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...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.
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.
Define collapse. Seat of government taken over by mobs ?
The Soviet Union took longer than that.
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
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.
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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.
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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.
..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.
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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 ?
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