Quotulatiousness

June 10, 2024

South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” falters

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup included a lengthy section on the recent election results in South Africa and what they might mean for the nation’s short- and medium-term stability:

Being a teen, the issue of South African Apartheid didn’t really fit all that well within the overarching Cold War paradigm. Unlike most other global issues, this one didn’t break down cleanly between the “freedom-loving West” and the “dictatorial, oppressive communist bloc”, as the push to dismantle the regime came from western liberals who were in agreement with the reds.

This slight bit of complexity did not faze most people, as Apartheid was seen as a relic of an older world, one to be consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history. It’s elimination did fit well enough into the Post-Berlin Wall world, one in which freedom and democracy were to reign supreme. This was more than enough reason for almost all people to cheer the release of Nelson Mandela and applaud South Africa’s embrace of western liberal democracy.

In the early 1990s, men once again dared to flirt with utopian ideas, and South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” was to be its centrepiece: out with authoritarianism, racism, ethnocentrism, etc., and in with multiracialism, multiethnicity, democracy and individual liberty. We could all leave the past where it belonged (in the past) and live in peace and harmony, as democracy would defend it, secure it, and preserve it. South Africa would lead the way, and would in fact teach us westerners how it is to be done.

Oddly enough, South Africa quickly fell off of the radar of mainstream media in the West when it failed to live up to these lofty goals. Rather than living up to the hype of being the “Rainbow Nation”, it instead was quickly mired in the politics of corruption and race, showing itself to be all too human, just like the rest of us. South Africa had failed to immediately resolve its inherent internal tensions, whether they be racial, economic, ethnic, or ideological, and by extension it had failed to deliver its promise to western liberals. “Out of sight, out of mind” became the best practice, replacing the utopianism of the first half of the 1990s.

Granted, a lot of grace was given to South Africa by western media so long as Nelson Mandela remained in office (and even after that), but the failures were plainly evident to see: an explosion in crime and in corruption were its most obvious characteristics, ones that could not be brushed under the carpet. The African National Congress (ANC), the party that would deliver the promise of the Rainbow Nation, was instead shown to be little more than a powerful engine of corruption and patronage. Luckily for the ANC, it was fueled in large part by the legacy of Mandela and the goodwill that he had accumulated over the years while he sat in prison.

The post-Mandela era has not been kind to the ANC (nor to South Africa as a whole), as the party could no longer hide behind his fading legacy, and could no longer cash in on the goodwill that came from it. It could “put up”, and would it not “shut up”. The ANC over time became a lumbering beast, too big to slay, but too slow to destroy its opposition when compared to its nimble youth.

What has the party delivered in its three decades of power? It did help dismantle Apartheid, but it did not deliver economic prosperity and opportunity to all. Instead, it simply swapped out elites where it could, preferring to keep the new ones in house. An inability to tame crime and to keep the national power grid running has turned the country into a bit of a joke, especially when it is lumped into the BRICS group alongside Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Despite its abundance of natural wealth, South Africa has been economically mismanaged.

South Africa is an important country to watch for the simple reason that there is so much tinder lying around, ready to be set ablaze. Luckily for South Africans, dire projections of widespread civil strife have not come to pass. Unluckily for South Africans, their national trajectory is headed in the wrong direction. Last week’s national elections saw the ANC lose their parliamentary majority for the first time ever, and the only way to read the results is to conclude that no matter how one may feel about this very corrupt party, it is an ominous sign.

Elite contempt for democracy is fuelling anti-immigration “far right” sentiment in the west

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Even for people who are generally happy with robust immigration, the numbers being recorded (or, more likely, under-recorded) in Canada, the United States and Europe are far too high to pretend that the new arrivals will quickly integrate into their new countries, and they are generally not being encouraged to do so anyway. Complaints to the people who have enabled these massive inflows — at best — are waved off or ignored, but often are seized upon as examples of hateful far-right xenophobia to be punished and suppressed:

Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.

Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.

The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.

Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.

If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?

This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grâce, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.

Biden, of course, is now desperately scrambling to salvage something from this disaster. This week, he contradicted himself by saying he has the unilateral capacity as president to shut down the border, and attempted to blame the GOP for the problem. Yes, the GOP was unhelpful and cynically political earlier this year — but that won’t muddy the waters for most voters who have been conscious for the past three years. But I am grateful nonetheless to hear the president echo what the Dish has been saying for years now, and for which I was routinely called a racist:

    To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.

Now that didn’t hurt, did it? But why did he keep telling us there was no crisis for the last three and a half years? And why would anyone trust a re-elected Biden to enact this if he had a Congressional majority? I sure don’t.

Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory“!

The FDA has a jaundiced view of psychotherapy involving the use of MDMA (aka “Ecstasy”)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh indulges in a minor “I told you so” after the FDA’s expert panel recommended against the agency permitting any medical use of MDMA, despite some experiments indicating it does have therapeutic value:

Ball-and-stick model of the 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine molecule, also known as MDMA, or ecstasy, a well-known psychoactive drug. Based on the crystal structure of MDMA hydrochloride, as determined by X-ray diffraction.
Color code: Carbon, C: black, Hydrogen, H: white, Oxygen, O: red, Nitrogen, N: blue.
Image by Jynto via Wikimedia Commons.

Hopes for research into therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs received a setback last week, one that your correspondent saw tripping (geddit?) up the road in advance. An expert panel published its official advice to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on permitting medical use of MDMA, the synthetic nightclub enhancer that we’re afraid the kids probably still aren’t calling “ecstasy” or “molly”.

There is long-recognized potential for MDMA to be combined with classical psychotherapy in treating emotional disorders, notably post-traumatic stress (PTSD), and now there are some small, limited studies showing evidence of positive effects.

But the FDA’s scientists weren’t very impressed with this evidence, and they voted almost unanimously against creating a therapeutic exception to the illegality of ecstasy, which the U.S. Controlled Substances Act classifies as a “Schedule 1” drug, right next to heroin. The panel’s advice isn’t binding on the agency, which is crawling in somewhat good faith toward recognizing the understudied medical potential of psychedelics. But the vote emphasizes the inherent problems that drugs face, once they are defined in law as “recreational”, in winning over skeptical scientists.

Reason magazine’s great drug-war correspondent Jacob Sullum has a thorough discussion of the issues. The existing research, despite some impressive headline results, has garden-variety issues with dropout rates, follow-ups and occasional researcher shenanigans. But the big problem, which defies easy technical solution, is with scientific blinding of the research subjects.

Scientific trials of the modern kind are predicated upon separating illusory placebo effects from genuine treatment effects. Researchers expect that a high-quality study will have a control group that receives sham treatment or none at all, and good practice requires that experimenters and their guinea pigs are both blind to who is in what group.

News flash: most people can tell whether they’ve been really given a psychedelic drug. Indeed, most doctors can tell whether they’ve given a patient a genuine psychedelic drug, and how much of it. Many placebo-controlled trials on psychoactive drugs, perhaps most of them, thus suffer from an alleged problem of broken blinding. (Have a glance, for example, at Table 2 in this review of blinding procedures in psychedelic studies.)

Bigger Isn’t Always Better: A1E1 Independent | Tank Chats Reloaded

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published Mar 1, 2024

A bigger tank is a better tank, right? Wrong.

Meet the Interwar Vickers A1E1 Independent: a failed prototype, a prototype that proved bigger isn’t always better. Impractical and expensive, it was never accepted into service – but it is said to have inspired equally cumbersome designs including the German Neubaufahrzeug and the Soviet T-35.

Join David Willey, The Tank Museum Curator, as he examines one of the more unusual vehicles in the collection – and discover how it became a focus for political espionage in the early 1930’s.

00:00 | Introduction
02:56 | Tank Design & Vickers
03:28 | Heavy Tank Requirements
05:38 | Initial Blueprints & Prototypes
11:08 | Test-bed Vehicle
14:50 | Myths, Issues and Life after Trials
19:25 | Does it lead to anything?

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

#tankmuseum #davidwilley #Interwar #heavytanks

QotD: The British sweet tooth

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It will be seen that British cookery displays more variety and more originality than foreign visitors are usually ready to allow, and that the average restaurant or hotel, whether cheap or expensive is not a trustworthy guide to the diet of the great mass of the people. Every style of cookery has its peculiar faults, and the two great shortcomings of British cookery are a failure to treat vegetables with due seriousness, and an excessive use of sugar. At normal times the average consumption of sugar per head is very much higher than in most countries, and all British children and a large proportion of adults are over-much given to eating sweets between meals. It is, of course, true that sweet dishes and confectionery – cakes, puddings, jams, biscuits and sweet sauces – are the especial glory of British cookery but the national addiction to sugar has not done the British palate any good. Too often it leads people to concentrate their main attention on subsidiary foods and to tolerate bad and unimaginative cookery in the main dishes. Part of the trouble is that alcohol, even beer, is fantastically expensive and has therefore come to be looked on as a luxury to be drunk in moments of relaxation, not as an integral part of the meal. The majority of people drink sweetened teas with at least two of their daily meals, and it is therefore only natural that they should want the food itself to taste excessively sweet. The innumerable bottled sauces and pickles which are on sale in Britain are also enemies of good cookery. There is reason to think, however, that the standard of British cookery – that is, cookery inside the home – has gone up during the war years, owing to the drastic rationing of tea, sugar, meats and fats. The average housewife has been compelled to be more economical then she used to be, to pay more attention to the seasoning of soups and stews, and to treat vegetables as a serious foodstuff and less a neglected sideline.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

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