South Africa is apparently having large riots and looting going on right now. This video popped up in my YouTube recommendations last week and completely surprised me. I'd tell you more but this video is my only exposure to it so far so I figured I'd just link it than try to say it second hand.
Funniest and saddest thing I saw was bookstores being completely ignored during the looting. South Africa's literacy rate declined from 93% to 87% during the last decade.
"Television, the drug of the nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation."
I've live in South Africa my entire life, but have yet to encounter a "roving gang of looters". Citation?
My wife was born in South Africa and always wanted to go back (her family left when she was a baby), so when an opportunity came to make a sales trip there she jumped at the chance. This was perhaps 5 years ago. One evening in Johannesburg she and a Brit were driving back from dinner when, stopped at a traffic light, they saw gunmen step up to a car ahead of them, one on each side, and force the passengers out with their hands behind their heads. IIRC, it was a one-way street. Luckily for my wife and the Brit, they were the last car in the queue and were able to make a u-turn and zoom out of there.
Was that a "roving gang of looters"? I don't know, but they exemplify Alex's point.
South Africa is a deteriorating shithole. My mother was telling me that they want to move to guarded security estate because she is afraid she might be raped, and my father bludgeoned in their home. (NB: they’re not under threat because of their race, rather because that’s what criminals do).
The police are dumb as rocks and totally lazy: look at the Boksburg tanker blast in December to see how they don’t GAF about doing their jobs.the public was standing around a burning gas tanker taking pictures for social media for hours before it exploded and killed dozens. The police only pitched after the explosion.
There is no serious border control, and any mention of it is shut down as “xenophobic” by the media and business that want to flout labour regulations by hiring undocumented migrants from the rest of Africa, despite the obscene unemployment rate.
The electricity situation has been discussed at length here previously, but it’s strangling the economy.
Sure you can make money if you are skilled, but you can make better money using those skills in any number of other countries.
The only thing that’s keeping many middle-class South Africans from emigrating is the cheap domestic help. They are happy to exploit the obscene inequality since it gives them cheap labour. They live in terror of washing their own clothes and cleaning their own toilets.
You should see South Africa. It is more of a stampede. Everyone I know has either left or is trying. Literally ten out of the twelve friends I have are either in UK, Aus or US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cew-BnjA_q4
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