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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.
No one is rehabilitating South Africa. But the people there don't deserve what is happening to them.
I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.
Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.
If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.
You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.
Gonna do anything about the goading, post-deleting obvious troll he's replying to? Or does the affirmative action policy cover that behavior
He's been warned to stop deleting posts or he'll be banned.
And you've been warned to stop goading mods and making things up. The last few times we've let pass, but the ankle-biting will stop. Now.
Clamping down on blunt feedback to the mods is a pretty serious change in norms around here, and a very negative development -- you should stop.
Here are the last couple directed at me. I even think he was directionally correct on the latter! Do you think it was helpful?
Amadan might be thinking of non-mod examples.
Probably not helpful per se, but I'm thinking of the oldish days in which mods were expected to put up with blunt-to-the-point-of-against-the-rules commentary on their decisions as part and parcel of the awesome power they wield. I'd probably need to go pretty far back on the reddit sub to find examples, and don't really know where the norm came from (LessWrong?) but it struck me as a pretty good norm. As with the "free-speech vs hate-speech" issue, "criticizing the mods is only allowed if you aren't a PITA about it" is not really a stable equilibrium.
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There's a difference between blunt feedback and ankle biting. If you want to question or criticize a mod decision that is of course allowed, but posting things like "What" or whining that we don't ban leftists and claiming we practice "affirmative action" is something Steve does constantly and has been told to stop. Just as we almost never mod people for reports, even people who constantly write spurious reports, but we had to tell him to stop writing reports calling people subhuman and talking about how leftists deserve to die. If you make it your goal to abuse the system and annoy us, yes, we're going to tell you to stop.
I guess I'll try to provide blunt feedback then. I apologize in advance for bringing in unrelated posts.
My entirely subjective opinion: In the span of a week, this thread is the second instance of very obvious bait going completely unnoticed without so much as a warning, even as a powermod explicitly shows up and participates in the discussion (without the modhat, given, but as the ban policy of the Motte is still the main topic in both cases I believe it counts as "speaking officially").
The first instance I believe has been given, frankly, a lot of leeway for a top level post that came out swinging with a thinly-veiled implicit accusation and hasn't (again, in my opinion) significantly improved the mode of communication or strength of argument in the following replies.
More bluntly, I find the (rather visible) pity/condescension towards
leftistunpopular points of view distasteful for a powermod, especially given the place's supposed focus on robust argumentation - at risk of being antagonistic, I would definitely not call that poster's median post "doing a good job of representing a point of view that is rare here" unless that was a polite euphemism. As I understand you're trying to keep it balanced as all things should be or something, but this is exactly how you get the affirmative action accusations.The second instance here is, well... I won't deny that @jeroboam's post is against the rules, but considering that he was rather obviously baited in a much less subtle way (really, argumentum ad Hitlerum in current_year?), I think a "proper" modhat warning would've more than sufficed, especially seeing as the bait itself remains unnoticed.
Notably, both posts were downvoted to hell - I hesitate to point this out, seeing as nobody likes getting dogpiled and updoot total isn't a very reliable metric (certainly a very gameable one), plus as you note downthread we're not a democracy so by itself this means jack shit. Still, it might serve as a very rough approximation of community reception when/if you ponder if it really is the children who are wrong.
FWIW I'm on record as a simp or the moderation here and haven't really felt any disconnect until now, but this is probably the first time I distinctly nootice a real lapse in vigilance, and especially disagree with your convenient blunt-feedback/ankle-biting distinction. The two are one and the same, cavalier dismissal of [thing you don't like] is not the way, and I sympathize with having to expend effort to separate wheat from the chaff every time you get more [things you don't like], but such is the way of the janitor.
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You like to blame things on other people, but your entire recent posting history is telling everyone they're wrong in their criticism of your moderation. And I know you take pride in being broadly disliked because you think it means you're pissing off everyone evenly, but how can you look at the responses and see them as demonstrating community support for your tactics?
I don't expect this will get through to you. It'll just be another round of blaming everyone else.
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