musings

"The Chinese dislike being touched by strangers. Do not touch, hug, lock arms, back slap or make any body contact.”

...on the evening of 21 January 1998 at around 6 pm, three armed men walked into the packed waiting room of Dr Aadil Moerat’s surgery in the township of Gugulethu, Cape Town. Minutes later, Dr Moerat was dead.

Established military wisdom has it that an invading army needs to outnumber defenders by a 3:1 ratio.

I have said it before and I will say it again – Thabo Mbeki was the best president in the world at the time of his sacking.

One of the questions we should always ask ourselves is "what if we get what we want?"

Let me give you some examples.

Many people wanted Donald Trump impeached as US president.

There are a number of ways we shut down conversations as human beings. In recent years, we created a term for one of those. We call it whatboutism or whataboutery...

I have a particular point of personal pain in this sixth decade of my life — the number of books that are being pulled from libraries.

Got a shared video today via WhatsApp (as one does); security cam footage shows the inside of a barbershop, patrons having their haircuts.

Two gunmen enter, ten shots are fired into the head of a customer, they flee the scene.

“This jst happened in Umhlanga” said the forwarder.

Within minutes, I can see this is going viral. It’s popping up on people’s WhatsApp status messages. Meanwhile, I’m checking it out because forwarding videos without fact-checking is something I try not to do.

This has been at the back of my mind ever since the Will Smith / Chris Rock incident last week. This is an except from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" which remains one of the most influential books in my life to this day,