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Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

theguardian.com

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Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#31

Post by sgt »

jimmydorry wrote: post #24
sgt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to downplay crime in South Africa, but I'd like to emphasize that not everyone is directly affected by crime in South Africa. The ones who have been (or the ones living in more exposed places) tend however to be more vocal about it.

Huh? In my time there, I did not have a single work colleague or person I interacted with that had not been impacted by crime (myself included). Every single one of them lived in gated communities and worked in a gated business complex. It boggles the mind that someone can espouse the opposite when I even was on the receiving end within my first month there and taking all reasonable precautions.

I meant across the whole country. Upper middle class neighborhoods in many cities can be extremely safe. I'm close to Cape Town, living in a freestanding house (i.e. not a security estate). Never been exposed to crime personally, and I've traveled to every province except NW.

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#32

Post by mekkkkkk »

lelanthran wrote: post #14
smokey_circles wrote: post #8

I've lived in Joburg all my life. Joburg, especially the inner city, is one of the most dangerous places in the world. Couriers are at risk? We all are. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a story of being held up at gunpoint somewhere around joburg, even the wealthy northern suburbs. Happened to me 4 times, twice in one week. Try convincing an armed mugger some other tit stole your phone already. Fun times. I also…

> Not one mention of the disgusting xenophobia demonstrated by the majority of city residents. Not. One. > ... > The western world has stolen enough wealth from us. Hilarious :-)

I don't think this geopolitical perspective constitutes xenophobia. Do you really?

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#33

Post by wesleywt »

zohch wrote: post #10
smokey_circles wrote: post #8

I've lived in Joburg all my life. Joburg, especially the inner city, is one of the most dangerous places in the world. Couriers are at risk? We all are. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a story of being held up at gunpoint somewhere around joburg, even the wealthy northern suburbs. Happened to me 4 times, twice in one week. Try convincing an armed mugger some other tit stole your phone already. Fun times. I also…

> The western world has stolen enough wealth from us. South Africa has taken all the rope it had and hung itself with it. Sure the west stole enough from South Africa, but South Africans stole more from other South Africans than the west ever stole from South Africa, and they continue to steal from other South Africans, and will continue doing so. South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west, it is…

As a South African. I am wondering what this guy is on about?

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#34

Post by zohch »

wesleywt wrote: post #33
zohch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The western world has stolen enough wealth from us. South Africa has taken all the rope it had and hung itself with it. Sure the west stole enough from South Africa, but South Africans stole more from other South Africans than the west ever stole from South Africa, and they continue to steal from other South Africans, and will continue doing so. South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west, it is…

As a South African. I am wondering what this guy is on about?

> As a South African. I am wondering what this guy is on about?

I guess as South Africans who voted for the politicians who sell South Africa out to anyone willing to pay while stuffing their pockets, the majority of South Africans have no clue what I'm on about.

I mean at least Russians can claim that their voting system is horribly corrupt, but South Africans claim with a straight face that they, en masse, do not in fact support the policies instituted by the politicians they elected and who who are so blatantly corrupt that it would make Putin blush.

No, that is all the west's fault. Apologies if I delayed you from a xenophobic lynching with my crazy talk, or was it the burning of another university?

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#35

Post by fennecfoxen »

lelanthran wrote: post #19
nsomaru wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it isn’t stealing if you’ve built the labour and market system to cater to labour exploitation and wealth extraction. Most here live a very simple life in rural africa and would probably be content to do so if it wasn’t for taxation and labour demand. Sure we have our issues. Billions of rands poor out of this country, extracted by modern multinational neo-imperialists. If we blink the wrong way, the spectre of…

> I love my country and it’s people. I think we have enough to feed and house everyone. It often feels like other people are pulling the strings. Well, stop for voting the people pulling the strings... A quick example: The largest owner of land is the South African Government, and yet laws are pushed through to allow land to be confiscated from people of a particular race and "redistributed" to other people of a sele…

More broadly, as a pragmatic issue utterly divorced from the goal of “justice”, few nations achieve prosperity when confiscation is the norm, as prosperity usually involves planning and investments with multi year returns. If a nation wishes to repair inequalities through transfers, the less disruptive way to do it is through taxation. Seizing specific properties outright is an arbitrary and capricious distribution of the burdens, and a lingering political culture of expropriation will likely deter investment for a generation or longer.

It is also remarkable the extent to which these land confiscation programs focus on the nation’s farms, as if the leaders’ vision of a prosperous future was simply subsistence agriculture: two acres and a cow for every family. The proceeds of a program of taxation can be invested in health and education and infrastructure, the foundations of future prosperity. It’s hard to do that with seized land; few will be fool enough to buy it off of you.

On the other hand, a campaign of land seizures, fêting ethnic resentment, is much more effective at feeding the ruling party’s political power, so, there’s your tragedy.

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#36

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

zohch wrote: post #21
smokey_circles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we're clear, I'm not proposing the west do any kind of reparations. You just won't calculate it and the damage is already done, a pay cheque isn't going to help. But you are wrong. I'd prefer it if they just left, take their corporations with them. They don't have to return anything, just go. Firstly, I am referring to the whole continent. The west didn't just destroy one nation, they took us all out (except Botsw…

> > South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west > The west excludes us from global economic activity all the goddamned time. And yet you fail to cite one example of this. I don't see how this is true, but by all means, maybe try again and cite an actual example. And just for clarity, an example of restricting travel in a god damned pandemic is not an example of "systemic economic exclusion", it may…

> And just for clarity, an example of restricting travel in a god damned pandemic is not an example of "systemic economic exclusion", it may be an ill conceived policy choice, but the west is also not responsible for your pathetically low vaccination rate which likely helped the new variant come into existence.

I’m not from Africa nor am I from America so I don’t think I have a horse in this race but I think this is the sort of rhetoric that the guy is critiquing. It has a clearly skewed understanding of the power differentials of the pandemic and then blames the nations with less power for being able to pull less strings.

Firstly, it makes total sense to me that preventing travel from a region just because it discovered a variant, when that region is apparently world reknowned in its ability to study infectious disease, is a policy born out of ignorant xenophobia. There’s no evidence that this thing started in the regions that were banned or that omicron hasn’t already spread internationally at that point, only that one of the nations with a world class variant detection system sounded the alarm.

Secondly, damn are we really gonna blame colonized countries on low vaccination rates when vaccine access is still being hoarded, it’s production still close sourced, and antivax movement is still strong in western nations?

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#38

Post by herodoturtle »

smokey_circles wrote: post #8

I've lived in Joburg all my life. Joburg, especially the inner city, is one of the most dangerous places in the world. Couriers are at risk? We all are. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a story of being held up at gunpoint somewhere around joburg, even the wealthy northern suburbs. Happened to me 4 times, twice in one week. Try convincing an armed mugger some other tit stole your phone already. Fun times. I also…

> Happened to me 4 times, twice in one week.

Jirre.

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#39

Post by yunohn »

lelanthran wrote: post #22
smokey_circles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we're clear, I'm not proposing the west do any kind of reparations. You just won't calculate it and the damage is already done, a pay cheque isn't going to help. But you are wrong. I'd prefer it if they just left, take their corporations with them. They don't have to return anything, just go. Firstly, I am referring to the whole continent. The west didn't just destroy one nation, they took us all out (except Botsw…

A lot of your argument relies on the assertion that the West took resources from Africa. And yes, while that is true to some extent, it is not the whole story. > America's wealth was greatly enhanced by the railways built by the slaves they stole. IIRC (and wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade ) the slaves were bought by the west. The theft was done by native Africans for the most part…

> Certainly, but it was not the West that, for the most part, enslaved and then sold the African slaves.

Surely the righteous West could’ve freed those slaves and not fought to keep them for centuries?

If you read the wiki link further, you’ll see that they paid Africans to find slaves, because they couldn’t survive on their own - amidst warring tribes and diseases. They would transport slaves as cargo, resell them throughout the West, indenture them in plantations and factories, make a racial caste that would propagate for centuries, mistreat them and kill them, and so on. It’s absolutely insane to frame colonialism in a callous manner such as you have, in 2021!

> Because I can all but guarantee that the Shell paid money

This should be investigated by the Western govs that Shell works with. Everyone knows this is happening all the time. How are they allowed to bribe poor countries, in the first place?

> you are getting nothing in return, then ask yourself where that money is going

Politicians in the West are also equally corrupt, on all sides, and none of their earnings are distributed to the people. What kind of weird argument is this?

> I'm South African, always have been

Doesn’t matter. You still seem to misunderstand colonialism’s effects, and post modern colonialism as it stands today.

Re: Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

#40

Post by zohch »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #36
zohch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west > The west excludes us from global economic activity all the goddamned time. And yet you fail to cite one example of this. I don't see how this is true, but by all means, maybe try again and cite an actual example. And just for clarity, an example of restricting travel in a god damned pandemic is not an example of "systemic economic exclusion", it may…

> And just for clarity, an example of restricting travel in a god damned pandemic is not an example of "systemic economic exclusion", it may be an ill conceived policy choice, but the west is also not responsible for your pathetically low vaccination rate which likely helped the new variant come into existence. I’m not from Africa nor am I from America so I don’t think I have a horse in this race but I think this is…

> It has a clearly skewed understanding of the power differentials of the pandemic and then blames the nations with less power for being able to pull less strings.

A stupid but justifiable policy from the past 2 weeks cannot be a good example of why South Africa is spiraling the toilet. Sorry. Pick better examples. South Africa has been spiraling the toilet way before COVID.

> Secondly, damn are we really gonna blame colonized countries on low vaccination rates when vaccine access is still being hoarded, it’s production still close sourced, and antivax movement is still strong in western nations?

Who exactly is South Africa colonized by currently? And further:

- EXCLUSIVE South Africa delays COVID vaccine deliveries as inoculations slow ( https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-... )

- South Africa Asks J&J, Pfizer to Stop Sending Vaccines “It is entirely owing to hesitancy,” Crisp said. “We have plenty vaccine and capacity but hesitancy is a challenge. Unfortunately it means that many unvaccinated people may have an unhappy festive season and will possibly result in hospitals being congested.” (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-24/s-africa-...)

- South Africa's low vaccination rate is NOT a supply problem and vaccine hesitancy is stifling demand so much that it had to delay delivery of doses, say experts - but the rest of Africa still needs more doses ( https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10248699/Low-vaccin... )

Let's not pretend like South Africa has a vaccine supply shortage, because that would be a lie.

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