And I’d rather live in American than Israel.
So what?
Cite?
Three examples:
Hiring practices
Land redistribution
Cricket (no, seriously, and I just found this by accident, though I believe SA has removed all racial quotas re: sports)
…I guess it’s evening out the poorer classes?
South Africa may claim to not use racial quotas, but it does in practice. Especially when you are redistributing land & giving financial aid based on race and percentages.
South Africa’s government is socialist, and not in the good way.
And how does this differ from Affermative Action?
You can edit link titles completely independently of what the actual title is called.
If South Africa is a mess, it’s a mess no different from the way the US is a mess, or Brazil is a mess, or Israel is a mess, or any other free, democratic country that has some problems, not always of its own making.
I’m not an apologist, I’m a fact-checker. When people spout uninformed bullshit, I correct them.
And I’d rather live in South Africa than America. So what?
Since when is “women” or “disabled” a racial category? The Equity Act is meant to address all past employment imbalances. Nobody complains about it helping women and handicapped people.
If it’s socialist (and IMO it has a long way to go to be as “socialist” as some Western European countries.) it is because the people chose that by voting for the ANC.
IMO, it’s nowhere near socialist enough.
I like cheese! Don’t criticize pineapples!
Is that supposed to be a coherent response? Look, the fact of the matter is that when it comes to employment equity, there is no “quota for Blacks”. You *do get a higher B-BBEE score the more "Blacks" you employ, and that counts in your favour with government tenders etc. But you also get a higher score for women and the handicapped in the Employment Equity act score, a separate law.
But it’s a score in both cases, not a quota. There is no quota, and if you don’t deal with the government, or hope to supply a company that deals with the government, no-one gives a shit what your score is. “In practice”
And even if you do need to worry about your score, You can get by with just doing Skills Development,Preferential Procurement,Enterprise Development and Socio-economic Development and keeping an entire staff of able white men yourself, if your company makes < R 35 million, and with doing jack-shit if you pull less than R 5 million (although a 50% black-owned company will own your ass in tenders). Only the 4% of SA companies who top R35 million turnover must consider their own staffing when calculating their score. And I’m quite OK with that, actually, as those tend to be the big companies traditionally run by middle-aged white men - your mining houses etc. And often the companies that profited most from apartheid. So fuck 'em
*“Black” includes Coloureds, Indians, Chinese
It was about as relevant as yours.
So you’re saying that South Africa does not engage in practices of racial discrimination?
The U.S. doesn’t, and don’t gimme any bullshit about affirmative action – how is SA any worse?
Affirmative action in the US, in terms of college applications, involves racial discrimination as follows:
In SA, in terms of college admissions, it seems they have the same racial discrimination:
And in terms of employment:
Ah, so the amended statement of the OP should read*: “Will South Africa and the United States go the way of Zimbabwe?”
*Disclaimer: this is not a real quote.
So long as “the way of Zimbabwe” is between consenting adults and requires no expensive equipment, count me in! 
As long as the US isn’t planning on shifting farm ownership in a similar manner
Breaking up American agribiz corporations’ plantations into family farms would be . . . a good idea, come to think of it.
I am not opposed to affirmative action.
I am opposed to specific race-related economic programs that seek to give advantage one group and disadvantage another.
There is a difference between ‘not discriminating’ or ‘seeking to make the workforce more diverse as it is a benefit to society’ v. ‘purposely redistributing wealth to a disadvantaged group while ignoring the rising poverty rates of the formerly advantaged group because of the sins of the forefathers’.
Not only does it fly in the face of human rights, but it is bad economics. The ANC has failed in all of its BEE goals thus far.
The United States does not have a program where it seeks to redistribute wealth to the bottom 90 per cent of the population based on race. I don’t oppose progressive economies, but those should be based on numbers, not skin color. This whitey panic shit has got to stop. There’s no rainbow Africa. There’s a black Africa with a tightly managed economy that has only brought ‘wealth’ to a few. Hell, what am I talking about? People who aren’t ‘colored’ or ‘black’ in S. Africa are called non-Africans, right?
As a non-citizen of South Africa, it’s fine if you don’t want me, but I’m thinking specifically of the citizens of South Africa - all of them.
Western governments are founded not only on democracy, but liberty. The Apartheid government was the tyranny of the minority, but since that was bad, people like Mr Dribble seem to think it’s okay for similar practices and rhetoric to be put into place…because somehow, “Hey, these people are white, the white people used to keep the black man down, so fuck it if you’re suffering now.” :dubious:
Not sure why I’m being demonized by my positions as Nelson Mandela has accused the ANC of being as racist as the former apartheid government.
Why?
Do you enjoy high food costs? I don’t. And if you don’t want your food filled with corn syrup and steroids, shop at Whole Paycheck or the farmer’s market.
For one thing, because a farm family has a certain measure of basic self-sufficiency. Barring foreclosure, they can’t be thrown out of work. My Mom’s family was pretty poor (her father was a sharecropper), but all through the Depression they never missed a meal – because they had a farm, and ate what they grew on it. If that doesn’t mean anything to us nowadays . . . I hope it never will again, but I suspect otherwise. I don’t want to be a farmer, but I’m sure there are many who would jump at the chance; and an America with a significant population of family farmers would be a more resilient society than we have now.
But we *used *to have a significant population of family farms. A family farm can only survive if it can afford all of the means of production, and that’s a rather expensive one. As you pointed out, your mom’s family was poor. Not many people are going to trade that for the benefit of being able to eat your pet cow if you get hungry.
SA has an ag sector and people are starving. Same with Japan and China, though they may have bigger ag economies-- SA’s imports account for a low part of its GDP.
Farms are a lot of work - I don’t know of any family farms that aren’t large fulltime businesses that wax and wane with the rest of the economy & weather. The richest parts of SA are the urban areas.
Anyway, the government stepping in to break up corporate farming to hand it to unskilled families sounds like a bad idea. 
edit: I’m also not sure how majority subsistence farming really contributes to the national or global economy.