Category: Politics

Politics both in theory and in terms of party politics, mostly focused on South Africa.

How should we respond to racists?

As submitted to The Daily Maverick

There are various undeniable facts that should inform any thinking or talking about racism, and South African racist attitudes and behaviour in particular. Key among these is the fact that white privilege persists, and that any number of high-profile tenderpreneurs who are black cannot elide the reality of race-based class inequality in South Africa.

As a result of this historical and current inequality, as well as population demographics, black South Africans are statistically more likely to be poor than white people. This also means that black South Africans are less likely to have equal access to educational facilities, and also that they might receive lower levels of service, and have access to goods of inferior quality.

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More on Gareth Cliff, Mngxitama (and now Magaxa)

Khaya Magaxa, SACP provincial secretary for the Western Cape, has responded to my column in the Mail&Guardian on November 12. His letter was printed in the Mail&Guardian of November 26, and is available online. However, I’m also pasting it here, so that my response (below) can be read in context.

Racism is still a reality

The fact that Jacques Rousseau (“White supremacy rant against Gareth Cliff sullies rational political debate“, November 12) could not identify any evidence of racism in Cliff’s letter to the president is precisely because his defence of Cliff is racist itself.

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Crazies gang up against god

In case you missed it, some Muslims, Jews and Christians gathered on the West Bank on November 11 to pray for rain. A curious aspect of these rituals is of course that god (all three of them, or 5, depending on how you understand the trinity-voodoo) already knows that it’s raining, and also knows about the drought that has apparently depleted Israel’s water supply by 25%. It’s all part of his plan, remember? God also knows that you want it to rain – he knew before you did, and certainly before you decided to arrange this group-prayer thing. But seeing as it hasn’t rained, he doesn’t want it to rain – and however much you plead, it won’t make a difference, because he also already knows why you want it to rain. See how this works?

It will rain when he’s damn well good and ready for it to rain. In the meanwhile, remember that he loves you. Or some of you, and wants the others to go to some place of damnation, for they are infidels. Or something – it’s sometimes difficult to keep it all straight in one’s head.

While it’s no doubt a good thing that people are setting aside their differences with respect to invisible people in the sky to engage with some common cause, it’s nevertheless sad that they can’t do so with respect to real, existing authorities like governments, terrorist groups, insane Mullah’s etc. Natural phenomena aren’t controllable by chanting – but other forms of noises, like those involved in rational and civilized conversation – can help to eliminate other forms of ill. Like people killing each other.

Mngxitama on Gareth Cliff

The Mail&Guardian of November 5 carried an opinion column by Andile Mngxitama which described Gareth Cliff as “the face of white supremacy“. To read the original text of a submission to the Mail&Guardian in response to Mngxitama, published on November 12 under the title “White supremacy rant against Gareth Cliff sullies rational political debate“, head over to the FSI website.

Woolworths offends the Christians

Those of you on Facebook can enjoy a few minutes of entertainment at the expense of some frothing at the mouth fundumbentalists, who are incensed at Woolworths’ decision to pull some Christian magazines from their shelves. The very Christian homophobe Errol Naidoo was quick out of the starting blocks, sending out a newsletter headlined “Christianity Not Welcomed At Woolies!” while the story was breaking on News24 and TimesLive.

Naidoo is apparently suffering from some memory loss to accompany his dementia.

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Sad/strange scenes at Council for Secular Humanism conference

Note: this post will be of limited interest to those readers who aren’t involved in secular movements, or who don’t keep up with the politics of such movements.

Some unpleasant scenes unfolded during the final session of the Council for Secular Humanism conference, that ended today. The last bit of today’s final session ended with questions from the audience, and first in line at the microphone was Paul Kurtz. The way things transpired left the audience feeling quite discomfited, and the same could be said for at least one panelist.

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Sincerity is (probably) bullshit

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

It is common knowledge – or at least, it should be – that many of us exhibit significant flexibility in terms of the selves we present to others in different contexts. We might affect an accent in one context but not in another, or pretend to care more about a particular issue when trying to engage with someone who is concerned about that issue. And as much as we might not like to think about such things, our own perceptions of self are notoriously unreliable, and we are equally unreliable in recognising this.

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Media freedom is not a black-and-white issue

As submitted to The Daily Maverick

I would hope that regular readers are by now in no doubt as to my commitment to the freedom of the press, and free speech in general, and that the following therefore doesn’t give anyone the idea that I’ve been offered a government contract. As I’ve frequently argued in these pages, no idea should be granted the status of being sacred or outside of the realm of criticism. It’s a legal defense – not a principled or philosophical one – to assert that something is enshrined in the Constitution (for example). The possibility is always open for the Constitution to be wrong on some issue, or for it to provide an inefficient mechanism for safeguarding and promoting goals that we agree are desirable.

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It’s often not the product that’s defective – it’s us

As one of my contributions to the Lead SA campaign, I’d like to tell you all to stop your moaning and complaining. Unless, of course, you plan some concrete action to back it up. It seems impossible to read a local news story that doesn’t have a stream of whiny complaints appended to it, where everything is wrong, and it’s always everybody else’s fault. This pervasive negativity can also be self-perpetuating. Consider the @PigSpotter micro-saga:  There’s a confirmation bias at play there, in that many of the callers/bloggers/twitterers are focusing on the cops who fit whatever stereotype is at play, and forgetting that the majority (?) of cops don’t deserve this moniker. Second, any justified ire is more perhaps more appropriately directed at those who give the cops their instructions, not the cops themselves.

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SA Blog Awards 2010

The voting phase of the SA Blog awards 2010 has started, and it seems that Synapses has made the final 10 in two categories: best blog about politics, and best post on a South African blog, for my February post on Giving Jacob Zuma the finger. Thanks for the nominations, whomever you generous folks may be. If you’re inclined to follow it up with a vote, then the banners below give you an easy way to do so. The left-hand one is for the politics category, and the right-hand one for best post – of course, you can just click one of them and fill in your other nominations when you get to the voting site.

There’s a bunch of good stuff there to vote for, but also some very strange contenders. Some of the blogs haven’t been updated in ages, and some aren’t even blogs (for example, The Daily Maverick). Unfortunately for me, if one is going to (falsely) consider the Maverick to be a blog, then they (rather than me) should certainly get your vote. But they’re not a blog, so rather vote for me. (Update: see Chris’s comment below. The Daily Maverick have taken themselves out of the running.) You can vote until the 17th of September, and the process allows for one vote per day. Yes, I know, the methodology is completely screwy, but there you go.

Other people/blogs worth checking out:

Two of my competitors for best post: 6000 with his Dear Uruguay (clearly inspired by my post, The hand of god, revisited, but never mind that); and Michael Meadon’s post, On deference, which exhorts us to bear the limits of our knowledge in mind, and to understand what authority means in the context of scientific claims.

Two of the entrants for “Best Science and Technology blog”: Michael Meadon’s Ionian Enchantment and Angela Meadon’s The Skeptic Detective also merit your consideration.