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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Have we had a discussion on South Africa yet?

Recently, Andre de Ruyter, the now-ex CEO of the state owned power provider ESKOM, did an interview that basically said the corruption and everything was so bad that he and ESKOM cannot do their jobs properly. He himself was a target of assassination (cyanide pill in his coffee or something?), and after the interview has been removed from his post (he put in his resignation before the interview). He has since left the country.

There are many reports that the grid can totally collapse soon, despite the "load shedding" that they have been doing. Apparently this may lead to civil war?

Unemployment is apparently 35%, clean water access and supply is apparently unstable. Crime is apparently extremely high. If you go on /r/southAfrica, there are frequent discussions of home invasion and other crimes (70 carjackings a day, 2500 home invasions a day...). One post I saw last week was a question asking "Dogs been poisoned, both dead. Typically how many days before robbery hit?"

See this recent thread for more issues: https://twitter.com/k9_reaper/status/1630436052723720193

Some blame this all on the ruling ANC party, on their policies like BBBEE (from a few years ago: https://www.revolver.news/2021/07/south-africa-riots-looting-critical-race-theory/).

In general, SA's situation is not looking good...

“Our murder rate is higher than the death rate in Ukraine’s current conflict,” he wrote.

From the news.com article. I'm astonished by this, if it's true. But it could be true.

Another article says "There were over 7,000 murders committed in South Africa from 1 July to September 2022."

Now I imagine the South African police aren't the most capable or reliable source of statistics, so maybe we pump that up to 10,000? Higher? Annualized that would be 40,000 deaths per year in a country of 60 million.

Nobody knows how many people have died in Ukraine. I highly doubt the estimates conveniently listed on wikipedia are accurate. Anyway, the UK says 40-60,000 Russians dead and presumably a similar number of Ukrainians plus 9,000 civilians. The number of dead Ukrainians is a guess even amongst this dodgy guesstimate arithmetic. So let's say 110,000+ have died in the war. But that's from a population of 185 million or so, the total of Russia and Ukraine.

So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.

So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.

I always get ratio'd when I say this, but, well, that's what autism is for, to make me impervious to pro-Ukrainian social pressure.

To wit: have you considered perhaps that Ukraine is not embroiled in "full scale" war in Europe and is instead being subject to a limited and comparatively humane Special Military Operation? Y'know, like that one side keeps saying it is, but everyone just keeps disregarding in spite of mountains of circumstantial evidence (like this)?

Well I don't buy the whole 'Russia inflicting genocide' line and I suppose the war isn't being waged along the whole front-line, mostly in the Donbass. But there have been mobilizations on both sides!

What would a post-45 full-scale war look like if not this? Korea had short, manageable frontlines and intense strategic bombing involving the flattenning of all the North's urban centres. Russia made an attempt at destroying Ukrainian power infrastructure but there's a lot of it to destroy plus missile defence and SAMs preventing unlimited bombing. Is it practical to flatten areas they want to conquer anyway? No.

In my book, if both sides are conscripting then it's a full-scale war. It isn't a total war, that would be finished in a week. I suppose you can ask 'why aren't you considering a full-scale war and total war to be the same' and my answer is that it's a matter of nuclear weapons. If it was a total war, Russia would demand unconditional surrender and start glassing Ukrainian cities if their demands weren't met.

Well I don't buy the whole 'Russia inflicting genocide' line

Russia's stated goal is to reunify the Ukrainian people with the Russian people, destroying an independent Ukrainian identity. That matches the definition of genocide.

By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. ... The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups

Forced assimilation qua taking Ukrainian children is one of the 5 prohibited acts, amounting to genocide in context.

Well they can define genocide that way but unless Russia is actually killing huge numbers of Ukrainian civilians, it's not meaningfully genocidal. When France enforced its own state language and culture on the various regions in the 19th century, that wasn't genocide. Political and social institutions come and go. The Soviet Union messed with a lot of things in terms of political and social institutions, culture, religion and economic existence. Yet we only talk about its genocide or classicide in the context of mass deaths in Ukraine, kulaks and so on.

Forced assimilation conducted in various ways might be bad but it does not fit the core meaning of genocide, which relies upon massed deaths. Why is genocide bad? Because of the massive numbers of civilian deaths! When Theodore Roosevelt raged against hyphenated Americans, he was not calling for genocide in any meaningful way. Wales was not genocided when its identity became part of Britain via military force. Alsace-Lorraine was not genocided by either France or Germany during its long history of conflict.

Imo a lot of what France did to the south would definitely count as genocide today. Not to mention their religious wars.

Yeah, the religious wars would count. Suppression of the Vendee in the revolutionary war too. But what were they doing that was so bad in the 19th century?

But what were they doing that was so bad in the 19th century?

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, France (really shouldn't single out France, a lot of placed did this) banned the teaching of local languages/official use and engaged in a campaign of forced assimilation (basically, to make France "french").

Before modernization, basically every region of France (and pretty much everywhere in the old world) had a regional language and culture. I think under modern criteria the wiping out of these languages and cultures would be considered ~10-15 genocides (although you could make a convincing argument from anywhere between 4 and about 50).

That's the story of pretty much everywhere in the old world during that period (the period does vary a bit, for example, England managed to wipe out a lot of regional languages much earlier).

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Sorry, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Dodging pro-ukrainian sentiment doesn’t make Russian apologetics correct by default.

The Falklands war had something like 3,500 killed and injured, total, and only 3 were civilians. Clearly, the definition of “war” includes “limited and comparatively humane” invasions. Russia killing 40+ civilians per week is above that bar.

Defending it as just or necessary is one thing. Acting like it doesn’t count as a war is unreasonable.

The Falklands war had something like 3,500 killed and injured, total, and only 3 were civilians. Clearly, the definition of “war” includes “limited and comparatively humane” invasions. Russia killing 40+ civilians per week is above that bar.

Is it?

The intensity of fighting is far higher. Falklands was a tiny war, with few soldiers.

If you adjusted the figure to show deaths per week of fighting / 1000 combatants, would it still look as bad ?

Might as well ask the Russians to tune it down to Falklands levels. The problem is that they’re invading at all, not that it doesn’t compare to Iraq or WWII. OP is trying to elide that bit.

The problem is that they’re invading at all

Try to empathize with them.

Russia killing 40+ civilians per week is above that bar.

How's that compare to Afghanistan or Iraq?

I would imagine pretty unfavorably for the period of normal combat operations (though part of that is because the U.S. is way better with precision munitions, as I understand it). To my knowledge (and I could be wrong here) the Ukraine conflict is much less of a partisan war than Iraq or Afghanistan. I would assume far more civvies die in suicide bombings and random attempted mortar attacks on scattered firebases than in trench warfare.

But then again, I haven't served, so I could be very wrong.

No idea. But I’d certainly rate them both as wars, not as Special Military Obfuscations.

This seems like a reasonable answer. @Supah_Schmendrick also offered what seemed like a reasonable answer. The thing is, aren't your two answers contradicting each other? The part you rate as a war is emphatically not the part he dismisses as bloodless, and vice versa.

First of all, we didn't actually declare war in either Iraq or Afghanistan; both were, quite literally, "special military obfuscations". Secondly, the actual war part in Iraq at least was extremely brief. Who can forget the iconic declaration of the end of major military operations in Iraq? After that point, Iraq was definately a "special military obfuscation", as politics for the next several years centered on trying to pretend that our occupation wasn't a bleeding ulcer.

I think the domestic politics of warfare are separate from the object-level question. If you asked a random…uh, let me find an uninvolved country…Belgian citizen, “was the US waging war in 2011?” He’d probably say yes. Not because of some floor on casualties per week, military or civilian, but because we were parked on foreign territory en masse, shooting at people.

Butlerian was trying some sort of excluded-middle argument where not rating as “full-scale war” means the Russians are being very cool and very legal humane. That’s not true. At the end of the day, they’re still parked on foreign territory, blowing up Ukrainians.

I think "limited and comparatively human special military operation" is the consensus view on the Iraq war as well, though. It's certainly not a view I share, but I will not forget how all the rhetoric about war crime tribunals abruptly evaporated the day Obama was inaugurated. This despite the fact that we were, as you say, still parked in foreign territory, blowing up Iraqis.

It seems plausible to me that the Ukraine war is less objectionable than the Iraq war, on account of killing fewer people, of having less disastrous consequences long-term, and of not being so obviously pointless. Iraq set fire to a good portion of the middle east, and the killing is still ongoing.

Hell, I can't even get some interlocutors to stop calling it a "genocide" on the Ukrainian people much less agree that the attack is less than total war. Nothing is ever the middle version of anything, it's always maximally terrible.

I hope the irony in this observation was intentional…

"genocide" on the Ukrainian people

Russia is kidnapping Ukranian children and Russifying them. According to the 1948 Genocide convention, ratified by both Ukraine and Russia, such actions rise to the level of genocide:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Russia is kidnapping Ukranian children and Russifying them.

There are barely any 'Ukrainian' children in the areas Russia has conquered so far.

These are mostly ethnic Russian areas.

How would we distinguish 'Russification' of Ukrainian children, from evacuation of Russian-speaking children from a warzone ?

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

We've got bigger problems than Russia then...

The difference being that you are doing these things to yourself, unlike Ukraine which is getting them forcibly imposed by another.

Partially yes.

Then there are other things that are hard to see as anything other than deliberate policy.

And on top of that you have more subtle things that are hard to prove are deliberate, but you have to keep in mind you're talking to a self-confessed conspiracy theorist.

Unless by "to yourself" you mean to say they're imposed by my own government. In which case: yes, but the people ruling me are hostile occupiers, as far as I'm concerned.

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