Makhanda is to me one of the greatest ironic stories in the history of our country.

I'll explain:

https://twitter.com/PeterTerry3/status/1718539724472660147

Makhanda (aka Nxele - "left-handed") lived at the time of the Christianisation of the Xhosa. He was a contemporary of the prophet Ntsikana (img right), who brought Chistianity into the heart of the people.

Ntsikana gave the name uThixo (Xhosa creator god) to God in translation.

My father told me a story from an old polish colleague last night

The guy was an engineer who came to South Africa after the fall of the USSR

He mentioned the many African students brought to Poland under communist scholarship programs The African students would not study, and would often just stare off into space during exams instead of writing.

But they all passed in three years anyway.

The Pole got angry and went to complain to his lecturer.

Last year, Helen Zille proposed a picture of SA since 2014, in which there is a "battle for the soul of South Africa".

In her picture of our system, she saw it as between "Rule of Law & Constitutionalism" (?) and black-national-socialism.

I think this frame is wrong. What Zille's little story implies, in her famous little Triangle speech at BizNews, is that the two main opposition parties (EFF and DA) should compete for the ANC's attentions come coalition negotiation once they lose their majority.

I think there are interesting comparisons between three kinds of extreme, identity-defined crimes in South Africa.

There are Farm Murders, "Gender Based Violence" and Cape gang violence. Farm Murders are specifically when someone invades a farm, usually torturing, raping and killing the inhabitants, and often stealing something.

Only 1.2% of these cases are related to workplace disputes, employees seldom do this.

Everyone blames Afrikaners for apartheid.

Sure, they ran the system, but there are two very big reasons they shouldn't be the ones singled out for responsibility - British Imperial rule and Anglo-American mining.

Why the blame is so one-sided is also interesting.

First, they didn't initiate segregation, and they didn't initiate separate development.

These two policies can be traced to British settlement, and SD can in particular be attributed to Theophilus Shepstone, governor of Natal.

I think one has to be cautious here.

Figures have gone down in recent years, due to much more intense private security efforts.

But you are right - since around 1980, farms were an explicit strategic target for terrorism by the ANC.

Genie out the bottle, much like necklacings.

https://twitter.com/Bikeman386970/status/1686972228121018368

The necklacing strategy was officially discontinued in 1987, due it to alienating potential supporters, and farm murders were no longer officially endorsed after (I think) 1993.

But the political dimension is impossible to separate

And so the EFF are culpable.

I've long had unfinished business with the Gettier Problems.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_p…

Intuitively, there always seemed to be something wrong with them that I couldn't put my finger on, and for a whilte I was genuinely obsessed.

I ended up discovering a funny bit of irony. The basic format is a criticism of the Classical theory of what knowledge is - justified true belief.

That is, for something to be knowledge, it must be something you believe is true, is also actually true, and was arrived at properly, that is, not by some insane coincidence.

What one can discover by 20, if IQ > 90, is that there are a few basic forms of skepticism that can be used to make any form of constructive dialogue impossible.

One is to demand impossible standards of evidence (easy) another is to demand a definition immune to contingency.

https://twitter.com/katiedimartin/status/1670141121983307777

Skepticism can be used instrumentally and selectively.

Use skepticism to dismantle arguments you don't like, don't apply it to arguments you like.

This way you can defend any narcissistic worldview you endorse.

lol what evidence

Just on black people, they outspent the UN development budget, building the worlds biggest hospital, introducing the first school systems, and one of the worlds biggest road networks.

They did all of this while fighting a two front war against the Soviets.

https://twitter.com/KaitlinRawson/status/1630598890339573760

When the sanctions were lifted, debt/gdp was half what it is now, all state institutions were functioning, there was surplus electricity production, and we had one of the most reliable banking and telecommunications systems outside of the United States.

@TheShyWoof @KingofShirgar You know precisely zero about South Africa.

The ANC was the source of almost all apartheid era violence against black people, because they massacred and tortured to death any black liberation movement who wouldn't submit to the. @TheShyWoof @KingofShirgar They also engaged in massive drug trafficking operations.

Today, they deliberately support and protect gangs in the Cape to destabilise areas where ethnic minorities vote against them.

Th crime levels have been consistently increasing for over a decade.

The concept of the Risk Society is the most powerful tool in the modern liberal state, and is woefully underappreciated.

Liberalism relies on Mill's harm principle to check the state. RS leverages actuarial sci into omnivorous coercive frameworks in the name of harm reduction. It was developed by Anthony Giddens, the leading intellectual of the Fabian Society, and Tony Blairs intellectual mentor.

It states that risk is unbounded in modern society, and thus the state has an unbounded mandate to intervene to control systemic risk.

Civil war conditions emerging in SA and Swazi have on single cause - the consolidation of power under Cyril Ramaphosa.

In Swazi, the king was backed by JZ when the state went bankrupt. SA covered security expenses. JZ also protected trad leaders across the country. The lawfare against Zuma was the thin end of the wedge. Most of the damage was done when they were cut off from state and party funds.

CR has gone after the Zulu royal family and traditional leaders in general, trying to enforce a totalising republican/socialist revolution

People can't decide what CR is. Puppet or zealot?

At a personal level, he is a communist. And yet he is very comfortable cutting lucrative deals with major industry to secure a personal capital legacy.

His closest followers are progressives, internationalists and communists. To understand this, understand Cicero's idea of a commonwealth - a political community with a common understanding of interests and identity, law and justice.

South Africa is not a commonwealth. It is a province within a global empire, and has no ethnic identity.

Official "scientific consensus" on COVID has been in error for a year now, flipping between several unproven positions on dozens of different issues, but if you differ from any one of these while it is official, you are guilty of "disinformation" and are an enemy of the state. It's all so predictable too - crisis management inevitably results in immense confusion in institutions. And in a global pandemic, getting overwhelmed by information and being uncertain of what measures are appropriate is normal. Filtering out criticism is dumb.