No thinking person can escape being horrified by the actions carried out in the name of God by religious fanatics across the world today. Killings, rapes, executions, wholesale slaughter, genocide, torture, and sometimes just ordinary nastiness — a litany of horrors that deny humankind the right to claim ourselves to be a uniformly emotionally intelligent […]
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Posted inEnvironment, News/Politics
Eskom and Sasol put a low price on life
By Alex Lenferna How much is a human life worth? How much is our future and that of our children worth? Well, the answer to both is “not too much” if Eskom and Sasol’s pollution-friendly tactics are anything to go by. Allow me to explain. On paper, South Africa has some pretty decent environmental legislation […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Depression never leaves you
By Sifiso Yengwa With Robin Williams’ death still fresh in the minds of many, the issue of depression has once again come to the fore. Nowadays it is generally accepted that depression is a clinical condition that is manageable with drugs and other forms of prescribed treatment. Sadly the majority of people still hold a […]
Posted inGender violence, News/Politics
Please stop telling me how not to get raped
On Tuesday, the South African Police Service sent a series of tweets detailing safety tips to avoid rape. In an extraordinarily ill-considered turn of phrase, they tweeted that SAPS Northwest “are concerned about escalating contact crimes due to victims who roam the streets late at night”. Just let that sink in for a minute. “Due […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Reflections on Gaza: How should my people be?
By Pedro Tabensky As the son of a Holocaust survivor and a refugee of mid-20th century turmoil, knowledge of the precariousness of existence has always been part of the fabric of my life, and has motivated me permanently to ask: How should I be in a way that pays respect to the suffering of my […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Dr Jordan and Mr Hide
On Monday night, the inevitable happened. Pallo Jordan resigned from Parliament. Although he attempted to simultaneously resign from the ANC, and its NEC, it is not clear whether his decision was accepted by the party itself. After a week of sustained pressure, during which Jordan’s eerie silence and period of hiding sent out a clear […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Beating Ebola in a global village
By Anayo Unachukwu While I was writing this piece, I received a news alert from the Washington Post, about the arrival to the US of Dr Kent Brantly, an American doctor, who was infected with Ebola while working in Liberia with a Christian missionary organisation — Samaritan’s Purse. His repatriation to his country was not […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Illicit capital flowing out of Africa often benefits foreign investors
By Antonio Macheve Jr The US-Africa Summit in Washington DC has built enormous expectations for the development of Africa, particularly in what concerns economic ties, trade relations, investments and business between the nations of the African continent and the US. Despite enormous human-rights violations, conflict, widespread disease and other ills commonly known to Africa, the […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Marikana widows shed tears in Women’s Month
This Women’s Month marks two years since the Marikana massacre. The widows of the workers killed by the South African Police Service in 2012 have since received their deceased husband’s provident fund dues, but still wait for justice while the media and public attention has long since transferred from their plight to the Farlam Commission. […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Tanya Poole and the paradox of ‘being-human’
The psychologist William James, brother of Henry James, the well-known novelist, once exhorted people to “Begin to be now what you will be hereafter”. In similar vein, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that one should “Become who you are” — a formulation that drives the paradox of being-human home even more clearly than James’s words. At least, […]
Posted inEquality
The ancient Greeks’ wisdom regarding sexual orientation
As history unfolds, people tend to regard earlier eras as being surpassed in practically all areas of cultural activity, the most obvious one being technology — “progress” regarding which, incidentally, seems to me to be proportional to retrogression in other spheres of culture, specifically self-understanding: the more gadgets there are to be fascinated by, the […]
Posted inBusiness
Max Weber on capitalism and religion
What must surely count as one of the shrewdest, albeit debatable, accounts of the distinctive traits of capitalism was penned by the justly famous German sociologist Max Weber in his controversial book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1930 (London: Routledge Classics, 2001). The reasons for its controversial status are summarised as […]