Dear reader ... - Thought Leader

Of course, your opinions are more important than the blog — that’s the whole point. I was going to write something new — but wanted to respond to Maria. It is unfortunate that you feel I used the term “social Down’s Syndrome” in a shallow way to describe stupid. I didn’t. Just because someone has a condition does not mean that they are a poster person for voluntary ignorance, that is an assumption and quite incorrect. My use of the term was more along these lines: Due to the inheritance of too much genetic material from a parent, without the biological maturity to assimilate the information contained, development of certain systems in the body is impaired. Sufferers can appear normal and lead healthy lives.

How is this not a considered description of Mr Malema? Are we going to simply find a clever word for “stupid” … or are we going to try and contextualise him?

And then there’s Mr Latino — if you feel that ET and Julius are so vastly different, I would make a list of all the things they have in common, and then all the things they don’t. If you’re honest in your lists, you will see evidence there that supports the liberal idea that all people are pretty much equal … both parties have made a huge fuss over minor differences between groups of people.

Besides that, why does sitting in a tree make them supposedly the same — the title is a joke on a poem from my tween days, a childish and sweet allusion to kissing, a naive image of national unity — perhaps a wish that our left and right one day bear fruit, a sort of colourless, centrist and fleshy thing, sweet and easy to swallow … and please don’t accuse me of myopia, you know how Maria feels about using actual conditions to describe limited perception … let’s keep up the discourse, the very point of this site.