This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link