stupidity | andrewdotcoza

Seven Years Late

March 29th, 2008 | by andrewdotcoza | old season

Mar
29

Seven years after new photographs destroyed the bizarre Face on Mars theory, my local community newspaper, the Tabletalk, has announced the possible extra-terrestrial origins of the human race in a front-page article that features the face prominently.

I shall be posting the image as soon as my scanner works again. In the mean time, I wrote the following letter.

Dear Sir or Madam

When arguing against the theories of Melkbosstrand writer Wayne Herschel (Facing Our Past, Table Talk, 19 March 2008), there is something far more effective than mentioning thousands of years of cultural history, a century of evolutionary science, and the fact that Dan Brown, whom he seems to believe is a serious scientific researcher, is actually a self-declared novelist, who makes stuff up for a living.

This would be to point out the preposterousness of his composite image of the so called “Face on Mars” that graces the front page of your newspaper.

The accompanying image shows one of the 1976 photographs on the left, and a 2001 photograph on the right. The bad photo looks face-like. The good one does not. Mr Herschel has reduced the quality of the good photograph by superimposing the bad one. He has done this in order to create a more compelling image, or perhaps an image that seems to show something which does not exist.

Thousands of academics all over the world have advanced human knowledge through the application of scientific methodology, and announced their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Mr Herschel’s work is constrained by no such process of validation and verification. As fascinating as his ideas are, we need to recognise that he is not so different from Dan Brown after-all, and that his works are nothing more than speculative fiction.

Andrew Freeborn
Table View

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The State of Our Freedoms

March 7th, 2008 | by andrewdotcoza | old season

Mar
07

This afternoon, I dropped a friend off at the Cape Town airport.

After a pleasant drive, trouble free check-in, and a quick chat, I saw him to the security checkpoint, where I noticed the following sign.

This wasn’t a cardboard sign. Oh, no. It was a large, laminated plastic sign with an aluminium frame that was bolted to a steel stand. Let us take a closer look.

I apologise for the poor quality of the photography, but I had to work covertly. Who knows what these people would be capable of if they saw someone taking pictures of their sign?

Although I admit it grates me that the people in charge of airport security consider MS Paint an appropriate tool for graphic design, this image of the faceless policeman dragging the tearfully inappropriate man “Off to Jail!” in handcuffs is disturbing on a number of other levels too.

Saying inappropriate things is not a crime! It is a crime to threaten to blow up an aeroplane, or to threaten the security staff at the airport, but there is no threat implicit in making an “inappropriate remark” about, for example, the bomb warnings!

Just doing a very quick search of News24 produces the following cases of overreactions on the part of airport security:

Yesterday, in Port Elizabeth, a man that was frustrated by having to answer security questions at the British Airways counter was summarily arrested for saying that he had a bomb in his bag. As we all know, terrorists frequently admit to packing bombs in their luggage when asked at the check-in counter.

The same story ends with a reminder of the fact that the flying squad, dog unit and explosives squad were called out to the same airport last year after a man remarked that he had a nuclear bomb in is suitcase.

In November of last year, a businessman was arrested in Cape Town for telling the Comair ground staff that he had a few bombs in his luggage. The airline staff did not even bother to search his luggage – they just had him arrested and did nothing more.

In August of 2002, the Australian rugby team left a plastic bottle swaddled in paper behind the seat of an aircraft in Johannesburg. This lead to a police investigation because, “The police cannot laugh off anything as a joke, as a person never knows when it is not one.”

No. Actually, you do.

I don’t know why people make stupid jokes like this. Some of them are just asses. Some of them are slightly drunk. Some of them are nervous about flying and resort to badly thought out humour as a coping mechanism.

What I do know is that someone who announces to the baggage check staff that they have a bomb in their suitcase doesn’t have one and poses no threat whatsoever. If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you know this too!

Someone who is planning to blow up a plane would keep their bomb secret until they were ready to use it. Even allowing for contrariness, there is no advantage in claiming that you have one beforehand. Someone planning to detonate something in the airport has every reason to put their money where their mouth is and produce their bomb immediately.

While I condemn the cowardice and criminality of terrorists – and all who would engage in senseless violence – out of hand, I cannot forgive the fact that our law enforcement has chosen the easy way of appearing to safe-guard our airline experiences at the cost of our fundamental constitutional rights to behave, on occasion, like idiots.

If you or I had to arrive at an airport and face an unreasonable search, we would be within our rights to complain and protest. However, we would be confronted by people who are primed to regard every single “inappropriate” comment as a crime. Faced with this situation, where one ill considered word could result in jail time, we cannot risk standing up for our rights. We don’t know who will be gauging the appropriateness of our comments. Neither airline check-in staff nor the MS Paint expert that made our sign are qualified to judge the legal nuances, or even the grammatical ones, of what we say. We are more than likely to be arrested and “proscuted” (No really. Read it again.) for saying something like, “You don’t understand your own stupid rules.”

This is the face of fascism. Right now, our fascists might be amateurs and confined to our airports, but our laws have created a situation in which, when we enter their domain, we are powerlessly subject to the whims of the power-hungry and the easily offended. It is no co-incidence that the inappropriate stick figure commits his crime in a cloudy thought bubble, reserved by more competent cartoonists for unspoken words. This sign, and this mentality, concerns itself with thought-crime rather than with real crime, and when these people go home at night, you can bet they will be partying like its 1984.

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Racism Unmasked: L. Ron Hubbard

February 10th, 2008 | by andrewdotcoza | old season

Feb
10

In celebration of a day of worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology organised by the shadowy hacker group Anonymous, I’ve decided to share some history that I have recently discovered.

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, spent a considerable amount of time living in South Africa, and the then Rhodesia, where he frequently wrote to members of the white minority governments of both territories. You can see pictures of his Johannesburg home here.

Hubbard’s time in Africa influenced many aspects of Scientology. For example, one activity that Scientology prescribes for members of some ranks is the security check. The Scientologist holds the cans of an E-Meter while responding to a rapid-fire list of questions. While living in Johannesburg, Hubbard developed the Johannesburg Security Check, which he described as, “the roughest security check in Scientology.” Most of the questions are crime related and include, “Have you ever murdered anyone?” and, “Have you ever raped anyone?”, as well as this absolute zinger:

“Have you ever slept with a member of a race of another color?”

Of course, times change and the Johannesburg Security Check was subsequently replaced by the Only Valid Security Check, which has a slightly different set of questions including, “Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?”

Religion, as we all know, works in mysterious ways. It would perhaps exceed the level of unkindness that Mr Hubbard merits for him to be branded as a racist based on the Johannesburg Security Check alone. After all, according to the Church of Scientology itself, Hubbard was a liberal who devoted his time in Africa to fostering human rights and encouraging governments to extend the franchise to people of all races.

A greater understanding of his views on race relations can be attained from his open support of the apartheid township policy in a letter to Dr H. F. Verwoerd, the “architect of apartheid”:

“Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.” – L. Ron Hubbard

Hubbard’s ingrained racism does not stop there. Like “security checks”, Scientology includes “rundowns“, a set of procedures designed to address specific problems. South Africa is unique in that there is a rundown specifically for her citizens, the South African Rundown. According to Mr Hubbard himself, it was necessary to create a rundown specifically for South Africans because:

“The South African native is probably the one impossible person to train in the entire world – he is probably impossible by any human standard.” – L. Ron Hubbard

The sources for these quotations have not been checked thoroughly due to the unavailability to me of original documents. I’ve been careful to use only material that has been property referenced in other sources, to which all links have been included. A big-up to Martin for drawing my attention to these utterances in the first place.

By no means do I mean to imply that the Church of Scientology is a racist organisation. The Church of Scientology is a cruel, deceitful and manipulative organisation just like any other church. The evidence suggests very strongly, however, that L. Ron Hubbard, their founder and the object of their personality cult, was a racist in the purest definition of the word, and did not consider applying of his apparently inexhaustible arcane knowledge to the upliftment of those who suffered oppression in the countries he visited. Oppressed people tend to have less money than their oppressors. One must wonder if these two facts are connected.

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Chained to the what?

February 5th, 2008 | by andrewdotcoza | old season

Feb
05

I’ve taken a longer break than anticipated, mainly due to the fact that I was lazy, and was considering instituting a fixed routine of blogging every Tuesday evening. Tuesday’s aren’t especially good days, however, so I am still undecided.

Tuesdays might be better in general than any day on which you choose to take the ferry to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many other luminaries of the revolution were incarcerated. IOL reports today that, as part of the “New Visitor Experience” programme, visitors would be shackled during the trip, to give them a better idea of what the prisoners felt like on the way over.

Wait… Just let me collect my wits…

Nope. No luck. Every time I read this, I expect that on some level I will see that it is not the most astoundingly bad idea I’ve heard this year. Unfortunately, it is, on a great many levels.

Firstly, would you want to set out on the ocean off The Cape of Storms in handcuffs? Handcuffed people have died in swimming pools, let alone the Atlantic Ocean!

Ms Shalo Mbatha, spokesperson for the Robben Island Museum, assures us that visitors will not be shackled directly to the boat, and that it will be done safely and only by choice. What, specifically, would the visitors be shackled to? A lifeboat? A 16 ton weight on the deck of the boat? How could it possibly be safe to set out to sea in handcuffs?

The boats themselves don’t have a great record either. In January, trips were cancelled because the boat had broken down. In the same week, two senior officials were suspended for “financial irregularities”. At the launch of the new, 26 Million Rand boat, 1 year late, on 31 January of this year, it was found to leak and had to be removed from the water for repairs. Granted, this is not an unusual occurrence for new vessels, but it still doesn’t inspire me to hog tie myself before going aboard a boat run by an organisation that ran at a loss of R25 Million during the 2006/2007 financial year!

On a more human level, however, we should be asking ourselves, as South Africans, what this New Visitor Experience could possibly lend to our nation. Are we discovering our history, or taking part in some bizarre passion play in our cargo-cult holocaust? Does a first-person re-enactment of the plight of Nelson Mandela amplify his undeniable greatness as a person, or does it just amplify in me a festering resentment of his oppressors and (if I happened to be black) of white people? Is this helping to build a nation, or are we symbolically chaining ourselves to the inequities of the past when we chain ourselves to the Robben Island ferry?

I feel a great solidarity with the victims of apartheid. In a recent reply to a comment, I lamented the use of the K-word on my fellow South Africans, because of the immediate and unjustified emotional pain that it inflicts. If you, however, choose to inflict the painful memory of apartheid on yourself unnecessarily, sympathy becomes far more difficult to motivate. It is far easier to sell people tickets that enable them to arrive on Robben Island in shackles that it is to sell them tickets that enable them to walk out of the Victor Verster Prison and embark on a path of reconciliation so profound and sincere that it formed the foundation of our modern, reborn nation.

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