In his famous 1928 dissenting opinion in Olmstead vs United States, US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis offered a warning to freedom-lovers everywhere. He wrote: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their [...]
Away from the Eskom horror show, far be it for me to rain on the “People’s Dialogue” to be launched soon by Herman Mashaba and Mmusi Maimane. However, a weather check may be in order to see whether a shaft of light may yet appear in our current darkness. There is an elephant’s graveyard in [...]
Three discrete encounters in Johannesburg recently reinforced the singular, stark economic darkness that now clouds the hype and hope of the Cyril Ramaphosa “new dawn”. First off, I listened to an acute analysis on the essential problem with our economy and its misdiagnosis by the governing ANC. Moeletsi Mbeki — an analyst of our political [...]
There is the famous story of the British admiral, Lord Nelson, who, when his commander-in-chief tried to signal him to retreat during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, placed his telescope into his blind eye. Something very similar is going on right now at our moment of national economic peril and our president’s wilful blindness [...]
Panned by his critics as a charlatan and a clown, or as “Donald Trump with a thesaurus”, new UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson moved with a cabinet massacre, within hours of kissing hands with the Queen, to dispel a self-created myth about his style of government. Among millions of words he gifted to commentators in [...]
In life the opposite of shame is shamelessness. In public life the antonym of shame is impunity. In both cases, it means you act unbound by the norms of decency, accountability, moral probity and ethics. Consequences for wrongful acts are for dummies and dupes. In a country where shamelessness and impunity are the norm, the [...]
During an English heat wave, I recently escaped London to lose myself in the bucolic Kent countryside near the picturesque town of Westerham. I was one of many Winston Churchill latter-day pilgrims on a visit to his country home at Chartwell. This was where he lived or visited for more than 40 years from 1922 until [...]
Binge-watching a top-rated TV series is a sure-fire way to escape the depressing reality of SA's winter of discontent. But beyond escapism, one current series offers compelling insight into what happens to a society where trust is destroyed and truth is completely corrupted. Chernobyl is the masterful HBO-Sky series depicting the nuclear disaster at the eponymous [...]
SA’s longest-serving leader of the opposition, Sir de Villiers Graaff, had a handy solution to the numerous crises faced by his United Party. “When in doubt, Div would appoint a committee,” one of his confidantes once told me. That worked until it didn’t and the UP dissolved itself, appropriately perhaps, on a Johannesburg ice rink [...]
“Never make predictions, least of all about the future,” was the wise advice of Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn. The same might be said of political slogans and phrases, some of which barely survive contact with the real world. As Theresa May limps through her last days as prime minister of Great Britain, and the fight [...]
