Politics

Julius Malema has exploded into political prominence by making himself hard to ignore. Inheriting a platform that drew attention to the accidental outrages he tripped into, he quickly learned to stoke outrage and roar back at any responses he provoked. For the media, trying to gauge the state of the nation’s health from moment to moment, this makes him a much more attractive candidate than the business-as-usual official announcements of the ruling party proper. But Malema’s sound and fury signify little, and his disproportionate voice in South Africa’s public conversation is only hurting our ability to speak to one another, and to speak sense when we do. We think it’s time to ignore Julius, and invite you to join us.

For the week of 7-14 April 2010, we undertake to talk about this country, its challenges, its promise, its news, and to ignore Julius while doing so. Join us in this initiative. If you blog, join the roll. If you Tweet, add the hashtag #ignoreJulius to your daily output.

However you communicate, take a week off from Julius.

Donn is being bullied by QVC for their Carlswald based marketing. He is being sued for defamation. Now I'm no lawyer, but I'm sure truth is a defence to defamation, as is it being in the public interest. If someone asked me whether to buy services from QVC, I would strongly recommend against it for the below reasons based on my experiences (and reiterated by a wealth of negative complaints on hellopeter, even with them diluted through their user of different company names, and several blogs).

Donn Edwards is being sued by QVC, the group who appear to be behind the less-than-honest "You've won a car" scheme I previously blogged about. Read his story, and press statement, and send in an affidavit, legal support or donations if you can.

I was interested to see if my political leanings (as described by the Political Compass test) had shifted since having left University, gotten a job, started paying taxes, converted to Catholicism and having grown older.

It is interesting to note that my results are very similar to what they were in 2004, and less libertarian and economically right wing than they were in 2006. Me and Nelson Mandela are still home boys though.

Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.13

Deloitte has gather together some good climate change resources. If you want some white papers, formal research or the like, this has some good links.

Satire: Blending criticism and humor to expose a fault or problem; often used ironically.

David Bullard, a noted South African columnist specialising in satire, had a dig at bloggers. There has been a major sense of humour failure [1], and there is a full on multi-blog, distributed flame war going on against the guy. I guess this is why satirists aim for the holy cows: the response is so much fun.

[1] Personally, I rarely find Bullard's satire funny.

Jason van Niekerk has put an excellent article together for the iCommons site. He details the theoretical and moral force that underpins the necessity for the types of collaboration being pioneered by movements such as free software and creative commons. It includes a podcast too.

Definately worth a read for those of you that think Ubuntu is a linux distribution.

This is a copy of an e-mail I was forwarded by iCommons (the international arm of Creative Commons) by Teresa Hackett of Electronic Information for Libraries. It very neatly lays out the problems with the TRIPS+ FTA Australia caved in to and America is trying to push on the rest of the world (South Africa only narrowly avoided it in our negotiations earlier this year). Even though it applies to libraries, it is well worth a read if you don't know what TRIPS+ is or why it is the devil.

The competition to the bloated bureaucracy, Telkom, was launched on the 1^st of September. Ladies and gentlemen, Neotel.

They currently aren't offering consumer services but plan to by April 2007. They have a fairly comprehensive FAQ available. Currently they are only offering wholesale broadband which should result in lower broadband prices from ISPs soonish. They have also done a good job of selling international carrier throuput to the cellular providers and claim we will soon have international CLI as a fringe benefit.

While it is a pity our government has chosen not to pursue a policy of full deregulation of this market (gosh, did I just say that), I welcome any competition to our evil monopoly Telkom.

The iSummit starts today in Rio. Daniela has been hard at work for the past couple of weeks organising it. I had a listen to the summit CD, there are some great tracks, I was particularly proud of South Africa's contribution. The DVD is more, um... bizarre, the documentary on Chinese body-builders is a hoot.

The iSummit page hasn't gone live as yet, but I have some inside info, you can check out two SAffies (Vhata's word for South Africans) profiles (daniela, colin), both ex-Rhodes students. Despite his picture, Colin is actually a nice guy.

Recently the ANC Youth League claimed that the fact that Jacob Zuma was found not guilty proves that the rape allegation was a set up whose purpose was to discredit Zuma and his political aspirations.

This has a very dangerous presupposition that I have seen trotted out in far too many articles and quotations on the matter.

Daniela has recently started her work for Creative Commons South Africa. It seems they are in charge of the iCommons, an organisation trying to extend the reach of the Creative Commons into other free culture areas. Lessig explains it better. Daniela has been hard at work and already regularly writing for the iCommons blog. Check it out.

Between our previous head of the South Africa National Aids Council 'taking a shower' to prevent the transmission of HIV, and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang excluding the TAC and Aids Law Project from the United Nations Special Assembly on AIDS (one of her many transgressions). I am seriously concerned about the intelligence and ability of Government to deal with this crisis.

Wow, you must read this. It scares me. Courtesy Vhata.

I had the pleasure of watching Paul Bremmer being interviewed on CNN earlier this morning. For those of you that don't remember, Paul was put in charge of the temporary government after America trashed Iraq. Paul made three interesting statements; he insisted that there were WMDs in Iraq and that there were clear links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam and that the insurgents wanted to re-install an oppresive dictatorship.

You see, all insurgents basically want to install oppresive facist regiemes. Like those terrorists n South Africa who wanted to install that facist communist government. Beware die swart gevaar!

But, his first point was the most fun, he gave two powerful reasons as to why there are WMDs. First, nobody has proven they weren't taken to Syria. Ha! This is aking to saying "I will only believe you if you eliminate every other possibility, including that the nukes were hidden in cheese blocks and exported to the moon!" The next reason gave me a better insight into how Paul lives with himself. He said "Who would know better than someone who lead 15 000 americans in a search for them!" The implicit premise here is that if you look for something it must be there, the alternative would be that Paul would have to realise he had wasted his time and been complicit in a corrupt invasion resulting in many deaths and the destruction of a country.

Nobody wants to be Skeletor. In truth few are commited to evil, rather their sense of righteousness blinds them to their deeds.