Category: Politics

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

SA Blog Awards 2010

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date September 1, 2010
Categories In General, Politics

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.

Responsible reporting: At what cost?

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date August 18, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Morality, Politics, Religion

As submitted to The Daily Maverick

Free speech is not the only value that democratic societies subscribe to. Nor does, or should, our commitment to free speech always have to trump competing values such as national security or personal dignity. But the principle of free speech nevertheless stands in need of exceptional, and exceptionally strong, counterarguments in cases where we are told that it is not permissible to broadcast or publish any particular point of view.

This commitment to an open marketplace of ideas rests on the belief that each person should have access to the points of view in circulation, so that he or she is able to exercise their right to moral independence by considering the ideas themselves. As Mill reminds us, compromising free speech costs us both the opportunity to hear things that are true, which can help to correct errors; and also to hear things that are false, where the truth is strengthened by “its collision with error”.

Mark your X in the box labelled “stereotype”

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date August 11, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Politics

As submitted to The Daily Maverick

Democracy and liberty are not equivalent, despite the fact that they are so often conflated in popular discourse. There is no logical obstacle to a dictator being democratically elected and then leaving us with little freedom. Likewise, a dictator could in theory be benevolent, and allow for more freedoms than we currently enjoy in South Africa.

This is why being silent in the face of oppression, tyranny, or abuse of power by the state should not be considered an option by those of us committed to both democracy as well as freedoms of various sorts. Fortunately, democracy and liberty are often positively correlated, so that an increase in the one tends to coincide with an increase in the other.

But because this connection is not a logically necessary one, we are sometimes required to fight these battles on independent fronts. Among the dilemmas and difficulties presented by these battles, we can identify the tone of our arguments as a significant complication, because sometimes struggles for liberty involve butting heads with majority sentiment – in other words with impulses arising from democratic discourses and ideals.

On rape by deception and state-sanctioned racism

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date August 4, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Morality, Politics, Religion

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

Most social interactions are likely to involve some measure of deception. This could range from feigning interest, or pretending to know more about the topic under discussion than you actually do, to calculated deception involving beliefs, character, or motivation. Many of these lesser deceptions are perhaps not even considered dishonest, but merely part of the everyday bargaining between our own multiple identities (which could vary according to context) and the identities of others.

Some more serious sorts of deception are of course legally actionable, and in many cases involve clear moral wrongs. One example of this is painfully fresh in many people’s memories, and involves entrusting financial investments to people who in the end misrepresented the extent to which they had the client’s best interest at heart.

But what to make of “rape by deception”, and in particular the case of Saber Kushour, recently sentenced to 18 months in prison for this “crime”? (The scare-quotes are of course not intended to indicate that rape is not a crime, or that it shouldn’t be, but rather to indicate that it’s not yet clear whether Kushour is guilty of rape at all.)

Mandela’s autopsy

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date July 14, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Morality, Politics

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

Yiull Damaso’s painting of an imagined autopsy of Nelson Mandela has provoked outrage similar to that generated by Zapiro’s recent Mohammed cartoon. The outrage is similar in its severity, and unfortunately also similar in its knee-jerk thoughtlessness. Most troubling, the similarities extend to having to hear yet another argument in favour of the censoring of free expression on the grounds of cultural or religious sensibilities.

The painting, adapted from Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp”, shows a deceased Mandela being autopsied by Nkosi Johnson, while FW de Klerk, Helen Zille, Desmond Tutu and others look on. It is, of course, the portrayal of Mandela as deceased that is causing most of the consternation, on the grounds that this portrayal consists, variously, of witchcraft, disrespect, a violation of dignity, and a “insult and an affront to values of our society” – at least according to ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu.

As with the Zapiro cartoon, we can and certainly should ask whether images like these are in unacceptably bad taste. If they are, we should say so, and hope that we can persuade artists of the legitimacy of our point of view. Having fewer offensive artworks in our purview would no doubt make for a more comfortable life. But one person – or one group, no matter how large – does not have the authority to define what counts as unacceptable and what doesn’t, except within their own cultural universe.

Africa is not a country: football and nationhood

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date June 30, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Politics

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

In the minutes before Ghana took on the USA in the first round of 16 game, a friend and I were discussing where our support lay. She wanted Ghana to win, and I expressed a preference for a USA victory. I wanted the American team to win on grounds of their footballing culture, in that the approach the USA has taken to professional football of late seemed a better example of what the South African team and football administrators should aspire to.

I can understand why South Africans, and Africans in general, like the idea of one of “our” teams doing well. But it doesn’t quite make sense for me, as a football fan, to support teams simply because they represent an African nation, because there is much about Africa that is difficult to support. From female genital mutilation in Egypt and homophobia in Malawi, to assorted human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, there are things about this continent that clearly expose a fundamental divide between Africa as a collective concept, and the sort of world I’d prefer to live in.

As an example of African football, Ghana is of course also a complicated example, given that only one of their squad of 23 actually plays football in Ghana. When the vast majority of the national team lives and works outside of the nation reflected on the covers of their passports, to what extent does it still make sense to think of them as representatives of Africa?

Is freedom of the press that important?

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date May 5, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Politics

The original text of my most recent column for The Daily Maverick:

As Opinionista Sipho Hlongwane reminded us on World Press Freedom Day, not only is the extent of press freedom a matter for debate, but much also still needs to be done in terms of bringing the benefits of a free press to most South Africans. This is not simply a matter of what goes unreported, or even of the potential stifling of a free press via intimidation of journalists or other forms of political interference. These are important concerns, but ones which presume an interest – as well as the ability – on the part of South Africans to equally engage with the issues discussed.

Our concerns should go deeper, in that for a developing country such as ours, the focus should perhaps more appropriately be on whether most South Africans have anything to say at all.

The future of South African tertiary education?

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date April 21, 2010
Categories In Academia and teaching, Daily Maverick, Politics

The original text of this article in The Daily Maverick.

A Higher Education summit hosted by the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, is taking place at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology on April 22 and 23. Much of the focus at the summit will be on “transformation”, one of the more flexible words you’ll encounter while working at a South African university. This is saying a lot, especially since many departments – at my university at least – still seem completely enamoured by the liberating brew of postmodernism, which of course allows for infinite lexical flexibility.

Perhaps this is simply another example of political correctness gone awry – we all know that transformation relates primarily to race, but to explicitly say so may be impolitic, in that colour-blindness is a virtue that we’re all meant to be aspiring to, even in cases where economic inequalities premised on race persist. Instead, transformation becomes code for various social issues, and allows us to collapse concerns around equity, throughput, policies on wheelchair ramps, and whatever else does not currently have its own committee under one handy banner.

For example, the most recent message from the Transformation Officer in my Faculty related to the “Executive Secretaries and Personal Assistants International Symposium”, which I had a difficult time relating to anything obviously to do with transformation. But then, perhaps I’m not transformed myself, or perhaps I’m simply insufficiently postmodern.

Playing the authenticity card

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date April 14, 2010
Categories In Daily Maverick, Politics

As published in The Daily Maverick

The nation’s favourite teddy-bear impersonator, Barry Ronge, recently wrote that “although Breyten Breytenbach has a point when he calls South Africa a ‘kleptocracy’, can we take someone seriously who doesn’t even live here?”

In response, we could perhaps ask whether we should take someone seriously if they think that the validity of someone’s point of view has anything to do with where they live.