ESP Screenshot

The go to app for all your loadshedding info has to be Eskom se poeEskom se PUSH, which will inform you exactly when your next slots of misery are due. Super useful, free (but therefore full of ads), and… well… it just works. There are, however, a couple of unnecessary embellishments, like their social media community chat thing, for example. This was probably added because everything needs to somehow be a social media community chat thing these days. That’s what the world seems to think, at least.

The trouble is that their social media community chat thing is not very well monitored, and this is South Africa, which makes it a hot bed of fake gnus…

…and often (not even) thinly veiled racism.

I don’t subscribe to the social media community chat thing because of these reasons, and because it’s actually of very little use, even when the comments aren’t lies or discrimination, but I still get a little snapshot each time I log on, presumably to try to encourage (?!?) me to get involved.
Stuff like this from “Bishop”:

Not a very ecclesiastical thing to say, Your Grace.

This was 17 hours ago, which means that Bishop has had at least three power cuts since it was written. One can only imagine the state of his diocese, given the promised loose stools which will presumably have repeatedly prevailed.

Eww. Messy. (And I don’t mean the overrated footy one.)

There is a serious side to this (other than the awful stuff that gets shared on their social media community chat thing), being that the reaction of the Bishop here is a snapshot all of us in SA right now: desperate, angry, overwhelmed, worried… and about to loose our shiit.
And while there is absolutely every justification for feeling this way, it achieves nothing at all, save for working us each towards an earlier grave. Sad.

Day 461 – Poor takes

First off, I got a miserable 4/8 right on my Euro 2020 R16 predictions. That’s why I’m not a betting man. No-one could have foreseen France’s weird capitulation, Holland and Sweden’s decisive red cards and England’s… er… win.

It’s not for me to talk about what’s racist and what’s not, but I am completely happy to talk about how you can choose your sources to suit your narrative. So this tweet:

…might seem to make a very fair point until you look at the other UK newspaper front pages this morning and note that the good doc has only chosen the to share the ones that don’t feature Raheem Sterling. Like ignoring the front page of The Sun. Which is usually a very good idea, fair enough, but not for his reasons.

Or The Times:

Even the FT (That’s Financial, not Football) got overlooked:

But while we’re on the subject of poor takes, did England really win? Or is it all part of the “experimental vaccine” plot? Which doesn’t exist, but if it did, was England’s “win” actually just to keep our minds off it?
Sarah Plumley BA PGCE thinks so:

To which the all-knowing Dj42(74404412) sagely replies:

Seems legit, and will surely be proven true when we crash out at the hands of Ukraine at the weekend (not an official prediction) and suddenly realise that we’re now 5g-nanobot chipped, somewhat magnetic, DNA-manipulated, mind-controlled mutant zombies.

Or just a bit less vulnerable to Coronavirus infection. One of the two, anyway.

And not me, anyway, because I won’t see a vaccine for many months yet, thanks to SA’s disastrous vaccine rollout (see 6000 miles… passim).

Sarah’s tweets are a veritable smorgasbord (have you ever known of a smorgasbord that wasn’t veritable?) of Thin Aluminium Millinery: Epstein, Big Pharma, IVM, Trump, “Sheeple” every second post.
It’s amusing to watch her calling other people “brainwashed”.

You could argue that maybe I’m just choosing the tweets that suit my narrative.
However, in Sarah’s case, there weren’t any others available.

Racial hatred in SA – there is Hope

Sadly, the Hope in question is Christopher Hope, writing for the Guardian on Eugene Terre’Blanche – his life, his murder, the trial and what it does (or rather what it doesn’t do) for South Africa.

It’s been a while since I’ve been drawn into an article in the way I was drawn into this one. Informative, personal and brutally honest, it’s a really interesting view into Terre’Blanche’s life, his views and his attitude. He even (quite rightly, in my opinion) compares ET to Julius Malema:

It is said that Terre’Blanche has no heirs but I’m not sure about that. He constantly vowed he would die for the volk. This is one of those coded games the power-hungry have always played in South Africa and it rarely fools anyone. Pious protestations to the contrary, what drives politics in this country is fear and anger, and what counts in the end is firepower.

When people speak of dying for their beliefs, they mean, all too often, that they will kill for them.It is a sentiment that has even been set to music. Julius Malema, the ANC youth movement leader until he was suspended recently, has made a song of the struggle years, Kill the Boer, into his theme tune and though a court has condemned it as “hate speech”, it continues to be sung. Hatred is not something that can be suspended by court rulings. There is very real anger in the country and it has not been addressed.

And in closing, more honest truths:

Outside the Pennywise Pawn Shop an old ox-wagon waits on the sidewalk, unlikely ever to find a buyer. The clocks on each bell tower of the three Dutch Reformed churches had stopped; the old order they represented has gone. Gone, too, is Eugene Terre’Blanche. What remains is the bitter disillusion on all sides of the racial divide that his murder has laid bare. You may kill the Boer, as the song invites, but the anger – what will anyone do about that?

It’s something that was unsurprisingly brought out into the open by the murder of Terre’Blanche, but these days, almost everything seems to elicit the same sort of reaction. The DA march to COSATU House was, apparently, not about politics, but about whites inciting  black on black violence. The Spear saga turned from being about having the rights of dignity and of freedom of speech, to being a debate on racism – forget the fact that JZ is the President, how could a white artist have portrayed a black man in that way?

In backing down and removing the artwork from their gallery and website, The Goodman Gallery has apparently saved themselves a court appearance but their action risks the issues which divide the country being swept back under the rug. The trouble is, each time this has happened, it results in a bigger and bigger lump and I have this horrible feeling that someone is going to trip over in front of the fireplace very soon.

So yes, however uncomfortable this is, we need to get these issues out in the open.
The trouble is that those who should be leading the process and guiding people in this regard are actually the ones crying foul.

Not looking twice…

Oh dear. The DA Student Organisation have launched a new poster campaign – “in OUR future, you wouldn’t look twice” – and SA has gone utterly mental over the first release.
The general reaction has been rather depressing to read, from accusations that it is racist, to complaints that the poster promotes sex, to terrifying over-analysis and allegations of it having overtones of slavery and sexism. I don’t see it that way at all – it seems to me that people sometimes desperately leap onto any passing bandwagon – but here it is so that you can judge for yourselves.

Let’s allow Jacques Rousseau at Synapses.co.za to explain for those who have a mental age below 5, shall we?

It simply highlights the fact that some people would look twice at an inter-racial couple, and reminds viewers of the poster that in the ideal DASO future, this wouldn’t happen.

While it has certainly got (some of) South Africa talking, as I said, the chatter is all rather depressing and I really don’t feel like joining in.
Fortunately, an amusing internet meme (which I am happy to propagate) appears to have risen from this general nonsense and added some amusement to the otherwise miserable proceedings:

      

Click images to upsize your viewing experience.

UPDATE: Oh – and Jacques sums it up just perfectly here:

What this sort of thing goes to show is that if you want to find a problem, you’ll do so – regardless of the intellectual contortions necessary.

Yep.

UPDATE 2: A point proven by this from the CDP’s Theunis Botha:

In a country with high levels of Aids and an overdose of crime, especially the high incidence of farm murders this year, this poster sends the opposite message to the country than needed.

Yes, when a white man hugs a black woman, farm murders happen. And God kills a kitten.

Where did the Cape Party get its logo?

Yes, yes, I know. The election is gone. As is the Cape Party with their utterly miserable and rather embarrassing showing of about 1,400 votes. But then I just had a thought.
Hypothetically, should they win and declare the Cape independent, exactly where would the borders be? After all, while it roughly follows the borders of the Northern and Western Cape provinces, it’s certainly not exact – especially with that chunk of Eastern Cape coast included.

Well, it stands to reason that they would be wherever was needed to make the new state the (francesque) shape of the Cape on their logo, thus:

And that’s all well and good. But then I wondered where they had got that particular shape from. Did all three of them sit down and have a meeting about it? Was it a rough doodle? Or was there some other source?

And then I found this page on wikipedia, which featured this image and while observing the form of the (ironically) pale bit, realised that I need wonder no more:

“Map showing the proportion of the South African population
that self-described as “Black African” in the 2001 census”

But no – it’s surely just chance, right (even that chunk of Eastern Cape coast)?