to how the taxi makes the definitive difference between being robbed or not in that scenario.

Completely divorced of context, I'd guess this was actually a scam perpetrated by the taxi driver and the hotel receptionist to drive more business to the former. Tourists are ripe targets for this class of game.

The harder numbers around SA crime certainly add credence to the assertion, though.

Sounds like he was in a city. It's a lot safer there than in the countryside, which is where things get truly dark and horrifying. I have a relative who has worked in both Afghanistan and rural SA, and he says there was less violence when he was in Afghanistan.

which is where things get truly dark and horrifying

Wait.. what ? I thought the crime in SA was the worst in poor urban areas and townships, not countryside.

Anecdotally, the difference is in the level of policing, and the possibility in the cities of staying in safe places - at least, if you have some money. I know people who have stayed safe in the cities their whole lives, but using methods that don't really work out in the countryside, like gated communities.

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