Cluttering the internet since 2005.
A very good point: Why treat Beijing differently to Harare?
I used to think “China’s not so bad - they can do whatever they want because it is their decision how to run their own country”, but now I realise that I made the same mistake as many others in thinking that “Countries can do whatever they want as long as they are doing well” which is obviously just plain wrong. Good economy != good government.
Actually… just read the link - I’m not doing it any justice as usual.
I’m suddenly addicted to David Bullard’s column on the times. Here are a few recent entries to get you started:
The man’s a genius. Just check his blog (start out with 50 things you could do which would be more rewarding than blogging…) 72 comments!
The African National Congress has called for the sacking of a senior council official who blew the whistle on alleged abuse of power and corruption in a R1-billion 2010 stadium project.
I actually find that funny. They’re openly corrupt, but if they read about it in the press then they fire the whistle-blower. But they don’t even try to make it any less obvious. It is like no one cares that everyone will know that they fired the guy because he blew the whistle on their corruption because nothing will come of it anyway. Perhaps they just don’t want any wet blankets around.
Go read more at the Mail & Guardian.
What the hell? Some proposal by someone in the government that obviously has too much time on his/her hands for a South African Schools pledge. I could go on and on about how much this sucks, but I can’t put it any better than this. Some secular and free country we live in. For now.
Something that’s been annoying me lately is the Genetically Modified Foods topic. People don’t seem to realise that there’s little difference between breeding and genetic modification. Almost none of the food we eat looks or even tastes anything like it did in the wild - the cultivars and breeds we eat today got changed by humans over tens, hundreds or in some cases thousands of years.
So.. on the surface I have no problem with genetically modified food. If we can make food cheaper, tastier, more disease-resistant, etc. then why not? Surely that’s what people have been doing all along?
The only side worth arguing is probably the economics behind it - I understand how sterile plants / seeds and patented / controlled things can really mess with the smaller scale farmers and obviously that should be prevented from happening.
Surely some testing of genetically modified food is important, but I think campaigning against the very concept of genetically modified food is just plain stupid.
President Robert Mugabe opened Zimbabwe’s Parliament on Tuesday with plans to push through laws that will allow him to appoint his successor without an election, and force businesses to give a controlling stake to ruling party loyalists and others chosen by the government.
from Mugabe wants power to name successor
Mugabe is my favourite clown. With Bush a distant second. Followed by that guy from Iran.
Went out last night to see a movie and we parked behind this car with a bumper sticker reading something like “Stop Eskom’s new nuclear power plant.”
That’s when I realised that the one thing in politics that I find most annoying is people that are fundamentally against nuclear power in any way without coming up with any examples of better alternatives.
To me saying “no nuclear power” means “more coal-fired power plants”. How much do nuclear power plants contribute to air pollution and global warming? Nothing, whereas the main alternative (coal power plants) is arguably the biggest contributor out there. Which one would I rather live next to? A modern nuclear power plant. Why? Coal power plants constantly create greenhouse gasses, whereas the chances of a nuclear power plant experiencing a meltdown in this day and age are extremely slim. Newer designs for nuclear power plants are much safer than Chernobyl’s reactor and anyone who did the smallest amount of reading up on pebblebed nuclear reactors would know that they cannot possibly melt down. They are designed and will be built that way. The laws of physics cause them to scale down and stop if things go wrong.
Wind and solar power aren’t always alternatives. I want them to be, but they are not a silver bullet. The sun doesn’t always shine and wind speed isn’t constant. Unlike traditional power plants, we can’t scale up wind or solar power during peak times when we suddenly need electricity. The biggest challenge is storing energy during off-peak times so that we can use it during peak times when we need more power than we’re generating. As far as I know the best way to do that is with some hydroelectric scheme, but we all know how damaging that can be for the environment. There are probably other ideas, but as far as I can tell no one’s come up with a cost-effective, reliable way of storing very large amounts of energy in a safe, environmentally friendly manner.
Then there’s the problem that in general no one wants a big wind-power farm built anywhere near them, we need very many wind turbines taking up lots of space and you can’t just put them anywhere, because the “wind quality” is just not the same everywhere all the time. People are afraid that wind turbines will somehow chop up birds (as if these things turn at the speed of a cooling fan) and that they make some dreadful noise as they turn. (This might have been true in the past, but is apparently also solved)
Furthermore, to satisfy all our energy requirements using solar panels will require a hell of a large amount of very expensive solar panels made using (as far as I’ve heard) very toxic chemicals.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not opposed to wind or solar power. In fact, I wish we had more of it, but we’ll need a lot of infrastructure for that to generate all the electricity we require. In the meantime I think we can at least try and supplement our electricity output with clean power and then have some nuclear power plants that we can turn up when we need them.
Coal-fired power plants are the enemy. That’s what we should phase out. In the near term I think we need nuclear power plants until we sorted out all the problems that a 100% wind and solar power economy would have.
I never intended to post anything political on this blog, but today I feel like I have to make an exception. The Christian Science monitor recently featured an article about afrikaners in South Africa and I feel like I should comment. At first I found parts of it a bit offensive:
That Afrikaners – the Dutch colonial descendants who viewed themselves as God’s chosen people in a savage land – would have trouble fitting into a new black-led South Africa should not come as any surprise. After all, it was Afrikaners who constructed the apartheid system of racial segregation in 1948 that gave white people in general, and Afrikaans speakers in particular, total political and economic power over the black majority.
“This is a classic power-loss syndrome,” says Theo Venter, a political scientist and special advisor to the vice chancellor at the Afrikaans- language Northwest University in Potchefstroom. “When you come to South Africa, and you start reading the Afrikaans language newspapers, like Beeld, you see the whole issue of crime, the issue of land reform, the issue of the ANC’s [ruling African National Congress party’s] ability to rule effectively, it’s all written in a very critical way.”
“People say they are ‘gatvol,’ which means ‘fed up.’ On the surface, the song ‘De la Rey’ is about the English during the Boer War,” he says, referring to the 1899-1902 war in which General Koos De la Rey reluctantly led an insurgency against a more organized and much larger British Army. But really, the subtext of this song is about white ‘fed-up-ness’ with black decisions and rule. They’re in control, and we’re not.”
Some academics like Mr. Venter – himself an Afrikaner – say that life has actually never been better for Afrikaners. Foreign investment has poured into the country since the end of apartheid. Black rule has allowed white-owned companies to largely continue business as usual; 80 percent of the trades on the Johannesburg stock exchange are done by whites, and 90 percent of the companies are still white-owned.
But then later after I re-read it I realised it is not always quite so bad:
But 12 years after Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president and encouraged reconciliation, South Africa’s 2.5 million Afrikaners are looking inward for strength, rather than outward for a scapegoat. That, at least, is what many young Afrikaners – many who have no memories of the apartheid government set up by their forefathers – say is the real message of the De la Rey phenomenon. Unlike violent Afrikaner militants, such as the recently imprisoned Boeremag gang, today’s younger Afrikaners reject the racist sins of their ancestors, but say that there still needs to be a place for them in the new South Africa.
“We were really lucky to have extremely capable leaders on both sides during the transition after apartheid,” says Tim Cohen, an editor at the Business Day newspaper in Johannesburg. But now, he says, white South Africans have “checked out of the political debate. In the long term, it’s dangerous.”
I am a white South African and my first language is Afrikaans. This means that many people would put me into the “afrikaner” box. Whether or not I consider myself an Afrikaner is complicated, but it is clear that most of the world automatically considers me as one of the 2.5million afrikaners. If you look at the general prejudices and asumptions about afrikaners, this is akin to thinking of all germans as nazis, all jews as zionists and all muslims as crazy jihadist suicide bombers.
This is obviously simply not true. These prejudices are often caused by these “experts” and extremists that just speak for all afrikaners. If you listen to one of these white extremists or “experts on afrikaners” and then believe all afrikaans speaking white South Africans are like that, then you might as well listen to a recording of Hitler speaking in the buildup to the second world war and then say “The 83 million germans is a classic case of people suffering from a power loss syndrome”. It is just rediculous.
The problem is that the afrikaners that are still racist, that do suffer from some power loss syndroms and that do complain about everything the ruling party does are just entrenching these prejudices. It makes it more and more difficult for people like Scott Baldauf from csmonitor and many others to distinguish between me and “afrikaners”. It is basically fear and hate-mongering. It puts us (South Africa) back at least 10 years. Part of the problem is that many are racist and angry, but that’s usually confined to specific areas and age groups.
Also, it now means that afrikaners (and by that I mean white, afrikaans-speaking South Africans) are not allowed to have an opinion. Whenever we do complain about anything that happens in the country, it is obvously because we are racist or suffering from some power-loss-syndrome. No matter how bad things get, we get reminded of how much better it is going now and we’re just moaning. Yes, the economy is doing fine, but the crime rate is amongst the highest in the world. HIV/Aids is a huge problem. Our education and health-care systems are underfunded and (dare I say it) terrible. Our police force really needs some work. Sure, things are better for a lot of people than it used to be, but by world standards, conditions suck. Progress did not happen as fast as was promised. Our public transport infrastructure is almost non-existant. I can go on and on.
And ofcourse the government and many “experts” that want to get themselves heard use this “afrikaners = apartheid” mentality. Things still get blamed on apartheid, we get reminded that 90% of businesses are still owned by whites, etc. As if the crime rate, education, health care, public transport, etc would be any better if 90% were owned by someone else. The ecomomy wouldn’t grow faster than now just because businesses are owned by people with a different skin colour, taxes wouldn’t increase, curruption wouldn’t magically go down and tax money wouldn’t get spent in much different ways, so I don’t see how that would change anything in the greater scheme of things. Sure, people would be empowered and more equal, but my point is that the government’s ability to govern wouldn’t magically change. But ofcourse, just highlighting this, in fact, just writing this post means that I am obviously one of them - a racist, white afrikaner.
By the second page of the csmonitor article it gets a bit better, but the initial impact you get is the typical story where all white afrikaans speaking people are put into the same box and that annoys me.
There’s something wrong with a world where people paint in broad strokes like that and get away with it.