“Get on WhatsApp!” they told me. “It’s FREE!” they said. So I caved. Not one to miss out on a freebie I headed down to the nearest Vodacom shop to connect my BlackBerry to the internet for R59 a month to get WhatsApp for “free”. BIS the shop girl called it. You’re damn right it’s […]
General
Posted inGeneral
A novel that can teach us how to rebel against the colonisation of the mind
What do you get when you project the present media-saturated and media-sustained global economic-political hegemony into the future? You get a society where the kind of colonisation of the mind, brought about mainly through mainstream media’s incessant distribution of standardised discourses affirming the nonsense, that there is “no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism, is exacerbated to […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Teacher, don’t leave those kids alone
I watched the basic education minister, Angie Motshekga, deliver the matric results on eNews yesterday afternoon. It was not pretty. Neither were the results impressive. And the minister’s speech was awful. There were times when she lost me completely, most of all when it came to the actual provincial results. Or was that the district […]
Posted inEnvironment, General, Health
‘The Life of I’: Narcissism and (of course) you
“Paranoia is the self-cure for insignificance … the paranoiac is at the centre of a world which has no centre … to be hated makes him feel real: he has made his presence felt. To be unforgiveable is to be unforgettable.” (Emphases mine.) Australian social philosopher Anne Manne shrewdly begins The Life of I: the […]
Posted inGeneral
My father told me…
My father came and told me of a place he went to as a child. It was a tunnel sweet with weeds and a rushing, voiceless wind. He said he wished he could take me there, sometime. My father came and told me of places he went to as a youth. They were […]
Posted inGeneral
Fanon and the question of ‘white theory’
It is undeniable that Frantz Fanon identifies European, or “white” culture as racist to the core. It is equally undeniable that he affirmed the likelihood of the discourses of knowledge emanating from this culture being equally racist. It stands to reason that a culture, which regards itself as being superior to all others, given its […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
An open letter to 2014
Dear 2014, I know a lot of people can’t wait to the see the back of you. They say they hated you, you were horrible and they’d rather forget you. Quite frankly, they say (and they don’t even bother to whisper) you were crap. So I wanted you to know that not everyone feels that […]
Posted inGeneral
The Apple Watch, history and creativity
It’s a very good thing that TIME magazine’s tech writer, Lev Grossman, is an intelligent guy, even when he teams up with others, such as Matt Vella, in the writing of an article called “Wearing the Internet”, on Apple’s newly introduced Apple Watch (TIME, September 22 2014, pp. 28-33). Anyone less intelligent is likely merely […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Take drugs? Don’t help the piranhas
I’ve never taken drugs. Well, not the illegal kind anyway. I prefer to walk up to the counter at the pharmacy, recite my request and wait mournfully to be told that Discovery isn’t paying. As a kid in primary school, I regularly took overdoses of my asthma pills (Microfillin; active ingredient theophylline) in order to […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
Sony cashing in on Kim Jong-un
This is a movie producer’s wildest dream. Make it look like you pissed off one of the most popular “love-to-hate” dictators in the world because you did a comic movie about having him assassinated by two United States late night talk show clowns. Have it leaked that his country, North Korea, hacked into the Sony […]
Posted inEquality, General
Debunking the ‘five million taxpayers’ myth
To evidence the “unsustainability” of social grants, it is often pointed out that in South Africa “there are only five million tax-paying citizens and 15-million social grants recipients”. The insinuation made is that the five million single-handedly subsidise the poor, thus bearing the brunt of the social assistance burden. This argument, however, ignores that income […]
Posted inEquality, General
Racism, sexism and homophobia: Which prejudice is worse?
By Matthew Beetar Racism is more of a problem than sexism. But sexism is more of a problem than xenophobia, which is less of a problem — occasionally — than homophobia. Transphobia we deal with sometimes, and ageism — what is that even? And dealing with ableism — let’s not take this “reconciliation” thing too […]