rowtheway

South Africa’s infrastructure failures have little to do with privatization or “the West,” and far more to do with self-inflicted brain drain, a general lack of expertise and project management skills, theft, crime, and corruption:

https://saice.org.za/downloads/SAICE-2022-Infrastructure-Rep...

When it comes to value systems that have stood the test of time and have well-understood failure modes vs. whatever hot new theory was cooked up on Twitter or Tumblr last week (the main vectors for recent moral changes in my country), I generally prefer the former.

>and just as most Christians don't support setting bears on children that mock priests.

I’m not Christian (anymore) but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a thing in canon law.

In contrast, the major strains of Islam are refreshingly clear in their treatment of apostates and unbelievers. Even a “kinder, gentler” interpretation retains the seeds of this dogma unless it rejects the Quran, which Islam holds to be the literal word of God. If you don’t hold with that, you’re not Muslim by definition.

This optimistic view of the Islamic world is, sadly, inaccurate. For example, as of 2013, an overwhelming majority of Muslims wish to make Sharia the law of the land:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-m...

You wouldn’t get fired at Rutgers:

https://torontosun.com/life/rutgers-professor-calls-white-pe...

Or Drexel:

https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/health/drexel-professor-white...

Or Yale:

https://news.yahoo.com/psychiatrist-delivered-lecture-yale-d...

But say things that are embarrassing yet true of minority students at Georgetown, and you’ll be fired and disowned by the college in under 48 hours:

https://news.yahoo.com/georgetown-law-professor-fired-over-1...

> Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.

Bureaucrats do this too. See the history of communism in Europe, or present state of communism in China. Centralized welfare is a centralized system of control in the hands of politicians.

I am an atheist ex-Catholic. The big atheist-leftist crowd in my college town are intensely more violent, toxic, and racist than local Catholics or Lutherans. Lack of religious belief is no guarantee of kindness or rationality, nor is the presence of faith a strong signal of evil.

Broadly speaking, the community-oriented left in places like the US support bureaucratic government welfare programs, while community-oriented conservatives support more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations. My preference runs toward the latter, for reasons best explained by John Carmack:

https://archive.ph/0tHg4

In America, you don’t need to reach for philosophy to explain the destruction of high-trust communities when history will do:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2056992.Left_Behind_In_R...

Summary of the book by a far-right nutjob:

https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/141461967105629798...

Community culture still exists in some places. Those places generally aren’t trying to solve massively complex racial or mass-migration conflicts at the same time as healthcare, housing, education and so on. Voters and leaders have limited time and attention. Fewer problems to solve means more resources available per problem.