Posted by andsoitis 6 days ago
In particular the Madlanga commission mentioned in the article has been uncovering eyewatering levels of incompetence and corruption in law enforcement so there is suddenly a lot of talk around that
That's not to dispute that the situation is bad and the trajectory is negative...but think the economist could have highlighted that context a bit better.
It's also probably the first country ever to regress from first world back to more-or-less third world. Just look at things like SAA and Eskom for examples of what two decades of corruption and nepotism and theft can do to a formerly outstanding enterprise, and then spread that out across everything else.
This is true for all of the western world, eastern Europe and maybe true for some other countries.
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I mean, I guess. I'm using Firefox, I have an adblocker, and I have tampermonkey installed? And turning off Javascript isn't a bad idea, either.
The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.
That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.
And there is nothing anyone can say to talk me out of adblockers - ad networks are a delivery system for malware and fraud.
>Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker
Also https://archive.ph/I82C0 works
What’s happening in South Africa is a phenomenon that happens around the third world. And it’s an enormous tax on half of the human population, even in relatively affluent countries like Mexico. Even in many of the countries that don’t suffer from internal destabilization by non-state actors, the solution has been dictators like Saddam Hussain in Iraq or El-Sisi in Egypt. It’s a subject that warrants thoughtful analysis and problem solving by people in the first world. We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help.
This is incorrect, bordering on flat-earthism. It's also impossible if you think about it for more than two seconds. If the "third world" had possessed "obscene amounts of wealth" to begin with, the first world never would have been able to "extract" it.
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-colonialism
[2] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/r...
[3] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-drain-of-wealth/
[4] https://wid.world/document/unequal-exchange-and-north-south-...
What you describe as feudalism- a czar/emperor/king/absolute ruler at the top with some people under him to carry on orders - applies to any dictatorship.
Feudalism includes (among other things) complete lack of population movement: serfs were not allowed to leave their villages. In Russia today people can (still) leave the country.
The ideological and demographic makeup of certain internet communities makes them incapable of understanding what you mean by this.
in Italy, there are deep ties to governments, esp. in the south, and they've had their fingers all the way into national leadership before; see also: bunga bunga
I’ve seen enough white Christian men shoot up schools and mosques in my lifetime to roll my eyes at this statement.
Americans are still getting lynched.
We have studied this problem ad nauseum. The West knew the answer until about a century ago. Europe became orderly through shame culture, executing criminals and destruction of clan culture.
El Salvador is a modern example.
The remedy is violent, unkind, and not communist so we get indefinite unbounded suffering instead.
That also describes European monarchs during the period when modern states were forming. So maybe crushing competitors to the state’s monopoly on violence is just a necessary milestone on the path to liberal democracy?
I see far more corruption evident in the US right now with Trump and his family and their crypto investments and dodgy govt deals - perhaps the Economist should do an article.
People being pardoned by paying for it.