domain:youtube.com
As others have suggested, many women (performatively or genuinely) overestimate the danger men pose, due to a combination of lipstick feminism, movies and television, being meme-susceptible, humble bragging as to being so desirable as to be a constant target for rape, a lifetime of being sheltered away from actually being under real risk of physical harm, perhaps some rape fantasy and hybristophilic wish-fulfillment sprinkled in there.
I’d also posit that on the flipside, women underestimate the danger animals, whether wild or domesticated, pose in general. Or at least, the modal woman underestimates the danger animals pose to her in particular, under the belief that in such situations her Disney Princess powers will kick in and she’ll have immediate rapport with the animals. Hence why defending pitbulls as nanny dogs is female-coded and the countless selfies of young women making a sad face with cuts and scratches after some mostly gentle mauling from getting too cuddly with a dog.
There’s a video that comes to mind but I can’t find, of a girl in a skirt or dress and Uggs getting rammed by a goat or sheep (wait, not that kind of video) because she picked up its offspring for a cUtE Insta photo. When she saw the mother coming, she tried evading by daintily kicking up a puff of dirt (“ugh, stupid mother! shoo”) and half-heartedly jogging away with the offspring in her arms before getting chased down in like half a second. Thot status: patrolled and offspring protected.
And of course, as always there’s the whole Who? Whom? aspect, as the bear vs. black man permutation hilariously illustrates.
Quantumfreakonomics
15hr ago
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.
As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
sliders1234
9hr ago
The evidence synthesized infant formula is bad is entirely from confounded studies showing mothers who breast feed lead to better results. But mothers who breast feed have a lot of other advantages for kids.
laxam
17hr ago
The bear is the option of someone who knows they'll never have to make this choice.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2hr ago
This is going to sound like edgy contrarianism for the sake of edgy contrarianism, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's not:
I really don't care. And if you told me that counter-protesters were being funded by Israel, I wouldn't care about that either. In a conflict where moral fervor runs high, I am an advocate for the freedom to simply not care.
I'm just tired of the moral guilt tripping from both sides. If you want to criticize the protesters, criticize their tactics. There's plenty to criticize there. But their alleged ties to Hamas add nothing to the story for me. In general I have always felt that concerns over "foreign manipulation of political sentiment" were paranoia of the worst kind. If the governments of Russia or China or the US (organizations that have engaged in plenty of nasty unethical behavior in the past that could plausibly be classified as "terrorism") want to pay for a Times Square billboard and fund some student organizations to get their message out then I say let them. Free speech doesn't stop at our borders; I am for open trade in a global free market of ideas.
I can't reasonably bring myself to be invested in every ethnic and sectarian conflict that happens around the world, particularly when its direct impact on me seems rather limited. If the Sudanese Masalit want to organize protests in the US against the RSF then bully for them; whether they win or lose in their struggles, I'm not going to lose sleep either way. I view Israel-Palestine similarly: just another in a long series of ethnic conflicts in a region of the world that is known for being prone to violent ethnic conflicts.
In some sense I am forced to care, due to the generous financial aid that the US supplies to Israel. But my investment doesn't extend beyond that.
SlowBoy
13hr ago
Ban is a bad policy for getting to the goal.
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
If I wanted to popularize lab-grown meat, I'd start by making it exotic and sexy. Growing chicken and steak might be the ultimate goal, but this is a losing proposition: everybody knows what beef is supposed to taste like. I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant. These meats would have a winning price-tag compared to "real" meat, and nobody can tell if they're not good enough. Run a promotion where the profits from every $70 "Penguin Steak" go to sustaining Penguin habitats.
I've also thought about opening a shell company that would advertise and sell lab-grown human flesh steaks. Sell a fun and fancy experience of getting to be a cannibal, except it's "ethical". This would generate a lot of publicity and interest. But I'm not actually sure whether that would ultimately be a winning or losing move.
Sloot
20hr ago
If your daughter gets eaten by a bear, the Daughter Question pasta can still apply:
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having had that daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You were feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she could teehee off into the woods and get eaten by a bear. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it had one simple result: her body was more enjoyable for the bear who would eventually feast on her every limb.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10hr ago
I fail to see how this analogy is remotely appropriate.
The primary reason that people who are vegan/vegetarian (for non-religious reasons, and even plenty of those) condemn the consumption of meat is because their heart aches at the idea of eating cute little animals, with souls, emotions and a life of endless frolicking in the pastures to look forward to. Most of the arguments advanced alongside that primary concern, such as "sustainability" and environmental issues or resource consumption, are there just to buttress their core concern.
I wholeheartedly agree with @Quantumfreakonomics when he says that:
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
After all, I've repeatedly said much the same myself.
Hence the recent fad, only just losing steam, of feverishly trying to find vegan substitutes for meat products. Impossible Burgers and all that jazz. Vegans, begrudgingly, note that they either like meat or that people who otherwise care dearly about animal welfare are dissuaded by the dullness of a life without nice steaks or a side of ribs to go with it.
So lab grown meat completely cuts the Gordian knot. No cute animals were hurt (or at least far fewer, if you don't look too closely at where fetal bovine serum comes from, but presumably we can avoid that too). What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds? A chunk of vatgrown muscle tissue is probably less sentient than an equivalent amount of fungi.
But of course, like the environmentalist movement and the cleanest and greenest source of energy we had/have/can have*, nuclear, much of the opposition arises from the abhorrent idea that their self-flagellation and virtue signaling will become entirely redundant. What brownie points do you get for not eating a cow, when the average Joe who just wants to grill is using a steak that's indistinguishable from one made the old fashioned way, tastes just as good, and might even be cost competitive?
We're not there yet, and the last overview I read of the topic suggested it's not going to be easy at all, but the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).
*Barring fusion, or farming black holes I guess.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10hr ago
from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation
AIUI, most of these involve single-celled organisms, with their own abilities to fight off rival microbes that animal muscle cells, adapted to the presence of a broader immune system, lack. And for the rest, look at how much the products cost — and that's usually chemicals produced by the organisms rather than the cultured cells themselves. Or how much a financial hit is taken if a vat or batch "goes bad." You'll be required to maintain a food production plant more sterile than a medical lab, at industrial scale.
Again, I read a lot of stuff without remembering where I read it, so I don't have cites on hand, but a quick google search gave this link: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story."
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
…
Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
…
“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
…
GFI’s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year. JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
…
It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
…
“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.
The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
…
Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.
“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”
…
The risks are even more dire when it comes to slow-growing animal cells in large reactors, because bacteria will overwhelm the cells more quickly. At the scale envisioned by proponents of cultured meat, there is little room for error. But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap. Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars. That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.
According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":
The first of Humbird's grievances is the need for a cheap and plentiful supply of nutrients for the cells. [15] Currently, such cell food is produced for pharmaceutical purposes, so is expensive and not produced in the vast quantities required have cultured meat supplant animal meat on the global market. [15] In fact, nutrients are the currently the most expensive part of cultured meat production. [15] On top of that, the most popular source for key biochemicals needed for proper cell growth is fetal bovine serum (FBS). [16] FBS is harvested (lethally) from unborn cattle after the mother is slaughtered. [16] A replacement for FBS will have to be found to keep the ethics people on cultured meat's side. Additionally, the cells' food would need to be extremely clean. In the case of animal meat, any trace toxins in the animal feed are (mostly) filtered out by the animal's liver, and do not end up in the muscle. However, for cultured meat, the cellular slurry inside the bioreactor has no liver, meaning any toxin left in the feed is put directly on your plate.
An effective scale-up of cultured meat production would also require an incredibly clean work environment. The warm, nutrient-rich bioreactor, ideal for animal cell growth, is also the perfect environment for pathogens (bacteria and viruses). If a single pathogen managed to get a foothold in the bioreactor, it would quickly overwhelm the animal cells, killing the entire batch. This restriction requires labs to be at least Class 6 cleanrooms. [15] Importantly, since that level of sanitation requires all pipes, windows, etc. to be perfectly sealed, as well as ventilation replacing the air 25 times an hour, they get much more expensive with size. Essentially, you can have a large factory or a clean factory. Cultured meat requires both. In animals, pathogens are mostly dealt with by the immune system. Since the cell slurry has no immune system, great care and expense must be invested to ensure the cells' safety.
The final problem I'll discuss is the limits on the size of the bioreactors. Larger bioreactors are more space-efficient, allowing you to have smaller cleanrooms, reducing those sanitation costs. However, larger bioreactors are also more susceptible to disease, since pathogens can ruin the entire batch. Beyond that cost balance lies another problem with larger bioreactors: waste management. When left to their own devices, cells build up waste products which slow down future cell growth. Cycling out this waste effectively is only possible in small bioreactors, requiring more reactors, therefore larger and much more expensive cleanrooms. [15] Another possible solution is to use slow-growing cell cultures, since they are more waste-efficient, however less frequent batches means again more reactors are required, again ratcheting up the price. [15] In animals, waste is extracted via blood vessels. Since cell cultures have no blood vessels, cell waste becomes a problem.
Can you link a study on that from any group that isn't openly pushing to abolish meat? Because I'm familiar with the propaganda tricks: classifying all rain that falls on grazing lands as "water used for animals", etc.
I know what my inputs and outputs are, and the inputs are extremely minimal. It's likely that the US wastes a lot of grain fattening up cows and even sheep (US carcass weights for "lambs" are double the UK's, which hurts quality for zero benefit), but those are inefficiencies due to our historically cheap feed prices and lack of innovation in decaying markets.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
23hr ago
Why would changing from yourself to your daughter being in the forest change anything? The bear is far more dangerous in either case (assuming we're talking about an average male human vs average bear) and can't be reasoned with. If anything your daughter is better placed to charm the man and get him to sacrifice himself for her if needs be than you are.
On the other hand if the comparison is between a particularly dumb human vs Yogi Bear then I would go with the bear...
MartianNight
4hr ago
by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins.
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
10hr ago
I presume the primary proponents are persons who prefer to partake of provisions procured without the pain of prey.
(Sorry, got to "proponents" and couldn't help myself.)
ResoluteRaven
11hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15hr ago
I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.
NullHypothesis
23hr ago
Because we have been conditioned by society to tell our daughters to avoid strange men (and for good reason!) and men are applying that same conditioning to this scenario. It's a trick to try to get men to consider the scenario from a woman's perspective.
As you point out, your daughter would have greater chances with a random man than with a bear.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
gattsuru
12hr ago
There's a few vendors that passed USDA clearance last year, though they've had production and funding problems that have kept its products from having too much of an impact on the store shelves, and it's not clear the tech is going to get there very soon.
On the other hand, when or if the tech does get there, there's not much trust that it's gonna be left for people to choose. Whether for environmental, animal suffering, or macroeconomic reasons, there's going to be a massive push to 'regulate the unpriced externalities' of conventional meat, and many routes for that, like restricting grazing permits, will be near-invisible to normal people.
Fetterman is pretty much a socialist maga now. I wouldn’t count him as a true blue Dem anymore. He’s basically one of the old unionists Dems who until he got in office forgot they left him behind.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Generally, things ran on Kafka's playbook with a side of hypocrisy.
Yes, I’d definitely gotten the impression of apartheid being a corrupt mess running off of cheap labor and limited central control of the state apparatus, which didn’t work as well as it’s thought to have. It’s nice to have that confirmed.
What I’d never heard was the description of it as being fundamentally bureaucratically arbitrary; most people who described living under the system- including one who was half Lebanese and I would have expected to suffer from bureaucratic probes into his racial classification- described the oppressive aspects as being aimed at other people- either blacks or dissident whites who couldn’t keep their heads down. I’m totally willing to believe it could be a problem for some people, though.
And BTW ‘Japanese are white but Chinese are colored’ and ‘Muslims are colored unless they’re Turks’ just seem like common sense to me, although I suppose that’s not the extent of racial arbitrariness.
pigeonburger
20hr ago
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
If you found yourself in the same, say, square kilometer as a bear, it is extremely unlikely to attack you. But you are also unlikely to see the bear; it will very much want to avoid you as much as he/she can. If the terrain is open maybe you'll see it at a distance, it's not likely to care unless you get close. But if you do find yourself face-to-face with the bear, the probabilities of attack are very different to the baseline. You might have wandered in proximity to its cubs. The bear might be habituated to human presence, associating them with food. The bear might be starving. These are all bad things.
A human is not gonna outrun a bear. Especially not in uneven terrain and in the forest. You can't climb a tree to evade it. And it has excellent sense of smell so you're unlikely to be able to hide from it.
zeke5123a
21hr ago
Apartheid is almost universally derided. But was it better for South Africa? This is a variation of the Ian Smith argument.
It was clearly better for the whites. Perhaps it was better for the non whites (less crime, better functioning government).
It raises the question of what the purpose of government is (ie is it about creating a good life or is it about self determination). If the latter, then what is the SA argument against allowing the Boers to form their own separate country. There isn’t even the anti colonialism argument.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
23hr ago
I always feel that everytime I read about East Asian social problems, it’s extremely focused on highly educated upper middle class striving part of the population. But then what about the remaining 80%+ of the population? What do Koreans who don’t do well at school think? The ones whose parents just run a shop or works for the municipality or something? People who never thought about buying a flat in a good area anyway? Surely there is also a real massive drop in the fertility rates of such people as well and it’s not because they are off studying or working 80 hours a week?
It depends what you mean by "better". A lot of older black folks look back on it wistfully given the current state of the country (I've had them joke to me about asking if they can vote for de Klerk), but for young black south africans the general attitude is that opportunity for aspiration is worth the price.
The real problem with apartheid is just that it didn't work very well. It was a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small group of hardline Afrikaner Calvinists who wished they could repress whites as much as they repressed blacks. The army was stronger than Rhodesia's in terms of size and equipment, but far less well-run and well-led. The "deep state" acted with complete lawlessness, dabbling in everything from illegal medical experiments to rhino poaching. The government blocked the introduction of TV until 1976, in large part for religious reasons. The system's fundamental contradiction between the desire for separation and the need for cheap black labour created a class of displaced single male labourers who would then become the foundation of modern townships. The racial classifications in mixed cities made no sense - Japanese were white, Chinese were coloured, Muslims were coloured unless they were Turks, in which case they were white, and god help you if some bureaucrat decided to screw with your classification. Generally, things ran on Kafka's playbook with a side of hypocrisy.
Now, could apartheid have worked if it had been set up properly from the beginning by some visionary genius and run efficiently? Yes, I suspect so, given the example of Rhodesia only folding to external pressure, or the possibility of simply jettisoning the "bantustans" as genuinely separate countries (though once SA was addicted to cheap labour, that became impossible). Did apartheid deliver many extremely valuable things, like basic safety, that SA no longer does? Largely yes. Could actually existing apartheid have survived, even without sanctions, without ending up collapsing into a race war? Only, in the long run, by becoming a genuinely totalitarian police state with all that implied - and, ultimately, that would have been a sad fate for a country founded by some of Europe's most freedom-loving children.
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