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DWol  ·  2548 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 5, 2017

Hi all

For the last while now I've been mulling over an idea to write a series of posts about some of the big debates and problems where I live in South Africa.

In many ways I think the (unique?) situation here has a lot that can be learnt from, so I wanted to canvas whether there would be any interest in something like that?

Maybe to give an idea, these are some of the types of things I'm thinking of:

Current symbolism vs historical value

How to navigate the space between symbolism from the past and its historical context? This is best exemplified I think by the removal of a prominent statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from its place at the University of Cape Town.

Spatial justice vs the invisible hand

The aftermath of forced removals and apartheid spatial planning have left immeasurably deep scars on South Africa's towns and cities. What must be done to deal with this legacy and where does the government's responsibility lie?

from Unequal Scenes

Some others

Decolonisation of curricula

Promotion of local languages vs English as the language of business, science etc.

Rights of local communities around mining operations

Fee-free higher education

The land question

Race, class and identity in post-apartheid society

etc.

So ja, maybe something along those lines. Curious to hear what people think. Mzansi by natives?

Cheers

De Waal

DWol  ·  1106 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 17, 2021

Hey everyone,

A thought crossed my mind today and I thought I might try to get an outside perspective.

Correct me if I am wrong but I feel that with respect to global vaccine rollouts we have simultaneously:

a) A supply bottleneck preventing most countries from consistently accessing vaccine doses. C.f. current grandstanding between EU and UK around supply of the AZ vaccine.

b) Opposition from many countries to proposals at the WTO level to waive aspects of IP relating to vaccine production.

Currently however I see no discussion of how these two situations are incongruent. The supply issues mean that the obvious narrative of rich countries importing all the vaccines and exporting only "fuck you" is only partially valid as, under the current circumstances, they can't even procure enough for themselves. So why the reluctance to open up the IP and allow generic production (as with HIV antiretrovirals) which would presumably increase availability?

I scanned through a few of these but I wanted to throw it out there before seeing if I have time later:

EU procurement woes

Recently in re TRIPS waiver

MSF report looking into IP waivers

DWol  ·  2436 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 26, 2017

Trip report

Went on a road trip with the family through South Africa's closest relative of the Empty Quarter, the Northern Cape. It's both the biggest and least populated province and the landscapes are beautiful in their brutality.

The journey started driving up through the Tankwa Karoo, where the SA version of Burning Man takes place.

According to the people on the other end, only an act of God saved us from a flat tire on the shale dirt road where donkey carts are a serious form of transport. We stopped over in Calvinia, where my great uncle used to run the show with a massive sheep farm, on the other side of those yonder mountains:

He sold it when he retired (at 70-odd) but apparently couldn't stop the itch so promptly started farming again further south. Go figure. Passed through a bunch of frontier towns that have all seen better days and could use a bit of hope. We slept over on the banks of the Orange river, in between the table grape farms which jut out into the arid veld. Most of the crop is destined for Europe and the US east coast.

Next day we were on the last leg of our Kalahari anabasis. Remarkably, it rained on the way. At some point the geography changed and we started to drive through the dune veld - where the sand has been grown over and stops shifting. It creates an interesting effect where you get to glimpse into one "dune row" after the other as the road cuts through. Maybe one will have a bird or some meerkats, or a wind pump. And then just grass and acacia forever, as far as I can tell.

The last 60km were along the most harrowing dirt road I've ever been on. Saw a dead kudu along the way which means someone fucked up - they go for $3000.

I thought I'd seen the milky way before but apparently that was all a ruse and you need to head out into the Kalahari to see the real one.

DWol  ·  2254 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 24, 2018

Bittersweet start to the year.

On a “career” level, things could hardly be better. I finished up the article write-up of my work last year and sent it forward for my higher-ups to check out. It was the definitive box to tick that would signify the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 – which also means that I am now officially starting my PhD. First order of business: proposal.

Also in the pipeline is a trip to Vancouver to present my work at a fancy conference, as well as the opportunity to head to Portugal and Finland for my case studies and sampling.

Unfortunately, life comes at you hard – my supervisor was diagnosed with cancer early last year and just learnt that it has spread all over. Terminal, with a horizon of end April. I’m finding that it’s a really strange thing to process. Time will tell. But I do know that I have a massive fire in the belly to get my proposal done such that I can present it with her there – just on a personal level it feels important.

Tough months ahead…

Peace

DW

DWol  ·  2233 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 14, 2018

Hey all. Four beers down.

His Excellency, the president of the Republic is busy addressing the proles in re his feelings about resigning.

For all its faults, I am grateful that in SA whether the big man feels like doing so or not is largely irrelevant. A motion of no confidence will occur tomorrow and, with the support of his own party, remove his ass.

But I can't type fast enough to keep up with the speech so hold tight for some retrospective analysis.

DWol  ·  2233 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 14, 2018

Alright.

So Msholozi has stepped down. TBH I am somewhat surprised. Most of his speech was about being beholden to only the constitution (as opposed to the resolutions of his party). And then in almost no time at all, finished it off with a "that being said".

As the president-in-the-wings finds it sufficient to enrich himself through only vanilla capitalist exploitation, the global investment crew seem to think this is a positive development. As to whether that is true on any more fundamental level remains to be seen.

But tomorrow the sun will come up and there will not be any military on the streets and people will be as free as they were today and there are reasons to be happy. Happy Valentine's day!

Ah very cool... This set me off on the right track. I think I found an inductive type explanation which I will try to go through.

So supposing we find ourselves in a given state, there is a chance, p, that we will transition to the other state and hence end up with length of 1. On the other hand there is 1-p chance that we will stay, and have a length 1 + L' where L' is the length of whatever happens after that. So the length, L, of our sequence is then:

  L = 1(p) + (1-p)(1+L')

But L' is just the next iteration of the same kind of process that produces L, and so their expected values should be the same, so L = L' leaving:

  L = 1/p

Which gels with what I found above... But on the other a little learning is a dangerous thing so I am not 100% confident that it is up to scratch.

Incidentally, my class was the last set who did not have intro statistics as a core course... Instead we did electromagnetism, used approximately never in the rest of the curriculum. Meanwhile statistics knowledge is something we had to cobble together over time as required. Each time the activation energy of finding a textbook and doing it properly from the start was just a little bit too high for what was at stake. It makes me wonder about the different roles of structured or formalised learning compared to figuring it out yourself. Knowing where to start looking is one of the big types of knowledge that a curriculum affords you I think.

Considering the circumstances, now is probably as good a time as any to bury the hatchet and dive into khanacademy or whatever. Personally that is probably what I will do as this has felt like a big hole in my competency for a while now. But on a general level, I wonder about when the right way is to dive in, mess around, fail, learn by doing etc. vs. deciding that you should rather let someone else guide the process, even if it means starting at a very basic level. I'm sure we go back and forth between these, and it's probably not meaningful to try and say that there is a "optimum" way...

DWol  ·  2262 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cape Town runs out of water on April 22.

Indeed. I think there some interesting things to talk about here:

    Unless residents drastically cut down on daily use, warns Cape Town Mayor Patricia De Lille, taps in the seaside metropolis of four million will soon run dry.

I don’t know what “drastic” means in this context. Current metro usage is hovering fairly stable at 600 ML/day (consulting the oracle). Before people gave a shit, it would have been around double that. I can assure you that the lifestyle change I am currently undergoing certainly feels drastically in line with the apparent halving of usage.

Here is a nice visualisation of the projection that (reading between the lines) the City is using to calculate Day Zero. Messing with the values and replacing 600 with the target 500 (which appears to be as low as it wants to go) only buys a week at this stage. So really, any additional consumption changes don’t affect the ultimate situation – that it is going to come down to the wire and mostly up to the will of the gods. If it rains early and abundantly, the City buys time to introduce additional abstraction and concoct new bylaws. If not… I’ll see you guys on the other side.

For me the most interesting stuff is in the hard lessons being learnt – this situation will probably be the poster child for how long-term dynamics can take you for a ride. This article is a good explainer for those with little background. The key for me is this set of graphs:

The yellow dots indicate predicted years with 2017 (i.e. drought) rainfall. None of the models necessarily agree in the absolute sense but what they do show is that a little lower average and a little more variation is all it takes to turn what used to be a 1-in-1000 year event into a 1-in-50 year event. And that’s what the face of climate change is likely to be (even if it’s not the culprit here – I understand the jury is still out on that).

On the politics side, there are also unforeseen consequences. One of the biggest issues is that in SA, water is used as a cross-subsidiser in municipal budgets. So the reduction in consumption has had a big impact on the balance sheet. Furthermore, as the rich take themselves off the grid with rainwater collection and boreholes, this income will probably stay lower than before. On top of this, unregulated groundwater abstraction is likely to be lead to massive problems in the future.

    The local version of Craigslist is already full of listings for companies willing to truck in tankers full of water from less drought-prone parts of the country, for a price.

Along similar lines, I seriously worry about the potential impacts of a laissez-faire approach which allows this kind of thing uncritically. SA is dry in general, and the Western Cape is not the only province with issues. People are playing themselves if they think exporting their water footprint elsewhere in the country is a sustainable solution.

    According to city statistics, only 54% of residents are hitting their target, one of the reasons why Day Zero was moved forward a week earlier this year.

I am very sceptical of this number. I live in an apartment complex and like most in the City, it does not have unit-by-unit water meters – I suspect the 54% value refers to the ones they can be sure about and 46% includes both guzzlers and unknowns. In any case, again, this is one of the things which will likely change going forward. There’s a silly saying that you can’t manage what you don’t measure but I think it rings true in this case.

DWol  ·  2310 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 29, 2017

Been thinking about a few things recently

I've been experiencing what I can only describe as a fight against complacency. Complacency with the way the world is, the way the country is, the way I am. Complacency might not be the right word so I want to sketch out the scenario:

For as long as I've been politically conscious I have told myself that I need to devote my time and energy to some society-building endeavour. Whether you frame it as a social justice problem or a sustainability problem, it appears to me that the world is fucked (reality check - is this just student angst?) and that there's a lot to make noise about. But it's hard - ever more I feel the crushing weight of the world's problems are not something I can carry indefinitely. It's certainly not good from a mental health perspective.

Do I pick some particular small thing and focus on it? Not sure. At the least I know that it's all too easy to show the veneer of caring - it's very simple to point out injustice but more difficult to really hear it as a clarion call. So that's the one side of the coin: whilst unsure about how to traverse it, I feel some sense of duty here (Calvinist tendencies...) to the rest of humanity, because we only really have humanity in a shared way.

On the other hand, it seems that a good number of people don't share that view, enough so to make me incredibly despondent (cf. Trump retweets) - in essence whether it's worth it to try and bring everyone into communion when I would consider a lot of them to be assholes. This thread kind of touches on that in some way. I don't want to get into the question of "how do you deal with the people you don't agree with" here though. Suffice to say that this force pushes me more into the individualistic direction of avoiding the difficult issues and just trying to live my best life. In many ways I think I have seen others wrestling with a similar feeling, maybe also described as "guilt".

On face value these might not seem like a dichotomy, and probably in a rational sense they aren't. But for me, I think I need to have some kind of "philosophical" backing for the overarching decisions that I make in my life - what direction to pursue. Coming back to the complacency, I feel that I have to choose whether to head in the ascetic, humanist direction or what could very well be a great white picket fence first world life that is complicit but never directly so. My "bias" obviously shows but the point is that complacency only pushes you in one direction, and so the choice is how to respond to it.

This is all the more relevant of late as I have been presented with a wonderful opportunity to start my PhD next year with EU funding and a range of bells and whistles that make it a really great proposition. Trouble is that this would be a pretty huge commitment to a life (or at least the next few years) that could be dramatically improved upon from the white picket fence perspective if I cut my project off and just hand it in as a Masters. I actually started writing this comment a few weeks ago so in this particular case I think I have made up my mind. There were a number of things adding to the calculus though. What I do know is that I haven't dissolved the contradiction in my mind yet, and so it will inevitably crop up again once I'm faced with the next big decision.

Has anybody here forded a similar kind of dilemma before? I'd really love to hear how you dealt with it...

___

Some bonus anecdotes:

One of the areas on Table Mountain is called Echo Valley. I've only been there a few times but it has to be one of the most hauntingly beautiful places. I don't have a photo but turns out there is actualy Street View up there...

https://goo.gl/maps/WQ8aftRW77k

Keep going and along the way down and you are greeted with this:

Reason I mention it is because it is somewhere where the "Pale Blue Dot" field is particularly strong - nothing else in the world really seems to be terribly important against that backdrop. There's a Xhosa phrase: sixole kanjani? When will we find peace? So I know there are times and places where people can find it transiently, and maybe you can build your life around those. But is it really worth it when not it's not "us" but "me" finding it...

Cheers

De Waal

DWol  ·  2464 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 28, 2017

Went to the store to buy chicken, was confronted by a lot of commotion outside - policemen on the ground shouting at colleagues of theirs running around on the roof. A group of bystanders started to form around a lady who said that there had been an attempted armed robbery - moving from a cellphone shop to into the grocery store itself. Unfortunately for these geniuses the area's police station is right across the road so at least 4 were apparently caught after a shootout (!).

___

On a different note, had some interesting work-related ideas and I thought it might be interesting to share:

So a big part of my work involves modelling mining site water balances. One of the most important factors from a risk perspective is the effect of rainfall on dam storage levels. Both in the sense that you can have too little water (halting or otherwise affecting production) or too much water (Bento Rodrigues).

Luckily, rainfall is one thing there is an abundance of data on for long time spans and across a broad spatial scale i.e. finding historical time-series data for whatever area you are interested in is not hard. The question is then: how best to take into account the change in rainfall over time from a modelling/simulation perspective?

On the simpler end you have the approach I took last year in my preliminary research - average out historical data into two annual groups, a wet and dry season. This is a bit too simple however. The next step is to add a bit of spice by propagating the variance of each seasonal value through the model (probably Monte Carlo?). That way you can see the sensitivity of the outputs to the input as well.

I've however been looking at some work by others that seems to hint that we need to go further. In particular, the effect of this kind of (hourly/daily/monthly) variation is felt dynamically - the water-related processes can hardly be assumed to be at steady-state. So now we need to set up a dynamic model of the process.

The last spanner in the works is that, in many places, there are climatic oscillations which act on scales bigger than a year (e.g. El Niños and the like). The effect of this is to cause more incidences of droughts and "floods" than what would be expected by chance, if chance were defined by the distribution of values historically (according to these guys).

Their analysis was purely historical one, looking into it from the euphemistic perspective of portfolio risk... for me it raised some important questions as to how to incorporate this in a predictive model to evaluate processes in the design stage, or help current operations to adapt to un-envisioned risks. Today I read about a Markov chain-based model that incorporates the chance of switching from e.g. a wetter-than-usual to a dryer-than-usual rainfall histogram based on the historical tendencies.

I think this stuff has some wider implementation possibilities - many ore bodies also have this kind of dual character. Complex mineralisations can have you switching from a low-sulphide to a high-sulphide ore. If these are just averaged out, you lose a lot of important insights into how, maybe, the downstream flotation is affected or even the potential for acid rock drainage impacts. So a lot of interesting work to be done in this space!

DWol  ·  2255 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

Wow. Thanks. This article hit me hard. It meanders through thoughts I have had for a while now and although I don’t think I have really formed a fully-fledged opinion, I think it touches on a number of difficult yet important conversations.

In South Africa, segregation is like a corporeal thing: I don’t really have the words but I want to convey that it is something very tangible which permeates basically every part of life.

Here is where I grew up:

Here is where I live now:

Here is a random town in the middle of nowhere:

Basically every town in the country has the same scars.

There are some important things to note from these (particularly the Cape Town one) which I think are broadly similar to the American experience – spatial integration left to its own devices takes place in two ways: upward mobility of PoC, and gentrification of a few well-located areas. Note that it does not appear to occur through downwardly mobile whites (or even idealistic ones) moving into the townships. These dynamics are important because they reflect an imbalance which gives segregation a kind of self-sustaining momentum.

Schools are an obvious site of friction for this sort of thing – the place where a child’s future is supposedly shaped. And so the author hits on an important question when she considers where to send her kid: contributing to (racial) diversity in an affluent white school or contributing to (class?) diversity in a poor non-white school.

The first aligns with the upward mobility idea above and the second with the idealism situation. The comparison is not absolute but suffice to say in both cases there is an anabatic and a katabatic option. One appears to be rational, the other based on ideology:

    One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into them, nothing would change.

    The few segregated, high-poverty schools we hold up as exceptions are almost always headed by a singular principal like Roberta Davenport. But relying on one dynamic leader is a precarious means of ensuring a quality education.

This is of course the crux of the reasoning for that second option. I think on face value it’s a laudable idea. It’s certainly an important question in general: what if any active role should be played in the integrative “project” by those with choice, resources, social capital etc? (Imbedded in there is the equally quagmired issue of paternalism but I don’t want to go there)

    But integration as a constitutional mandate, as justice for black and Latino children, as a moral righting of past wrongs, is no longer our country’s stated goal.

I agree here that this is troubling – as I said, integration left to progress organically has, I think, undesirable outcomes. At the least we can agree that it happens slowly.

    In early spring 2015, the city’s Department of Education sent out notices telling 50 families that had applied to kindergarten at P.S. 8 that their children would be placed on the waiting list and instead guaranteed admission to P.S. 307. Distraught parents dashed off letters to school administrators and to their elected officials.

FWIW we get a lot of this sort of thing in SA too but it’s more often under the bracket of language (an added spanner in the works).

The author's description of what happens along the whole redistricting thing is reminiscent of the arguments around gentrification – what seems a positive change on the one axis might have unintended negative consequences on another. What I got from this story is another example of the deep web of complexity which I think is ultimately the reason why this segregation thing is so hard to beat.

    True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage…

She gives this as a statement but I think it is probably the real site of debate on these sorts of issues – a debate which doesn’t look like being resolved any time soon.

DWol  ·  2323 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Zimbabwe's Mugabe Out Of Power For First Time Since 1980s As Military Takes Control

All the Zimbabweans I've spoken to in the last few days have been positive/hopeful in general. It seems that it is less a coup against Mugabe than his wife Grace and her G40 faction - this could better be considered an internal power struggle within the ruling party. Furthermore, whatever happens it looks like Mugabe will be the one to "make the decision" - for better or for worse the man is unassaible in his individual capacity.

Situation on the ground seems calm but probably very tense. As to whether things will be better, I think the best outcome will be had if fresh elections are called soon. Will have to wait and see.

DWol  ·  2485 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 7, 2017

A day of contradictions...

Massive frontal storm has been rolling past since last night. Schools and universities closed across the province. Where I am there's been power outages and trees falling over but I'm told there's been flooding and thousands displaced in the low-lying areas.

Further down the coast lightning has caused some massive fires fanned by the wind but unfortunately they have not had any rain to counter it. My old roommate is from there and his hometown of 70k people is being evacuated. It's big pine plantation country and it seems the town in basically encircled by flames.

There's not much info coming through right now as it's the middle of the night so we'll only really know the extent of the damage tomorrow... :(

DWol  ·  3090 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Non-American Users of Hubski, where are you from?

Hey guys, South Africa checking in...

I've been on the 'ski for quite a while now, don't really post that much though.

But enjoy this photo from a walk I took a while ago:

DWol  ·  2261 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cape Town runs out of water on April 22.

Perhaps. It will depend so much on the implementation. Keep in mind that about a fifth of the city already receives their water through communal taps which is essentially what will happen for everyone. I also think the fact that it has been approaching so slowly means it will be more... orderly - at least in contrast to other disaster scenarios where everything happens at once and authorities are left scrambling. I can only speak for myself but I have made peace with having to queue for water and I guess most others people have too.

DWol  ·  2266 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dispatches from the shithole of Nambia

    I feel an apathetic slumber accompany even the scantest attention to the deluge of scandal, rank idiocy, and bigotry that comes daily out of our nation's capital.

Two related points:

The first is that I am starting to get the impression that the true equilibrium state of democracy is people fighting their elected officials and the officials simultaneously seeing how big of a cake slice they can get away with. Different countries lie in different places along the graft scale in this context. In such a situation, apathy is (at the least) dangerous - it allows people the opportunity to push the envelope a little more the next time.

But how do you react with anything but apathy for something which is so antithetical to what you believe in? The recent thread about Sam Altman's post got me thinking about this thing of debates and arguments - convincing other people, in whatever context, that you are right. When so much of the nonsense above is driven by what can lightly be described as a "difference of opinion". Do we entrust this kind of debate to our legislative bodies alone? What, really, is the process by which large amounts of people change their opinions?

I think if you truly believe something must be changed, or are otherwise unhappy with the state of affairs, you should try and actively foster that kind of change in opinion in others. People may hold opinions that are nasty (or even illegal) but this hopefully does not condemn them to those opinions. As I say though, I have no idea what a concrete strategy for this is because as sure as you are of your convictions, so sure are the others. Difficult.

In principle, yes. But it's probably not economically viable. Rare earth oxide prices are in the range of 10-100 USD per kilo. Platinum and gold go for ~1000 USD per ounce. Of course the tailings grades will be different but as far as I know these are the only metals which have gone through significant tailings reprocessing efforts. In SA that's also mainly because they had loads of material that had been mined 100 years ago when recovery was lower. I think copper might also reprocessed in a few places but I would guess only via heap leaching (stick in some plumbing and irrigate your dump with acid).

Interesting. I have a few thoughts.

Rare earth elements are currently sourced essentially from two distinct mineralogies: hard rock mining from igneous intrusions with the rare earths contained in e.g. bastnaesite and monazite (such as Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia and Mountain Pass in California), and from ion absorption clays (for reasons above my pay grade these only occur in the subtropical belts hence their prevalence in southern China).

These two ores have some important distinguishing characteristics. Firstly, the hard rock ores tend to be enriched in the so-called "light" REEs (e.g. lanthanum, cerium) whereas the clays are somewhat enriched in the "heavy" REEs (e.g. lutetium, yttrium). They also have very different processing methods. Hard rock ores are processed in a more conventional way, via grinding/milling the ore, floating the valuables and then sequentially removing elements using solvent extraction. With maybe leaching in there somewhere... This is more or less similar to processing for the precious metals but as I understand it the large number and chemical similarity of the REEs makes this more resource intensive. On the other hand, in the clay ores the REEs are already in the free ionic form and are flushed out via ion exchange in heaps or vats.

Both of these processing methods are pretty nasty but one falls under the remit of large state-controlled enterprise and the other can be done by a dude with a spade and a vat full of salt water. So it's no surprise that there is a large unregulated industry around the processing of these clays, which is in turn responsible for some seriously hellish mining landscapes and environmental degradation. The Chinese government is apparently cracking down on that sort of thing which I can only imagine involves a lot of authoritarian police state tactics.

Coming back to the article, I wasn't entirely sure at what part of the above processes this advancement would fit in. The paper they are referecing seems to have used spent ceria polishing powder and lutetium crystal waste as the feedstock for their experiments (i.e. already very pure in terms of REE content). So it appears that this applies to the extraction phase - they first had to go through an alkaline roast and HCl dissolution before using the new solvent. This doesn't really enable making a big difference to the overall production process. In the conventional mining case, it will still need to produce masses of somewhat radioactive tailings, require massive amounts of energy to grind the ore and so on. Similar situation for the clay mining. It's an unfortunate reality that the amount of value added in a processing step tends to be inversely proportional to the environmental impact associated, and this technology seems to be acting on the end of the pipe.

DWol  ·  2386 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mzansi by natives 3: The suspended revolution

I'll be honest and say that politically motivated killings are not something I know much about, at least in terms of getting below the surface. Certainly in the past it was much worse, even with the "rule of law" associated with an iron fist minority government and pliable Bantustan leaders.

The proximal cause is essentially political infighting and maneuvering by internal ANC factions. Why it can happen in the face of laws and democracy? More difficult. On the one hand it's clear that the police don't actually have the power/resources to prevent this kind of thing happening. But on a deeper level, and in line with what I was saying above, the situation (or more accurately, the system) on the ground has not really changed much since the IFP/ANC/Third force "war" in the 80's and 90's. I guess what I'm saying is that the rule of legitimate law can hardly break down if it was never built up to begin with.

DWol  ·  3204 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Take down the Confederate flag now

Wow, when I heard Jon Stewart talking about the confederate flag flying over SC I assumed it was a metaphor...

I have a question though; forgive my ignorance but what exactly are people referring to when they say that the flag represents their heritage?

Is there any other facet to it than symbolising the idea that black people are not equal?

DWol  ·  2464 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible

Some quick thoughts from my side:

This idea hasn't really made its way down south so much in my experience. I don't think this is a information dissemination issue because many other ideas coming from this "sphere" have entered the discourse. Which is interesting because SA's cultural and language plurality should make it a big pitfall if the author is to be believed? (Not to mention power dynamics)

Maybe part of it lies in that there is not really a unified South African identity yet. So it is still seen as (broadly) good to try and assimilate or show internalisation of different aspects from different cultures? The idea that it's incontrovertibly bad seems a stretch.

More generally, culture/identity and so on are such complex things that it's probably difficult to apply broad strokes to it in any case.

DWol  ·  2162 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: One small passage from "No Future Without Forgiveness" that really stands out to me.

    I think it speaks volumes that even a group of people with a single goal in mind and the best of intentions in their hearts have to struggle in such a way. I think it speaks volumes as to why sometimes society seems really messed up.

Don't really think I have much insightful to say, but this thought up here is important. The question I am left asking is whether we are doomed to this? Will things get better in my lifetime? I heard someone say once that as a first pass estimate, it takes about as long for conflict to be resolved as the conflict had been going on in the first place. In SA that means we are only about 10% of the way there, according to the consensus for when the shit hit the fan.

I think the Arch is right in saying there's no future without forgiveness, but these days one has to wonder whether forgiveness has any value if it was given for free. 24 years is sadly enough time for us to collectively begin to forget the past, with the result being that no-one really knows what they gave away or gained anymore. It's a bad place to be because it means that now we can't even agree that we "have the same goal in mind". The irreversibility of that lost opportunity is honestly the saddest part for me.

DWol  ·  2386 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Two Americas

Thanks for this.

I think the ideas she puts out here do not necessarily only apply to America - exceptionalist thinking is probably what defines the border between nationalism and patriotism. I abhor it for its tendency to need an us and a them - to know others only by analogy.

I see nationalism as a blind identity-driven thing that will only work in the most trivial of cases and definitely doesn't translate to the globalised world we have today: Neville Alexander wrote a whole book about the national question in South Africa. His thesis was essentially that every historical attempt to define the nation was doomed to failure because they ultimately rely on a flawed definition of what it must be. I don't think the question has actually been answered yet: "What is a South African?" has not been settled. Where exceptionalism comes in is that it makes you think that at least you know what a South African is not. Africa, but not that Africa, right?

In that way I'd like to imagine a different kind of feeling (patriotism?) that is more focused on doing the things that are good for all mankind, but just doing them in the place where you happen to be and which so intangibly forms your identity. Not really sure about this but it's a thought. It's probably more pragmatism than anything else.

In any case, I think the takeaway from the article should not be a narrow realisation of "America's other reputation abroad" but more about the introspective elements to it - trying to imagine a different way of locating yourself in the world. I actually think there's something profound hidden here but I haven't been able to crack it.

DWol  ·  2547 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mzansi by natives 1: Somewhere to start

Definitely more philosophical. It was constituted following a national canvassing of demands from the townships and homelands. So it was like the consolidated voice of a large percentage of the oppressed.

At the time, non-whites had incredibly limited political representation and so it was a major act of defiance to demand the things set out there. In fact the huge meeting where it was proclaimed was broken up by the police on the second day. A few years later the organisations involved would be banned.

Ever since it served as the foundation of the struggle (for most) in the sense that it showed what was required, culminating on its influence on the Constitution.

DWol  ·  2547 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mzansi by natives 1: Somewhere to start

Thanks, I think this is a great question.

Certainly in the general sense there is agreement (with some caveats that I'll get into now-now). Within the Constitution the main source of these ideals is in the bill of rights (SS 7-39). The rest deals with more procedural stuff relating to how government will function etc. I believe the US constitution has a similar setup.

There is broad agreement largely because of the relatively consultative process which produced it - during the transitional period (~90s) there was engagement between the various political groupings and the old regime culminating in an interim constitution that paved the way for a democratically constructed one after the elections.

As such, it reflects the politics of the day - in South Africa the Overton window lies very much to the left, at least in the talk-space.

The devil is in the details however. There are two main issues/debates as far as I have eyes to see:

The first is the idea that the Constitution did not go far enough in pushing for revolutionary change. There is a view that is gaining more traction than it used to have that the 1994 dispensation represents a suspension of the revolution. I think there is perhaps something to this, although I cannot throw my weight behind it entirely. S 25 for instance guarantees the right to property and prohibits expropriation without compensation. The question is then how this squares with the process (which is mandated in the same section) of righting our history of marginalisation and dispossession. In essence, who should own the land and how to shift? I won't get into the specifics here but I hope it illustrates this type of clash.

The second issue is the question of how to actually do the practical legwork in trying to guarantee the rights. This is where the debate more commonly lies. For instance when people protest and demand access to sanitation, they can rest assured that the Constitution guarantees the right to adequate housing, with sanitation almost assuredly being a necessary condition for such.

There is yet much to be said here but hopefully that goes some way to answering your question!

DWol  ·  3817 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "Homogenization Bias" on hubski?

Look, I comment rather infrequently and I'd classify myself in the lurker/passive consumer cohort, but seeing all the meta-talk going on recently I figured my thoughts might be useful. Or maybe not.

Because that's the crux for me at least. Ninety-nine percent of the time I really don't consider my own opinions interesting enough to present to you lot. Is it an acceptance thing? Maybe. Perhaps it's the idea that my hubski presence needs to be curated in some way, throttled but then distilled.

That seems to be the ideal, but if it makes you think that my comment history is going to be an intellectual goldmine or whatever don't even bother looking, because honestly my recent comments have been quite mediocre.

It could be just me, in which case I'll get and take what's coming to me, but hubski incubates a fucked up kind of performance anxiety in me. Right now I'm having a bit of an internal conflict about whether or not to just erase everything I wrote and remain silent.

Don't get me wrong though, I really like hubski and I really like the conversations and debates and whatnot which take place. If hubski command thinks lurkers are counter to the mission statement, then I hope this kind of info is helpful to you.

I think I've said everything that I wanted to (not) say, so two final things:

a. If you think this is complete bullshit, does that validate what I was trying to get across?

b. Here's some weirdly relevant poetry which may or may not lose its meaning in translation:

  ...[O you] Controller of Conversations

  Sir...

  My Lord

  No!

        guess I'll try again...

                                      later
DWol  ·  3859 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Case For A 21-Hour Work Week

I think the point is that the amount of "work" equal to a dollar is an arbitrary value, and that we've somehow landed on the 40-hours-per-week-is-enough-to-drive-my-lifestyle paradigm.

If everyone works less, but also decides that work is worth more, you'll end up with more free time but the same prices. Up to a certain point of practicality, i.e. the minimum amount of work needed for shit to actually get done.

Unfortunately I don't see this kind of shift happening very quickly...

DWol  ·  3933 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Update: More RSS

While I personally find it more convenient to simply use hubski.com as opposed to a feed, this is what it looks like in my reader :)

DWol  ·  3935 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What cover songs do you think are well done?

With regards to Ceremony, one of my favourite bands, Chromatics, did a cover of it too, putting a bit of an italo spin to it.

Actually, while I'm here, they also covered Kate Bush with Running Up That Hill

DWol  ·  3957 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Personal projects and research

I suppose I have two "projects" at the moment. They're related actually.

The first is my quest to read a few poetry anthologies, on lease from my mother, and some books from my father. Reasons? Since finishing high school, I don't want to lose touch with poetry and literature (seeing as no-one is forcing me to read anymore). Also I want to improve my own writing skills.

Which links in with the other project, music. Up until now it's all been "instrumental", but I'd like to start adding lyrics (I guess I'm feeling more confident or somesuch). So to be able to pen whatever inspiration might come my way, I figured I'd need the background knowledge.

The problem is that also studying at the same time, so I'm not getting much time for my own stuff. Especially now, during exams. Holidays are soon though, so I'm optimistic.