To the extreme right Afro-pessimists. I'll keep it simple.
What evidence would it take you to admit that South Africa is better of now than 1994 in the following categories :
-economy
- Average household income (inflation related)
-educational level
-services delivered to citizens (people provided with basic services from electricity, water to access to clinics and hospitals.)
-violent crime
- Road infrastructure
If I can't provide the evidence you get to change the name of my site to anything you want.
Go ! Give it a good shot. I dare you.
26 comments:
peccimists? wtf is a PECCImist? Nothing to do with Jane Goodall I'm sure, but I must confess I'm confused.com - Why is that dark critter on the blind side creeping up there, creeping up there from that mistyre? Aye, she be white stuff on yer blind side 'oi reckon....sinister she is...
I have no idea what you are talking about ? Have you been at the Pax ?
Good to know that Sanral is not going ahead with tolls after all. But that R20 billion debt has to be paid somehow, so Treasury will have to foot the bill. And where will Treasury get the money from? From sucker taxpayers, of course. We have seen political moves by Sanral such as exempting tax drivers from having to pay for the use of the toll roads. After that, you could see that it would all go downhill, or tits up, whichever way you want to look at it. I have nothing against building roads and infrastructure - look at what Eisenhower did for the American economy by building all those freeways - but the extent of financial blundering and cynical dishonesty by parastatals takes my breath away.
What has China , Brazil and India invested billions and trillions into ? Road and rail infastructure. South Africa has the top available rating for our road infastructure available in the world but our railways leave much to be desired. I like you have no issue with us contonuing to develop these infastrutures even if their chief motive is skimming off the top. This is one of the single best way to boost a developing economy. Ease and reduced cost of movement = trade.
I roll my eyes at the "we have pot holes so the sky is falling" brigade. When did we not have pot holes ? Which country does not have pot holes ? The roads today are far better (and there are far more of them you don't need a 4x4 just to drive on) than during apartheid.
Tolling sucks indeed. But you know what it's called "supply and demand". If you don't consider the toll worth paying use the alternative route. I think more people will be using the tolled roads than we like to pretend. But the fucking white sense of entitlement in this country they were taught by the communist like apartheid regime where the state provided whites everything for "free" (despite the tax rate being higher than today).
And before someone points it out the predominent black sense of entitlment pisses me off too. But one group of entitled spoiled brats who thought they deserved to be middle classed with a standard 7 in a technical school, shouting about extremely disenfranchised poor people expecting some stuff to survive from next to their fillet steak roasting webers and swimming pools doesn't rub well with my sense of hypocricy.
If a significant number of motorists use alternative routes to avoid the toll charges - which must obviously be high enough to warrant a detour - then what will it cost to repair the truck hammered detour roads? I have nothing against tolls if they are viable, reasonable and affordable, preferably with no skimming off the top, the middle or the bottom. That would be economic egalitarianism.
Jane Goodall is a British primatologist and anthropologist famous for her work with wild chimpanzees. mistyre is of course mystery scrambled and misspelt. People will take the mick if you don't bother to spell correctly. The letter c is not right next to s on your keyboard.
Oh, you don't misspell it this time. I don't even notice your excruciating spelling anymore, lol.
Jane Goodall is a British primatologist and anthropologist famous for her work with wild chimpanzees
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Oh really ? Gosh I've never heard of Jane Goodall. What was I doing through those three years of anthrolpology, internet access and DSTv since it's inception.
/ends sarcasm
People will take the mick if you don't bother to spell correctly. The letter c is not right next to s on your keyboard.
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Let's be clear "anal retentive people" will think they are taking the mick. The joke is on them because their minds are in little regimented, formatted, pedantic boxes. Blogger has a spell checker but I don't bother using it, nor do I proof read anything I write. Why ? Because I don't give a shit about conforming to little details that serve no purpose. Consider a word like quiche....I mean fuck off....just spell it Keesh. What's so precious about maintaining such a rigid flawed pattern in a phonetic writing system ?
atfer all ti sohuld be prefctly claer waht wrod a psreon is meainng eevn wehn seplt worng ulness yuor mnid is sutnted. So wyh sohuld I pnader to peoleps hdandicaps ?
As a witty man once said "I pity the man who can only spell a word one way".
and this is the part that convinces me this man is a long time friend with the crack pipe.
"Why is that dark critter on the blind side creeping up there, creeping up there from that mistyre? Aye, she be white stuff on yer blind side 'oi reckon....sinister she is..."
I wouldn't brag about having DSTV. I switched over to Premium DSTV to pander to the craven tastes of my house guests over the holiday period. What a waste of money. The day they left I switched back to DSTV Compact. I still think I'm being had with Compact but at least I get to watch the Jerry Springer show for comic relief.
Brag about DSTV ? Even my maid has DSTV. My point was it's kind of hard to miss somewhere hearing about Jane Goodall.
Your maid has DSTV? I rent out the servants quarters for a nice little income. I have a char in once a week and she gets paid very well. No DSTV, DSTV does not pay for the school fees, she does the job and gets her dosh. Domestic workers would be far off with this kind of arrangement working for better pay for different employers. This white sense of entitlement to a full time maid beggars belief. You're impeding black development by continuing to give black women a hope of this dead end low paid occupation if all else fails.
Don't be so snotty about technical education. Nobody leaves a technical school at standard seven, that's about when you start going to a technical school. Most of SA's education problem lies in inappropriate training. Everyone wants to be a social wekka or a teetcha or a laywer but then they find out they don't get paid very well in those occupations or there is no demand. There's a shortage of engineers in this country. You might be surprised how many qualified black engineers come from countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi and Ghana. We need more technical schools but with proper standards unlike the matric farce. Graeme Bloch sets my teeth on edge. He blames the failures of the education system on the legacy of apartheid and, yes, he admits, mistakes have been made by the current government. He was the one who introduced outcomes based education after it failed everywhere else in the world. That moron has three university degrees but he's a total idiot. There is no fool like a fool who thinks he is educated by isn't.
Your maid has DSTV? I rent out the servants quarters for a nice little income. I have a char in once a week and she gets paid very well. No DSTV, DSTV does not pay for the school fees, she does the job and gets her dosh. Domestic workers would be far off with this kind of arrangement working for better pay for different employers. This white sense of entitlement to a full time maid beggars belief. You're impeding black development by continuing to give black women a hope of this dead end low paid occupation if all else fails.
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Trust me there are people lining up to do any work available. This myth that black or coloured people don't want to work is so fucking dumb when I see the rural people lining up at 4am in the freezing winter morning AT THE CHANCE of getting picked up by a farmer for a few rand for picking oranges all day. That's not entitlement, that's desperation.
All these whites from these lofty perches going on about "these lazy kaffis" wouldn't last a day on a dump truck. Fucking insensititve assholes.
Don't be so snotty about technical education. Nobody leaves a technical school at standard seven, that's about when you start going to a technical school. Most of SA's education problem lies in inappropriate training. Everyone wants to be a social wekka or a teetcha or a laywer but then they find out they don't get paid very well in those occupations or there is no demand. There's a shortage of engineers in this country. You might be surprised how many qualified black engineers come from countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi and Ghana. We need more technical schools but with proper standards unlike the matric farce.
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I agree and I think this has been widely recognised and there are many programmes in place to rectify this.
I don't get what the issue is with the matric standards. It's still the best people who get to go to university. And fuck school, they don't teach you anything very interesting anyway (and I went to a private elite one). Everything interesting I either learn at university or through books/the internet. I mean when once in physics at school do they even attempt to contextualise it ? The universe is fucking mind blowingly fascinating and beautiful. But do they even touch on cosmology of the physisophical side of things ? Not a fuck. Newtons laws and equations. All fucking how, where and what and no fucking why. Same with maths.
I had to find out what the fucking decimal system actually WAS in my first computer science class at university. I mean I new how maths worked but I didn't fucking know why or what it actually was. 12 years in school and I'm doing this robotic fucking repetitive thing without someone giving me the fucking concept of what it is.
Sorry just a quick rant about how shitty and unstimulating to someone of my type of holistic pattern and context seeking mind school is.
You know why I love perfect correlations and patterns and statistics and the scientific method etc ? They help us understand the causes of things and hopefully manipulate and predict them to our advantage. I think this simple curiosity is what sets intelligent and pro-active people apart from stupid and negative reactive people.
It astounds me today that the average persons understanding of the world is cartesian dualism. Some things are good, some things are bad. Bad people are evil, good people are moral etc etc and it all happens in a social fucking vacume or they're born that way (both blameless cicrumstances...if you born that way you can't choose it and if it's a social vacume it's random and you;'re blameless). They show no appreciation for fucking causality. No interest in the effects of nature or nurture or environment on the human individual. No interest in wanting to fix the bee hive or causes of poor social behaviour, instead rather swatting the effects.
I guess what I'm ranting about is that I'm describing a right wing extremist here.
I notice that when someone poses an argument that you can't really counter, you revert to babbling about cartesian duality and how this represents the mentality of right wing extremism. The irony is that you judge anyone who doesn't always agree with you to be an evil racist. So then haven't you fallen into the trap of cartesian duality yourself?
Dismal as matric standards currently are and might have been at the high school you went to, do you honestly expect anyone to believe you weren't taught the decimal system? I don't mean the hexadecimal system as taught in COS103, that's simple arithmetic, not math. I took those first year computer science modules for a hobby once too, you're not fooling me.
If you didn't grasp maths easily, why didn't you just find a book on it and beaver your way through, instead of daydreaming about cosmology as if you were Einstein. You suffer from delusions of intellectual superiority.
I notice that when someone poses an argument that you can't really counter, you revert to babbling about cartesian duality and how this represents the mentality of right wing extremism. The irony is that you judge anyone who doesn't always agree with you to be an evil racist.
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What ? where the fuck did I use the word evil or racist ? You will never catch me talking about something as "evil" in the noun sense. And racism is a symptom of an incomplete understaing of the world. A lazy unsophisticated lack of attempt to understand the causation of things completely. The correlations between environment and behaviour are so close to perfect, while the correlation between race and behaviour are so flimsy. I can't be more lenient that form a strong correlation between people who believe race is more important than the environment in predicting someones behaviour and between people who are "badly informed". I'd be so bold as to say they range from stupid to emotionally compromised to politically susceptible. I don't care if piss anyone off with casting that wide net and making that stereotype about what belies racism. I can't excuse such a piss poor lazy fucking lack of attempt to try understand the world acurately.
There's nothing "evil" about being a racist. I'd certainly say ignorant. I do know intelligent racists but dig a little deeper and you'll find they've had some trauma that lead to their intolerance and comprimised their rationality. The subjective experience of the few can not trumph the objective reality in any form of universal "truth". It may be true in their mind but they need to get the fuck over themselves.
Dismal as matric standards currently are and might have been at the high school you went to, do you honestly expect anyone to believe you weren't taught the decimal system?
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I wrote IEB back in the 90's. A far higher standard than the state matric. Of course they taught the decimal system but you missed the nauance of my whole point which was they never explained the context of maths and what it meant in the bgger picture.
If you didn't grasp maths easily, why didn't you just find a book on it and beaver your way through, instead of daydreaming about cosmology as if you were Einstein. You suffer from delusions of intellectual superiority.
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To whome ? The average moron on the street who seems to make up 99.9% of people I meet ? I doubt it's a delusion. I can barely relate to other humans beings without having to tone done to them as if I'm patronising a child.
I had a conversation with some christians who approached me many years ago to convert me. They obviously caught on I was unenthusiastic about their dogma. But they kept trying to push their views on me. I went very, very soft touch with them and explained I was not an athiest but an agnostic. They explained that they were liberal christians and that all god's were the same god. Then I explained politely that I was not a thiest. Then they said that it didn't matter as long as believed there was a power looking over me. I explained to them as nicely as I could that I did not project anthromorphic characteristics onto any non human "power" because that would be very arrogant and self centred to assume in such a massive universe we are of any significance to anything, especially considering we exist in 4th dimensional lumpy space and could not even percieve of the higher dimensions and couldn't possibly begin to understand what the fuck is going on in the universe. More over if we don't stand a chance of knowing anything significant about the universe I doubt bronze age goat herders figured it out much better.
Then they walked away thinking I was wierd.
That's a pretty average human ineraction for me. I go to a pub and imitate a "bloke"
to perfection. A big histrionic bored to death act of rugby/women talk. On the slightest chance a topic of interest is brought up such as politics or economics etc I just soak in all the stupid uninformed opinions and don't dare open my mouth in fear of being classed as "wierd". So it's one big , alienated, existentially lonely existance I can only describe as a curse. I envy the ignorant and simple minded people. So getting upset or angry at my apparant arrogance about my intellect is misplaced.
People are dumb. En masse. My social life is one bullshit pantomime of fake nods of agreement, smiles and fake laughs at stupid jokes.
I have exactly 3 friends I consider something close to on my level. They are all men. I have never met a woman when I got through the social veneer showed any level of intellectual depth or satisfactory curiousity about the world. There are many people (women included) I admire of course for their intellect and they are far superior to me just I don't have the luxury of their company.
Ranting a lot today. Mondays make me grumpy.
yes, yes...whom ...not whome...etc etc for the rest of the post/s .
Oh and if the western standard IQ tests the extreme right love to bring up are indeed valid, and you trust them I am verifiably not only a genius but in the "gifted" category. You mentioned Eintein and he scored 2 points less than me (although I can't be sure the same test was administered but it was the same scale.)
For the record I do not believe in the validity of these tests.
I think everybody has at some stage been hassled by happy clappies. I had the misfortune to befriend a happy clappy woman for many years not realising how crazy she really was. When she needed a discounted laser printer I would find one, when she was in the process of selling her car and hadn't received her new car I would lend her my second car. My thanks for this was being falsely accused of having an affair with the attractive, married Muslim guy who provided the discount printer, and having my BMW's gaskets blown as a result of her not topping up with water. You dare not say anything to a happy clappy because Jesus doesn't love you the way he loves happy clappies. I have learned to distrust and avoid them ever since.
As far as conversations in pubs are concerned, I am also not widely admired for my unwillingness to buy into bullshit for the sake of appearing to be agreeable. I spend a lot of time on my own, a lot like Lisbeth Salander in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it does not make me lonely or unhappy. So perhaps I am a bit autistic as well as borderline gifted. I have pretty much the same attitude towards men as Lisbeth Salander.
Haven't seen the flick but it's on my "to watch" list. So I'll get the reference later I suppose.
I think I was approached at least 5 times in South Korea with people asking me "Have you heard about Cesus Christ?". Who the fuck am I ? Helen Keller ?
No irony intended. That's one place that needs to get out more.
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