Zuma is at it again...

...shooting his mouth off.

Read this gem of well-reasoned discourse. 

I commented as follows:

"What a joke. School dropout is a complex problem and "educating by force" will not solve it. And how pray tell, if our government can't provide free basic education to any decent standard, how will they provide tertiary education for those who cannot pay for it?? Better, safer schools, better infrastructure, more protection and encouragement for children would be good places to start.

Better yet, are we now going to punish teenage mothers by taking their babies away? There is culture of viewing women and girls as objects, and unprotected sex as a man's "right". THAT is what needs to be addressed. But hey, if we take children from their mothers we have a better chance of indoctrinating them."

The man never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps the fact that he had no formal education makes him more sensitive to the difficulties faced by kids in a similar situation, or perhaps I'm trying too hard to justify his ridiculous comments.  Most of our Grade 3s are functionally illiterate, so one may imagine that the matter is a bit more complex than educating people by force??

Eish.

Paging Dr Milgram

The regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I don't really plan these posts. If something gets up my nose I tend to put it on here. My husband insists on reading the often inane, occasionally incomprehensible, and sometimes frankly terrifying posts on MyNews 24 and Thought Leader and sharing these things with me. Today I read this:

http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/sandilememela/2008/10/01/can-shilowa-be-greater-than-the-anc/

And responded as follows:

"Mr Memela, please tell me you are joking. Your profile claims the following about you:
"He believes freedom of thought and expression encourages diversity of opinion and tolerance for the 'other.' He is very sane." That doesn't fit well with this post.

If people blindly follow the group's "authority" and abdicate personal responsibility, the most horrific things can happen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

People committing atrocities in apartheid-era South Africa were also just following orders, instead of listening to the dictates of their conscience, and we are familiar with the terrible results.

Let's not slavishly follow the dictates of the organisation, comprised as it is of humans, and temper our respect for authority with sense, reason and justice."

Later on in discussion with Mr Shnukums I realised that the point put across also seemed to imply that the "conscience" of the organisation may be at odds with that of society, which in this particular case is extremely worrying.

At any rate, I hope Borg-like assimilation is not the actual view or ideal of the ANC.