For many years, I have been a coffee snob. But my entitlement to this snobbery is somewhat questionable, seeing as it stems from a few years spent as a barrista, back in the early 90′s when nobody knew what a barrista was. We did roast our own coffee, though, so were at least marginally authentic. And I could make funky layered drinks, after all. Given that most SA restaurants still today serve a cup worse than the one you can make at home, I certainly felt entitled to some snobbery at the time.

And “the time” lasted for a good 15 years, long after I had desisted from making layered lattes, and had instead begun digging myself  into theoretical holes so deep you needed a heidegger[1] to get out of them. But the time is now over, as I have gone and done one of the things that make real coffee snobs roll their eyes, and sometimes snort in disgust. Continue reading »

  1. [1] borrowed from the (absolutely tremendous) novel 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein (partner to Steven Pinker)

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

Uruguay’s Luis Saurez cheated in order for his team to beat Ghana in the Wold Cup quarter final. Of this there can be no doubt, for Saurez admitted as much in boasting that his was the new “hand of God”. There can also be no doubt that the referee did the right thing, according to the rules of the game. We can however doubt the rules themselves.

But there are some red herrings in the responses I’ve encountered to Saurez’s actions. First, it’s not obvious that he should be cast as a villain in this case. If we were being honest, many of us might admit that we would prefer that members of our own team sacrificed themselves in this way in similar situations. The rules of the game, as they currently stand, reward such sacrifices. If Siphiwe Tshabalala could have won South Africa the game against Uruguay by doing a Saurez, we might admire his honesty, yet perhaps regret it in equal measure. Continue reading »

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

It is not the Internet, or Google, that is making is stupid – it’s our brains. We’ve never been as smart as we’d like to think we are, and the current fashion of looking for reasons why we feel less clever than before partly amounts to a hope to find excuses – someone to blame – for our attention deficits.

It is of course true that there is more information available to us than ever before, and the amount of available information grows exponentially every day. But there has always been more information available than we can comfortably pay attention to, at least since Gutenberg made printed material available to the masses.

What changed are our cultural dispositions in terms of agency and blame – we used to understand that mastering a field took time and effort, and that work was required to filter signal from noise. Now, we blame the noise, even as we no longer invest the time and effort required for mastery of a field. Continue reading »

More on the vuvuzela, as submitted to The Daily Maverick.

Any claim made repeatedly does not become increasingly true in proportion to the number of repetitions. Yet, according to much of what you read on websites where the vuvuzela is discussed, it is now taken for granted that this musical instrument is “part of our culture”. Furthermore, one gets the impression that many believe it to be a long-standing part of our culture, such that its existence and continued use is beyond criticism. Attempts to raise questions about its cultural status – or more prosaically, about its value – are frequently deflected by accusations of “lacking gees” (on the civilised end of the debate), and of simple racism at the less civilised end.

Something being part of any given culture is, however, not a reason to regard that thing as being good. Instead, we should remember that things become part of cultures because people value them – whether we’d prefer they did so or not. Our culture has come to value democracy, because we regard democracy as having properties that are valuable to us. We don’t simply value democracy because we see it defended in the media every day (or at least, we shouldn’t). To value something simply through habit or programming is a prejudice, which puts it on the same epistemic level as sexism or racism. Continue reading »

I suppose it was predictable enough, but I still can’t help being somewhat disappointed by the fact that the entire nation now appears to believe that the vuvuzela is “part of our culture”, and also that this somehow makes it a good thing. If it’s part of South African culture at all, it’s a relatively recent addition to that culture, with widespread use of it dating back only to the 90′s. Even it’s claimed “invention” by a Kaizer Chiefs fan occurred contemporaneously with the emergence of a similarly annoying trumpet at football games in Latin America – in other words, this is not something that South Africans have been using since Dingaan. Continue reading »

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