“For us, it is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. You know it well … If you harm our children, old women, our fighters, our old men, we will attack the men who fight against us.” This is what Amedy Coulibaly told his hostages following his attack on a kosher […]
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Posted inNews/Politics
It’s the high dropout rate we should be worried about not the matric results
An important milestone was reached in the life of many learners when the matric results were released. Some succeeded admirably but others were disappointed. They now have to make critical choices about the careers they wish to follow. For many among them, their choices could have been different if the education system was functioning optimally. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The ANC has a leadership problem
Despite its parliamentary majority, 2014 was a year of reckoning for the ANC. Seemingly no longer in command of Parliament or public opinion, it emerged from the election bruised but not defeated. However, its performance lacks the swaggering bravado we have come to expect – it knows it has been wounded. Whether it can staunch […]
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
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 inNews/Politics
2014: The SAS Zuma adrift in choppy waters
The year’s close is traditionally a time for introspection. It is not only an opportunity to dwell nostalgically on what was good, but also to identify patterns that if extrapolated give plausible shape to our future. South Africa’s first year without Nelson Mandela around has been a rudderless one. And since Madiba was absent from […]
Posted inEquality, General
Cultural embodiments of the life and death instincts in human beings
Since the 19th century, when the heirs of 17th- and 18th-century British empiricism started thinking of the social implications of the empiricist doctrine, that all we know comes from experience, thinkers like Lord Shaftesbury and his ilk have believed that human society was “perfectible”. After all, if society could be arranged in such a way […]
Posted inEquality, General
Of birth rights and gay rights
By Steven Hussey “Nobody is born gay” reads the headline of a billboard by a so-called “pro-ex-gay” non-profit in the United States. The ad shows identical twin brothers with the revelation, “One gay. One not.” Profound. Ironically, the openly gay South African model featured in the ad, who has no twin brother and whose image […]
Posted inLifestyle
The December great trek
By Janet Lopes As the December holiday approaches every year South Africans across the country begin to prepare for the new great trek. The pack-up and leave-home drive is almost primeval in its urgency — a ritual of pilgrimage embedded in our subconscious since we were children. In South Africa, the first and probably the […]