By Bre Carter This week, Facebook started launching a profile redesign called Timeline. While the social media giant is known for constantly tinkering with its product, and although it has often made news for rolling out new features and designs that users initially complain about and then quickly accept, the timeline appears to be different. […]
General
Posted inGeneral
Can we please all stop spelling ‘lose’ as ‘loose’?
No. It couldn’t be. Not here, of all places. But there it was, in black and white, on page 38 of the one bastion of standards in which I still believed, the Mail & Guardian. “The opening of the Gautrain”, reads the sentence in question, “has only marginally dented OR Tambo’s R230-million parking income, loosing […]
Posted inGeneral
The ‘economistic worldview’ and the destruction of life
In his important recent book Treading Softly – Paths to Ecological Order (see my earlier post on it) — Thomas Princen distinguishes among four “worldviews” in relation to the environment, that is, four different ways of “perceiving and conceiving and making sense of one’s world” (pg 164) within what he terms “the current industrial, commercial […]
Posted inGeneral
How the Proteas can overcome their mental block
Journalism allows you the opportunity to see, hear and read a lot of different opinions on how sports teams overcome tough patches to eventually triumph in a manner that would demand an unlimited bar tab at the big game after-party. So with that in mind and after watching the Proteas surrender to Sri Lanka last […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
There’s something odious about academic publishing
There is something terribly wrong about peer-reviewed scholarship and about academic publishing in general. It resembles an exclusive club of knowledge production where new knowledge is circulated among an elite group of scholars who confirm each other’s prejudices and biases and then pat each other on the back. In some ways, once new knowledge is […]
Posted inGeneral
Politics of helplessness
As I sat with my iPad on my lap to write this article I went blank. All the points on the article I was to write disappeared from my mind. All I had was a feeling of helplessness. The same feeling I had growing up at KwaNdengezi whenever I heard the unmistakable drone of the […]
Posted inGeneral
Yay，Secret Santas! We just gotta give
I will never forget it. I was one of those young men back in the early eighties who had a choice: two years’ military conscription or four years in jail. I disliked either option but chose the shorter “jail” sentence and thankfully ended up as a telex operator. One of the little businesses going on […]
Posted inGeneral
No guts, no glory
I had the pleasure last week of watching Australia finish off India in the first Test in Melbourne, Australia. As South Africans, it’s almost a birth right to “hate” Aussies, and this is, in my opinion, because jealousy makes us nasty. We all know that we want our national sporting teams to experience the success […]
Posted inGeneral
Going green: 12 steps for 2012
Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. As we head into 2012, many of us will be resolving to lose those few extra pounds, save more money, or spend a few more hours with our families and friends. But there are also some resolutions we can make to make our lives a little greener. […]
Posted inGeneral
Political parties — part of the solution or the problem?
By Amukelani Mayimele As a young woman determined to fight an unjust system that worked against the poor I joined South African Students Congress (Sasco) during my first year at university. The number of people we helped each year did not represent half of the people who needed the help. We spent the rest of […]
Posted inGeneral
Mandela wedding is a misguided act of defiance
South Africans should be annoyed at the defiance showed by the grandson of former president Nelson Mandela in proceeding with a wedding which was clearly in contempt of a court order. On Saturday Mandla Mandela married his third wife, Swazi princess Mbali Makhathini, in a traditional ceremony despite an interdict prohibiting him from doing so. […]
Posted inGeneral
Fanon and resistance
Critical psychologist Desmond Painter, writing on the 50th commemoration of Frantz Fanon’s untimely death, says: “Fanon was interested in forging new categories of thought, new subjectivities and new modes of being and becoming. To this end, he challenged European thought [and the cultural and political category of ‘Europe’ as such] with a forceful refusal — […]