Not that there is anything wrong with that, I follow and comment on many such highly-personal blogs. But I became a bit more private in a sense. Over the years, rather than writing about my life – it became more important to me to write about my thoughts. My philosophical musings (as amatuerish as they may perhaps be), my take on technology news and more recently -roleplaying. How interesting that I stopped writing about my own personal life – and started to write about the personal lives of fictional characters. Personal lives with only the most tenuous connections to the game in which they are in fact set. The quests and events happen – but the thougths and feelings of those characters as they experience them – in fact their every experience of them, exist only in my mind.

I don’t want to try and analyze why the blog changed in this way because frankly – I haven’t got a clue where to start. I remain as adamantly on my quest of studying my own psyche for deeper meanings as I ever was, I suppose however that somewhere along the line I lost the capacity to express what I saw anymore – and that rather rules out the idea of crowd-sourcing the process.

Instead, the blog became an expression of my ideas and my fantasies rather than myself. I’m not unhappy about this, nor for that matter particularly extatic about it, I just find it interesting – and perhaps if I continue along this line of thought I’ll draw some useful conclusions to write a future post about. For now, I’ll go on with the philosophical post I was planning in my head as I lay in my bed late last night, which is in fact about pets.

It’s been said that having pets are the most uniquely human behaviour there is. No other species would raise, shelter, feed, protect and nurture another species for no other reward than the pleasure of it’s company. Evolutionary biologists generally believe however that it didn’t start out that way (though whose to say the first wolf-puppies brought into the cave by our ancestors as children was not brought in because he was cute and playful ? That the whole "hey he can help us hunt" thing only happened later ?). But let’s stick to the more orthodox theories for now, particularly as it aligns with the ones that fit into recorded history. Cats, horses – in fact almost every single pet humans keep did not start out as "pets". They started out as a simple symbiosis – the same kind of interspecies cooperation that is well documented throughout the animal kingdom.

Horses carried us around and pulled our vehicles- in return we gave them food, shelter and all the other amenities we could – allowing both species to exist in far greater numbers than either could have done alone. Some like rabits were originally domesticated purely for food reasons. Cats were kept primarily to keep down pests in grain stores and most likely – dogs were kept to guard and help hunt.

There is nothing particularly uniquely human about this. Sharks and Remoras have almost identically the same relationship as humans had with cats not long ago. In fact it almost appears that pets as we know it only even appeared on the scene in the last century or so – after the automobile was invented. Suddenly horses weren’t needed anymore – so they only ones left are kept for love. Urbanization largely removed the need for working cats – so cats came to be household companions like dogs. The result is that there has been interesting documented changes in cat behaviour over the past century. Cats still pretend to be highly independent creatures who could drop and forget their human hosts at a whim and only stick around and put up with the whole "affection" thing for the free food.

Any cat-owner knows it’s an act though – every cat knows it too. Cats need and seek out the love and affection of their human hosts, but the old loner-genes are still there, telling them they shouldn’t need it. So they pretend not to, as long as we are happy to let them pretend – they are happy to play along. Dogs however have been proper pets for far longer. Sure there are still hunting and guarding dogs out there – but they are a shrinking minority and most dogs haven’t been working dogs in any way at all for centuries.

Dogs have, in fact, managed to turn the whole master-pet relationship on it’s head. The best dogs are obedient and subservient – but also know they will never be asked anything more strenuous than a few simple tricks like "sit". In return for which – humans shelter them, feed them, clean up their poop, give them warmth and the loving affection which these pack animals are genetically programmed to crave as much as we do. Humans are masters only in name. We may believe we give the orders – but show me one decent human who can look at a hungry dog and refuse to give it food ? They may not vocalise the commands – but the commands are there nonetheless.

Domesticated animals have a deal with humans – they provide us something in return we provide them with things. When that which they provided us once loses value- and we keep providing without asking anything more than their company… we move beyond symbiosis, these animals become pets. If ever there was proof that humans are not merely slaves to our evolution but can transcend it – pets are it. Beyond symbiosis love survived, on both sides of the deal.

But if my hypothesis is correct then this civilized pet-keeping genuinely didn’t exist even a hundred years ago. Just 50 years ago the vast majority of people were still in favor of racial segregation (sure those people still exist but they are a shrinking minority now). The last 100 years or so of human history was not just the period of the most rapid scientific and technological advance in our history – it seems to me it was the period of the most rapid social and civilizational advance as well.

And in this there is a message perhaps of hope. Those who feel that peace for humanity is impossible because all of human history is war – are missing this. We were evolved to be a warfaring species, but we can transcend our evolution. The proof is all around us, pets being just one of the obvious examples. It’s not going to happen fast. It’s not going to happen easilly. But it certainly can happen – and the trend seems to be toward that change. Slow as it may be.

So do I believe world peace is possible ? I do in fact yes. Humanity is still evolving, our brains are, much faster than our bodies could. We’re getting better as a species. I don’t know if I, or anybody who reads this, will be around to see it. But look what we did in the last 100 years… imagine where we will be by 2110 ? Forget the technology and science, try to imagine what we can do socially… there is real reason to hope.

Having said that – hope alone has never done anything good. There is still in the world today many who relish our inherited, destructive natures. Who commit genocides and atrocities and call it "justice". Who order soldiers to kill and call it "honor". There are still soldiers who take pleasure in shooting a schoolbus to pieces from a helicopter – as many in the "good" nations as in the "bad". There are still politicians who will call torture "harsh interogation" and then go and claim it’s justified.

If we leave them be – we won’t progress. Progress depends on our efforts to speak out against these things. Decry them – and face the ire of their supporters. We won’t live to see world peace. But every time we open our mouths to say "no, it’s NOT okay" – we help make sure that our children or grandchildren might.

Those we call heroes, and those we call despots tend to sound exactly the same when you listen to their speeches superficially. Because they use the exact same vocabulary. They use words like "justice" and "honor" and "rights". To tell the difference you must look not at what words are used – but what they say with those words.

So when you next take your dog for a walk, when it licks your hand and you see that utter love in it’s eyes. Remember that once we used them like slaves – and they became our friends, our brothers. We crossed the line of perfectly peaceful coexistence with other species. Species who were evolved to be OUR predators ! In just a century – we evolved that friendship to persist past "usefulness" – into pure love and affection and companionship.

If our ancestors could do that with wolves – then there is absolutely no reason we cannot do it with one another.

Ironically from a strictly economic point of view unions are as capitalist an idea as you’ll find. The reason people see it differently is a lie spread in the last few decades that capitalism is all about benefiting companies – this makes the best of it’s ideas sour for socialists, and ironically produces a kind of capitalism that is not only deserving of disrespect but doomed to faillure. Capitalism in essence is based on rewarding production with money. Capitalism is therefore incapable of succeeding whenever one party has too much power or control over money – as that destroys he reward system. The reason to reward production in the first place is to create a society where more people have access to more resources.

If those resources all end up in a few hands, then you’re achieving the opposite to the goal of capitalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of bargaining to set market rates – and when you have a significant power imbalance (as between employers and employees) it makes sense to use collective bargaining to restore the equilibrium.

A lot of the sour feeling among many people about striking as a concept comes from a work ethic that is genuinely uncapitalist. The ideal of work as it’s own reward. This is a very religious position – but it’s not an economic one. The realty is that labour is a market, employees are selling a resource that employers are buying. The trouble is that in the vast majority of roles it’s a buyers market – there is excessive supply compared to the demand. This is one reason for inflation and the reduction in living standards over the past 30 years (the first time since the foundation of the USA that a generation has had a reduction in living standards compared to their parents, ever, and that was already true at the height of hte 2005 boom – long before the current downturn).

The role unions play is to allow employees to bargain collectively and set a more fair market price for their product. This is in fact a very essential part of the free-market system. If you think the free market is only about producing goods and maximising corporate profits then you may think that anything that prevents salaries from being at the lowest possible level is bad for the economy (like the people who believe that unemployment rates of less than 20% is bad for the economy as well). However if you think of each member of society as being a part of the free market system then whether you’re a business owner or an employee you have to think in terms of maximising your individual profit.

Employees can do so by gaining rarer skills that have higher market value but this is not an option available to all and wouldn’t be good for the economy if it was (after all -if nobody is a factory worker anymore, then there aren’t factories). So for those in the bad end of the market, unions and collective bargaining is a powerful and much needed means of ensuring they get to sell their product (labour) for a decent price. If capitalism is working then that means EVERYTHING must be sold at a profit. In the labor market this means even the floor sweeper must be able to earn more than his expenses. Merely meeting them is not enough (and besides is indistinguishable from slavery), there must be profit – profit that can be saved, so it can be invested in new industries and the economy can keep growing.

One standard practise of unions through the years have been to picket their places of work during strikes, this too is needed. If the employers can simply replace the strikers then bargaining is impossible and your downward spiral (that can ONLY lead to economic collapse) is actually hastened rather than prevented.

Where the South African unions however are truly getting the irk of people up are in their habit of using intimidation to prevent people who do want to work from performing important tasks. This is even worse when the employer is the state – not because the state is better than a corporation or shouldn’t get the same need to bargain – but because it’s services are usually a matter of life and death.

There must be an understanding that people’s lives, and the safety of children are of higher consequence than profit. This is why for many years teachers, policemen and health professionals did not have the right to strike. The South African constitution has since 1994 changed this, granting striking as a constitutional right to all citizens (unionized or otherwise) and also removing the previous red-tape of needing permission from a court before being allowed to commence a strike action.

It was needed to provide bargaining means to these professions. Our countries history is filled with health professionals in particular working under terrible conditions for terrible pay – and not having any recourse to bargain for better. It was so bad that I’ve heard hospital administrators (the people who they bargain against) declare the need for them to have industrial action recourses. What the law lacks however, is the means to ensure that this required ability to bargain as a group does not endanger lives.

When teachers and medical professionals go on strike people’s lives are risked and children’s safety is at stake – that is not condoneable either. There was a time in the 90′s when we saw people dying in empty hospitals while their nurses and doctors Toyi-Toyi’d outside. This is a terrible situation. Things are not that bad now, as the hospitals and unions have agreed to maintain enough staff to ensure that ICU and ER’s continue to operate – shutting down only the less immediate threats during the strike. This is still an issue for people whose illness may BECOME fatal if not treated now but it’s an improvement.

There is no doubt that there have been acts of intimidation during this strike to try and prevent volunteers and other workers (union-members and otherwise) from fullfilling these critical roles during the strike. This is decidedly NOT allowed by the constitutional right to strike and must be condemned. But it’s quite wrong to focus only on those cases and then decry the entire strike.

Somebody on twitter declared the strike imorral because "you do not become a nurse or a teacher for the money". Perhaps not, but nurses and teachers also need to earn a living wage, otherwise the only people who would take these jobs are those who can’t get any others – and those are not the people we want doing them. Wage-rates are a product and the price is set by the market, strikes are a part of that process.

In short, like just about everything people have a firm and absolute opinion on – the opinions are ill-informed and wrong. The issue is complex and the balance is hard to strike (no pun intended). Without unions and industrial action – employees are at a market disadvantage that sets the price of their product lower and lower (ultimately below cost) – and that destroys economies, on the other hand – ensuring that balance cannot be done at the cost of human lives !

So is there a solution ? Well to an extent part of it must consist of preventing strike actions in the first place. It is my opinion that nurses, doctors and teachers do perhaps the most crucial work in the country and their wages must represent that. They are striking for 8% but their basic rate ought to be some 800% higher than it is. Pay them well, really well, in the first place – and the likelihood of strikes are greatly reduced.

That is of course only a partial sollution – it is no better for the economy to give the employees 100% power than it is if the employers have it. The current system is still so sided toward employers (including the state) that even if the strikers get every demand they will still have far less than what their jobs ought to have. A first step ought to be the implementation of a different payscale for these roles to put them on salaries comensurate to the importance of their work. Ironically if you do this – you remove the need for unions.

In markets where labor does earn good incomes you rarely see unionization. IT workers and stock-brokers don’t have or need unions. We don’t need them because our labor rate can be effectively bargained on an individual basis. Our employers do not have absolute power because we can always get another job (and probably a better one), but we don’t have absolute power either because if we fired our ability to do so is diminished. That is the best balance to get.

There is probably no way to ever get that for floorsweepers and tea-ladies but it is an absolute shame on our government that we don’t have it for teachers and nurses. If set up the system to do so – then we won’t have, or need, strikes. We can then actually prohibit these roles from striking – and it won’t be a travesty because once the system IS like that, it becomes almost impossible to change it.

In short, we are seeing the problems we have right now because we’ve allowed crucial roles to be sold at a major disadvantage in the market. Thus unionised action is the only way for these people to bargain about the price. If we wish to end strikes – we must correct this and make the market for these roles comensurate to the need for them.

Well the joke is over that’s for sure. Larry spent the last few years on a drive of targetted acquisitions that usually ended up buying companies for their products and putting most of the employees who created those products out of a job (that btw. of ye who worship the "invisible hand of the market" does NOT count as economic growth. Bigger companies with FEWER employees is bad for everybody – including customers) culminating now in the acquisition of SUN.

Unlike most such acquisitions Oracle did not need to fire most of SUN’s top engineers – they almost all walked out on the first day in protest. These were people who worked for what was once perhaps the closest thing to noble any corporation could be, a company that was once rated the best I.T. company in the world to work for – founded by engineers. Oracle’s culture is almost a polar opposite – it has always and forever been for them about one thing only: how much money can we make.

Oracle’s purchase of SUN gave them control over a number of major technologies – the sun hardware business being practically speaking the least of them. SUN may not in recent years have been very good at monetizing their assets but the software technologies they owned were nonetheless disruptive, innovative and major forces in the market – and now Oracle owns them all.

They own MySQL – a database that was rapidly chewing away at their market share. Most analysts never realized just how huge a threat to their primary bottom line MySQL really was. A few more years, MySQL may have supplanted Oracle as the market leader in databases and the number two spot would have belonged to PostGreSQL. If you thought Oracles competition was Ingress and IBM’s DB2 they looked untouchable – but while this fooled analysts (and oracle was happy to keep them fooled) it wasn’t a true picture. Oracle knew very well that MySQL and PostgreSQL had the capacity to take over the database market from them and the inevitability of that success which is practically built into any successfull FOSS business model.

So Oracle bought SUN to get MySQL. The other major technology they wanted was Java. That most beloved of academic languages that somehow never took off on desktops or the web it was supposedly created for. It didn’t take off on desktops because frankly the story of Java the web-language was a bit of marketing. James Gossling and his team had designed oak: a language created for mobile and embedded systems, to capitalize on a coming revolution. SUN wasn’t wrong in predicting said revolution – they were just 15 years too early, so in the meantime they reinvented Oak into Java, called it a web-language and got it out there, getting a stable of developers ready.

Java expanded it became a darling of back-end services and application-service systems (tomcat is a lovely example). It became a cornerstone language in the market for many tasks (developing user-facing desktop applications was never it’s strong suit but there’s a lot more to the programming world than those) – and when the embedded revolution did come, Java was it’s darling.

It still is, J2ME is the most widely usable phone development platform there is. Android apps are written in a slight variant of desktop Java (but Android can also run J2ME apps through a compatibility layer). Even Windows7 phones support Java apps. The only exception is Android’s biggest rival: The Iphone.

People talk about Steve Jobs’s refusal to allow flash on the iphone but much more important is his continued prevention of java as a language. Both are prevented for one reason only: it makes iphone into a walled garden, whose apps run on nothing else, and which cannot run apps developed for anything else. Such deliberately blocking of interoperability is bad for the consumers and gets worse in the long run – in fact, it’s a classic Microsoft business technique (less so nowadays because Microsoft is frankly not as powerful as it once was and cannot get away with it so easilly).

Android is the great thorn in Apple’s side – a platform that gives comparable features while being open and interoperable breaks down the value of their walled garden approach. Apple however never had the gutts to sue Google – instead they sued HTC and other handsent manufactuers – their hope being to scare the handsets away from googles stack with the very real threat of patent litigation.

So far, nobody has backed down so I think Apple’s plan isn’t working very well for them. Larry Ellingson however, did not sue HTC. Larry went after google itself. It doesn’t have much choice really – their claim is that google’s adapted desktop JVM on a phone (rather than a desktop computer) violates the Java licensing (those parts that aren’t GPL’d at least) and patents. Patents which recent posts by people like James Gossling reveal to have been filed for absolutely no other reason than to build SUN a defensive position when other companies sued the once patentless company over trivial patents and won. Patents created through a "lets see who can get the stupidest patent granted" competition among the staff !

Now those patents belong to one of the most unscrupulous businessmen in I.T. today. The suit against google is about one thing – firmly cementing Oracle as the dictator over Java. They who shall decide which java features are available on which platforms. Google perhaps has some room for a defense based on stretching the defintions of desktop computer. Android is pretty close to a desktop OS as it is, and tablets will bring it even closer (much as it did for Apple). As the line between "phone" and "pc" has gotten blurrier – perhaps the legal seperation of the concepts aren’t so clear anymore either. I’m no lawyer so I won’t debate the viability of this but it’s worth considering that when J2ME was created with it’s smaller feature-set (a feature-set not good enough for Androids capabilities) phones (and the apps they could run) were far less powerful than they are now. My HTC Desire has more processing power than any of my first 5 computers. It just happens to fit in my pocket.

Oracle wants control over Java at that level. Sun already gave us the core java technologies under the GPL which makes oracle weak in what they can do with it, but here they are showing the power of patents. The Harmony class-libraries from apache were based on the GPL’d java source code, Android’s JVM is based on Harmony – yet Oracle is asserting a power that the GPL specifically removes: to control where and how the code may be run. Harmony remains an uncertified Java set – because to get certified requires one to comply with an additional license that removes almost all the GPL freedoms.

Oracle didn’t go after Harmony, at least – not yet, they went after Google and they have one goal in mind here: to take back control over Java. Ironic because it’s exactly the fact that SUN has been evermore relaxed about controlling it over the years that allowed it’s continued growth. It remains one of the few parts of SUN’s software business that was actually profitable right to the end.

But control Java, and you control a huge section of the software market, particularly that part where Oracle is the strongest. If you destroy it in the process ? So what. Oracle DB will only get stronger if that happens – they would much rather lose the Java revenue to protect their database market at all costs.

So does this mean the end of Java ? This lawsuit already has companies clamoring to start processes to move their code from Java to other platforms which has a largely negative knock-on effect on everybody (and ultimately the worst on consumers) so it’s already done terrible harm. It is likely to get worse. If Google prevails, or comes out with a good settlement – then mobile Java may yet survive – it’s too huge a market to die easily. If they fail – even that is dead.

But Java as we know it died the day Larry Ellingson filed that lawsuit. It will spend quite a few years on involuntary muscle spasms as the case drags on – but it’s dead. In the interest of consumers and corporates and everybody else outside Oracle it is now truly vital to viably replace all of Java with a truly free alternative. The good news is that the core Java technologies ARE GPL’d. Java may be dead – but it is now time to ressurect it, in a new form without corporate control. Use th GPL’d code that SUN gave us before it’s demise and rebuild the rest from the ground up. We weren’t far from it even before -nothing should stop us now.

I propose this as the new number one entry on the FSF’s important-projects list. We need a free J2ME, a free JVM, a free servlet engine. I write as somebody who learned Java at University and never voluntarily used it since. I despise the language, I find it clunky and hard to read and harder to build with and I much prefer leaner and cleaner languages like python myself, but I recognize the value Java and it’s position has brought to computing, I recognize the harm it can do to once more revert this power into a single corporate entity’s hands. In fact it will be far worse now. Java is much more powerful, and it’s not Oracle’s primary product for them it is nothing BUT a means of control – so they will fight to control it entirely, and with it a thousand companies and a million developers and a hundred million users.

I may not like Java – but I know we cannot let that happen.

Why is it so hard to imagine a world where everybody can be whatever sexual orientation they are, including you – mister homophobe, without feeling incredibly threatened by the idea of everybody not being exactly like you – without making everyone who is other than you an enemy ? Why is it so hard for a movement that starts to advance the rights of an oppressed group to advance those same rights for all – without creating a "them" to hate ? Feminism started out like that. Perhaps the most credible definition of sexism I ever heard came from a feminist icon who defined it as: "To consider sex, when sex doesn’t matter."

It’s credible because firstly it doesn’t pretend that sex (as in male or female) never matters – and limits sexism to when you use it as a judging tool, in cases where it doesn’t and shouldn’t influence the judgement – crucially it makes no distinction about the sex of the person practising sexism, it is something that can be done by either sex to either sex. The dictionary definition is almost identical though less poetically put.

But the people who run this blogsite (and many others) have decreed that sexism is only sexism if you have power as wel – and since women never have power they can never be sexist. I have written before about the flaws in their logic (what about a female business owner who sexually harasses a male employee ? It does happen – and it’s definitely sexist, it’s really sexist against themselves for women to imagine they have no power and no other women ever do either) but that is not what I want to write about now. I think if you look deeper then you see the same old problem.

What began as a noble goal (equal opportunities regardless of sex) had become an us-and-them issue for these people – and is now fueled by hatred. To justify an us-and-them attitude you have to create an enemy (they call it "the patriarchy" and cleverly pretend they don’t mean everybody on the planet who happened to have been born a heterosexual male), and you must make that enemy the symbol of all you consider evil. You cannot be honest and admit that the evil you oppose sometimes come from your own side, that your own actions can actually hinder sexual equality for some people (the very same actions that are decried as objectification in one context is claimed as feminist liberation by other women in other contexts – something else I have previously written about).

Of course not all feminists are man-haters, but some certainly are – and they speak loudly and their hatred causes them to act in ways that are harmful to society as a whole, just like homophobes and racists do.

In the end what all these ideas have in common is a basis of exclusion. A prehistoric tendency to split the world up into "my people" who are "the true human beings" and everybody else who is "the enemy". Overcoming this attitude could perhaps be deemed the only true measure of civilization. We become human when we stop seperating people into us and them but rather start to judge and consider them as individuals.

Sex columnist Dorothy Black in a tweet today decried how "an act of tenderness toward a male partner is often decried as unempowered in feminist discourse". To the kind of feminist who has (perhaps subconciously) turned it into a battle between "us and the patriarchy" tenderness toward a male partner does seem, without exception, to be unempowered – more specifically to be treachery. To show kindness to the enemy. Ironically the sexism that feminism was created to combat had done exactly the same thing, and once it was considered weak and unempowered for a man to show tenderness to his female partner. Merely turning the tables is no victory for feminism – it’s just a new kind of evil. A victory only happens when I can be tender toward my girlfriend, and she to me without either of having to fear that we are somehow not living up to societies expectations of us. There is no sexual equality if either sex cannot be happy in their sex lives, career lives and love lives. Is that such a hard concept ?

Such seperatist ideas have a long history of causing terrible harm, sadness, suffering and needless death. Surely we as people are not such slaves to our ancestry as to be unable to surmount it as a species ? I know many individuals who have – who have managed to come to see people as individuals and judge them as such alone. To determine who they want to be friends with or not based on how somebody acts- not the gender of that person, or their religion, or their culture or their country of birth.

As long as we entertain these us-and-them ideas, as long as we think it’s okay to split the world up into those who are acceptable and those who are not, hatred will continue to be our definining attribute. Wars will remain our natural state (there has only been 2 years of complete peace in the entire time since World War 2 – out of all of human history, less than 1% was peacefull times), and society will be unable to progress.

Of course to those who have made this leap – it becomes second nature and the us-and-them attitude is filled with logical contradictions and obvious stupidity – so we assume the people who hold it to be stupid. This isn’t entirely true – what is really happening is cognitive dissonance. People unable and unwilling to entertain facts that contradict what they want to, need to, believe.

It’s a curse of humanity and there is very little we can do about it, except to try and expose people to alternate beliefs at a young age -before they become so invested in those ancestral beliefs as to never again be able to live outside them. When we encounter other ideas from a young age, our emotional investment in one set is less intense, we can consider those ideas. We may yet reject them – but at least we consider them and will refine the ideas we do have to be smarter because of this.

That is a slow process, but it’s not an unstoppable one, and it’s not a process that can only be done to the young (it just works a little easier there). Every time a person is forced to confront facts that question his or her us-and-them believes there’s a small chance that person will not succumb to the lure of cognitive dissonance, will recognize the question and be forced to try and answer it… that a small crack in that believe system can appear. Cracks can and do break down walls.

So my question to all who reads this today, and to myself as well, is this: what are you doing to break down a little hatred today ?

Today’s post is somewhere between humor, philosophy and politics… but ultimately it’s a bit of light hearted dreaming with some serious moments… I am about to list my top ten predictions on what would happen if I lived in a perfect world… and then my top ten predictions on what will probably happen instead. Timeline… give it say, 2 years – putting us neatly in 2012.

And yes it’s all very silly, but hopefully, in silliness lies a bit of make-you-think.

In a perfect world
1. Will Wheaton becomes the first unanimously elected president of the United States
2. My wife Felicia Venter (born Day) and I are decide to name our first born daughter Jaina Proudmoore Venter.
3. Seph Blatter’s four year trial for single-handedly bankrupting South Africa ends with his conviction and sentencing to ten years in Rooigrond prison.
4. Julius Malema’s body is found in his parktown home, apparently having drowned in his heated pool after going for a drunken swim. His will has all his assets sold and the money used to form a trust-fund for poverty-relief (somebody told him it would look good in the press and there’d be plenty of time to change it after everyone had forgotten again).
5. Steve Hoffmeir and Joost Van Der Westhuizen announce that they are in fact gay, and are getting married. The entire country gossips about who will cheat first and who with. A year later they discover they were both cheating at the same time… wih Nathaniel.
6. As a direct result of the above – every conservative Afrikaans family in the country suddenly decide that moffies are cool, and not the spawn of Satan after all and furthermore declare that they have always thought so and “look I even have a moffie friend who cuts my hair”. They can’t figure out that you won’t really pass much mustard as having gone beyond discrimination while you continue to use pejorative terms like “moffie” but at least they are making the effort.
7. After yet another spate of shocking revelations of corruption, the accused politicians actually resign their jobs and apologize to the people.
8. Multiple independent sources determine that violent crime in South Africa is now the lowest in the world. Nobody can even remember what all those razor-wire fences were for.
9. The government declares digital freedom a basic human right. Copyright terms are reduced to 14 years, software may not be legally sold or distributed in any other form without source code and there is a ban on “protective measure” technologies that could interfere with citizens exercise of their fair dealing rights. Copyright propaganda that overstates the limits of copyright becomes grounds for having said copyright revoked. The success of the program in South Africa leads to it’s adoption in the EU and Canada and subsequent enforcement as WIPO treaty
10. HIV vaccination is approved for human use and subsequently becomes a legal requirement much like polio in the past, with the tide of new infections stemmed, the eradication of the disease becomes a viable reality

What will probably happen instead
1. Outrage over Obama’s liberal politics lead to a far-right swing in US politics and Rush Limbaugh becomes the leader of the free world, thus effectively removing any “freedom” in it for anybody who isn’t a Straight,White, Wealthy,American, Christian.
2. Still a single divorcee, I sit on my couch watching Doctor Who and trying to decide if I’ll eat pronutro for dinner or bother to call for pizza
3. President-for-life Jacob Zuma announces that after his sterling success running the reserve bank for 3 years and maintaining both inflation and interest rates of over 30%, Seph Blatter is to become the new Minister of Finance.
4. Julius Malema’s body is found in a the pool of a Sandton Socialite of the new “Black-Kugel” variety, as is hers, both apparently overdosed on cocaine which they were snorting through rolled up copies of the South African constitution.. Rather than finally ruining faith in his rhetoric, he is hailed as a martyr and the ANCYL announces that in his memory they will never again elect a leader who has passed any subjects in school… ever.
5. Steve and Joost , both feeling their last scandals sufficiently forgotten, announces their next marriages. Somehow, yet again, both are getting married to models.
6. The ACDP announces that should they win enough seats in parliament they will campaign for the ritual stoning of gay people as an official policy. Thousands of Afrikaans families switch their votes from the DA to the ACDP.
7. After yet another spate of corruption charges, numerous MPs are found guilty, fined and return to work the next day with no concerns about the matter.
8. South Africa’s violent crime rate actually hits a daily death-toll that surpasses that of the (continuing) war in Iraq.
9. The government declares that Microsoft and Apple are now the only .legal entities allowed to sell software in South Africa, fair dealing laws are scrapped, and under pressure from WIPO a DMCA style prohibition on bypassing protection measures is put in place. Downloading an MP3 now carries the death penalty they refuse to give to murderers.
10. The minister of health declares that, in contrast to the FDA, the HIV Vaccine which the was declared fit-for-human-trials in 2009 already and is now declared safe and usable, has a minor risk of damaging your hair follicles and will therefore be banned in South Africa. It takes 6 years and numerous court cases to get it made available in state hospitals and those who get the vaccine are generally excommunicated from their churches on suspicion of promiscuity.

So… which future do you want to live in? What will you do to make the right one happen ?

Feminism has long ceased to be a noble cause exactly because it degenerated into an ideology. Now I would say exactly the same thing about any -ism including capitalism or communisim. The moment your ideology becomes so important that you can see no grounds for exceptions – that you cannot choose the rational best-approach on a case-by-case basis it becomes harmful, regardless how noble it may have started out.

The disagreement in feminist circles came to a head last year when a group of Welsh women, inspired by the true-life movie Calendar Girls made a nude calendar. Their calendar made money, and they wanted to donate this to feminist charities… but the first charity they offered it to refused the donation!
The feminist charity said: “This isn’t feminism. We want less focus on women’s bodies, and more on their brains. There are too much female nudity out there already and we can’t support a campaign built on adding to it.”
Yet for those Welsh women what they were doing was an act of liberation – shackling of a repressive social attitude, ignoring it and taking pride in their bodies.
So who is right ? The Welsh women who feel they shouldn’t have to hide their bodies or the organisation thinking that the evolutionary predisposition of straight men to enjoy a women’s figure makes them incapable of appreciating her mind ?
To me, there is no debate- those women felt liberated by their actions. They rebelled against something they experienced as sex-based discrimination in their culture – they made themselves more equal. Could it be that they did it at the price of all other women being less equal now ?

Actually, I don’t think so – this is where ideology becomes so narrow-minded as to ruin people’s perspective (that’s what ideology means). Right now among the most sexualy unequal societies in the world are those practising strict Sharia law. The women in those societies could make a very strong argument that never being allowed to leave the house without a Hajib on, that never getting the sun on their faces “lest they inspire the lusts of men” is a far worse form of discrimination than having a man ogling you in a pub.
No wonder most women no longer want to be associated with the feminist movement. None of them want to be discriminated against, but when some women tell you that men thinking you are good-looking is always and without exception discriminatory is so obviously irrational and removes something that they find such joy in – that they only logical conclusion they can come to is that these must be a jealous minority of women who never get ogled.

That stereotype is completely false to. The feminists aren’t (at least probably most of them aren’t) just jealous, ugly old women… they are just blinded by their ideology. What would rational equality be in terms of display of the human body then ?
To me, it’s very simple and has nothing to do with the gender of the person on display. Anybody should be allowed to flaunt however much or little they personally and individually want to, whenever they want to, to whomever they want to… but nobody should ever HAVE to flaunt anything.
Physical flirtation is as much an aspect of our humanity and sexuality as kissing is. It is appopriate in some contexts, and inappropriate in others and we have a right to demand that these appropriate behaviours be respected. A boss that abuses her position of power to sexually intimidate or take advantage of an employee is doing wrong, and that’s why this is illegal. The sex of the boss and employee is irrelevent (any other point of view would make it impossible for a gay, female manager to sexually harrass a female employee for example – well nobody is perfect, and being gay doesn’t by default make you any better at respecting other people’s sexual rights, neither does being female or anything else – that is a matter of personal responsibility and choice).

In my culture, it is still common practise to greet all relatives and close friends of the opposite sex with a kiss (this practise seems to be dying out in the current generation, being replaced by hugs instead- but even those youngsters will still kiss-greet their older aunts). There is nothing sexual about this kiss, it’s a light peck on the lips that implies affection only. In that context, it’s appropriate behavior. Running up to a random stranger of the opposite sex, introducing yourself and then kissing them would not be.

That may seem obvious – but the thing is that obvious things become invisible to us when we wear the blinders of ideology. Once feminists began their crusade against one type of mysoginist society, they became like any soldiers, completely blinded to the humanity of their enemy. The enemy was the patriarchy of their time, but it came to be “all men”. That’s why feminists had to redefine the word sexism from what it says in the dictionary it means, so that only men could ever practise it and only women could ever be victims. Their arguments for doing so are spurious at best and overlook much obvious evidence that outright proves it wrong. They claim that sexism can only occur (or at least matter) when it’s discrimination by the one in power, and since men have the power – women can never be sexist.
They had to make this definition because the (much denied but blatantly visible) male-hatred that came to permeate their war (as it does all wars) couldn’t be justified otherwise. But what if a female manager sexually harrasses a male employee ? Is she not being sexist ? She has the power in that relationship, she’s abusing it.
I can categorically state the vast majority of small business owners I know are female – female entrepeneurship has truly taken off in my city in the last decade. This is a positive thing. But those women are now bosses. If they abuse their position – they are being sexist, that they are women doesn’t change anything about this.
There are many examples of inequality in our society. Some of it however, is rationaly justified. Radical feminist Gloria Steinhem has actually demanded that firemen-testing must remove physical-fitness tests because men have a natural advantage there and thus a 50% percent representation is impossible. That a firewoman who can’t carry an unconscious person through a building won’t be able to do her job does not deter her. She is so obsessed with the ideology that equality means 50% female workforce, that she is unable to accept any realities that could stop this in any case.
Yet she’s never complained about the lack of representation of women as garbage collectors, or of men as preschool teachers (a profession that is incredibly biassed against men, in a society that tends to have a very sexist assumption that men with a love for children must be paedophiles – that’s what ideological propaganda can do for you).

The debate as it currently stands is, ultimately, between second-wave and third-wave feminism. Third wave feminism tends to embrace sex-positivity, while second-wave saw sex as a method of maintaining inequality. The reality is though that the vast majority of contemporary women vehemently deny being feminists even as they hapilly embrace the ideals of third-wave feminism. This is a positive move – it shows a society moving from ideology to idealism. Idealism has no place for blinders, idealism is about pursuing something noble. It’s not in contrast to realism, realism is recognition of the gaps between present reality and the ideal. Practical idealism is the process by which one tries to change that reality into the ideal, and for the vast majority of women today- this is no longer a battle for acceptance to be fought with activism. It’s a matter of living true to their ideals and themselves. It’s a matter of embracing their rights not so much as women but as individuals. Ultimately, that’s beyond equality, that’s freedom… think of it as the upgrade pack.
Sadly, politics is usually 50 years behind reality and it’s no different here. Those feminists in politics, and those politicians who listen to them are stil reacting to second-wave feminist ideas, blind to the faillures of it. Because third-wave feminism is no longer combatative, it isn’t being heard – and those who had spent a lifetime in combat, have no capacity left to recognize the humanity of their perceived enemy – and regard their daughters who do as weaklings who had given up the fight… not realising that the fight is over.

We have new battles to fight now. We have to fight barbaric practises like circumsition and genital mutilation (and for a start recognize that it is no less barbaric if done to a man). We have to fight true cultural inequalities like those in extreme Sharia law. But this is no longer a fight between genders. The war of the sexes is over, it has to be. This is a fight for individual freedom and humanity – a fight we need to be fighting side-by-side. Equality is not the goal anymore, it’s the measure. We can measure how much individual freedom we have attained – by how equal we have become.
This is a fight that all who believe in individual freedom needs to fight together, against all prejudice and discrimination. Racism, homophobia, sexism, no matter who does it, no matter why – we must speak out against it as one voice. The war of the sexes is over… the war for our humanity has just begun- and that is why boobquake was one of the best and most powerful pieces of activism I have ever witnessed. Women responding to a mysoginist, sexist claim. A claim that demeans them and denies them sexual freedom… not with futile rage or anger but by mocking it and showing it up for the absolute trash it is… and having fun in the process, without ever pressuring anybody to do anything they wouldn’t have done anyway.

Bravo boobquake ladies. You get it.

We all have our parts to play. I do my bit as a writer, and maybe I’ll change a mind or two. That’s not huge, but I think it’s a good start, in fact I think it’s more than enough… because every time a person has an orgasm because that person wanted one, by themselves or with a partner (or partners) of their own choice… that is freedom. Not just orgasms of course, though it’s an effective measuring tool (and of course, a very fun one), but in all things. Getting a fair chance to try and achieve the career you want, and going for it.
In fact… the true activism of our time, the most important thing we all can do – is to live our lives. Our lives, not the lives scripted for us by old authority figures – and encourage (without pressuring) everyone around us to do the same even if just by our example.

So why is geek culture suddenly embracing a design style so radically different from what we more commonly expect ? What happen to the LED-string lights and cathode-tubes and plasma-balls we all love and why are we now decorating with cogwheels and mechanicals ? What most geeks do for a living shuns “mechanical” as generally being the worst part of things – it’s the gears and sprockets in the computer (usually in things like fans and hard drive motors) that break. Yet … this design seems to hype up something we are supposed to dislike ?

I think I have an idea why though. Steampunk design takes it’s cues not from the technology of the Victorian age but from the aesthetic designs for technology that were prevalent in that age – and there is a crucial difference between the aesthetic design that Victorian era companies embraced and that prevalent today.
Victorian technology took pride in making as much of the workings of the device visible as possible, as many moving parts in plain sight as could be there. The casings were usually made of glass, and the sprockets and gears kept polished and shined as they were meant to be observed.
The reason was that the Victorians took pride not just in what the device did, but in the intricate workings that allowed it to do so. The designers fed a market filled with curiosity.
By contrast – modern culture has developed a kind of hatred of curiosity. People not only aren’t curious, they not only don’t care about how things work – they insist that their ignorance is a kind of right. Designers of modern technology hide as much of the workings of their product as possible, hide the intricacies – because people get upset by them. People care only about what the device does, they do not want to know or think about how it does so and confronting them with the knowledge upset them.
Geeks have always been a counter-culture to this aspect. Geeks want to know how it works, they are curious explorers by nature. We open our stuff up to see how it fits together, we are the drivers of the free and open-source movement because we want to be able to see how our software works.
In short – geeks have embraced steampunk design out of a deepseated nostalgia for an era when this curiosity was not frowned upon, deemed antisocial or weird, but in fact shared by so many that every device was designed to meet it.

Like all forms of nostalgia this is probably a pretty romanticized view (and certainly a mostly unconscious one). I doubt the average Victorian coalminer gave a damn how a clock worked, but the Victorian gentleman who owned the clock certainly did – that is why all the clocks had casings made of glass rather than wood or sheet-metal. Today we all own clocks – but only a small group of us still care about how a clock works. We are the geeks, the curious ones – the seekers of knowledge. Steampunk-design is a representation of that desire to see behind the veil – a nostalgia for an age when the veil wasn’t there, and more importantly was unwanted rather than desired.

This led to what many consider their single most important contribution to human knowledge – they were the first to quantify logic, and draw up rules by which arguments could be studied to determine their validity. Aristotle’s six laws of deductive logic remains to this day the cornerstone of any philosophy course on logic and critical thinking.
It didn’t stop there though, as time progressed we discovered inductive logic (which is a basic foundation of all science) and also started discovering that there are some arguments that seem entirely logical, sounds logical – but simply isn’t. They just don’t prove anything. These arguments are called fallacies and they essentially reoccur in all debates and arguments over and over. Quite frankly they are a form of deception – often used deliberately but sometimes used out of ignorance. Knowing how to recognize them is a basic life skill. The use of a fallacy doesn’t prove an argument false, but it doesn’t prove it true either – in fact it ads no weight at all to it, and if there isn’t a better argument available it significantly reduces the trustworthiness of the argument. When an argument is justified on a fallacy – the best advice is to refuse to accept it unless better and truer evidence can be found.

The purpose of this post is to introduce you to some of the most common fallacies, and some of their most common uses around us – to hopefully allow you to spot some of them and not be deceived.

Ad hominem attack – The attack on the arguer.
This argument, despite being fallacious has become almost all of modern politics. The core of the fallacy comes in when your argument does not address your opponents points, but instead attacks the person you are arguing against. Essentially it’s a character attack – you try to convince the audience to reject your opponents argument because they shouldn’t like the other guy instead of considering whether his argument makes sense.
Julius Malema’s political rhetoric consists basically of nothing else but ad hominem attacks. He has never actually discussed whether policies make more sense than that of his opponents, what their historical success was or anything else to strengthen his arguments – he simply makes attacks on the character of his opponents. Every female politician whom he is in opposition to he accuses of sleeping around (that this sexist double-standard still influences people is shocking but we live in a society where apparently it does). That his accusations are generally unfounded and unproven is not the part we’re interested in though – it’s the fact that his accusations has nothing to do with politics or policy that make them fallacious.
Malema is a bit of an extreme example – but the reality is that virtually every political debate in the world today consists almost entirely of this fallacy and almost no discussion ever happens on whether the policies promoted actually make any sense. That this apparently wins elections is nothing short of tragic. In short, like it or not, I couldn’t care less who Jacob Zuma shagged last night – what should matter is whether his policies are good for the country or not, what his character is like has no influence on that question – and to suggest it does is a logical fallacy – a false argument.

Appeal to emotions.
This fallacy is a cornerstone of most marketing and much of politics. It consists of trying to trigger an emotional response in the audience to prevent them from actually considering the validity of your argument. When an insurance company shows you images of a happy family in a house being protected from some sort of tragedy, that’s a classic example. The advertisement tells us nothing about the quality of their service, the comparative value of their premiums or the level of their coverage. Instead it reminds us that we are at risk, triggers a fear response, reminds us that we love our families and want to protect them – then presents itself as a form of that protection, while this is indeed what they are selling, by getting our emotions involved they avoid ever actually discussing the relative merits of the protection they offer compared to their competitors. They hope that we’ll buy their product because we feel scared right now, that we’ll feel so scared we won’t risk taking the time to compare their product to other products in the market. This is one of the most deliberate and deciduous fallacies in the world today. Much of politics also revolve around this, a good example is the politician kissing a baby. Kissing a baby says nothing about the politician’s policies – it’s intended to make us feel affection for him as a person and vote based on that affection.

Argumentum ad consequentiam: Appeal to consequences.
This is a variant of the appeal to emotion but worthy of a separate mention. The core of the fallacy is to claim an argument is true or false based on whether the consequences of the argument is appealing or not. Most of the gay-marriage debate has consisted of this argument – at least from those opposed to it. Very little discussion has happened on the core of the pro-gay-marriage argument: that treating gay couples differently from heterosexual couples is discrimination.
Instead almost all the retorts are claims like “legalized gay marriage would destroy the foundations of society”. Whether this outcome is true or not, it’s a fallacy. It doesn’t answer the claim that preventing gay marriage is discrimination. Instead it assumes that it can’t be discrimination because it believes the consequences of it being discrimination (and correcting it) would be bad. That is bad logic, good logic requires you to address the argument made. If the argument is true – then you have to address it. If this has unwanted consequences, the best way of addressing those consequences is a separate argument entirely. In other words – we should be asking “if banning gay marriage is discrimination, and we make it legal, and it then has negative effects – how can we mitigate those effects ?” but we cannot use the claim of potential negative effects as evidence of whether gay marriage should be legal or not.

Appeal to authority.
This is a very common fallacy, it underlies much of religion and most of society in fact and it’s what frequently throughout history has pitted scientists against figures of authority. The heart of this fallacy is to claim that your argument is true because somebody else who is an authority said it is true. Sadly this even covers a significant portion of the legal system (much of legal precedent is based on “previous judges found” – and thus essentially assumes the truth of the argument based on the fact that those judges, authorities, agreed with it). In theory it isn’t quite that bad the idea is that you don’t have to repeat the argument every time when a previous judge has already ruled – unless you can present evidence that the previous judge did not have at his disposal. This and the appeal system is the legal system’s defense against being entirely run on this logical fallacy, but most of the rest of the world have no such defenses.
It occurs even among scientists, it’s one of the easiest fallacies to fall pray to. We assume that a figure of authority, or a specialist in the field knows more than we do – thus their conclusions are true, but their authority doesn’t mean they weren’t wrong, doesn’t mean they knew everything – the reason this is a fallacy is because it avoids whatever argument is presented and simply states that it cannot be true because a previous authority didn’t believe the conclusion. If we said that gravity works based on the square inverse law “because Newton said so” – we’re committing this fallacy, the fact is that gravity doesn’t work on the square inverse law, Einsteinian physics is essentially a description of why. Newtonian comes close enough for many practical uses but it’s just not true. If we had refused to accept Einstein’s research because of Newton’s position as a figure of scientific authority – most of the 20th century’s important discoveries could never have been made. In short, just because somebody is in charge – that doesn’t mean they are right. If it did, we wouldn’t need democracy. This fallacy is shockingly common in South African (and American) politics – how often has a politician declared “you cannot criticize the president because he is the president and to question him is unpatriotic) – that is the appeal to authority hard at work to deceive us.

Naturalistic fallacy.
Sadly despite how much I like the character of Gregory House for his love of reason- he commits this fallacy a few thousand times in every episode. The naturalistic fallacy is the assumption that things should be as they are. Much of the anti-evolution crowd’s arguments are naturalistic fallacies. Essentially saying “evolution can’t be true because it justifies people acting in some bad way” (bad way is often lust-fullness or animalistic behavior). This is the naturalistic fallacy. Evolution says humans are animals with animalistic basic urges. It doesn’t say we should act according to them. Science tells us how things are, it never says we can’t change them. In fact recognizing the source of something you don’t like better enables you to change them – denying the causes of things because you don’t like those things is an excercize in futility.
House commits this fallacy most obviously in “No more Mister Nice Guy” – he reasons that “niceness” is not an evolutionary survival trait – therefore it must be a symptom. Ultimately the episode proves him largely wrong – and he is wrong. Just because we didn’t evolve to be nice people – doesn’t mean we can’t be or shouldn’t be – knowing why we aren’t nice-by-default is useful knowledge that empowers us to act against our dangerous urges and act nice anyway (yes I know I’m using a fictional example – but it’s a very useful one because it’s so clear, we see the same argument all over all the time).

Straw man attack.
This is another very common fallacy. It is the fallacy of taking a part of the opponents argument out of context to form a weak argument then attacking this weak argument while ignoring the fact that the actual argument is valid. A common one in our society today centers around drug enforcement policy.
The basic debate goes like this:

A: We should legalize marijuana as it’s less addictive than many already-legal substances, relatively harmless and have known beneficial side-effects to health.

B: If we legalize drugs then society will collapse !

The point is that A never suggested legalizing all drugs (some people would but it wasn’t in this argument), she made a strong argument with factual premises. B never addressed any of them. B did not argue whether marijuana is relatively harmless, did not argue on whether it has health benefits and never debated that many legal substances such as alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are more addictive than marijuana. These premises may or may not be true but B didn’t address them at all – and usually doesn’t. B attacked a weakened form of A’s argument, which is only superficially similar (legalizing all drugs is a very different thing from legalizing one drug).
The marijuana debate world wide replays this scene over and over and every time B says it- it’s still a fallacy. The slippery-slope argument we so often hear is mostly a variant of the same fallacy. This version goes “we cannot allow X because it would lead inevitably to allowing Y and Z” where Y and Z are clearly unwanted results. In fact the slippery-slope argument is usually a straw-man fallacy – unless you actually prove that Y and Z really are inevitable consequences, even then it’s still often an appeal-to-consequences fallacy (fallacies often inter-mesh – making them harder to recognize – all the more reason to be vigilant if you wish to think critically for yourself).

Appeal to tradition.
This is one of the most pervasive and powerful fallacies in the world and forms a huge part of modern politics. The conservapedia website claims for example that the most important values of conservatives are “morals and tradition”. But the latter is a known fallacy. The fallacy essentially consists in it’s simplest form of saying “we’ve always done it this way/believed this – therefore it must be true”. Terry Pratchett regularly makes fun of it “ten thousand generations of dwarves couldn’t have been wrong, if it was wrong we wouldn’t have kept doing it all that time”. The implication is clear, another generation is about to repeat it unquestioningly based on the assumption that a previous one would have questioned it. The call to tradition is insidious, deceptive and incredibly dangerous because if there is one lesson printed throughout history it’s that “the way we always did it” is very rarely the right way.
Not long ago people defended slavery on the grounds that “slavery has been allowed for all of history” – making it’s ending take that much longer and cause several wars. Today hardly anybody thinks slavery was a good thing, but it was a human tradition for thousands of years, and long defended based on this fallacy. Nearly all of conservative politics today consists of this fallacy. It’s powerful because it soothes human’s natural fear of change. We want to believe the fallacy because it protects us from having to question the ideas we were raised with, provides a shelter from the changes in the world which we fear may harm us – the reality though is that it’s a paper-shelter that doesn’t protect us, it merely lets us hide from reality. It’s an ostrich-position that lets us hide our heads in the sand and cling to ideas that are provably false (even if they may have been true once in the past). Whenever tradition is brought up as an argument the only logical answer is to demand a better argument- proof that tradition wasn’t in fact wrong all along because it very often is.

This list and description is hardly exhaustive – Wikipedia has a much more complete list. This list instead is focused on those fallacies that we encounter daily on television, in the newspapers and in discussion -to help us recognize them and refuse to be tricked by them. So we can make clearer, more logical decisions. It is also based on fallacies we have simple, easy to recognize examples off – not abstract ones, things we hear daily to let us judge them better.

As the outcry over the President’s affair and subsequent fathering a child continous, I have lost whatever tiny smidgen of respect I once had for
Hellen Zille. Unlike most people who may make such a claim – I don’t support Zuma as a politician either however. I don’t think he should be the
president and I don’t think he should be re-elected. Unlike Zille however, my statements to this effect is based on critique of (many of) his policies
(and recognition of the correctness of others), his performance at the implementation of those policies and – most importantly – the fact that he
used weasel techniques and legal technicalities to avoid prosecution for the fraud charges he faced – instead of standing in a proper court. As the
accused he had the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t even have to prove his innocense, he’d walk away a free man with no controversy if they couldn’t prove
his guilt… when you have that kind of odds… and his kind of money… it’s pretty suspicious if you dodge the trial.

But none of this removes his rights as a citizen of the country. Privacy is not a negotiable matter. It’s a basic human right. Like free speech, free labour,
free thought, free association… but then I have never really believed that Zille believes in any of these things. Let’s be clear about this, the DA’s
policies are about as liberal as Rush Limbaugh painted pink… purely skin-deep and even that facade is filled with cracks.
They do not, because most of their voters do not, really believe in these human rights. Like all concervatives they think “I have these rights, and you
can have them too – just as long as you only use them to do and say what I agree with.”
The difference can be summed up like this: concervatives and liberals both claim to believe in freedom of religion. But a liberal means “let anybody have
the right to believe what they want”, a concervative means “let me have the right to force my particular brand of religion on all of society without
restriction”.

Now wrap all that up in a politician and you get Zille’s opportunistic grab at the news headline that Zuma had a child out of wedlock. Zuma rightfully
points out that his sex life is a private matter (and what, in this world is more private than that ?)… and she claims he doesn’t have a right to privacy
about his sex life because other people look to him for examples.
Sorry – reporting his sex life in the newspapers should not be tolerated. Free press does not mean the right to privacy goes away. It means they can
report in the public interest without restriction. Who any particular person fucks is never in the public interest to know… sorry, I can’t think of a
single example where an individuals right to privacy would not outweigh this need. If he was caught with an underaged girl that would be another matter
because now the legality of his private actions are at stake. But sex between consenting adults is a private matter… end of story – there can be
no debate about this – if you start making exceptions on things like this… very soon – none of us will have any privacy.

Think it can’t happen ? We lived in that world not long ago. Remember the puritans ? The victorians ? The latter is barely a century ago –
in what was already a liberal nation! Just 25 years ago, here in South Africa, the government decided that sex with somebody of a different race was
immoral, and forbade mariages between them as a little bonus. Technically it was sex-out-of-wedlock that was illegal, but it would only apply if that
sex happened where wedlock was prohibited. Their morality (which I’m sure Zille would publicly claim not to agree with) came to be a law that caused some of
the greatest hardships in this country.
My fathers generation saw four brothers who all grew up supporting appartheid all become opposed to it during their lifetimes via various routes. For one
of my uncles – the heart of that opposition came about when he was a young prosecutor working in a magistrates court and watching case after case of
people’s lives being destroyed for falling in love with somebody they weren’t allowed to.

Because the people in power had decided that their personal morality should have the force of law.

Fundamental to the democracy we built after 1994 is the basic premise that individual human rights are sacrosanct. That personal choice is a right and
we do not have to conform with every idea of society – even the popular ones. Whether I agree with Zuma’s behavior or not is irellevent. The fact that
I know about it without his deciding to tell me himself is however a basic violation of his rights. This attempt to attack him based on his personal
moral and cultural values and for how they do not comply with those of the conservatives who vote for the DA is nothing but outrageous.

None of the excuses bandied about for why his behaviour should be decried hold any water. We’re told we should violate his privacy and complain because
he is an example to the youth who follow his lead. Nevermind that actual research shows this just isn’t true (at least off sexual behaviour)… the fact is
if his rights had not been violated in the first place- the youth would never have known what his behaviour actually was !
Saying he is a role model who should live by a higher standard is one thing – demanding that to be YOUR higher standard is quite another. Zuma is acting
as a perfect role model for the values he believes in. You may question those values, this is our constitutional right, but you may not force him to accept
yours. That’s the law.

This is a secular nation now – with good reason. Because we felt in severe suffering the results of letting morality and religion have the force of law very
recently. Believe what you will, express your beliefs but do not enforce them on others. You may not like Zuma having four wives and an affair – but nobody
is forcing you to do the same, and you can’t force him not to.
Whatever else it may be, it’s not a political issue by any means. You aren’t supposed to pick a politician who agrees with your morals, you’re supposed to
pick a politician just liked you’d hire a staff member. Based on his fitness for the job at hand. We don’t get to ask potential staff members their sexual
preference – the law has seen fit to protect people’s privacy in that regard – why should we get to ask a politician if he believes in polygamy or not ?

It’s probably discriminatory that polygamy is only legal if you ethnically belong to one of the cultures where it has always been tradition, it should be
allowed or banned across the board – but then I don’t believe in giving cultures special treatment – that is what discrimination means. The fact is though,
Zuma has not – in this instance, broken any of the laws of this country. His actions are perfectly within his rights as a citizen of this nation.
That fact that his job is public doesn’t mean his life is. By that logic so is the lives of every other public servant as well. Do you think we have
the right to know if a postal worker is gay or not ? Nor do we have the right to know the sexual activities and preferences of politicians unless they
choose too tell us.
I don’t believe in censorship – but preventing a newspaper (also known as a corporate entity – e.g. NOT a human being anyway) from profiting
from the violation of human rights is not censorship – it’s PROTECTING free speech. Court decisions here and abroad has consistently found that the
sex lives of celebrities are not news in the public interest. A politician is nothing but a celebrity postal worker and should enjoy the same protection of
his rights.
The fact that Zille is jumping up and down screaming “adultering polygamist” while people in her province are starving to death is the very peak of
self-righteous political hipocricy that has caused the terrible state that the world is in today.
It’s one thing for Hayibo to joke about her Botox treatments, it would be quite another for them to steal her medical records to prove their jokes.

Of course, since I’m not writing a PHD paper here, I’ll be using a few (fair) assumptions, which can be questioned, but I believe that – for the vast majority of cases, my postulation will stand up to scrutiny.

So let’s first think of how we might calculate the actual impact a person may have had on history, as measured at any given point. Let’s call our hypothetical person: Sarah. How much impact did Sarah have on the world ? Well, one way to estimate that would be to find out, at any given moment: how many people alive right now wishes Sarah had never died (or if she’s still alive, that she’d remain so forever), call this value (A). Then, we subtract the number of people who wishes she had never been born (call this B). For most people – the values of both these would be at their highest either sometime during their lives when they do something most impactful – or right after their deaths. With each passing year, both A and B will decrease – as people die and forget, some will tell their children though – so the decrease isn’t absolute.

If we say that Y starts as A-B, and Time is X, then, since there is direct inverse proportion between X and Y (over time the number of people who have any opinion at all of Sarah’s life reduces) there is a very standard function that we can plot here: Y=1/X – the function for an inverse proportion. But this function, by itself, does not consider the case where B is bigger than A. That function has the starting value of Y as a negative amount. So we should plot that with the function:
Y=-1/X (which is the direct polar opposite graph).
So the graph of peoples impact on the world is pretty much always somewhere on these lines:

The Red line shows us the impact of a person who had a high starting value for A and a low starting value for B. The green line shows us a high B and a low A person.
If we use today as a the value of X, then right noow Ghandi and Nelson Mandela is probably right at the very top of the Red line at this moment. Hitler would be near the very bottom of the green line. George Busch and HF Verwoerd just a little higher on the same line.
With each passing day though – the lines get smaller, no matter how far away from zero your line starts – it always approaches it on a long enough timeline. Today – even though almost all of us still know the name of Alexander the Great, hardly anybody really has an opinion on whether we’re glad he lived anymore… yet a few of us do (historians mostly, trying to work out if his impact on history ultimately benefited mankind or not).
The point is though – for no life, no matter how big or small it starts out as – on this function – ever reaches zero. The only way that could happen, is if it starts at zero. Which is pretty much only possible if you were an orphan who became a hermit at the age of 6.
So your life has an impact that spreads throughout the entirety of history from the moment you were born onwards. The impact of your actions influences the world. The influence could be small or big, but it’s never non-existent. And over time, the impact dimishes, but it never goes away. Hitler may not be putting anybody in concentration camps anymore, but the fact that he once did radically changed the world and we still live in many of those changes.
Your life matters. If your life has a largely positive effect on the people around you – the remnants of that effect will last until the end of time, ditto if you had a largely negative effect.
We have very little opportunity to change the size of A and B (though we call get a few), but we sure can determine whether A is bigger than B or not… in other words, you can choose if your line in history is green or red – and the choice matters, because the line never, ever gets to zero.