Hey man. I had this playing in the background yesterday.
I think some of the key points I'd comment on in response are:
- He's right that this is not the country for anyone wanting to raise a family. I can talk all I want about loving my country, but the reality is that if a South African is starting a family and he/she has the option not to do it here, then it would be madness to raise that family here. Seriously, go almost anywhere else in the world that isn't an active warzone (even some warzones might be a better idea to let your kids play in).
The country needs all the good people it can get, but this is not a place for children.
- South Africa very much has a culture of lawlessness. In many cases, it pays to break the laws because the laws are near-unenforced, they're unreasonable, or the system is too corrupt to be worth dealing with. This is true at all levels and in all facets of society.
For example, if someone breaks into my house, it is never Plan A to get the cops involved at all; I will only deal with the cops if the neighbours call them in response to the sound of gunfire. Otherwise, I would prefer to resolve the situation myself. When you see those South Africans lining up in the streets and gunning down rioters, that's not because it's legal to do that. It's because the state can't handle shit - so it falls to the South African citizen to sort his own shit out, and sometimes that gets ugly.
Likewise, in response to the looting, the government quickly passed a law banning the sale of petrol in any hand-held container - but that's a law that will have to be broken, because the government also can't keep the lights on, so people have to buy petrol for their generators.
Another example are e-tolls: a digital road-use taxing system that tracks your use of the roads with these blue-light doohickeys they built over the highways. I don't think I know anyone at all who has ever paid their e-tolls. It's just an additional stupid tax in a country on the verge of a tax revolt.
The taxi associations are incredibly socially and politically influential - yet, huge swathes of their vehicles are not legally roadworthy, like half their drivers are murderers and rapists, and rules of the road are barely even suggestions to them.
When they banned alcohol and cigarettes for the lockdowns last year, basically everyone still had access via the black market - that's how prolific that black market is, and how ingrained it is into every socioeconomic level of society.
In the old SA, whites broke the law in order to hire black labour. In the new SA, almost all businesses lie to circumvent or abuse Black Economic Empowerment policies.
These might seem like odd, unconnected examples, and I know that everyone in the world is a casual law-breaker to one extent or another. But I'm just trying to illustrate that in South Africa, whether you're a maid or a CEO, if you are not consciously breaking the law, you're probably losing at life. The further we get from 1994, the more the law becomes a set of guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules.
- Americans are whiny little bitches when it comes to racism. Seriously. It's actually fucking enraging to see these entitled leftist brats with their god-damn BLM placards and their "microaggressions" harping on about "muh systemic racisms". They were lucky enough to be born into an amazing country, with no real worries at all, and what is probably history's best diversity-to-racism ratio, and they seem determined to ruin it because they're so desperate to feel like some sorts of noble victims or virtue signalers while vilifying half the people they share the country with. And in so doing, they're actually the ones introducing real racism.
There are a lot of things about America that annoy me and yes, the country definitely has a relatively complex race history - but they should all be incredibly proud of how their country has handled that, continues to overcome it, and has set itself apart as one of history's most incredible achievements.
I can almost guarantee that I have personally been the target of more genuine and dangerous racism than probably 99% of living African Americans - who are among the most privileged people in the world.
Something that I do want to comment on as well, is when he discusses optimistic South Africans as being like beaten wives, desperately looking for a reason to hope. He's partially right, but there is more context to even that.
So, for example, I am an English-speaking, British-Boer but British-raised South African from an upper-middle class background. That means that I was raised in a very liberal environment, largely insulated from the country's uglier side for a very long time. My life took a couple of messy twists that kept me from being particularly sheltered, but the reality is that a lot of (predominantly English-speaking white, but also a number from other groups) South Africans are legitimately blind to their own country because they still live in a version of Europe-light cloistered within the country. They probably aren't dealing with any food shortages and they rarely face crime. They're not optimistic about the country because they're refusing to face up to its reality, they're optimistic about the country because they rarely ever see it. These riots probably came as a great surprise to them. Sheltered millennials are not exclusively a Western thing.