Ritual sacrifice and the ANC centenary
The ANC’s centenary celebrations were marked by another instance of an uncomfortable collision of cultural norms in the ritual slaughter of a bull. But is cultural habit a sufficient justification for such rituals?
Brief thoughts on Jack Bloom
Jack Bloom, DA Leader in the Gauteng legislature, seems to want to outsource his job to God in claiming that we need more politics and less prayer.
Reasons for optimism in 2012
A contribution to Cosmopolitan’s January edition, on things to be grateful for in 2012.
What happened to Plan A, Obama?
The overturning of an FDA recommendation to allow Plan B to be sold over-the-counter plays politics with the health of future generations of voters, all for the sake of unlikely gains in sympathy with this generation of voters.
Sometimes we’re just like the rest of us
Policy interventions need to be premised on non-arbitrary premises, which is part of the explanation for our reluctance to allow subjective moral standpoints or populist vote-seeking to influence what leaders like Helen Zille propose. But where the data do suggest that a certain course of action is justified, are we able to accept that we (as individuals) should be treated as anonymous data points in an aggregated dataset?
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