Category: External World

Outside of philosophical headspace, things happening in the “real” world.

The boer is dead (#uniteZA)

Following the murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche on Saturday, plenty of good pieces discussing the relationship (or lack thereof) between the murder and Julius Malema’s constant singing of that charming folk-ditty “Kill the boer”. And while government officials on the scene were quick to insist that the murder had nothing to do with Malema’s singing of that song – that it was instead motivated by unpaid wages and general frustration towards a man who had a history of not treating his farm workers too well – we should also be wary of believing that simply because it’s a more comfortable explanation, and one which results in less worry for South Africa’s immediate future.

Because even if the workers were aggrieved at unpaid wages, or poor working conditions, it may still be the case that those frustrations were encouraged to reach boiling point via the “endorsement” for the the murder that they perceived Malema to be offering. It’s an easy answer to blame Malema, and it’s an easy answer to think he has no responsibility in this case.

And as usual, the easy answers are probably incomplete answers. As many others have argued, it’s a time for calm and sober reflection. As with the #speakZA campaign a couple of weeks ago, bloggers in SA have been rallying for calm, and for SA to not let the death of this horrible little man cause any unnecessary friction. Under the banner of #uniteZA, feel free to join by tweeting and/or blogging the message below:

South Africa stands at a crossroads – a time in which racial tensions run high and the world is focused on us. Neither the people of South Africa nor the country itself can afford to have negativity and irrational outbursts rule our daily lives.

To that end, UniteSA is an attempt to bring people from all corners of our nation together in a call for peace, calm and rational thought.

Various ministers have called for restraint as has President Zuma – certain organisations have chosen to use this time to push a political agenda and we appeal to them to allow the authorities the chance they need to resolve the issues.

We urge the people of South Africa to express faith in the police force and the justice system at this time.
We call upon the ANC to rein in Julius Malema appropriately and urge him to behave responsibly.
We call upon the AWB to continue to act responsibly after the tragic death of Eugene Terre’blanche
We call upon the National Government to plan for protection of farmers as they worry about their futures
We express our solidarity and empathy for those who have suffered because of crime and corruption in our country

We are far stronger united than we are apart.

Blogroll
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/gatherer/
http://www.dreamfoundry.co.za/
http://www.6000.co.za
http://loveandpolitics.co.za
http://synapses.co.za
http://fsi.org.za
http://www.macgeek.co.za
http://www.futurechurch.co.za
http://www.robsramblings.co.za
http://antithesis.blognation.co.za
http://jhbprincess.blognation.co.za

Utter awesomeness from Rev. Peasboro

This is old news, but I just heard about it yesterday via The Doctor and Derren Brown: In a book published in 2000, Reverend Jim Peasboro alerts us to the frightening possibility that our PC’s (he doesn’t mention Mac’s, so you trendoids are perhaps safe) may be possessed by demons. Oh yes, “demons can possess anything with a brain, including a chicken, a human being, or a computer”, and “any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit”.

I wonder if this has to do with the decreased costs of storage. Perhaps your average demon takes up 20 megabytes of hard drive space, and that limitation would have been crippling in 1985, when Commodore’s Amiga 1000 sold for $1,295 dollars (without monitor), and hard drive space maxed out at 40MB or so. Nowadays, of course, your PC could house thousands of demons, who could take advantage of the multiple CPU’s in your machine to get up to some serious mischief.

Antivirus manufacturers have been slow on the uptake here, unfortunately. I can find no mention of possession in the documentation for mine, but perhaps I’m using inferior software. One in 10 computers in the US is infected by a demon, but the South African rates are likely to be lower, seeing as I imagine the demons to transport themselves via ADSL, and our connections are much slower than those in the US – your demon might still be in transit, perhaps at a Telkom substation somewhere.

The good news is that “Technicians can replace the hard drive and reinstall the software, getting rid of the wicked spirit permanently”. While the snippets from the book aren’t clear on what stops your computer from being re-infected after this process, I imagine that the Rev. Peasboro answers this question in the book itself. My guess would be that he’s trained a select bunch of technicians in this process, who will guarantee inoculation for a small(ish) fee. I’ll look into the matter of accreditation, as us South Africans can’t be left exposed to these sorts of mortal dangers. We can’t be asked to take the risk of our PC’s suddenly uttering a “stream of obscenities written in a 2,800-year-old Mesopotamian dialect”, now can we?

Addicted to victimhood

Being married to someone who is obsessed with food has its upsides, in that the cooking of regular and delicious meals is something the Doctor enjoys doing (or so she claims, after years of doing so). I can apparently cook too, but this is a hypothesis that I’d rather not subject to much testing, in that I fear the loss of a potentially undeserved reputation. But it has its downsides too, in that her time spent thinking about food, and reading in the discipline of “Food Studies”, involves having to listen to and read an awful amount of utter tosh. Being a naturally inquisitive sort of fellow, I sometimes get caught in the crossfire, which led to us recently having a conversation about the evils of high-fructose corn syrup, which is apparently in everything.

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Help is at hand

Yes, life is sometimes somewhat perplexing. Who to trust, what to read, and “what the hell did she mean by that?”. And that’s just to mention a few of the problems humans have had to face ever since we figured out how to communicate. But now, the stakes are higher, what with Google making us stupid (or, stupid making us Google), and the information overload generally taxing our attention-deficit disorders.

We’ve all received those emails where it’s not quite clear whether the sender is joking, or perhaps laying on some not-so-obvious sarcasm. One of the things readers have to do in these instances is some interpretive work, where you try to balance what you know about the person, and your history of correspondence with them, in order to determine the implicit meaning of a sentence or letter. This activity is most likely beneficial to us in some respects, as we practice our interpretive skills, and perhaps learn a little about psychology along the way.

And viewed from the perspective of the sender, conveying subtleties in the absence of face-to-face communication is also sometimes a challenging task – and one that we become better at through exercising the skills in question. For some, though, both the reading and the writing tasks described above are simply too much effort. Would it not be just great if you can dispense with the whole bother of trying to craft a sentence, and provide the reader with some completely unambiguous clue as to how to interpret your utterance?

SarcMarkYes it would, say Sarcasm, Inc. – the inventors of the SarcMark – who also tell us that the this symbol (denoting sarcasm) “makes punctuation cool again”, and also claim that by using the new SarcMark, “you’ll never be misunderstood again”. How cool is that? As pointed out by The Guardian:

The real breakthrough of Sarcasm, Inc is the realisation that, despite having used sarcasm and irony in the written word for hundreds of years, humans are simply too stupid to consistently recognise when someone has said the opposite of what they mean. The SarcMark solves that problem … Our prayers are answered.

This must surely be the dawning of a new and exciting era in communication. With the SarcMark as precedent, we will no doubt discover all sorts of ways in which we could be more efficient at communication. If you’re angry, or sad, or disappointed, you’ll be able to say exactly that with some clever punctuation mark – perhaps in increasing size depending on the depth of your feelings.

Gizmodo really said it all with the title of their article responding to this innovation:

SarcMark: For when you’re not smart enough to express sarcasm online.

Eastwood does Oprah

A couple of nights ago, the Doctor and I watched a feature-length episode of Oprah directed by Clint Eastwood, titled Invictus. It was somewhat like going to a church service (at least as far as I can recall) where everyone is hopped-up on Ecstasy while trying to channel the spirit of the Dalai Lama – such was the overwhelming schmaltziness of this account of how Mandela saved South Africa with an oval ball. Parts of it were good – here in South Africa, much chattering occurs around the authenticity of accents when movies feature local characters, and both Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon did a good job in this regard. Also, some of the action scenes (rugby scrums and so forth) were appropriately animalistic (in general, though, the rugby scenes were rather devoid of tension or spectacle). But in what appears to be a concerted effort to win a couple of Oscars, Eastwood lays on the cheese to such an extent that at one point the Doctor remarked “this is more than cheesy – it’s an entire fondue!”.

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Travels in the hyperreal

Normal service* should now be able to resume here at Synapses, following a 20-day sojourn in various parts of that strange place they call America. While it’s great to be back in Cape Town, especially with World Cup fever already starting to mount, there are aspects of life there that I never fail to appreciate – most notably the generally polite (even if often formulaic) ways in which people interact. The ad-hoc manner of much social engagement here in South Africa is certainly interesting, and oftentimes a good tonic against boredom**, but I do hope we one day reach a socio-economic level whereby people’s incentives are no longer so emphatically short-term.

But short-term incentives was exactly the zone in which our trip started, in Las Vegas. The Bellagio's water showWhile I was there for a conference (on responsible gambling), that didn’t stop the Doctor and I from having plenty of fun. It’s not the sort of place I’d want to live, but if you’re there for 4 days, and are able to pretend you’re living in a video game (in which your character has plenty of disposable income), it’s a great place to be.

We wined, we dined (there’s a plethora of celeb-chef eateries in the casinos), we saw a few shows. And then we (the Doctor took another path at this point) went way south to Birmingham, Alabama, home of countless fundamentalist churches and boarded-up abortion clinics (well, I didn’t try to count, but there are a fair number). In this ocean of mental-death, a small island of deep thought presented itself at the University of Alabama, where Ross, Ladyman and Dennett (and others) spoke at a colloquium on scientific naturalism and metaphysics.

In terms of cultural difference, you’d struggle to find two American locations more divergent, but we were fortunately well-insulated from the most unwelcome sorts of Southern hospitality, while still getting to enjoy the welcome sorts (pulled pork and barbecue sauce, of course).

And then, a week of pure vacation in Maryland, which mostly involved eating and drinking, interspersed with an evening of excessive eating, drinking, and incredulity over Thanksgiving, where the Doctor and I were seated at a table including a (self-professed) redneck, a TSA agent and his military bride, and some incredibly loud children. These people were all family, in some indirect way that adds further terror to the idea of “family”.

Now were back home in Cape Town, and I’m mostly caught up with the backlog of stuff that relentlessly piles up. But most importantly, it’s good to be home – nothing reminds you more of what a great place this is to live than being away from it.

* No rash promises here: this means perhaps a post every two weeks, rather than one per month.

** The headline news item on 567 CapeTalk at 2pm today was that Charlize Theron was dining at the Waterfront, right now! The breathless reporter reported (as they do) that he had tried to gain entry to the restaurant in question (not named) to have a few words, but was not permitted entry.

Passing the buck

Part of my routine, accompanying the second cup of coffee, is my morning browse through the 100 or so items that have accumulated in Google Reader overnight. As any of you who use it would know, it’s a very useful way to stay on top of peripheral interest areas, so long as you keep a firm editorial hand.

What I mean is that – as with most sources of information – if you don’t pay attention to filtering, the signals are soon drowned out by noise, and something quite interesting from one source can get drowned out by 10 links from some blogger who should really save his one-liners and links for Twitter (or keep them to himself).

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You deserve what you get

While waiting for our dinner guests to  arrive last night, the Doctor remarked on the (apparently) sad state of some of our friends’ lives, where they appear to be involved in relationships that aren’t bringing them much joy. Of one in particular, the Doctor remarked that “he doesn’t deserve that”, and it was clear what she meant – that the friend in question is a lovely man, dedicated to doing as little harm to others as possible, and that we’d therefore prefer a world in which he was as happy as possible.

Hearing “he doesn’t deserve that”, though, immediately brought to mind the thought that – for most of us – you deserve what you get, because of the choices you made.

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Irate offenders (or, inversions of the natural order)

Yesterday the Doctor and I went to the V&A Waterfront, expecting it to be relatively peaceful, given that the vast majority of Capetonians were expected to be watching some SA sporting triumph or another. In the end they weren’t, and it was apparently no triumph either, but that’s besides the point. After an unsuccessful shopping attempt and some lunch (Sevruga sushi, decent), we walked out towards the car, where locals would know of the two pedestrian crossings before you reach the parking garage.

The first was successfully navigated, with the drivers doing the typical (hence, expected) thing of slowing/stopping to allow pedestrians to cross. The second was less so: I had my first foot on the crossing, and as I moved my other leg (plus attached foot) towards the “planted on crossing” position, a young woman in a blue Fiat Uno sped up to get across the crossing before I could impede her progress. So I kicked her car.

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Doing ourselves no favours

While I have no data on this, my impression is that the average person takes a somewhat fundamentalist or absolutist view on morality, by which I mean that they subscribe – in theory, if not in practice – to a core set of fundamental or foundational principles, where “being good” is a matter of maximising their adherence to those principles. This may however be a mistake, and furthermore, a mistake that can result not only in decreased happiness for the person herself, but also in their incurring increased harms on others.

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