Kangaroo courts part 1: The Polanski case
Every so often we are faced with a news story that divides opinion and causes heavy debate. In these cases, emotion often rules supreme and otherwise pleasant people become laptop dictators demanding...
View ArticleTake your filthy hands off our porn
Government, it seems, wants to control our access to porn on DSTV. Thank goodness we have them to look out for us. We are clearly not capable of making these complex moral decisions all by ourselves....
View ArticleSpeakZA: The free press will never die
The name Zanu-PF used to be synonymous with liberation as was the ANC. It used to stand for the high ideals of fighting oppression at great cost to those who lead the fight. Across the globe,...
View ArticleMalema, Milosevic, Hitler and the ticking time bomb
In March of 1991 after months of nationalistic propaganda and other divisive rhetoric from Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman, a small group of Serbs and Croats clashed in the Plitvice Lakes...
View Article‘I’m South African Neutral’ and what it really means
Being a South African over the past few weeks has been a turbulent experience. The excitement of the looming Fifa World Cup has been tempered by a degree of racial polarisation not seen since the...
View ArticleZapiro vs The Prophet
The recent fracas surrounding Zapiro’s drawing of the Prophet Muhammad has predictably culminated in the usual death threats from irate Muslims. Both the cartoonist and the newspaper’s editor...
View ArticleChristmas is sick!
Christmas is sick. Based largely on sun worship and Scandinavian pagan ritual, Christmas in some form has been with us for thousands of years. Christians muscled in on an existing winter solstice...
View ArticleThank God for Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist, master debater and razor-sharp intellectual has died. His passing was accompanied by an almost audible sigh of collective relief from the many hapless...
View ArticleDoes terrorism work?
The dust has settled now at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. I am not going to list the numbers of dead or expand upon the horror of it all; it is an all too common occurrence for there to be anything...
View ArticleThe pet food multinationals that almost killed our cat
As a student in Moscow in the late 90’s, my wife Sonja decided it was time to own a cat. As a kid, her parents had always refused to allow a cat into their apartment. Now that she was 18, those rules...
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