Thursday 27 January 2011

A new rise...

Greetings my loving fanbase. From today I will be less half arsed about this blog again and updating more as we approach the local elections.

The latest studies done by the SAIRR (South African Institute of Race relations) have been a breath of fresh air. For years, no decades, South Africans have been making jokes about our parastatals and their effectiveness thinking they were taking a swipe at black ineptitude. The irony is delicious in so many ways.

Firstly as you can see from the data I recently posted the performance of parastatals with a few exceptions has been stellar. Eskom for example has put as much as 80% more people on the electricity grid in 15 years. But here's the first part of the joke. Despite this there has been a widely held perception that Eskom had somehow done a bad job.

Now it's clear they haven't. So again it was a case that there was a willingness to form this mythology because people simply wanted to believe that black people can't run a parastatal effectively. But guess what ? They weren't running it in the first place ! Whites were !

http://www.timeslive.co.za/iLIVE/article874191.ece/Parastatals-still-lilly-white--SAIRR


The data, which was sourced from a parliamentary question, shows that at the electricity parastatal, Eskom, of the 21 members of top management, only a third are African, a third Indian or coloured, and a third white. Nearly half (48%) of the 388 members of senior management are white. Some 30% are African, six percent coloured, and 16% Indian.

Of the 407 members of the management of the arms parastatal, Denel, 10% are African, five percent coloured, eight percent Indian, and 77% white.Of the 102 members of the top management of the logistics parastatal, Transnet, 41% are African, six percent coloured, 21% Indian, and 32% white. Of the 495 members of senior management at Transnet, 39% are African, 10% coloured, 19% Indian, and 33% white.

There are only three parastatals where Africans make up 50% or more of management. These are South African Airways (Africans account for 50% of management), the South African Forestry Company Limited (67%), and South African Express (67%).

So ladies and chumps, there you have it. The extreme right winged white South Africans dilemma.

Does he swallow his pride and now change his tune and come out in praise of the work done by the mostly white run parastatals ? Or does he against all the facts continue his dogmatic yapping against them and rubbish his case that whites could do better job running the country than blacks ?

Thoughts ?

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey poes hoe gaan dit met die kaffer naai?

The Rooster said...

So great to see if anything the intelligence and quality of the comments on my site is improving.

Exzanian said...

Tut-tut-tut - Cheap shot Rooster and you know it! You got to do better than cherry pick articles from MSM sources and post them without analysis. Really, this is a cheapy "kool aid" post...You fall foul of a whole bunch of logical fallacies (never mind being such a lazy dumb-ass!) Just google "baloney detection kit"

Here's sample of your sins:

Excluded middle (False dichotomy) -considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).

Confusion of correlation and causation.

Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..

Suppressed evidence or half-truths.

Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.

Misunderstanding the nature of statistics

Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).

The Rooster said...

I don't care for a lecture in logic 101 by someone who desperately spends his everyday trying to convince himself of something so illogical and frankly stupid as "South Africa is worse now than under Apartheid."

All the facts are against you. You're in a loony minority. You've failed to overcome a lifetime of propoganda. Put all that critical thinking to your own arguments an then come back and tell me if you're really in any position to advise me about the world in general.

Exzanian said...

Oh dear, a conundrum for Rooster. So, are Eskom and other parastatals a fuck up or not? If you disagree, your article is hollow and you are effectively admitting it's because the whites are still in charge. If you agree, then you have at least admitted it and taken the first step out of denial...C'mon Rooster, get off the fence.

The Rooster said...

I have friends who are white, who work for eskom and always kept me informed about the facts. This is no news to me. Eskom have done a great job with all considered. I mentioned this many times before.

Exzanian said...

Sorry to tie you in knots old boy, but you asked for it....

The Rooster said...

Sorry to tie you in knots old boy, but you asked for it....

____________

What knots ? I say Eskom are not in a mess and have done a good job. I always have said this.

The Rooster said...

Want to have a bit of fun exanian ?

I give you a challenge.

What would it take for you to agree that South Africa is better off now than during Apartheid ?

You surely know that I can easily demonstrate using studies, stats and data alone that this is the case easily don't you ? So I highly doubt you will answer the question without being extremely obscure regarding what you'd need to see.

So if you feel I'm begging the question or making some other pisswilly excuse then I give you another challenge. We both write a post relating to the relaive standars or ther following and post them side by side on both of our websides. Once we agree there is no backing /chickening out. We give ourselves a one day deadline to hack it out. We provide links for any assertions we make and we make zero arguments based on perception of hearsay. We keep it down to the cold hard facts not badly remembered nostalgia, and we include everyone into our definition of "South Africans".

So here's the topic we're writign about.

Life for South Africans was better under Apartheid than it is now.

Now I don't think you're stupid enough to agree to this, but let's see.

I will wipe the floor with you if you agree with this, be warned. The facts are extremely loaded in my favour. I think you know this. You won't agree.

The Rooster said...

Sorry the topic is.

Life under Apartheid was better or worse for South Africans as it is now in 1994 (when the NP lost power).


Let's be more specific. Let's talk in terms of ...

Economics,Service delivery, Healthcare,Education,lifestyle, diet, human rights, freedom.

Exzanian said...

I don't have to do it...There are lots of blacks who can see it as well and are blogging about it
see:

http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/luckyntuli/2011/01/28/of-political-hacks-hyenas-and-moral-decay/

Why don't you paste articles like that on your blog? You are isolating yourself and painting yourself into a corner Roosty...By caricaturing me and others as loony right wing nuts you have developed a narrow field of vision..You are so desperately eager not to give an inch of ground you have become a total bigot...So no, Roosty Doosty, I am not going to rise to your false dichotomy of a stupid debate...

The Rooster said...

Regarding that article, with the rampant media sensationalism about the apparent failures post 1994 you would expect some blacks to get suckered in. Opinions and feeling aside the actual hard facts just don't support such silly views.

Exzanian said...

And the Grand prize for the smallest "Pyrrhic" Victory goooooeeeesss tooooooooooo
Roosty Doosty!!!!!
You win, I'm blowing this pop stand, bye :)