Michael Trapido has a very strange post on Zimbabwe, arguing that the United States should lift its sanctions on Zimbabwe because to do otherwise would be inconsistent with Obama’s policy on Iran:
As Africans living in the SADC, a healthy Zimbabwe would be of benefit to the region as a whole. Moreover if Ahmadinejad is capable [...]

Reg Rumney favours the partial privatisation of the SABC:
And not every State asset is strategic. What’s strategic about the SABC when the Broadcast Act obliges all broadcasters, public and private, to do the State’s bidding? Or is strategy in this context another word for propaganda?
SABC 3, which I understand is not performing its intended role [...]

The intersection between globalisation and local culture continues to produce weird results. Case in point: the suggestion that FIFA ban the vuvuzela at the World Cup in deference to the sensibilities of foreign visitors, which has outraged local football fans.
SA Football Fans blog weighs in the side of the vuvuzela:
International viewers have been complaining about [...]

My friend John has some pithy words on Bafana Bafana Joel Santana coach whining about “spoiler tactics” by Iraq:
Seriously… since when did adapting your team’s strategy to an aggressive opposition offense become a bad thing? Maybe it’s because I don’t understand the nitty gritty nuances of football that I don’t quite understand how Santana can [...]

As a fan of contrarian political analysis, I’ve enjoyed reading reading Daniel Larison’s take on the Iranian elections. (See here, here and here, for example.) A sample:

We pick sides like this all the time, and when we do it is almost always arbitrary, ill-informed and mistaken. For various reasons, one side in a contest is [...]

Noah Millman has a very good post on the Iranian election and what it means for US foreign policy, which is well worth reading in its entirety. I was particularly intrigued by this observation:
What will happen next? I would assume that much depends, as it did in China in 1989, on what the military [...]

Democratic Capitalist speculates on whether Jacob Zuma’s style of leadership will be successful:
[B]y Zuma’s mates own admission, he’s not great with money and yet this is the guy who is expected to negotiate South Africa through the current financial and economic crisis and the social problems that come with it… yet despite his own “short-comings” [...]

Iran has exploded into mass protest and violence, in the wake of a rigged election that once again installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. The situation on the ground is currently changing too rapidly to keep up with, but I’ve been trying to follow developments on several blogs, including Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole.
In brief, my [...]

…there are no problems that cannot be solved with “militant action”.

The president of Niger is behaving like, well, a tin-pot dictator:
It appears that Niger has now become the fifth African country to suffer a coup in the past year. It is a disturbing development, undermining the trend towards democracy in the continent as a whole, and it should be of particular concern to Canada, the [...]

South African libertarians generally have an instinctive sympathy for the taxi industry. With good reason; the taxi industry, whatever its faults, is an entrepreneurial, bottom-up sector of the economy that has arisen in response to consumers’ needs. The taxi industry has created the closest thing South Africa has to a mass-transit system without any government [...]

Tom Robbins says South Africa should abandon its “conservative monetary policy” (ie. using interest rates to counter inflation):
The UK and US have long abandoned conservative monetary and fiscal policy to fight the recession. This ironically leaves the South African government as one of the most prominent administrations in the world to hang on to remnants [...]

This month’s Atlantic cover-story, on a group of 268 Harvard men whose entire lives were studied as they unfolded, makes for fascinating and engaging reading. A sample:
What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for [...]

For the record, this post by Megan McArdle is a good illustration of the things I like about her writing: her willingness to question her own underlying assumptions, to take her political opponents’ ideas seriously, and to take unusual stands on even taboo topics like terrorism. (It’s worth noting McArdle does a far better job [...]

My friend Kyle on media culture in South Africa:
Why isn’t the media stronger in South Africa? Sure you could say it’s young, but I don’t buy that – especially since we’re supposed to have a very activisty past, complete with Journos Risking Their Lives for Truth™. Besides, one doesn’t need much money to take a [...]

Ross Douthat on Angels & Demons author Dan Brown:
[Brown] isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same [...]

The murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller by a pro-life extremist has provoked several interesting arguments in the blogosphere. A number of pro-choice writers (notably Will Saletan and Richard Spencer) have made the case that Tiller’s assassin was simply taking the logic of the pro-life argument - that abortion is morally equivalent to the murder [...]

Should opposition parties treat Jacob Zuma with a certain degree of respect simply because he occupies the office of the presidency? Michael Trapido, Pierre de Vos and the DA’s own Athol Trollip seem to think so, and I agree. Politeness is one mark of a virtuous and civilised society, and while it is not always [...]

Megan McArdle on the Obama deficits:
According to the CBO, which is usually preferred for projections because it does not share the White House Office of Management and Budget’s fervent desire to please the boss, the debt-to-GDP ratio will end up north of 80% early in the next decade. It peaked around 110% at the [...]

During the campaign, Jacob Zuma mastered the art of telling audiences what they wanted to hear. He would appear before Afrikaans farm communities, black township residents, left-wing university students and business-owning investors, assuring each group equally that their interests would be looked-after by the new government. Zuma was also notoriously reluctant to talk about policy, [...]