The past month has seen another round of vitriolic and unsubstantiated attacks against white South African men, especially those of the Afrikaans speaking persuasion. I blame the Oscar Pistorius trial for igniting what seems like a very one sided conversation. Damned if you raise your voice for a more balanced conversation, damned if you don’t. You’re either a silent conspirator against the truth or an overt supporter of misogyny and bigotry.
This is not an article about Nelson Mandela. It is a warning about the dangerous and dishonest attempts by many white South Africans to establish their democratic and human rights credentials in the eyes of the world. For them and many Western ‘liberals’ Mandela was not a man with many great qualities and a number of major flaws. For them he was a brand, to use as a smokescreen for their apathy towards the social ills that haunt this country and indeed many others across the world.
The western black rhino is no more according to headlines, tweets, shares and other modes of eco agony, invariably perpetrated by that most spineless of Moloch’s children, the hipster and its incestuous cousin, the yuppie. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the western black rhino, as much as everyone else who had never heard of its existence. I will however bet my last Oreo, that all those cyber tears were shed more in aid of social awareness brownie points than actual knowledge of, or love for the animal concerned.
A swing high above Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed this stately view of the golden-hued planet and its main rings. The view is in natural color, as human eyes would have seen it. This mosaic was made from 36 images in three color filters obtained by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem on Oct. 10, 2013. The observation and resulting image mosaic were planned as one of three images for Cassini’s 2013 Scientist for a Day essay contest.
I smoked for over 20 years, and I enjoyed it for most of those two decades. Neither potential health issues nor the increasing cost of cigarettes could budge me from my god given right to screw myself up. That was before I admitted to myself that all my addiction was accomplishing was the enrichment of a few immoral bastards. Consumed with righteous anger I went cold turkey earlier this year, going from a 40 a day habit to jogging five kilometres per day without vomiting. This is my story …
We have all amused ourselves by looking at articles and graphics imagining social media as a country, but what about the correlation between social media and political support? With South Africa’s next general election scheduled for a date between April and July next year, it may be an interesting exercise to see which South African political parties could be considered Twitterati and which ones come across as twits in the social media arena.
