I watched the new Harry Potter movie yesterday, and thought it was pretty good. I’m not sure it was good enough to justify its 78 score on Metacritic, but it’s competently executed, and the film-makers have largely succeeded in their efforts to create a darker Harry Potter that corresponds with the increasing maturity of the [...]

Andrew Sullivan joins the calls for Obama to release his “original birth certificate”:
So many readers are furious that I have dared to ask the president to show the original copy of his birth certificate. The reason for demanding it is the same reason for demanding basic medical records proving Sarah Palin is the biological mother [...]

I’ll be on CNBC tomorrow at 6:30am, discussing Libyan foreign policy.

During Thabo Mbeki’s presidency, I argued on several occasions that South Africa’s confrontational foreign policy towards the United States did not advance our national interests, to which the then-Department of Foreign Affairs essentially responded by saying that this was a lie, and that their US policy was not confrontational at all.
Thus I was intrigued to [...]

Peter Singer has an article in the New York Times Magazine, arguing that healthcare should be rationed in order to keep costs down. Peter Suderman at Reason Magazine disagrees:
[T]he QALY standard results in an essentially command-and-control approach to health-care distribution: Rather than let individual preferences and agreements work out prices and reach an equilibrium, the [...]

Read this account of the Judicial Services Commission, in which a seemingly thoughtful and knowledgeable judge candidate is subjected to a series of attacks over his religious views, his race, the fact that he’s not part of the same club as one of his interlocutors, and a trumped-up accusation that he destroyed the career of [...]

Critics of “transformation” in South African society often argue that the transformation process, ostensibly intended to redress the injustices of apartheid, is in reality designed to entrench the ANC’s hold on political power. Without weighing in on that particular debate, I will say how I surprised I am that Cosatu’s own press releases have taken [...]

Steven Friedman critiques the public criticism of Peter de Villiers:
The problem is not that people criticise De Villiers — or Percy Sonn or Norman Arendse or black lawyers and business people whose names come to mind: in a free society everyone can criticise everyone else. It is that they are reduced to buffoons, butts of [...]

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes about leadership, in a long paragraph that deserves to be quoted in full:
Gandhi thought people should generally be nicer to Untouchables but other than that the caste system was just fine, and the best way forward for India was to eradicate modern technology and revert to an agrarian state of proto-nature, a [...]

(Note: I’m back! My sincere thanks Mayibuye Magwaza for maintaining this blog in my absence.)
Eusebius Mckaiser in the Mail & Guardian discusses the future of COPE, a political party that has been so quiet since the election that most people could be excused for forgetting its existence.
Although his diagnosis is pessimistic, I think Mckaiser nevertheless [...]

by Mayibuye Magwaza
This will probably be my last post - Laurence should be back soon.
South Africa’s Constitution is on a pretty high pedestal in South African political discourse. We are informed that it is progressive and wonderful and in general, it’s rarely questioned or challenged.
This is good, to the extent that it ought to frame [...]

by Mayibuye Magwaza
So, the new Madagascan president has gone to the EU, asking them to keep the aid money flowing. South Africa (and the African Union in general) is backing the current talks, after Zuma rejected any notion of using force. Meanwhile, the Mail and Guardian reports that Ravalomanana has been talking to strange chaps [...]

by Mayibuye Magwaza
Rape is a part of South African culture. It’s a disgusting and abominable part that we need to discard, but it’s definitely a part of South African culture.
There, I went and said it. The next time you hear a South African defending something – anything – on the basis that it is ‘part [...]

Just to let everyone know, I’ll be away for the next week. I will have access to email, but I won’t be able to update this blog. However, don’t stop reading this page, because I’ve asked Mayibuye Magwaza to guest-blog for me while I’m away. Like me, his background is in international relations, and in [...]

See, this is example of why Robert Kaplan is so awesome. I’ve read plenty of interesting commentary on the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, but almost all of it focuses on local issues: how did the government’s counterinsurgency campaign work?; how has the Tamil civilian population been affected?; etc. By contrast, Kaplan [...]

Mpumelelo Mkhabela asks the following question about the controversy surrounding Jacob Zuma’s latest “Jesus” remarks:
The South African Council of Churches is very angry that the president has repeated his remarks that the ANC will rule until the Second Coming of Jesus. Casual talk in this context is normally used when a person vows that something [...]

Reihan Salam at The American Scene has some thoughts on South Africa.