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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.

Which is why Chinese immigration is constantly overwhelmed with applicants while basically nobody bothers trying to come to the US.

No, "strong" and "weak" are doing a whole lot of heavy lifting and also don't evenly distribute across populations. One could argue that the South African state, and a significant cross-section of its citizens, form a significantly "stronger" oppressive government bloc from the perspective of a smaller fraction of citizens who have enough time preference to prefer electricity tomorrow over the maintenance costs of that infrastructure today than can be found in any other Western nation, whose governments (and supporting citizenry) are much weaker in that regard.

Those citizens are all emigrating to countries with "weaker" governments in the sense that that government is either unwilling or unable to enforce similar terms- in essence, the taxes are lower. Sure, the (example) Australian government and people are very awful in a number of other ways, but until they start shutting the power off every night because muh carbon or fail to enforce law and order because muh racism (the latter is still a thing in any US-aligned nation, but to a much smaller degree than it is in SA), they're better masters than their fellow South Africans (and their government) would be, hence their migration.