It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese.
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Samizdata quote of the day – South Africa circling the drainJune 14th, 2023 |
 45 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – South Africa circling the drain |
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Change the name to all but one British PM of the last 13 years, and Western Cape to Dover and the ANC to the Conservative Party and it could apply to the UK.
South Africa is just Detroit writ large. Coleman Young told the whites to get on the other side of Eight Mile Road, so they did and took their tax base with them. The result is the total collapse of the city.
South Africa should have paid attention.
Oh well.
I don’t think the drain would want it!
Russia and China will – I would guess – wait on anything further for South Africa. The price is only going to go down over the next decade. Belt and Road Initiative is already there, of course, but hasn’t paid off at all yet.
South Africa is f*cked. It was the moment that the white minority was pushed into surrendering to the ANC, which was always a communist front run by thugs.
Same as Rhodesia, just delayed a few decades.
What the whites should have done is gotten out, completely, and abandoned the place to the blacks. In a few short generations, they would have (as they are…) depopulated and ruined the place, and then they could have returned. If they wanted to.
Not being racist, either… Were you to have replaced the people of the ANC with some of the more reasonable Nigerians, South Africa would have been fine. But, with the lot they have? LOL… Yeah. No.
The real situation here is that the various do-gooder types who demanded the dismantlement of apartheid destroyed what could have been the leading nation of Africa, and for what? To feel good about themselves? Raw fact is, the South African situation was what it was due to the intractibly feral nature of much of the population, coupled with the reactionary response that garnered from the majority of realistic whites.
Y’all just don’t “get” the real nature of the problem, which is something I didn’t really fully understand until I met a couple of South African security operators over in Iraq. They weren’t all white, either… If anything, the mixed-race guys were rather more down on the majority population of tribal types than the whites were, having been caught in the middle between the two. The crap those ex-South African Police guys described to me was beyond belief, and the only thing they could answer when I asked them why the hell they hadn’t gotten out when they could was that they’d grown up there and loved the place, not necessarily the people.
You really do not want to delve into what goes on between the tribal blacks and the “colored” mixed-race groups. It’s extremely ugly, disturbing, and entirely disgusting. Also, as an aside? If you can avoid it, don’t be born an albino black girl in an area where AIDS is rife. Just… Don’t.
1) It is too late for those who did not beat feet out of there by now. You can feel sorry for them, but neither force nor politics can save them.
2) The American Left has the same plans for us, with the assumption that a white. Leftist Nomenklatura will rule over the rest of the proles. I fear we are beyond politics.
Subotai Bahadur
Now now Kirk. I have been assured, by all the bestest people, that racism is precluded by the presence of melanin. Sun power, and lack of representation, or something.
They simply cain’t be racist.
People can flee South Africa, but where to? The West seems to be intent on eating itself. I have family in Hong Kong, but that’s turning into Kaliningrad, with everything that is “Hong Kong” being swept out and replaced.
The major complaints weren’t necessarily “racist”, although that was a strong component. The major complaints were a.) inherent corruption/incompetence, and b.) superstition ruling everything. One of the colored guys I was talking to related stories about his boss hiring (with government money…) witch doctors to fix electrical problems in the station house he worked at, after someone was electrocuted. The boss legitimately thought that would solve the problem…
The whole “put-the-ANC-in-charge” idea reveals the magical thinking of everyone in the West, who failed to consider that the vast majority of the people who’d join such an organization were ne’erdowell types who couldn’t function in a modern society in the first damn place, much like the issue with those who ran Zimbabwe into the ground. Mugabe was never anything more than a successful thug, along with most of his fellows.
I never really bought into the whole idea with South Africa being evil personified, myself. But, they sure as hell didn’t manage what was essentially an unmanageable situation very well. I still think they’d have been a lot better off if instead of trying for a racially-reconciliated South Africa they’d split the place into constituent enclaves under a cantonal system, and let the blacks run their bits into the ground on their own. Hopefully, they’d have seen that the whiter enclaves weren’t going the same way and learned something from that, but… Noooo… We had to do the “right thing”, which proved to be entirely unworkable.
I suspect that the Chinese are going to wind up trying to run the place, and they’re eventually going to either resort to genocide or throw their hands up and leave the whole thing to the natives. I just don’t see it un-f*cking itself, at all. Same with a lot of Africa, sadly. The sub-Saharan bits of the continent may be entirely beyond help, and that’s entirely down to culture, not race.
Although, I suppose you could make an argument that culture is merely the expression of things in the genes that are somewhat correlated with the markers we take as “race”…
As the saying goes, Africa wins again.
Building on what Kirk has observed, we should bear in mind that the Chinese don’t want the land, and they don’t want to trade, and they don’t want to export to these places, or to run them – they only want the resources. They’re quite happy to let the locals starve to death, kill each other in internecine struggles, or subsist in hopeless poverty and want while the corrupticrats who always, always, always seem to rise the the surface in sub-Sharan Africa steal their substance, their patrimony and their posterity – so long as the nickel and the copper keep flowing reliably. So the Chinese will more-likely set up heavily-defended extractive centers and supply lines to the coasts, and simply pay off said corrupticrats to keep the local populations either compliant, ignorant or apathetic. They’ll only “throw up their hands and leave the whole thing to the natives” when the yields on the ores fall to a point where they can do better elsewhere. Genocide isn’t a likely outcome – they are businessmen, and blood is a big expense – they’ll just find ways to keep the locals away from their operations, and only for as long as they want to keep extracting.
llater,
llamas
SkippyTony writes, “As the saying goes, Africa wins again.”
Not Africa. Socialism. There are some political delusions whose appeal to the human mind is so strong that no failure, however spectacular, can cure them for long. The worst famines of the twentieth century did not take place in Africa but in China during 1958-62, in the Soviet Union in 1921-22, and again in the Soviet Union during 1932-34, particularly in Ukraine. The common factor wasn’t geographical location or race.
And the worst recent famine that did take place in Africa, the Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s, wasn’t caused by Africa, it came about for the usual reasons:
I’d beg to differ with you, Natalie.
Socialism metastasizing up out of the schoolrooms inhabited by inveterate students is a function of far deeper issues in a society that result in that happening. It’s not the socialism, per se, but the things that lead to enough people saying “Yeah! That looks like a great idea! Let’s try it!”
Absent the social dysfunction enabled by the nobility and royalty of France, the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened, and all the ravings of the various idjits who animated that nightmare would have remained mere subjects for academic study.
Adoption of socialism is a symptom of other, deeper-rooted ills in a society. Generally related to the over-production of wannabe elites who use “socialism” as a lever to get themselves the power they feel so entitled to.
I think it’s a manifestation of other things, not a root cause. So long as the idiots espousing it are unable to convince others that it’s a good idea, it’s a harmless pastime for sophomoric dorm room discussion over a beer or a joint. Once things are dislocated enough in the greater outside society, usually due to the idiots in charge not doing their jobs…? Then, it’s a major damn problem. But, it is really a symptom more than a cause.
“Yeah! That looks like a great idea! Let’s try it!”
The part that has always baffled me is why this doesn’t immediately die a death as soon as it is pointed out that everyone who did try it, everyone ever, found out that it wasn’t a great idea after all. It is always, without a single exception, a disaster. So why are you expecting it to be great this time around?
Socialism is driven by a belief in its own moral rectitude. Any socialist will readily attribute his or her commitment to socialism in moral terms. To socialist leaders, therefore, any consequences of socialist policy which run counter to the aims and ends of socialism must be attributed either to enemy reactionary forces, or to insufficient zeal on the part of its friends in the socialist project.
Socialism Produces Good Outcomes is the one assertion from which all other arguments derive: bad outcomes must therefore be caused by anti-socialism, or by insufficient socialism. This is why when land confiscations, or currency export limits, or rent controls, or state subsidies of uncompetitive industries do not produce the intended beneficial outcome, the confiscations, limits, controls and subsidies must go up rather than down.
The effect is like a lifeboat captain prescribing the ingestion of increasing volumes of seawater to his thirsty crew. Becuase he believes that seawater is water, and because he knows that water relieves thirst, and that his crew must not be thirsty, his actions are ruinous, and increasingly so. His knowledge is not faulty; his beliefs however dictate irrational actions, and their ceaseless repetition. This analysis applies alike to the wicked captain, who doesn’t care whether his crew survive or not so long as the boat gets him to safety, and to the benign captain, who loves his crew like a parent, and who weeps to see them thirsty.
It’s generous to characterize it that way.
I would say it’s more like a Captain who doesn’t wish to give up fresh water to wash his dainty hands, and so requires those under his authority to swallow salt so that he might tend to his abolutions in comfort and style.
Certainly those pushing such policies today do not propose to suffer the privations they prescribe for others.
Yes, I think jgh has the basics of the situation correct. The whole western way of life is under profound threat, and while this is clearer to see in Johannesburg than London, the general trend is there. It is just a matter of time. Unfortunately.
So why are you expecting it to be great this time around?
– Remember, we’re talking the LEFT here; they’re blinded by the gleam of the “Shining Lie”, and anybody who tries to point-out that it’s a lie is for the gulag once the Left takes-over – which they will; it’s inevitable, Marx even said so. So the two factors they’re in thrall to, are:
1) Socialism itself – “The Soviet Union built itself into a GREAT POWER, and the People were ALL HAPPY – they WERE!!! And why did it all collapse? – they were stabbed in the back by the West”, and:
2) Their blind, fanatical, Utopian belief in their own infallibility, just like the adherents of every other religion: “Oh of course WE would NEVER let that happen in OUR dream collective! We’re MUCH smarter than everybody else!” And you just can’t get them to internalise that their much-smarter brains don’t work anymore once they’ve been blown-out onto a convenient wall by the Bolsheviks – which is what always happens to the useful idiots, it’s another universal function of every communist Utopia.
I met a woman in Perth, Western Australia, who had emigrated from South Africa, and she could not see the link between the whites’ policies (she was white) and the blacks’ embrace of communism. She seemed to think the apartheid system was natural, and linked it to capitalism, and wondered why communism was preferred!
Give it a few more years, and all concerned will be looking back on the “Good Old Days” of apartheid as some sort of golden age when the electricity flowed and the water coming out of the taps was drinkable…
The problem with the whole thing really began with the incredibly unrealistic views all parties concerned had about the situation. The Boers thought they could dominate forever, the English thought that sweetness and light would prevail, and the tribal types all thought that they could do just as well as the whites did, without putting in the effort to either educate themselves or do the actual work of running the country. The ANC still operates as though they were looting whitey, instead of grasping that they’re looting themselves. They’ve effectively replaced the whites running the country, but without their success at organizing it all.
I don’t think you can run a multi-ethnic state wherein you have these vast gulfs of culture and capability between the ethnicities. Such a society will never do anything well, and will spend much of its time in infighting between the groups.
Which is why I think they should have split South Africa up into enclaves, divided things fairly, and then left it at that. Trying to make a go of that country with the circumstances as they existed? Just… Not happening.
The entire mess began back when the Brits were building South Africa as their colony. I suspect that if the Dutch had been left in charge, it would have remained the Cape Colony, and relatively small. The insane conglomeration with the territories of the Zulu and Xhosa would never have happened, and some rational borders would have been worked out, rather than the whole “combine it all for Imperial glory”. Absent the pressure of the British coming in, would the Boers have felt the need to make the Trek? Would they have remained there on the coast, never going inland to create the long-term problems?
Well to be fair, that was not true for most people who lived in many of the townships.
Botswana is right next to South Africa and has a largely black population – yet is not very badly governed.
The problem with South Africa is ideological not racial – it is the dominance of “Social Justice” ideas, both in the ANC and in other people.
“But the crime – even the railways have been destroyed by criminals taking the rails and other stuff for scrap metal” – the crime is also part of “Social Justice” doctrine, the denial of private property rights.
Some American D.A.s show the same attitude -including those put in power by the money of Mr Soros, although the elderly Mr Soros may not really be in control of his money these days.
So does the largely white population of Portland Oregon – they believe in “Social Justice” as well.
Social Justice is EVIL, it is INJUSTICE, it is the opposite of justice. Social Justice is theft, Social Justice is plundering which leads to economic breakdown and societal chaos.
“But Paul senior members of your own political party say they support Social Justice”.
Yes, I am aware of that – as is Mr Ed.
The protection of private property (especially in land – the chaos of so many Latin American countries can be traced to lack of clear property title, which is actually defended and secure), and freedom to produce and to trade, is what an economy is about – and, in the end, all of society depends on this.
@Perry de Havilland,
Too true. But, again… Were those conditions the results of things done to the inhabitants, or by the inhabitants?
https://www.sapeople.com/2022/11/01/thieves-have-stolen-cape-town-school-brick-by-brick/
I am not saying that the apartheid regime was right, but I am going to point out that there were other reasons than apartheid explaining why those communities were what they were.
South Africa was a mess, and it ain’t fixing itself that I can see. They exchanged one set of mostly competent racists running the place for another set of mostly incompetent ones, and they appear to be OK with the whole thing.
The colored South Africans I’ve talked to were the ones I had the most sympathy for… Everyone was out to get them, and none of the mess was their doing.
I had the same thought Paul, but I did not comment, since I then only had Precious Ramotswe’s word, for Botswana’s excellence. I feared someone here would overturn my happy view of that country.
It’s down to the people involved.
The real problem with racism is that it’s based on false premises, the idea that cosmetic details of different ethnic groups are meaningful. The idea has a certain logic to it, given our experience with domestic animals. Who is afraid of a Golden Retriever? Who isn’t cautious around a pit bull?
And, there may well be some slight truth to the whole idea of appearances indicating deeper behavioral traits, but we often interpret those very, very badly:
https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-genes-behind-domestication
What they’re talking about there, “domestication syndrome” is something that most people know instinctively. You see a lovely domesticated doggy with floppy ears, you feel a hell of a lot safer than one which still carries wolf traits for pointy-up ones… This is engrained into the human behavioral complex enough that I suspect it plays a huge role in expressed racism, because whenever that reflexive response of “looks primitive, undomesticated” gets triggered by appearance or behavior…? Do the math.
Nearly everyone will instinctively tell you that a German Shepherd or some other dog breed retaining more wolf characteristics is dangerous, based on appearances, while almost totally ignoring the risk from a dog like a St. Bernard or Golden Retriever, strictly due to the visual signals they send. It feels valid, doing that. It’s why they crop ears on dogs like Rottweilers and others, so that they stick up…
And, there may be at least something to it. Look at our own unreconstructed ancestors of Scots-Irish heritage, and compare the levels of social violence prevalent in their communities of a hundred or more years ago. Honor killings? Yep; we had them. Casual murder in bars? Yep; we had those, too. What changed? I’d be willing to lay long odds on certain specific genes having been culled either through actual elimination, or methylation in an epigenetic phenomenon.
The reasons why a lot of African populations are the way they are, from scoring low on the IQ test to having poor ability to function in modern society (like a lot of Scots-Irish from back in the day, I would point out…) comes down to poor adaptation, not a lack of some hypothetical “virtue” that all the racists want to ascribe. Everyone of these idiots, from the Nazis to Planned Parenthood to the KKK, has been focused on their own kind, thinking them to be the ultimate in human. Reality? They’re just somewhat better adapted to the modern environment we’ve created for ourselves, and contemptuous of any who aren’t.
Which is asinine. The assumption of virtue just cracks me up, with all these types, no matter when or where I encounter it. “Oh, I’m so smart…” Yeah? Tell me again why you have to hire my ass to fix your doorknob, my good professor?
The other thing is that if you leave a given population of human beings in a given environment, they’ll eventually adapt to it. If you get the hell out of their way, that is… Which we aren’t doing with a lot of the sub-populations here in the West that aren’t adapted to conditions. You’re doing them no favors by not helping those populations cull the unfit for conditions out of their population, and when you subsidize maladaptive behavior? You’re just prolonging the process and making actual adaptation a lot less likely.
Someone today pointed out to me that GDP growth in South Africa has been high over the last years – my response to that is that it shows that “GDP” is a stupid measure of the strength of an economy, it measures consumption not really production.
GDP growth has also been “excellent” in the United States (as the despicable Economist magazine keeps reminding us) – but have a drive around, you will not see a country that is prospering, you will see a country that is falling apart.
Assuming you can trust any of the numbers they report…
I’m pretty sure that nothing coming out of any of the major governments is accurate, at all. Smaller countries, where things are closer to the bone…? Maybe you can trust Finland’s numbers, but the rest of them? I can but laugh.
When the reckoning comes, I guarantee you that you’re going to be shocked, shocked I say, that the numbers here in the US were falsified and deliberately distorted.
@ Natalie, you wont get any argument about the evils of socialism from me, but Africa was a terrible hell hole long before Marx was born. On one level it serves as a real world exemplar of the logical conclusion of tribalism, which seems to be the emerging evil of the 21st Century. From North to South, the western idea of “nation states” has not really caught on in Africa. All that matters is Tribe and Family. Tribes are not democratic meritocracies, they are Aristocratic in nature. Socialism implies (no matter how imperfectly implemented) that the needs of the many are placed above the needs of the few, correct?. Though they may at times hide behind it as a flag of convenience, Tribes cannot be socialistic in practice. They much more closely resemble the Aristocratic model, where the main role of the masses is to serve the elite – Indeed, examples abound through history where the elites treat the masses as a resource to be harvested. The things that are destroying what we think of as nations, eg South Africa or Zimbabwe is the visible decay of western values. Rule of law? Phhht, imperialist rubbish. Property values? Only to the extent that the Tribe (eg the Aristocrats) own anything. Universal Suffrage? White man mania. Lets not even get started on western constructs like women’s rights or gay rights.
So, pretty much, they are winding the dial back to pre-enlightenment which is a tragedy of massive proportions, but largely a complete own goal. As far as I can see, there is no evidence of this trend being reversed anywhere on the continent. In a generation Africa will be back to pre-Victorian times. A savage and brutal place where resources are there to be plundered by the strong. Lets hope its not contagious.
I take exception to your characterization of tribalism as an “emerging evil”. News flash: That’s not “emerging”, it’s always been there. Why do you think Ireland and Scotland were so easily dominated by the bloody Sassenachs?
If anything, that should be phrased as “re-emerging” or “devolving into”.
You can also observe it taking place in real time, here in the West. Deliberately encouraged by the powers-that-be, in an attempt to acquire more power, and retain that which they already have.
Socialism isn’t necessarily a bad thing; most nuclear families are run on socialist principles, as are military forces and many other things like expeditions. The problem comes when you try to take the ideals of the small family and military and then apply them to the greater whole of an entire economy, which doesn’t work because the same rules and conditions don’t obtain there.
There are times and places for socialism, just as there are times and places for traditional economics. I don’t hold with the term “capitalism”, because that’s something ginned up by the idjit class to cast derision at the things that work.
The thing here is that the real issue is that the typical African mentality prevalent in Southern Africa does not want to be a part of the same sort of modern economy we’ve built. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing; it is simply a thing. Because of that, they’re tearing the one they were handed down, and will regress down the tree of “progress” until they reach a point that they are comfortable with. Again, not a good thing or a bad thing, just a thing; you cannot forcibly “fix” someone, make them participate in something they don’t want or understand. It’s very much like dealing with an alcoholic; until they reach the moment when they are tired of being ruled by the alcohol, they’ll keep right on drinking. You don’t “fix” them from the outside, not if you want the “fix” to stick.
And, again: It’s not a value judgment. If the majority of South Africans aren’t comfortable with living under modern civilized conditions, you can’t force that on them. They’ll do as they want, finding solutions that suit them. It’s just like with the Japanese/Chinese responses to Western encroachment: The Japanese went their way, the Chinese theirs, and here we are. Anyone trying to judge either group should step back and think again about what their own people’s reactions were.
Hell, I’m mostly Scottish, according to my genes and family genealogy. My ancestors were, I am afraid, a bunch of rude tribalistic primitives encountering more civilized and efficient Englishmen. We were poorly adapted to the environment, being next door to the bloody-minded English monarchists. As such, we got pushed out and/or force-drafted into adapting. Many of my people got on fairly well as hirelings for the English, and went on to oppress others around the world. Some of us got even better at the civilization thing than the English did, and we wound up running their bloody empire for them, in a lot of key and essential ways. That’s the way these things work. Adapt, or die.
Africa seems hell-bent on dying. Which they’ll do, until they reach a compromise with the actual carrying capacity of their lands under the ways they want to run things. Can’t be helped.
This is the essential and utter problem with colonialism as the British practiced it… Unless you find fertile ground with the locals who are willing to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, the sad fact is that you can’t really force civilization as we’ve developed it onto people who don’t want it, not without doing what we Americans did to the locals. Which, I fear I must point out, amounted to a total replacement of them.
Neither pretty nor pleasant, but it is what it is. It’s the way of the world, nature red in tooth and claw. You only get to be what the Sentinelese are when you have neighbors who don’t want your lands and are willing to put up with your raving primitivism. Anyone else? Darwin, baby…
That stretches the definition of “socialism” to the point it becomes meaningless.
Talk to anyone espousing for socialism or socialist ideas/ideals, and you’ll find out that they’re really longing for mommy and daddy to take care of them, again. They want the safety and comfort of the womb, and to never, ever have to grow up.
Perpetual responsibility- and consequence-free childhood. That’s why so many of them are drug users and wastrels, refusing to participate in productive activities. It’s also why they clamp down on anyone else doing productive things, because that makes them look bad and feel guilty for their sloth.
It’s very much the perpetual self-renewing crab bucket, pulling anyone who wants out of the bucket back down into it, because “equity”. The majority of the adherents I’ve run into over the years are all infantilized man-children who fear adulthood.
So… Yeah. I disagree. They want the safety, security, and responsibility-free world of the toddler and adolescent. We get these people because we created the idea of childhood and adolescence in the first damn place, because I guarantee you that if the majority had been forced out onto their own two feet the way we used to, they’d have either grown up or died. It’s not accidental that the rise of socialism came in with the concept of a lengthy childhood, putting off adulthood until their mid-20s.
Sure, it’s atavistic, but that’s like describing the spring in a watch as “a watch” rather than just a component. Your comments are essentially correct, but I have a problem with your semantics.
To the extent that individual family members forgo their interests in the interests of the wider family, I guess families can be said to be socialistic. Of course in the west, its much more common to put your interests above those of your wider family. Arguably, say Chinese and Africans are willing to put “Family First”, but again, I dont think socialism is the fundamental issue in Africa, its tribalism and by implication the rejection of *ahem* western values.
You’ve lost me, there…
Semantics being defined as:
1. The study or science of meaning in language.
2. The competence of a speaker with regard to the interpretation of the meaning of linguistic structures.
3. The study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent.
I am not seeing where semantics of the terms I’m using are at all germane. Is there another meaning to the word I’m unfamiliar with?
The textbook definition of socialism generally goes thusly:
If that isn’t descriptive of a nuclear family, as it operates within the framework of a larger society, I’d be hard pressed to really come up with another economic description. Families do not generally operate on a for-profit basis, nor do they have internal markets. Well, other than those that the benign dictators, the parents, set up as training mechanisms for their progeny in order to prepare them for the wider world. Yes, they’re not formally set up as socialistic, but that’s what they are. Children don’t pay their parents for raising them, and parents don’t charge their kids for their food, shelter, and clothing. Truly a case of “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities…”
@Kirk
Talk to anyone espousing for socialism or socialist ideas/ideals, and you’ll find out that they’re really longing for mommy and daddy to take care of them, again. They want the safety and comfort of the womb, and to never, ever have to grow up.
I don’t agree at all. I am about as far from a socialist as it is possible to be, but to think that all socialists are somehow wanting to crawl back into their mamma’s womb is ridiculous. The fact is that we live in a horrible corporatist world controlled by big governments empowering big corporations who do everything in their power to take away the power of the individual. At the bottom there are some vestiges of free markets left, but not much, and less and less every day. That people kick against those pricks is hardly surprising, and that they have been indoctrinated into thinking this is “capitalism” makes it pretty obvious why they hate capitalism. Heck, I hate that brand of “capitalism” too.
Because of our society’s indoctrination into thinking the only two alternatives are “capitalism” which is really “corporatism” and “socialism” makes a preference for the latter a lot more understandable. You can see it in the US Healthcare system — it is some kind of vile, unnatural chimera of corporatism and socialism sewed together like some monster from Dr. Frankenstein. It is truly the worst of both worlds, and since nobody seems to even be able to conceptualize the idea of a true free market system in healthcare, in fact they are told the monster IS a free market system, it is no wonder that they long for the European model of healthcare.
And BTW, one of the tools of this indoctrination is the use of the word “capitalism” itself, which conjures up images of Scrooge McDuck sending your kids up the chimneys and down the mines. The term “free market” or just “freedom” is so much more accurately descriptive.
My experience is most people are decent, trying to make it in life and any political views they have are some vestige of trying to get “the man” off their back so they can get on with it. Our power elites in the media and politics have been very successfuly in deceiving people into thinking that “the man” is any man except them.
Well yes, your use of the word ‘socialism’ is the problem, one of semantics, as you treat it as a catch all term that largely denatures it. It is germane because you keep using it in a way that makes your comments hard to understand.
Whose property, resources, are being used within a family dynamic?
Also, say you have a business with a board of directors making collective decisions about resource allocation. If that socialism?
That would be up to the family in question and there is no longer a one size fits all answer. It could be one parent working and the other staying home, it could be both parents working, it could be both parents working but keeping separate bank accounts, it could be determined by laws about joint assets, it could be a child making the money while the parents sponge off of him in the case of successful child entertainers, it could be a mother and her boyfriend draining an ex-husband via the courts with alimony and child support, it could be entirely a single parent in the case of a widow or a parent with zero contact with the other parent, it could even be some messed up group collective thing in the case of polygamy. Although, I concede your point about it generally being joint effort by the parents.
Strictly speaking, aren’t the BoD employees of the owners (e.g. stockholders) or major funders in the case of a non-profit organization?
Amplifying Kirk’s point earlier about it not being about race. He brings up his own Scots-Irish heritage and their dis-functions as an example.
I don’t remember if it was in one of his books, or an article, but Dr. Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), posits something similar. He describes a place, and then challenges the reader to guess where he is describing. Best I can remember, it went something like this….
He describes a place in a big city. A government housing estate, where the majority of households are single welfare mothers with multiple children from multiple fathers, none of whom support their children. Often, these households are multi-generational, grandmother, mother, daughter, and now daughter’s kids. The male culture is “honour” and “dis” based, with lots of fighting and casual violence. Status is dependent on particular fashion, brand of shoes, “bling” etc. The major industries are welfare, welfare fraud, drug-dealing and other crime.
Now most people reading that will very likely assume he is describing a black urban ghetto in a US city like Detroit, Baltimore and so on.
Turns out, he was describing a welfare ghetto in Glasgow. The denizens of this place are Scots, outside of Scandinavia, probably the whitest people in the world. Some of them will likely get sunburned if they stay under fluorescent lights for too long. Scotland has produced a huge number of engineers, generals, colonial administrators, eminent surgeons. Modern road surfacing was invented by a Scottish engineer. One of the premier centers for medical education and the development of modern medicine in the 19th century was in Scotland.
There are plenty of whites with low IQ, short time preference, poor impulse control, and living in a dis-functional culture. It is those traits and that kind of culture, NOT race that is the problem.
@Perry de Havilland,
You apparently want “socialism” to apply only in big-picture, society-wide ways, when in fact that is only a narrow use of the term. Small-“s” socialism has been a term of art used to describe economic systems that exist in the absence of exchange mechanisms; you don’t have children bartering with their parents for their meals, nor their shelter, nor their clothing. The state (parents) provides… Literally everything.
And, that’s entirely appropriate and workable, just as the state-sponsored socialism of a military unit is. Or, along another avenue, some university-sponsored expedition off to explore something.
I’m not really sure what the hell else you would describe these economic sub-regions as. Is there an alternative description I’m unaware of? Enlighten us, please do.
Different systems work for different conditions, different environments. We’ve found that “for-profit” military systems don’t always work so well for the needs we’ve had, so those have mostly gone away. Rationally speaking, were we consistent with our economic system, we would be putting things like D-Day up for open bid, and then entrepreneurial officers would be bidding for the rights to conduct those operations for profit. Instead, the entirety of WWII (so far as actual military operations went) was conducted on a government-sponsored and government-run basis. Which, again, is essentially small-“s” socialist.
Which was my original point, that there are times and places where things like the principles of socialism are entirely appropriate, and times and places where they’re essentially non-operable and entirely undesirable. Just like other economic “system” ideas…
In my opinion, the real sin of the big-“S” Socialists, Communists, and Fascists isn’t so much their ideological ideas about the real-world economy, but their attempts to force-fit the whole thing into their ideological molds.
You hit a crisis, even a society built around traditional economics is going to have to do some unfortunate (from the ideological standpoint…) things to survive. Those things are justified, when they’re needed. So long as they work, that is…
..as for my native land, (I was born in Durban), the brain drain and general incompetence has progressed too far to be arrested. The primitive culture (and I use the word “primitive” in the academic/anthropological sense) doesn’t help.
What I mean by that is that pre-science, we used superstition and religion to provide comprehensible answers to unanswerable questions. Today we know what causes lighting, because we have a scientific explanation for it. Before that, we needed an explanation, so we came up with thunder gods and so on. Things we couldn’t explain were often ascribed to things like “witchcraft”. The problem with South Africa, is that an awful lot of people still subscribe to the older explanations, (particularly the witchcraft).
Lightning is a good example. I remember an incident where a survey team was surveying for a small dam project. One of the workers was murdered by a mob, because he was seen hammering metal stakes into the ground, so obviously a wizard trying to summon lightning!
There is a belief in much of Africa, that drowning is caused by witchcraft. There is a good, logical reason to believe that if you are part of that culture. After all, the logic goes, water is essential to life. If you drink water, you don’t drown. If you swim, or take a bath, you don’t drown, so if you drown, it must be because a witch or wizard cast a malevolent spell on you. The logic works, and it is perfectly “reasonable”, if you don’t have a modern scientific explanation.
When these sorts of “primitive” beliefs permeate a culture, you get what Kirk was talking about earlier, the idea of a culture incompatible with modern western culture. If you have a portion of the population doing so, no great harm. Lots of people in the west believe in crystal therapy and astrology after all, but if those beliefs are rife in the governing elite, you are hosed.
When the Minister of Education has a press conference to complain that her predecessor put a hex on her ministerial office, you are done! This was the Minister of EDUCATION!
Now I want to point out that all of the weird beliefs that hamstring Africa, are the same weird beliefs that Europeans believed well into the 19th, and even 20th century. The idea that sex with a virgin cures AIDS is very similar to a belief in 19th century Britain, that syphilis could be cured the same way.
The modern African belief in “juju” (or in South Africa “muthi”), that can stop bullets is mirrored in exactly the same belief held by soldiers in the English Civil War. Even the method is similar. Certain herbs and preparations wrapped in a piece of paper with a religious quotation were carried, and certain conditions applied, and if it failed, it must have been because the user didn’t follow the instruction properly.
I have seen a coffee table book on the of witchcraft in Europe, and one of the artifacts is a European equivalent of a voodoo doll. It was found in a stately home after WWII. The mansion had been lent to the military as a hospital, and temporary walls put up in the ballroom to convert it into nurses’ quarters. After the war when these were dismantled, the doll was found hidden in the wall. It was a small knitted doll of a woman in a nurse’s uniform. So in WWII, a nurse, presumably educated and intelligent, used this doll to put a hex on another nurse, likely a rival pursuing the same man.
So again, culture,not race.
No. socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself. ‘Politicalism’ would be a more honest term.
Paul, I feel forced to expand on your last line, there.
This is a poorly defined space, I’m afraid. There are problems with our definitions that I think block us from looking at this properly. We don’t want to be racists, so we hand-wave all the things that indicate that an awful lot of human behavioral traits are both “in the genes” and fully heritable. We also refuse to acknowledge that these things can be prevalent enough across the societies built up out of those group-collective heritable behavior traits to be able to make a lot of useful stereotype-based decisions, across a broad range of individuals.
Which isn’t to say that racism is justified, just that there are experience-based reasons for it to appear valid.
And, as I’ve said before, it’s a question of adaptation rather more than anything else. You have “racially black” populations in regions of Africa that have been playing the “civilization game” for a very long time, and you have other ones that haven’t. Is it any wonder that you get better results from transporting select Nigerians from long-“civilized” backgrounds to the United States than you do some of their neighbors who never left the tribal era of organization? Juxtapose “Somali-American” and “Nigerian-American”, and look at which group has done better, if you doubt me.
I think a lot of the problems we have dealing with Africa and Africans is that we still process everything based on appearance. If you’d only ever met Africans whose cultural and genetic backgrounds derived from the ancient Malian empire, you’d likely use that experience to extrapolate out and expect similar behavior from similar-appearing other groups who’d never taken part in anything more complex than a loose tribal grouping living in villages. Which would be, frankly, nuts.
I think the vast majority of the differences we see between different groups of humans stem from one thing and one thing only: Adaptation to conditions. Civilization is a game we play, and after enough of it, it changes you. Look at the differences between Ashkenazic Jews and Sephardic, in terms of test results and other things. The life-patterns the Ashkenazi had selected for certain traits that translate well into high scores on the IQ tests, while the Sephardic Jews didn’t pass through that adaptational sieve and remain as they were, adapted to their lives.
And, it ain’t a question of virtue, either. You’re not better than me because you’re better at living at altitude in the Himalayas the way the Nepalese are; you’re simply better adapted to the conditions there than I am. For purposes of mountain-climbing, that’s a consideration, but it also doesn’t mean that I can’t go climbing in the mountains, either… It just means that I have to spend more time training and acclimating myself than you do.
Which is the essential mistake we’re making with a lot of these things. Instead of saying “Oh, blacks are inferior because they don’t take to the same sort of schooling that Ashkenazic Jews do so well…” we should be stepping back, analyzing just what is really going on, and then doing the equivalent of at-altitude training and acclimatization for those students.
I’ve worked around a lot of different people, over the years. The one thing I’ve learned for certain is that the IQ test and our educational systems don’t capture a lot of qualities about what I think we should really be defining as “intelligence” when we discuss it. I remember a lot of different people that performed abysmally on the military aptitude tests (which are based on the same principles as the IQ tests…) who actually performed a hell of a lot better than the tests predicted. The tests are useful across a broad range, but much less useful when applied to the individual level. I remember one guy I had working for me who was a literal mechanical genius, but whose scores on the test that they used for assessing whether he’d be a good prospect for mechanic were so low that he couldn’t get into those jobs. And, I do mean he was a mechanical genius; he fixed things that our maintenance warrant officer said were beyond help, and could diagnose exactly what was wrong with an engine or mechanism just by listening to it, usually better than the diagnostic hardware could. However, being ever so slightly dyslexic, he had a very hard time taking things off of paper and translating his skills into doing well on tests.
Racism is really stupid, because you’re using outward appearances to judge things you really have to rely on actual demonstrated behaviors to be certain of. You don’t look at every single Golden Retriever and automatically assume “Oh, big, fluffy, dumb, and friendly…”, which is why a lot of people get themselves bitten by the atypical one that isn’t so fluffy, dumb, or friendly.
That said, you’re fully justified in being more casual around a Golden than you are an Akita or an Ovcharka.
There’s a whole poorly thought-out and badly polluted “region of thought” about these things, and I think that while it’s currently politically correct to say that race and heritage are immaterial…? They really aren’t. Underneath it all, there are things going on that are at least somewhat congruent to the ideas the various racist types have vomited forth. You spend time looking, you can find entire family lineages that have baffling propensities for very similar behaviors. Some good, some bad, but they are there.
GDP growth has also been “excellent” in the United States (as the despicable Economist magazine keeps reminding us) – but have a drive around, you will not see a country that is prospering, you will see a country that is falling apart.
Depends on what part of the United States you’re talking about. In the part of the United States I’ve lived in the past 30 years, we’re growing like gangbusters, building new homes, new businesses, new schools, new roads, new bridges, new parks. The growth slowed down some — but didn’t stop — during the pandemic, but picked right back up again a year or two ago.
There’s still a part of America that still works, but you won’t see favorable news of it in the press. It’s in the region known as “flyover country.”
Kirk,
I think we are on the same page, more or less…..
You speak of differences we see between different groups of humans, and most often we (and most particularly racists), use the shortcut of broadly defining groups by things such as race. Which is pretty useless, as it is a gross over-simplification. As you said, racism is really stupid. Ascribing traits to say, Thomas Sowell based on the stereotypical actions of an American inner city gang member on the basis that they are both black is ludicrous.
You speak of Adaptations and conditions (by groups), and I think that you are spot on. I used the words “culture rather than race”, and think the problem isn’t so much the definition of race, as it is the definition of “culture”…
Lets use my Scots example and your Scots-Irish. If you go the border marches today, residents of Cumbria are not noted for feuding and trip-wire violence. Why? Racially, as much as such a thing exists, modern Cumbrians and residents of the border marches region of England are certainly the same race as their violent ancestors and their violent Appalachian Hatfield-McCoy redneck offshoots. If you want to slice the salami thinner, they are also of the same ethnicity. If you want to slice even thinner still, many share the same smaller regional ethnic identity, the tribe or clan. You could do 23-and-me genetic tests between an American named Nixon from Appalachia, and a Cumbrian named Nixon and there would be a clear genetic ancestral relationship. So…..why the difference? Clearly there is one…..
There is a fairly new theory going around that the reason Europe is less violent now than in the past, and less violent than other parts of the world is to do with selection. Europe used to be extremely violent (see Pinker and others). The theory is that over time those with a genetic propensity for trip-wire violence got selected out. Some propensity for violence is desirable under certain circumstances, and assists survival, but too much in the wrong circumstances is mal-adaptive. So those who were too violent got selected out, either by dying in a bar fight before procreating, or being killed or exiled by the community (weak central authority), or being executed or deported (stronger central authority).
Also consequently, less violence creates an environment where a propensity for violence is less necessary for survival and Darwinian fitness, so it gets less emphasized and passed on less frequently. Much like today we have lots of people with poor eyesight and allergies and so on. Those traits were mal-adaptive back in the day. A stone-age hunter with poor eyesight likely didn’t survive, but a modern human does just fine because in modern society, wearing glasses is not particularly a survival disadvantage.
Scandinavia has a well deserved history of violent Vikings, but today is held up as the democratic socialist egalitarian ideal, peaceful and prosperous (notwithstanding the imported gang violence). What happened? Same as the Scots-Irish, the uber-violent got killed off, and anyone not on board with the communitarian consensus, those too individualistic to conform, emigrated to the US.
Genetically, these groups are the same, so the heritable behaviors we are talking about are deeper than the genes for race/ethnicity, but obviously heritable. So we get a chicken-egg situation. Environmental pressure leads to adaptation. Adaptive traits become heritable. Environment changes, (either directly, or the person moves to a new environment/culture), these traits are now mal-adaptive. Either the population stagnates or dies out, or the environmental pressure gradually changes the behavior until the new traits become adaptive become hardwired, rinse and repeat.
So going back to the main point. If we have a hard time defining race, or ethnicity sufficiently well, how well do we do substituting culture? How well do we define culture in the sense you and I are trying to. Where do you put the brackets around the “group”? It seems to me, that we need to specify that “culture” in this sense is much narrower. Not “western European culture”. The Glasgow “Trainspotting” druggy is clearly a member of the broader Scottish “culture”, and the broader western European “culture”, but his day to day “culture” is urban dysfunctional ghetto culture.
So I think we can agree that a “group” (of various sizes and scales), will develop traits. These traits will be either adaptive, or mal-adaptive, and are driven mostly by the environment, but then become in large part heritable. That they will tend to be mal-adaptive if the environment changes rapidly, or the group moves to a different environment. This is relative to the group in a particular environment/location, independent of race or ethnicity. Whites can be “ghetto trash”, same as blacks in the same environment if they stay in it for more than a few generations.
Not sure I have expressed this properly, and I still haven’t got a good handle of where to draw the bracket around the “group”. Stereotypes exist for a reason, but “all Scots are thrifty and industrious” is clearly wrong given the example above, so what is a cultural group? Dunbar’s Number is probably a good minimum, but above that it gets fuzzy. Neighbourhood? City? Region? Province? Country? Continent?
We’re on the same page, Paul.
I suspect that there’s rather more to behavior than just what’s out in the environment. It’s a complex dance between what’s genetic, epigenetic, and what the environment provides as input. I also believe, based on recent research I’ve read, that there are factors coming in from our commensal bacteria which also influence behavior. I’d love to know, for example, just what changed in the Border region in terms of what their gut bacteria looked like compared to the more peaceful times today.
End of the day, I think that there’s a lot more going on with human behavior than the simplistic ideas we’ve been floating for centuries. I’d lay you good odds that there’s rather more involved with our gut bacteria than anyone currently credits, and it might well be that a propensity towards violence and aggressive behavior has origins in places we don’t even consider.
Lots and lots of research needs to be done on this, and it’s unfortunate that because the animal we need to work on is another human being, the rules of the road for ethical research are so strict.