In your opinion where did it go wrong?

1985… when the National Party decided to commercialise and deregulate everything in the hopes of causing socio-economic chaos in the country - which it did. They, for instance, knew perfectly wll deregulating the taxi industry would cause chaos - they literally commissioned White Papers to research the outcomes - and they did it not in spite of the findings of that research, but because of it.

Same thing with Eskom - commercialised in 1985, and by 2002 Eskom was disconnecting more households than they were connecting - I literally have the UKZN research papers on my desktop to prove it - because Eskom was now being “run like a business.” The outcome we see today shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but because the media has been lying to us about the root cause of our problems we are all making surprise Pikachu faces while whining about “corruption” and “incompetence.”

The ANC took one look at this state of affairs and went, “Oh, we’re fine with this” and they’ve been doing the bog-standard “living it up while the rich gets richer and the poor get poorer” neoliberal shuffle ever since. Don’t get me wrong… the ANC is as corrupt as fuck - but that doesn’t make them unique here in South Africa or the rest of the world. But they are not the root cause… it’s the socio-economic system that enables this shitfuckery that is.

What should the government/country do to get out the current crisis?

We already know how… the same people that now applaud the DA or ActionSA every time their talking heads use the word “privatisation” are the very people who remember (or rather, selectively forgets) how well our public infrastructure worked when they were actually run as public infrastructure and not profit-making “businesses.” That’s what the country needs to do - reclaim our public infrastructure. But don’t expect the snivelling racketeers (whether they be ANC, DA, EFF or any of the parasites squatting in parliament) in our political establishment to push that idea any time soon…

I have never understood why people anticipate game realeases - I mean, people have learned how the AAA game industry works by now, right?

Yeah… tons of bribe money will do that to the governments of weak nations - it’s almost like Cuba had the correct idea.

ANC short sightedness

What ANC short-sightedness? They’re doing what all the rich people wanted them to do, aren’t they? Running everything “like a business?” I guess South Africans are now seeing for themselves how short-sighted running “everything like a business” was always going to be, huh?

Last time I checked, big foreign corporations are still looting and pillaging all over Africa as if independence never happened… I wonder why?

edit: This includes Shell, a Dutch corporation, btw.

Laughs hysterically in South African… where we now have no choice but to use gas for almost everything because our electrical grid is collapsing due to IMF-approved neoliberal shitfuckery.

When was this nationalist hokum ever in date? Nationality has always been a piss-poor substitute for actual cultural identities… that’s the whole reason classical liberal nation states had to be forced onto people through state brutality.

What about confronting it’s colonial present? Last time I checked, the colonialist world order that underpins the wealth of the Global North hasn’t ended.

Maintaining a settler-colonialist state in the face of people who aren’t just armed with spears takes a lot of money, I guess.

Regulated capitalism. Prosecuting corruption.

Right, regulate capitalism… by regulating the capitalists that have all the money and can buy the regulators any time they feel like it.

Sounds legit.

They don’t bat an eyelid when you accuse Israel of being an Apartheid-state - it’s like water flowing off a duck’s back. Call Israel a kapo state, however, and they lose their shit. That they can’t ignore.

basically the UN is a forum for dialogue and we need the big players to be part of it.

Allowing the five biggest arms manufacturers on the planet to decide “security” issues is no different than allowing the five biggest drug cartels in the world to decide “health” issues.

The Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive put Army Group Center in an increasingly precarious position even as Russia continually gained ground in Byelorussia.

And don’t forget that during this time the ubermensch were also losing control over the Balkans…

Russians trying to rewrite history,

TIL… western historians deliberately glorifying the US and Britain’s role in WW2 = “Russians trying to rewrite history.”

When the USA joined the war it was already clear the axis had lost.

While I agree that that it was the Soviet and Chinese people that absorbed the greatest part of the Axis’ powers warmaking ability (which western historians are apt to ignore), it’s not true that the Axis had already lost the war by 1941. It’s accurate to say that the US joined the war at a moment when the Axis forces had hopelessly overstretched themselves.

The US has never opposed fascism - Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were colonialist rivals threatening US hegemony and influence and nothing more.

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I have zero sympathy for anyone that bought anything connected to Phony Stark. Zilch.

You knew what you were buying into - you live with it.

A way to rapidly exit a game a la The Binding Of Isaac: Afterbirth. It has saved that game from being rage-deleted off my machine plenty of times.

I recently came back to Lemmy from reddit to escape the batshit pro-Israel censorship happening on there right now and I have to say that the quality of the content and discussion has just gone up.