Posted inEqualityMediaTech

News24 right to axe online comments

Earlier this month News24, the country’s largest online news publisher, took a decision not to allow readers to post comments on all but a few select articles. According to its editor-in-chief Andrew Trench, too many commentators insisted on “pushing the boundaries of free speech”, with the result that comments “tediously drift towards hate speech at […]

Posted inEqualityNews/Politics

South Africa’s Weimar moment?

What motivates a young black student leader — and we’re not talking here of a self-hating Uncle Tom-like figure but of one well to the left of Malcolm X — to fulsomely declare his admiration for Adolf Hitler? It is surely common knowledge that extreme anti-black racism was an inextricable part of the Nazi ideology. […]

Posted inEqualityNews/Politics

Global freedom in retreat?

Following the collapse of communism, Francis Fukuyama famously asserted that humankind was on the threshold of “the end of history”. By this, he meant that humanity’s sociocultural evolution was poised to resolve itself in a general acceptance of the principles of Western liberal democracy as the basis of government. This he spelled out in his […]

Posted inEqualityNews/Politics

Pogroms in Mandelaland

With regard to the latest outbreak of xenophobic violence, I can do no better than quote Ranjeni Munusamy, who wrote (Daily Maverick, January 23): “Incidents of racism and xenophobia have again exposed South Africa as a superficial, ugly, violent nation that lacks respect for other human beings. From exclusive restaurants in Cape Town that discriminate […]

Posted inNews/Politics

The receding spectre of a one-party state

“If you have a country where everyone is complaining, you’ve got a democracy; if you have one where no-one is complaining, you’ve got a problem” (not bad, huh? — © Saks, D — all rights reserved etc … ). Related to the above is the paradox that huge victory margins in elections are indicative not […]