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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   35094 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.

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.”

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

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.

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