Critic slams ‘mustfall, pro-transformation movements

Various #(Something)MustFall and pro-transformation movements were issued a scathing indictment this morning, after an Area man and member of AfriForum blasted the group’s manifestos as “unnecessary and moot”.

52-year-old Johannes Botha, a passionate builder and online commenter, today slammed the groups in a brutal refutation, citing statistics that show that South African society is “transformed and representative of the demographics of the country”.

“We hear all these ridiculous claims being thrown around that our country, universities, society and the media still have issues of transformation that urgently need to be addressed, but it’s all lies,” he explained, finishing off his last beer and poking the coals of his braai. “But if you just look more closelier at the country, you’ll see I’m right.”

He explained at some length between glasses of Klipdrift.

“Just look at our universities – they are filled with black people! We look at the cleaners and gardeners and people who sweep up the halls and wipe up the vomit from when Johan junior has had a couple too many - and are they white? No! Just because these okes don’t have ludicrous, high-paying jobs from their dads doesn’t mean we can start to pretend they don’t dominate the economy.”

He continued his stunning dissertation, pausing only to check if 49-year-old domestic worker Thembiswa Mhlanga could hear him from the kitchen.

“It gets worse, just look at the townships and – Thembi?! THEMBI?! KAN JY VIR MY HOOR??? - sorry, just look at townships and prisons. These so-called academics and ‘critical thinkers who have studied this problem for many years and in great detail’ say that society is unequal – but blacks are represented more in society than oppressed whites, in places like jails or low-income housing zones. This kind of reverse racism is disgusting.”

“Then we need only look at employment statistics: if you’re a middle-class white person and you want to go work in a low-wage workhouse making Nike shoes and export trinkets for 17 hours a day, guess how much of a chance you have? We need to start admitting that there are just some places where black people have an unfair advantage over us poor whiteys.”

Stopping momentarily to ensure the inter-leading glass door to the servant’s scullery was properly closed and locked, he went on.

“Then there’s the media – I mean come on, black people are in the news all the time! These ridiculous students complain that there is an absence of black voices and stories in the traditional and digital media, and then they get all picky and angry just because a lot of those stories are about crime and corruption?” he brilliantly noted, sotto voce. “Sometimes I look at the country and think that, hell, there’s so much transformations going on it’s laaike flippen’ Michael Bay is the president.”

He shook his head gravely and tutted.

“Me and all my friends – some of my best ones are black, you know? - agree: Nelson Mandinga is probably sitting in a retirement home in Kunu in abject shock at how his rainbow nation is filled with racist ignoramsuses who are completely out of touch with the history, current affairs and problems of our country. For shame!"

Social media legal ‘experts’ to get Honourary Degrees

Citing the vast quantities of insightful expertise and legal opinion being offered incessantly on social media websites Facebook and Twitter, universities across the world have today announced their decision to confer thousands of Honourary Doctorates in Law to what they’re calling “the true legal geniuses of our time.”

According to Law Faculty Deans worldwide, what is most surprising of all is how these amazing and legally-literate opinions have all been produced after seemingly little to no prior study of the law, at any level.

“When we look back at some of the most popular and controversial legal cases of our time – the O.J Simpson trial, the Oscar Pistorius case, the Michael Jackson hearings, or even back as far as the Jacob Zuma inquiries – what we notice again and again is a wave, a veritable flood of thousands of social media users giving paragraphs-long and technically sound legal insights into these nuanced and complex cases,” said Dean of the Witswaterstrand University Law Faculty, Iona Gavel.

“Who would have known that so many hundreds of people, with little – if any – legal training or university knowledge of the Rome Statute, Constitutional Law, Due Process or even Crimen Injuria would be able to produce such lucid, confident, and not-at-all-pulled-out-their-arses legal commentary?” she said. “Often, at just a single glance at the case in question, they can instantly tell if someone’s guilty. Hell, I wonder why we even have universities or law faculties.”

However, many of the soon-to-be Honourary Doctors of Law are remain humble.

“It’s quite simple [how we did it],” explained mechanic and part-time understudy of famed Civil Law Barrister Judge Judy, Ree Parenjin. “You just look at the facts that they’ve reported in the newspaper and on my twitters, think about it for a few seconds, and the truth of the whole issue becomes immediately clear. Some people have an issue with what we say, but really there are some kinds of justice that are better and faster. Ag, some of these old judges have spent so much time in dusty libraries and boring classrooms reading cold, dull so-called ‘precedents’ that they no longer understand what justice is.“

And now, citizens everywhere are looking forward to the promise of a better, more efficient legal system.

“Oscar Pistorius was obviously guilty,” said Parenjin. “In a brighter future, we won’t have true justice delayed or cheated by pesky appeals processes or irritating subminimum standards of Reasonable Doubt. Oscar, those blerrie rhino poachers in the Kruger [National Park], and even corrupt ministers: they’ll all get the death penalty or life in jail, straight.”

Legal experts can’t wait.

“I look at some of the sentences and legal process changes these guys want, and I have to say I’m excited,” said Gavel. “I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”

Man in solidarity with French victims apologises for "selfish tweets, statuses"

Citing criticisms that he “doesn’t give a crap about anyone outside of Paris” following his obligatory “#PrayForParis” tweet and Facebook status yesterday, an area man has deeply apologised for his inconsiderate, selfish words of support and solidarity.

The man, 27-year-old accountant Jake Hendersen, approached the media this morning to confirm that he has since started a campaign to be more “equitable and considerate with his supportive tweets”.

“I’ve been reading some of the comments and criticisms of my messages on Facebook and twitter yesterday, and people are right,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about ‘being an ignorant fuck who conveniently doesn’t care about the senseless deaths of people until it’s white people dying’ or my being a ‘completely retarded insensitive Eurocentric moron’ – Obviously, I can’t care about senseless tragedies without displaying equal outrage for all death and tragedy everywhere else.”

"Without hundreds of clarifying tweets, my messages of solidarity and love are totally meaningless and myopic.”

The initial message, which read simply “my heart is with all of France #PrayForFrance”, attracted the ire of thousands of online commenters.

“Jake is an idiot,” said one person who appeared able to communicate only in all-caps. “My hashtag is #FuckFrance because of its heritage of evil and colonialism. Obviously the deaths of innocent people – people who could have been my sister or brother or mother or girlfriend – mean total jack shit to me. Why should I care about them or their grieving families when their government is so evil and twisted, even if those who died might not have voted for the majority political party, or even if they were, say, absolutely opposed to France’s involvement in international warfare or were outspokenly critical of their governments’ hurtful diplomacy with certain nations? Nah, fuck ‘em.”

In light of the controversy, Hendersen has promised to post an exhaustive and comprehensive collection of messages of support and solidarity with every country, city and nation in the world.

“It’ll take a bit of time to Photoshop my Facebook profile photo to have all the flags of the world, and to compose and post the hundreds of thousands of tweets and facebook statuses, but I think it’s totally necessary,” he said. “After all, how can anyone know that awful tragedies like these sadden me and that I care about the lives of those affected by terrorism, murder and war without having the relevant social media posts to prove it?”

It’s an issue not without difficulty.

“Oh, I’ve had some troubles,” he explained. “For example how can I rank all these atrocities and a bombings and killings? Should I listen to my detractors, and consider them all equally bad, even if this opens me up to attacks from the anti-#AllLivesMatter crowd?”

“And if all lives matter and I should care about all deaths equally, then must I make an ISIS flag Facebook profile picture mourning their deaths at the hands of a brutal, war-hungry coalition of Western nations? I’m still mulling these little quandaries over.”

Sources close to Hendersen now say that he is well on the way to proving to his some-600 Facebook friends and thousands of strangers on Twitter that he is against all tragedy.

“Given the sheer number cities, villages, hamlets and small townships in the world, he’ll probably have to post another 250 000 or more tweets to properly show he's in solidarity with all people who are suffering any kind of tragedy or horror,” said an unnamed friend. “But at least he’s halfway through posting the 196 individual transparent-flag-Facebook-profile pictures that show he cares about their struggles, so it’s a great start.”

Just some of the 196 transparent-flag-Profile-pics
that prove Jake really does care about people
dying in other countries.

And with the controversy boiling over, online commenters say it may be time for another support movement to start.

“Jake is being attacked, just as hundreds of #PrayForParis supporters are,” said one commenter. “We need to stand with these people in their time of need – which is why I propose we all Tweet messages of solidarity to those standing in solidarity with the French. #PrayForPeopleWhoPrayForParis.”

Want to know more about this developing story? Well, just log onto Facebook.com and see literally any of your friends’ goddamn statuses and comments.

Instagrammer comes to blindly obvious conclusion, quits Instagram

Gut-wrenching feelings of shock and betrayal persist today, after 18-year-old Instagrammer Tay Kasselfey came to the self-evident conclusion that Instagram is “contrived perfection made to get attention” and deleted her account.

Kasselfey, who had to this sudden and utterly self-apparently epiphany this weekend, has slammed Instagram, saying that despite the social media platform's devilishly misleading realism, the service is actually built on “carefully constructed lies that didn’t eat that morning and also had to suck in their belly”.

“Instagram might look totally real. If you scroll down it and see all the glossy, filtered and yet also hyperrealistic photos of coffee and stunningly attractive, thin woman dressed and made up to perfection, you could be easily tricked into thinking, ‘yeah, this is a totally realistic and accurate representation of the daily lived experience of every human being currently alive’,” she said. “But – brace yourself – it isn’t.”

She explained at length.

“Look at this photo of myself. Now, from this photo alone and no other information, you might easily think that I study in a skimpy bikini in the sun with books of different subjects all opened at the same time and strategically placed and turned to random pages while I pose in a super-uncomfortable yet sexy angle that accentuates my butt, flat, toned stomach and boobs,” she said. “But what if I told you that it was totally posed and took several dozen shots and careful post-editing to capture? It’s shocking and incredible to hear, I know, but that’s the truth.”

“And looking at any of the millions of photos on Instagram, you might think that every woman currently alive is a smokingly gorgeous perfect 10 with abs and boobs – but that just isn’t true. I mean, how is anyone supposed to figure that out on their own?”

And the disappointment doesn’t stop there.

“All those hashtags that we all think are there to accurately label and classify the images into neat categories that allow users to easily find content that suits their tastes and search criteria?” she asked. “Well, I hate to be the one to break this awful news, but actually they are just abused and piled up to try and get as many views and as much reach as possible, and often don’t even describe in any logical way at all what is in the photo.”

“I mean, I once used #goals #life #future #books #intellect #nerdy #dreams #workhard and #college on a selfie of me wearing glasses and holding a science textbook. How could anyone possibly have known that none of those tags actually meant anything?”

Kasselfey – who in real life is an overweight 42-year-old man who works in IT - has now sworn off the “narcissistic, self-obsessed, egotistical” Instagram, and has started a new campaign to try and create a more meaningful world that cares about other people.

“My new campaign features hundreds of photos of me in sexy poses that expose how shallow the whole thing is,” he explained. “We should care about things that truly matter, and not try to force the world to obsess about themselves or flood their spheres with endless pictures of themselves.

But despite this selfless awareness drive, public reaction has been mixed.

“I simply don’t believe it,” said one man. “You’re telling me that the vast majority of women aren’t oversaturated-colour-tinted models constantly wearing clothes that leave little to the imagination, and that all those photos weren’t taken in one spontaneous, off-the-cuff snap and hence don’t give a realistic depiction of real life? PSHT. Pull the other one.”

“I think it’s fantastic,” said a woman. “I’m not a size-zero supermodel, and so when I say that Instagram is fake and constructed, people just think I’m being a jealous, insecure hater bitch. I’m just glad that there’s someone much thinner and more beautiful than myself and thousands of other women who people will actually listen to about how women don’t look like that.”

But not all of the public is positive.

“She’s obviously lying,” said one angry commenter. “I mean, there’s no way it’s fake. Why would thousands of people spend hours on hair and make-up and positioning their Pina Colada very carefully on the edge of the table to get a perfect snap of the sunset, and dozens of minutes choosing the perfect filter to best exaggerate your image’s qualities? So that they can assuage their insecurity? So that they can garner more followers and possibly get asked to shoot a sponsored post that earns them thousands of dollars just to drink a cup of tea?”

“No ways – how gullible do you think I am? Next thing she’ll try to tell us that Wrestling is fake.”

Historic protest “actually pretty damn boring”, says protester

Pic by M de Klerk

Disappointment abounds today, after protesters – who turned out in their hundreds expecting to face tear gas, stun grenades and the terrifying history of brutality of the South African Police Service – realised that historic, nation-changing protests are far more peaceful and boring than their media feeds make them seem.

“What’s even the damn point in being here?” said embittered protester Molly Tov, altering her placard to read ‘Ban stun grenades – but come on, just use one so I can see what it’s all about’.

“I’ve seen dozens of hours of video of flashbang grenades, chemical watercannons that drive you crazy with itching, and rubber bullets; I’ve read countless articles outlining the ceaseless street violence, racial tensions, and rampant vandalism. Where is all this stuff? All I've seen today is just a peaceful protest demanding a long-overdue, positive change for the future. I mean, WTF is this kak?”

Protests mill around awkwardly waiting for the first
stun grenade to be thrown like in their
Twitter feeds.
Pic: M de Klerk

Other protesters have agreed.

“A few days ago I was so excited to do my bit: you know, stand against the exploitative capitalist system, maybe march a bit, not have to hand in my Economics essay that’s due later today,” said post-graduate Economics student Reeva Lution. “I turned on the news on TV and all I saw was endless replayed footage and in-studio analysts saying ‘blerrie students looting and destroying campus and spraying blerrie graffiti everywhere’. And then I get here and all it is boring hours of standing peacefully by barricades, turning cars away, calmly explaining our agenda to passers-by. I didn’t even get beaten to a pulp or wrongfully arrested. What kind of protest is this?”

However, some students say they might know the reason for such counter-intuitive events.

“I’m busy dusting off my application for NMMU and UCT,” said second-year Anthropology student, Emma Pee. “That way I can get a decent education AND have better struggle credentials from taking a smoke grenade to the back of the head.”

Whatever the controversy, all protesters can agree that the protest action shows how South Africa is transforming into an enviable nation of peace and progress.

“Let’s just think about what we’ve accomplished this week: the SAPS didn’t murder hundreds of civilians, Blade Nzimande actually fucking did something for a change, and students realised that people protesting to make their fees cheaper isn’t something they should bitch about on Twitter,” said the MIPMustFall movement in a statement this morning.

"Now we just have to get our protest movement to focus on the things that truly hurt and disadvantage all university students: Tuesday's Braised Club Steak in the Dining Hall. That shit needs to fall, ASAP.

NASA pledges $100b program to find intelligent life on Earth

Citing the age-old adage that “you can’t run before you’ve learnt to crawl”, the National Aeronautical Space Agency has today announced their suspension of the multi-million dollar program to find intelligent life out in space - in favour of a multi-billion dollar program to first find intelligent life on Earth.

NASA, which first started their SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) wing in the 1980s, says that it’s about time we found sentient, thinking, smart beings on our slice of the solar system.

“We know it’s a needle-in-a-haystack operation,” said NASA’s chief coordinator for the global search program SEBI (Search for Earth-Based Intelligence), Rocky Tjips. “Given our long and mentally-undeveloped history of race-based hatred, purposeful environmental destruction, war, ethnic cleansing, the News24 comments section and One Direction being a thing that people actively enjoy, we realise that this task may even be more difficult than scanning the billions upon billions of stars for signs of intelligent life – but we’re up for the challenge.”

“After all,” he added, “how can we possibly start looking for intelligent life out there, if we haven’t even found any down here?”

Scientists now say that intelligent life could
theoretically exist on Earth.

And while some detractors argue that human beings do show isolated, tiny sparks of intellect, NASA holds firm that, given the circumstances, these claims are exaggerated at the least and statistical outliers at the most.

“Yeah, people do throw around names like ‘Einstein’ or ‘Hawkings’ or even ‘Newton’, but honestly, just weigh that up against the billions of morons these guys rub shoulders with,” rebuked Tjips. “Seriously, we used to think that the moon was a god, and that radium was a great pick-me up tonic and ingredient in makeup,” he stressed. “These guys were just huge statistical blips, outweighed by the multitudinous nincompoops who, say, think Fox News gives balanced reportage, or think that Ebola is a real threat to anyone visiting the Southern African regions.”

The search, says Tjips, is now on, and despite initial negative results, he says they’re confident they’ll find something soon.

“We’ve gone through the comment sections of most major websites, almost all of my Facebook feed, most Instagram accounts, and thousands of celebrity Twitter handles,” he said. “Sure, it’s a tiresome process of elimination, and yes, everything we’ve found just confirms our belief that human beings are primordial, cognitively underdeveloped scum, but eventually we’ll find something. I mean, it’s not like most people are so stupid it makes you blink and recoil from your screen, right? Right?”

Turning topic into race, gender issue “exactly what was needed”

True progress showed itself on Facebook today, after an innocent, inoffensive status was immediately turned into a racial and gender issue.

The post, which was a harmless joke about the Springbok’s match last weekend against New Zealand, only lasted 12 minutes before being skewed and twisted out of context and proportion to become an embittered flamewar about racism and sexism in the white-supremacist-capitalist patriarchy of televised sports culture. In just one day it attracted thousands of comments and arguments from incensed online commenters.

The status’s author, Jake Hendersen, now says that he’s glad they’ve started a “conversation” around race and sexism.

“You know, when I posted my status I just wanted to poke fun at New Zealand friends about this weekend’s match and say ‘springboks r the best lol all blacks are so useless’, not knowing my awful spelling would cause a digital meltdown,” he told reporters this morning.

“But now that hundreds of people are typing out ALL-CAPS hate speech, racial slurs, ad hominem attacks and demands that the idiots on the opposing side go read a fucking book, I’m glad to see a ‘discussion’ has started. This is just the first step one a long, arduous journey to a future free of racism, gender-based hatred, and harmless humour.

The post, which now stands at 21 485 likes and 11 792 comments, has been called “just what we all needed” by Human Rights advocacy groups.

“This is how we change the world: by getting people coming together, talking, discussing, and calling each other 'total retards who haven’t even read a book in their damn lives',” said chief researcher for Rights For All, Nelson King Jr. “You know, a lot of people might say, ‘oh, Nelson, but completely misunderstanding and detracting from the simplistic comedic value of the original post and embroiling the entire internet in a foetid clusterfuck of ad hominem attacks and fallacious, shallow arguments littered with faulty logic or emotional jabs will just divide and separate us all,’ but that’s where they’re wrong,” he said.

“This is how true progress is made: by just putting everything on the table, showing our cards, and turning every internet user against each other in a horrible, embarrassing hate-thread that everyone tires of in just minutes.”

However, internet analysts now believe such a peace could be all too brief.

“People have the ability to overcome great barriers and create a better, more tolerant future of peace and prosperity devoid of casual humour,” said web expert Hilby Bloggin.

“But come on, this is the 21st century. How could there ever be lasting peace when every ten minutes we have something like Caitlyn Jenner or Cecil the Lion to hate each other over?”

Man gives to charity without making elaborate viral video

The philanthropic community is in uproar today, after a man reportedly donated a large sum of money to a charity organisation without filming an elaborate viral video.

According to the man, who for some reason beyond the comprehension of modern man wishes to remain anonymous, he didn’t even tweet that he had done it, or even take a selfie or use any hashtags like #charity.

This isn’t the first time he’s pulled such a mad stunt – sources close to the man say that back in August 2014 he didn’t dump a bucket of ice water over his head before giving R50 000 to an organisation working to find a cure for ALS.

And while many people say this is pure madness, scientists say that the science is feasible.

“We’ve been looking into the neurochemistry and psychology behind such irrational acts, and we have to say that the science is sound,” said lead researcher for the study, Cora Layshin. “Turns out, you actually can donate money without making it about you or yelling to the entire world in hashtagged ALL CAPS that you’re so goddamn selfless and giving and kind.”

But this is just the beginning, say scientists conducting similar research.

”We’ve been looking into the innate, very natural links between being a good human being and making sure that it’s also tagged on Facebook and linked to your Instagram account,” said Dr Narsa Sistique of the Institute of Brain Studies. “Peer-reviewed research and carefully experimentation shows that – in an utter contrast to popular belief and going against everything certain Youtubers know to be true – you can donate money or food to homeless shelters without making exploitative Social Experiment videos that make thousands of dollars in ad revenue.”

International Charity organisations have jumped onto this trend, and are now challenging thousands of budding social media philanthropists to the bold and daring new "Just Donate some Goddamn Money" challenge.

”We know that it’s difficult to comprehend, but dozens of peer-reviewed papers on the matter have shown that you can do things like asking your girlfriend to marry you without having to stage some huge viral flashmob video,” said Dr Sistique. “Every time you do something like have a cup of coffee or a vegetarian quiche at a local bistro, or go to the gym, or go for a 22km bike ride on a Friday, you can actually do it without flooding everyone’s social media feeds with it. It’s crazy, but true.”

However, not everyone is too fazed by this shocking discovery.

“There may be one or two people who upset the system by giving money without making a viral video,” said online philanthropy expert Jack Givvens, “but as long as there are hundreds of people who make viral videos or do a No Makeup Selfie challenge without giving a cent, we figure it kinda all balances out.”

Study finds something that can’t be easily turned into clickbait

Confusion abounds today, after a ten-year scientific research program found something that can’t be oversimplified or easily turned into clickbait.

According to researchers at the Centre for Galactic Astrophysics, who have been looking into the nature of blackholes and how they interact with space-time, the results of their study, while incredibly important for the advancement of astrophysics as a science, cannot be easily turned into an image-heavy and arbitrarily-numbered list of things that will totally blow your mind or leave you speechless.

“We’ve been looking at the results, and we must say that we’re conflicted,” said Dr Theo Reece of the CGA. “I mean, the data really does change the way astrophysicists look at the complex equations and science of spatio-temporal interactions between objects of astounding mass, but when it comes to telling Buzzfeed readers that ‘These Scientists Have Been Researching Blackholes – And What They Found Will Completely Blow You Away’ we come up totally empty-handed. I mean, what good is scientific advancement if it can’t be completely reduced to an overly simplified misinterpretation for idiots to share on the ‘I Fucking Love Science’ Facebook page?”

CGA researchers now say that they are back at work searching for four more facts in their massive study that will fill a 10-item, 150-word listicle.

“It’s going to be a difficult task – like finding a needle in a haystack, or original content on Buzzfeed,” said Reece, “but we’re confident that, by early January at the latest, we’ll have found something dull and uninspired enough to get you through the last four points on the list so that you can read item 10 and do your obligatory reshare on Facebook and ‘lol’ comment.”

However, “writers” at the social media viral sites now say that they’ll probably just go ahead with the article anyway.

“We’ll just churn out the listicle anyway,” said Killean Jurnlizm, section editor for the sciences beat at the viral website. “I dunno, maybe there’s something on Reddit we can just steal and paste in… Besides, since when did our readers care about scientific accuracy anyway?”

Woman’s profile pic not fooling anyone

A woman was declared “obviously not attractive” today, after the internet came to a general consensus that her profile picture isn’t fooling anyone.

The black-and-white airbrushed image, which was carefully framed, lit and chosen out of four dozen other photos taken at around the same time, was uploaded yesterday evening to 26-year-old Megan Jenners’s Facebook profile – and all her friends agree that “this shit isn’t fooling anyone”.

“Yes, it’s a pretty photo. Yes, to the untrained eye that hasn’t seen her in real life, you might be fooled into thinking she’s attractive and then swiping right,” said the guy who follows her every update but hasn’t spoken to her in four years, Vuyo Rystic. “But let’s just admit the facts here: it’s a top-down, filter-heavy selfie that has clearly been put through the Instagram-photoshop wringer.”

Friends and followers of Jenners– even those on Twitter – have agreed.

“For me, my suspicions were raised when I saw the angle. I mean, it’s top-down and is filled with her face,” said one friend Jake Henderson shortly before liking it and commenting ‘omg so pretty u stuning babe’. “Why else would you want a full picture of your face as your profile picture unless you had a disgusting, corpulent and revoltingly grosteque mass underneath it that you wanted to hide no matter what?”

Others agree.

“No amount of BW correction and careful balancing of exposure and saturation can hide how much of a soulless, blackhearted skank Megan is,” said another friend, Erin Blakey, before hitting ‘like’. “I’ve read her statuses. She’s vapid and completely irritating and full of herself. Maybe I should post a passive-aggressive status about her?”

She followed this by adding “no, on second thoughts I shouldn’t” and “the two-faced bitch might realise who I was talking about.”

According to online researchers, much of the anger stems from its inherent insincere dishonesty.

“When it comes to Social Media, I think we can all agree that the most important, central tenet is honesty and truth,” said media analyst Eric Henderson. “So when she posted these quasi-blurry, pseudo-artistic selfies of herself and tried to pretend she was someone she wasn’t, she broke the cardinal rule of the internet: never lie to people.”

“In their eyes, this publication of a falsehood is a deep and hurtful mockery of the thought-provoking articles, provocative philosophical debates, and cat pictures they share,” he explained. “To the untrained eye, it might seem like all these people commenting on the picture think she is, quote, ‘gorjuz’ and ‘totes hawt girl’, but we all tacitly know what they’re really saying.”

However, not everyone agrees.

“Oh, I dunno, bro,” said one man. “I mean, I would still definitely bang her.”

Facebook to distribute likes to cancer victims

Social media giant and philanthropic website Facebook have announced that, starting today, they will now be distributing the accumulated likes, shares, and statuses aimed at ending cancer.

According to Head of Facebook's Charity wing, Sharon Lyks, the decision has been a long time coming.

"Ever since that first photo of a small girl smiling sadly at the camera, her bald head shining tragically in the little-girl-hating, cancer-giving sun, we knew we had to do something to stop this awful illness," she said in an interview with Muse and Abuse this morning. "Of course, we all know that the best way to end the combined pain and suffering of the victims of disease is to like and share photos of the internet."

The response, said Lyks, has been amazing.

"Since sharing that photo and putting it on everyone's wall, the picture has garnered over 4 billions likes and 18 billion comments," she said. "We're not sure, but we're pretty sure that's gotta be worth a lot of Internet Money."

Lyks and the Facebook team intend on taking these likes and comments to the Internet Monetary Exchange Bank later today.

The secret to its success, she said, was in Facebook users' tendency to repost the picture again and again, even if they know other people had seen it before.

"That's how much they cared about this campaign," said Lyks with a big smile. "They'll share it on all their friends' walls, even if that friend is a cancer-loving douche who replies 'oh, it's a hoax' and 'you should check these things to see if they're real, or just donate to a recognised charity', the cancer-apologist arsehole."

Facebook first shared that seminal photo in early 2003, but have now extended their charitable goodness to other worthy causes.

"World hunger, poverty, water shortages, homelessness... These are just a few of the things on the list of tragedies we are eliminating, one mouse click at a time."

Facebook's early estimates now state that homelessness and poverty are a mere 43 243 likes away from not existing.

"When it comes to creating a perfect utopian world of wonder, we believe that Facebook is right up there with those other bastions of social change: you know, email chain letters and online petitions on Change.org.

Facebook introduces new revolutionary new features

Social media users should brace themselves for a whole Facebook experience filled chock-a-block with features set to revolutionise the way you live in the online world.

“We’re changing everything,” said head of the R&D team at Facebook, Cody Compyler, “and not just the colour and logo font.”

“Facebook forces users to go through their entire lives, photos, opinions, thoughts and personality, and choose only a tiny fraction of a percentage of what is true to impress the people around you,” he said, “but most of us got Facebook when we were 16-year-old morons who thought liking a page called ‘Beer and Cigarettes’ made us look like rebellious bad boys. How can you pretend to be cool on Facebook if there’s over three years of evidence to the contrary that you can’t delete for fear of making it look like you joined Facebook this year, like your grandmother?”

This issue, says Compyler, is expounded only by its corollary.

“Then, when your mother or grandmother or someone close to you goes on Facebook, they judge you or start worrying because the only photos of you are taken at parties or trance festivals, making them say they’re worried about your ‘drinking problem’ when actually you’re not even that much of a lady-slaying party animal.”

In light of this, they’re introducing two new features: the ‘Real User feature, and the ‘Make Me Cool’ feature.

“Let’s see these features in action. If we go to my friend Jake’s profile, we can see he has photos of himself in the gym, at the beach with his really hot girlfriend, and driving around in his badass car. All of this makes me feel pretty inadequate. So if I press the ‘Show Me The Real Jake’ button over here, Facebook immediately shows me pictures of his girlfriend in a Onesie without makeup on, and here it gives us some really embarrassing childhood pictures, and here we have a collection of desperate and awkward messages to his grandmother and his ex-girlfriend who he apparently still loves to death. This is great, because now I know that Jake isn’t as cool as he seems, and also that my life isn’t that shit in comparison.”

“Now, if I go to my own profile, we can see that I have over 2943 photos and six years of likes, comments, posts and shares. I can’t possibly go through all of this and sweep all the embarrassing stuff under the carpet – that would take hours. So I just click the ‘Make Me Cool’ button and voilà! Thanks to Facebook’s coolness algorithm, I no longer liked ‘Beer’ and ‘Fast Cars’ and ‘The Hangover’ when I was 16, but instead I liked ‘The works of Noam Chomsky’ and ‘Psychodynamic analysis of postmodern literature’.”

The R&D team now report that they are working on a feature that will half the time it takes to ignore, trivialise or mock people on your newsfeed.

“It used to take as much as an entire hour to entirely debase someone’s existence and being, but we’ve cut down that time to as little as sixty seconds,” they said. “Hell, the only thing it doesn’t do for you is groan, roll your eyes and moan ‘how fucking retarded are some people?’”

Court finds MRA misogynist “deserved” to be assaulted, murdered

Justice has been served today, after the South African Supreme Court acquitted and released a man wrongfully charged with murder, saying that the victim’s dress sense, irresponsibility and consumption of alcoholic beverages proved that he was “asking for it”.

28-year-old Eric Manson was cleared of all charges of murdering well-known men's rights blogger and Men's Rights Activist, Andrew Hamaray, after courts looking into some of Andrew's compelling posts on the internet found that "it only makes sense, really".

”Some might consider this a sickening, heinous crime, and our judgement a gross usurpation and betrayal of the very idea of justice,” said Supreme Justice Victor Ree, “but we have to ask ourselves very important questions, like ‘what was he wearing at the time?’ and ‘why was he in a dangerous area alone at night?’ and even ‘how much did he drink before being stabbed multiple times in the chest and neck?’”.

Judges examined what was soon revealed to be very damning evidence.

“First of all, he was wearing an expensive, Italian leather jacket,” said Ree, counting the condemning proofs off with his fingers. “He was flashing around his wallet and talking openly on his phone in a risky part of town, and he had drunk a lot of alcohol before the incident. This leaves one conclusion: that he was asking to be robbed and butchered. That it was his fault.”

This judgement is supported strongly by police testimony.

“He waited almost three hours to report the crime,” said the sergeant on duty who took the initial statement. “Why? And don’t give me that ‘he was bleeding to death in a hospital’ bullshit. If this crime was so serious he would have reported it immediately, ICU life-suppport or not.”

Lawyers representing the wrongfully accused agreed, asking why the alleged victim waited so long to come forward to be slandered and discredited by their legal team.

“If they had really had a case based on facts and truth, they would have come forward to be belittled and attacked by us and rabid social media users much, much earlier than they did.”

So strong has the initial evidence been that police have not even needed to consult forensic evidence.

“The fingerprints we took from the scene and blood samples are sitting in their kit on a dusty shelf in the evidence room,” said the sergeant. “It’s clear that we don’t need any more evidence. Real men don't get robbed.”

Social media has also voiced its opinion, emphasising its agreement with the judge’s findings.

“He was an affluent manwhore prick," said one of many thousands of comments that weren't made under anonymity. "All these Men’s Rights Activists make me sick, saying men should be allowed to wear what they want and drink what they want. They should just STFU and go back to the garage repairing cars where they belong."

Family of the man have fully supported the court’s decision, saying, "we stand by Drew's words."

“Drew was always very vocal about the issues he cared about on social media, and never failed to air these exact same opinions on his twitter page,” they said. “We accept the court’s findings. Really, when you look at it closely, it’s what Dan would have wanted.”

Newspapers don’t publish

Newstands and paper racks across the world were utterly bare yesterday, after news organisations worldwide failed to publish a single newspaper because “nothing bad happened”.

“As we all know, traumatic, horrifying, shallow or fear-mongering stories are our bread and butter,” said News Media Expert Ngud Gnuus. “But yesterday, there was no war, no famine, no murder, no rapes, no burglaries, no car accidents… nothing. How can we make a 24-page newspaper if no one dies or does something that makes you want to draw the curtains, stay locked indoors all day or just straight-out kill yourself?”

Gnuus went on to say that, despite the ever-worsening conflict in the Gaza strip and between Israel and Palestine, deeping strife and socioeconomic disparities across the seven continents and rampant crime rates, there was somehow nothing bad enough happening out of which to make an endlessly repeating loop of controversy and stern-anchored news coverage.

“It makes no sense, we know, but nothing bad happened. Usually there are any thousands of examples which we can shock and horrify you with, but yesterday it was only good stuff. How can we possibly sell papers with that?”

However, some newspapers have decided to rise to the challenge, releasing small online reports in spite of yesterday’s paucity of source material.

“We’ve decided to put a different spin on it,” said Editor of CNN Deborah Hardings. “We have headlines like World braces itself for inevitable explosion of crime, death and Bus full of School kids will definitely careen off road into ravine and blow up tomorrow, say experts. If the news media knows one thing, it’s how to turn no story into the top story of the day. Just look at any news story where our cameras and microphones are outside in the street or at a press conference or even outside a hospital where a royal baby is about to be born. Usually in these spots, we are just waiting for something to happen. That’s news, baby.”

Muse and Abuse will keep you updated today, as more nothing happens.

New App revolutionises how we remember Huge Life Events

Life-changing experiences will never be the same again, thanks to a new App that is making huge waves in social media circles.

Insta-Mem, which has been downloaded 6 million times since it hit the App Store this weekend, automatically takes your boring, unspecial photos and diary entries from incredible experiences and journeys and converts them into a more representative and social-media friendly format.

“Times have changed, and with ever-ubiquitous modern technologies in our increasingly digitalised world, it’s about time we updated and modernised the way we remember the special moments in our life,” said creator of the application, Ian Staygram. “Let’s say I went to Naples and lay on the warm white shores of the Mediterranean, gently out my slowly-bronzing legs out on the beautiful soft sands just meters from the warm waters and taking in the simple pleasures of life in a moment that hope will stay with me until I die - how am I supposed to remember that without multiple selfies, social media check-in posts and filter-heavy shots of the local cuisine?”

Thousands have agreed.

“What, really, is the holiday of a lifetime if it isn’t posted online for your friends to like and comment on? And if you do take photos of the mountains or scenery, how am I supposed to know that I, or anyone who was apparently there, was *actually* there?” asked internet user and fervent Mem-er Jake Henderson. “I think we can all agree that, whether you’re diving in the Pacific Ocean with Whalesharks and Sunfish, or sitting on Mount Everest watching the sun rise over the distant smoky hills like a magnificent orb made from burning gold, the most important thing is that everyone you know knows that you – you, with your face, maybe your mouth curled into a cheesy grin with an accompanying peace sign or thumbs-up – were there. Everything else is meaningless.”

Social-media users no longer need to fear forgetting these magical moments, says Staygram.

“The app is so simple to use, that even a Twitter user wouldn’t struggle. All you do is take a photo of yourself, and our Smartscan technology will do the rest. All those yawn-provoking shots of the scenery and panoramic views of the island snoozefest you were staying in will now be updated to have you in them, even if you didn’t take any selfies on the trip,” he said. “Hell, if you didn’t even take pics at the place, the app just searches Google for sunsets and snaps in that area and edits those into your album. It’s not like anyone will be able to tell the difference between sunsets or check that you actually took the pictures.”

The app also automatically adds a relevant filter and hashtags.

“When I visit memorable locations, I don’t want to have have the stress of taking periodic selfies that reaffirm that I do actually exist and am actually in Paris,” said another user Mary Marie. “I don’t want to bother with the profound hassle of picking between ten slightly different pre-set image filters, or the philosophical wrestling match of coming up with seventeen hashtags that adequately sum up the profound, life-altering trip I’ve taken. With Insta-Mem , never again will I forget that I travelled and visited the Top Ten places in Paris that I read about in a listicle."

Already, many thousands are wishing they had had this app when they travelled the globe to broaden their understanding of the myriad different cultures and peoples of our beautiful, rich planet.

“Nowadays I just sit in my chair trying to work out what I did between the years of 1968 and 2010,” said senior citizen Jerry Attrick. “We didn’t have Twitter or Facebook back then, so how were we supposed to remember those moments that changed us deeply and profoundly for the rest of our lives?”

Staygram now says they have their eyes set on video format technologies.

“Let’s say you go to a concert and forgot to record the entire thing from eighty-seven seats back in the cheap section on your 2.8 megapixel cameraphone. Well, with the app we’re developing, we’ll just take DVD-quality official footage and convert it to be smaller, blurrier, and filled with uncompressed, low-quality sound complete with barely audible songs being drowned out by the cheering and screaming. Imagine you’re bobbing for apples in a tub of Vaseline after corneal damage.”

Photos: Everest by Luca Galuzzi; Great Wall of China by Severin.stalder. Both Creative Commons.

Buzzfeed apologises for endless stream of shallow, un-lifechanging garbage

Citing the endless stream of failed attempts to “blow your mind”, “change your life”, “make you weep” and other such hyperbolic click-baitery, the chief editor and long-time writer at viral media website and “content aggregator” Buzzfeed has this morning issued a long and heartfelt apology to the internet, people who originally made the content they so brazenly “aggregate”, and the world in general.

“We just want to say we’re so damn sorry,” said editor Plaie Gerize. “Looking back at our long and ugly history of hyperbole, exaggeration and outright lies, we want to wholeheartedly apologise.”

Gerize’s list of apologies was long.

“We’re sorry. We know that Picture Number 8 didn’t blow your mind. We know Number 6 wasn’t perfect, as we said it would be in countless articles,” he said, permanently deleting the entire website in a show of ultimate contrition and sorrow. “Those fabulous snaps of Jennifer Lawrence didn’t prove that she was perfection, and that series of photos that was supposed to restore your faith in humanity was completely inadequate. We're scum. We're cancer. And we’re sorry. We can’t say that enough.”

Pictured: the new Buzzfeed website, with all relevant changes.

His apology extended to all the content that the Buzzfeed team as a whole –regardless of country or origin or format – had produced.

“Even our videos. When they weren’t silly or ham-fistedly trying to send an self-evident life-lesson, they were just totally trivial. Also, time and time again we totally blew down the importance of individual people’s hard work and passion by never using their name and just reducing them to their sex, nationality or even just ‘someone’. We should have given them due respect, even if it is hard to get a click out of you by using someone’s full name.”

He continued.

“We’re also sorry for having outright stolen content from many sites. Sorry, ‘aggregated’. Or maybe ‘curated’? I dunno, which word are we using these days?”

“Furthermore, we’re sorry about contradicting articles that provide you with reasons why each member of your favourite boyband or series is the best one. Like those twenty articles which individually claimed why different members of Friends or One Direction or The Backstreet Boy or whatever were by far the best. I mean, how did we not see how black our souls were, posting these kinds of articles at the same time and having each written by the same author? How could we have been so spineless as to not have an editorial stance on anything?”

“Finally, we’re sorry for using social issues and controversial topics to squeeze a few cheap clicks out of you. Like videos where we show people giving homeless people a pizza or a hundred dollars in a video that probably makes eighteen times that, or with serious issues that don’t deserve to be trivialised in shallow, bullet-point, GIF-heavy listicles.”

Having realised their errors, editors and writers at the website have since vowed to take courses in ethics and journalistic values, and have furthermore vowed to never oversimplify an argument or concept by using cat pictures or images cut from popular culture.

“We realise now that our insatiable hunger to just get that click out of you, to bleed you and other readers for pageviews and time, made us blind,” he said in a long, profound, ten-chapter essay that didn’t contain one picture or numerical bulletpoint. “It turned us into monsters, veritable scum-sucking bottom feeders who lurked on Reddit and subReddit forums and Tumblr pages, copy-pasting and rehashing and resharing old and boring content because we knew that, hell, you’d click whatever old shit we regurgitate.”

The move has been met by widespread praise.

"Their apology was amazing, incredibly. It literally blew my mind and changed my life," said one internet user. "In fact, if there was a list of 10 apologies published on the internet somewhere, this would probably be at number 4."

Those wanting to know more about this story can read this exact same article on The Huffington Post, Upworthy and Elitedaily.

7 of the most offensive, disgusting images ever published on the internet (that we have the decency, ethical values and common sense not to republish or share)

The internet – and indeed the world – is a disgusting, horrifying place.

Every day, everywhere, there are acts that are being carried out that are so contrary to common decency and humanity that if you knew about them you would buy a gun and climb a clock tower: acts so heinous that they go against the very idea of what it is to be a living, thinking human on this earth; acts so utterly unspeakable that, if there were images of them out there, would make the whole internet-going audience click them and link them and share them again and again and make for incredible web traffic and advertising revenue.

But unlike most websites, we’re better than that.

And so here they are. The seven most horrifying, disgusting, vomit-inducing and shocking pictures you’ll ever not see on the internet, all curated on one website.

1. This book
   

   Throughout history there have been books and literature that have touched a little too roughly on the protruding jagged and sensitive bone jutting out the broken leg of contemporary society. And thus, many, many books have been banned.

   None like this, however. Christ, the hatred in the passage above (which we’ve edited to save you endless consternation and fury) alone is just shocking. Racism. Sexism. Arguing in favour of eugenics. “But Muse and Abuse,” I hear you argue, “wouldn’t showing us this image sate our morbid curiosity AND garner you tonnes of pageviews and money? Isn’t it win-win?”. Well, yes. But we like to think that we’re better than stooping to such lows just to make the number in the top-right-hand corner of this blog a little bigger.

2. Animal abuse and cruelty
   

   Vivisection. Animal cruelty. Abuse. Sadism. Just these words are enough to make you vomit out the murdered cow or mass-slaughtered poultry you had for lunch. This picture, however, would make you outright rage and do everything in your power to repost and share your outrage online to all your friends. You know, stuff that will really change the world and end these horrific practices that you despise so much. And so, we’ve taken out everything that will purposefully offend you just because we believe that getting a few more readers than last month is simply not as important as protecting society from unnecessary depictions of senseless cruelty.

   If it helps, imagine that this image has a picture of an adorable kitten smiling innocently in a shoe three times bigger than it instead of a cow whose neck has been slit open, its helpless, tied-up hooves scraping a desperate, futile final few mad jerks as its vital fluids pool in a shallow crimson pool under its lolling tongue and insane, terrified bulging eyeballs.

3. This racist, bigoted post on Facebook
   

   We all have that friend on Facebook who defends blackface or posts News24 articles saying why black people are stupid and lesser beings. But god, this post (which we won’t share because controversy breeds controversy and doing this won’t challenge the status quo but only provide a wider audience to this person to disseminate their hateful, backward views) just takes the cake. The eugenics-supporting, supremacist, Vanilla-only-no-chocolate-allowed cake. It makes Steve Hofmeyr look like Martin Luther King for godssakes. Why would we want to share that?

   Sometimes it’s better to use our silence to doom something to die in its own stupidity and obscolecence than create a domino effect of controversy just because we want to show off how progressive and outraged we are.

4. This tweet
   

   This tweet – which links directly to an ISIS beheading video – will end your faith in humanity. That’s why – unlike CNN, the BBC or any other major news network which technically acts as an intermediary for scary terrorist training videos and PR campaigns – we have blacked it out. We know fear sells, but seeing how we don’t want to make money off people’s fear and how, because this blog has no advertising revenue activated, we actually cannot make money off your endless fear, we just won’t. We like to think we’re progressive like that.

5. This picture
   

   Honestly, this image was so unspeakably disgusting that we won’t even edit out specific parts of it. Maybe it’s child abuse. Maybe it’s sexual slavery. Whatever it is, there isn’t a need for ad-revenue-and-pageview-hungry sites like this to make these sorts of things widely accessible to a large internet-faring audience. But hey, what better way to raise awareness to stop these sick acts than to keep spreading the content they produce and gloat about on social media, right?

6. This, god help us all.
   

   This. You can't guess what’s going on in this picture (just the way it should be), but Jesus, if you had finer details, you’d want to kill yourself. Imagine the worst thing you can, and then multiply that by Satan to the power of Ebola times infinity times Justin Bieber. Whatever this image was before we tastefully redacted it, it’s simply better that you don’t live your life in constant, ceaseless terror of leaving your house.

7. This disgusting sexual act
   

   For god’s sakes, people, there might be be children out there seeing every post that you accidentally have defaulted to “public”. We would hate for these images to fall into young, innocent hands. At the most, we’re stopping accidental exposure of graphic images to blissful juvenile minds unaware of such horrors. Although, we might still make kids get a sexual fetish for shadows or silhouette porn.

   Our bad.

Pics courtesy of Photoshop God and resident editor of photography Matthew de Klerk

Incredible! Young girl gets crippling student loans, broken dreams at just 14!

Most people would wait until their mid-twenties to mount up crippling student debt and a mountain made entirely out of the shards of shattered, pointless dreams – but 14-year-old Thessalonika Arzu-Embry isn’t most people.

Yes, you heard us. At just fourteen, Thessalonika has done what most would only dream of: get a piece of paper that entitles you to a ceaseless job-quest in a market saturated with equal qualifications and desperate graduates and lets you finally be a part of the horrific system of modern indentured servitude that will have you paying off your tuition until you’re lying on your death-bed, signing away your kidneys to a loan-shark.

“It wasn’t easy,” she said to reporters. “It always helps to have your family around you, supporting you every step of the way.”

Social services are now investigating this abuse.

However, despite this incredible news, some doubt the credibility of her degree.

“A degree at fourteen?” said one fellow graduate. “How can that be a real degree? How are we supposed to take you seriously as a critically-thinking member of worldwide academia and intelligentsia if you’ve never been utterly trashed in a bar on a Friday night rehashing the same old tired arguments to people you’ve just met about why Marxism or Socialism isn’t the answer, or about what the relative merits are of a capitalist democracy in today’s ever-changing political atmosphere? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Others agree.

“Oh, Jesus, when I was fourteen I was also a snotty bookworm,” said one guy who reiterated that this wasn’t a rant borne from ugly, embittered cognitive dissonance and jealousy. “I mean, I could easily have gotten a degree too. Just, you know, I was busy. With stuff.”

Even large corporations have added their voice.

“We congratulate the young girl on this fantastic accomplishment,” said food giant McDonalds, “but we also don’t understand it. She is far too young to work in one of our many chains across the country. Why would you want a degree in Psychology?”

However, Thessalonika remains adamant in the face of heated criticism.

“Many people say that the qualification isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s printed on,” she said, wearing her robes and posing for a photograph that would of course go immediately viral, because people can’t believe that fourteen-year-olds are capable of doing anything more than garbled idiocy.

“I totally disagree. It *is* worth the paper it’s printed on.”

GuitarHero World Number One still sucks at guitar

Despite spending hundreds of hours on his plinky-plonky plastic GuitarHero guitar and winning dozens of international competitions across the globe, 22-year-old Eric Layla told reporters this morning that he is still terrible at “normal guitar”.

“I get a perfect 300-note streak time and time again,” he said, holding an old Taylor guitar out of which he could not coax even a shabby Wonderwall, that crappy beginner-guitarist’s bread and butter. “I get Ultra Perfect scores, even on Master difficultly, and I can destroy even the third piano solo on The Beatle’s Here Comes the Sun. It makes no sense. I should be at least as good as Angus Young by now.”

He said that while the Ten-Thousand-Hour rule had proven successful for many other video game addicts, it did not seem to be working at all for him.

“Violent video games make you violent, and all the people that play these turn into brutal cold killers with 100% accuracy on the gun range – so why can’t I shred like a boss yet? I mean, I can hit over 893 000 points on Smoke on the Water, and I can’t even do a barre chord yet,” he said. “You know, whatever ‘barre chord’ means.”

Scientists have since looked into this complaint.

“We have done science and chemicals and graphs over this problem, and I think we have found the solution,” said lead researcher Tess Tubes. “You see, where games like DJ Hero allow for the fully real and visceral experience of plugging in a flashstick, pressing play, and then touching buttons and turning dials that do nothing for three hours, GuitarHero is a little different.”

The problem, she said, lies with the instrument.

“What we need,” she said, “is a GuitarHero controller that has not just five buttons with different colours, but instead six rows of buttons with 22 columns. For a fully real experience, he should up the difficultly rating past Master all the way to Real Life.”

Artist's impression of what the all-new Future controller
might look like

Creators of the game have since said that they have taken heed of these complaints, saying they were coming up with a new game that more accurately represented the instrument.

“We just have some legal hurdles to vault,” they said in a statement yesterday, “but already we are working on GuitarHero: Real Life.”

The game, they said, would have a number of different modes.

“Practice Mode is set in the lifelike setting of your room, where you spend hours stumbling and fumbling away on one particular chord progression,” they said. “Once you have mastered this early campaign, you move onto Shitty Gig Mode, where you will cope with terrible equipment, a drunk, uninterested crowd, and a guy who keeps coming up to the mic and asking you to play songs you don’t know.”

However, at this stage the game is all in an early development phase.

“We have a whole lot of ideas – like towards the end of Shitty Gig Mode, we might have ‘Friends Asking You To Play At Their Society's Event For Free Mode’, and maybe a ‘Your First ‘Real’ Gig In A City, Which Only Your Sisters And Mom Come To Mode’. Like we said, it’s all in the early stages, but as you can see, when it comes out, it’ll be like you’re actually playing a real guitar.”

Man definitely not racist

pic: wikimedia commons

A man who posted a racist rant to facebook yesterday attracting the ire of hundreds of online comments and posts has been found to be "definitely not racist" by the Institute for the Study of Racist Behaviour.

According to officials from the SRB, the post by 46-year-old Sandton businessman Johan van der Westhuyzen may have at first seemed racist, as it contained several harsh slurs, including the words nigger and k****r and phrases like "these bloody blacks", but a second revision of both the content, the poster, and the circumstances under which the post was made shows that the status was actually benign in its nature.

"If we take a second look at what he said, we can see that he started off with some very insightful preceding statements," said Dr Ray Cist of the SRB. "If you look at his status, he started off by convincingly telling us that 'I'm not racist, but...'. Statements like these are societal agreements that whatever we say after that will be totally devoid of hate speech."

Cist went on to point out that Van Der Westhuyzen also went on to point out that "some of my best friends are black", saying that this is also the mark of a forward-thinking, unprejudiced individual.

"It's well known that if you talk to black people every once in a while, you can't physically be racist. Fact," he said. "He also said that he hates Darren Scott and thinks places like Orania are backwards. I mean, you can't argue with logic like that."

Cist said that the Racism Research Team they put to task also found that the offended facebook users who were up in arms over the innocent post totally ignored the context in which the post was published.

"Again, there are times and places where shouting racist or hateful slurs is socially okay," said Cist. "Just look at Shoot the Boer. Johan had a really bad day, and that car guard did get a scratch in his expensive Merc."

Johan has since retracted his apology on facebook, saying that it was "just typical" how "those people" react to "innocent freedom of speech".

Van der Westhuyzen has, however, promised that in future, he would be more equality-minded and politically correct.

"I know that this country is filled with different races and cultures, all of which play a vital role in our society," he said. "Next time, I'll try to slander as many different races as possible."