Dieter's Dinkskrum

Weapons of Freedom? The Jacob Zuma Coup d'état, was ultimately thwarted, some believe, on grounds that: 1. Private security in South Africa, outnumbered the military, (many private people also bare arms). 2. The taxi industry, it seems, also has no taste for state capturing dictatorship. So what seemed impossible, happened when Zuma stepped down. To be ‘...free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources;’ is something we need to all stand for. Yet, today it seems no more than a useful fiction in the mouths of government officials hell bent on the boiling of all sorts of frogs. ‘Boiling frogs’ for those that don’t know, notoriously the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa in reference to those excluded from the category ‘our people’. This category seems to shrink daily in those it now excludes, Michael Cassidy reminded us. It is a cruel irony when Bheki Cele implied (beneath rhetorical concern for our people) that South Africans have no right to arms. That is, in...

Loving (a very wobbly approximation) Part 2 I am very slowly working through the book, Determined to Believe, by John Lennox. It is a remarkable book and for my part hugely challenging. Below are some thoughts relevant to what I wrote previously in part one of this meditation. Quote: “Cambridge neuroscientist Harvey McMahon writes: Free-will also underpins ethics, where choices are made in the light of moral principles. In fact free-will underpins all choices. Furthermore, free-will underpins the role of intentionality and guilt in the judicial system… The very idea of rules or laws implies that we have a choice or ability to obey. How can the law command us to do certain things if we do not have the ability to do them? Thus, even the concept of obedience implies we have a choice.” Excerpt From, Determined to Believe, Lennox, John C. Our desire for fairness which I discussed in part one points to human concern about suffering. Law in this light is not a cold scientific utilitarianism, ...

Loving (a very wobbly approximation) Part One Professor Simon May at King's College London has written two deeply thoughtful books on love, — Love: A History. Yale University Press, 2011 and Love. A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, Yale University Press, 02 May 2019. I am currently reading the latter. The book is tremendously challenging on so many levels. For today's thought for the day, I will write on some of my thoughts from this brave work and some of the possible implications. For the sake of context, Simon May's project looks at the nature of love as a category. Quote: “This updated Christian God—a God that took decisive shape only in the nineteenth century, with such thinkers as Kierkegaard, who insists (especially in his Works of Love) on the purely unconditional, disinterested, eternal, and benevolent nature of divine love—is one palatable to an era that, as Nietzsche rightly diagnosed, craves comfort and safety above all else: a one-sided God, forcibly st...