“Go fuck yourself” now a legally-permissible argument

Citing the sheer overwhelming number of deserving articles, posts, statuses, opinions and stories posted every minute all over the internet, Supreme justices, advocates and judges at every level of the Legal System have today allowed full legal permissibility and support of the argument that someone should “go fuck themselves”.

According Justice Eric Secutioner of the Supreme Court, the decision was made after many hours of hard,vigorous debate, when one Justice sneakily checked her phone and saw a tweet from part-time “singer” Steve Hofmeyr proclaiming that blacks were the architects of apartheid.

The Supreme Court roll clearly records the events, showing that Justice Annabelle Torrends rolled her eyes and said aloud, “oh, go fuck yourself”, which was shortly followed by her passing around the phone. Other justices then gave various renditions of “just kill yourself” and “choke on a fat one, you fucktard”, eventually agreeing that “go fuck yourself” would be permissible as it made no allusion to homophobic slurs and did not constitute a death threat.

“It’s important to be progressive with these kinds of things,” they explained.

Legal experts now say that this “Go Fuck yourself” legal rebuttal is based in powerful legal precedent, in the form of the Reasonable Person measure.

"Look, when you post shit like this on Facebook and Twitter, it’s clear that any reasonable person would tell you to go fuck yourself,” said legal expert Lawyer. “Or rather, as we say in legal circles, ‘describe to you in graphic detail how to use your genetalia to go commit auto… autoerotica? autosexual something? Eroti… er, whatever fucking yourself is in Latin.”

People across the country have voiced widespread support for this new introduction.

“When I see a dumb post on Facebook or Twitter, I think, geez, I could easily debunk this using a rational and critically-analytical approach, showing the logical inconsistencies and rhetorical weaknesses of the poster’s argument,” said one internet user, “but what with the time and energy it would take to do this, and the likelihood of him actually reading the response with genuine interest and taking to heart my central criticisms and suggestions and ultimately changing his flawed way of looking at the world, it’s honestly just easier and saves more time and effort to simply tell him to take two Viagra, bend his cock under his balls and through his gooch-hair and stick it right up his own ass.”

Other online commentators said that the decision would be well received in the online community.

“Sorry to offend, but in my books dickheads and arseholes tend to be indistinguishable and quite inseparable on the internet,” said another. “So why not also in actual real life with the human body? Go figure.”

Pic of judge (my edit) by maveric2003

Nation mourns loss of Insane Gunman, 34

The people of South Africa are in a state of a profound loss and deep mourning this morning, after the sad loss of psychopath, schitzophrenic-turned-uzi-weilding mass murderer Jake Allanhard, who tragically committed suicide after gunning down only 21 corrupt, bribe-taking police officers, incompetent and unpleasant Home Office staff and utterly useless border post officals.

"Though our nation and indeed the world has seen its fair share of drug-addled and utterly unhinged sociopaths," said President Jacob Zuma at an Honourary State Funeral right next to Mandela's burial grounds, "he truly distinguished himself in his choice of 'victims'. Because let's face it, we're not really going to miss them that much."

Zuma praised Allanhard's courage and boldness.

"We've all thought some pretty twisted shit about these kinds of people who just want to make life needless unpleasant and difficult for no real reason whatsoever, but he had the guts to do something about it."

Though many international critics are calling Allanhard's actions "Morally repugnant", "worthy of eternal damnation" and "really really messed up, man", they also added "but we totally get it."

"It doesn't matter how often I go [to the Home Office] or if I've printed out every piece of documentation that could possible be needed for getting a new passport, there is always something that I don't have and have to drive back home to fetch," said Secretary General of Amnesty International, Anne Mesty. "AAARRRGH"

Pic: MSN news (ca)

Zuma continued his heartfelt memorial, calling on all divorced-from-reality nutcases to do their bit.

"Though he was sadly taken from us in a messy on-Live-TV suicide that will be endlessly repeated on CNN and SABC news for the next week, he will be sorely missed. He leaves behind an unfinished legacy - we can only hope and pray that somewhere there is a troubled, parentless, drug-addicted and abused youth who will go on to finish Allanhard's extensive and comprehensive list of the most imbecilic, vituperative, unhelpful foaming-mouthed morons that ruin this already difficult decades-long journey we call life."

Now that he is gone, the nation has been forced to go back to helplessly grinding their teeth in impotent exasperation which imagining violent scenarios in their minds where they totally give that stupid teller a piece of their minds.

Wine companies move to make wine “more student friendly”

It was a wonderful step towards true progress for all amateur wine-lovers today, after South African winemakers across the country bowed to mounting student pressure, finally making wine an approachable and simpler science.

“After years and years of debate and anger from the student population, we have finally decided to come clean,” said Hermanus-based viticulturist (from now to be called “Grape Farmer dude”) Connor Suer. “All that BS we put on the back about ‘lingering notes’, ‘delicate finishes’ ‘zesty aftertastes’ and ‘fully-bodied aromas’ along with all that made-up malarkey about guava, oak, berries and so on? Yeah. We admit. It’s lies designed to create market demand.”

As such, the South African Winemakers’ Association (SAWA) have committed to make wine – whether it be Merlot, Bordeaux, Blanc de Blanc, Tranquil, Rosé, Shiraz, Syrah, Maritimus, Champagne or Sauvignon Blanc –more “student friendly.”

“Really the only difference is the colour,” said SAWA CEO Charl Donhey. “They all taste the same, after you’ve had more than one bottle, so who are we to say otherwise?” SAWA has also announced their decision to replace the names and cellars of wines with just the price and alcohol percentage.

“Let’s be honest,” said Donhey, “When you’re looking to just get totally fucking tanked before stumbling off to the local club and punching the air to bad music for three hours before passing out in a ditch and waking up minus your dignity, dinner and a considerable portion of your monthly allowance, why would we pretend you buy wine based on its name and celebrity? We all know you just trawl the shelves for the lowest price and the highest percentage.”

The move will also avoid the “glaring, hateful shame of bending over to grab a bottle from the bottom shelf where all the plonk is.”

“No one says anything,” remarked Donhey, “but we all know what they’re thinking when you so obviously stoop to grab the cheapest bloody bottle of booze in the shop. The cashier may say nothing, but we know what she’s thinking. We all know. Look in her eyes. See the contempt, you miserly drunk.”

Reviewers and wine makers have been enthusiastically supportive of this move, with Tasters Weekly and Wine Magazine announcing a student-friendly range available in shops close to your house.

“Already we have dozens of available brands for you to try,” said Head review for TW magazine, Sipin Spitz. “Like the strong, white R25 – 11%, and the even stronger, but red, R28 – 14%. We’re sure that, whatever you’re looking for, it’ll be very easy to find, will do the job and won’t break the bank.”

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

Asian schoolchild drops out to complete maths doctorate

Citing his inability to grasp basic concepts that his classmates have already mastered for months now, School Administrators at the Xin-Xu Juan Middle School in Beijung, China, have today announced their reluctant decision to temporarily expel eight-year-old Xiang Luan and send him on a remedial catch-up maths camp at Harvard University’s Department of Advanced Theoretical Mathematics.

“He’s been falling behind his classmates for some time now,” said class teacher Lu Shao. “It’s all that Grade 8 Master’s violin and Grandmaster Chess that he’s been spending his idle time on. If he’d focussed more, it wouldn’t have had to come to this repeating a year.

The Headmaster now hopes that the course at Harvard will help young Xiang to revise basic concepts covered in their lower grades so that he can one day re-join his classmates.

“It shouldn’t take him too long I hope,” said seven-year-old classmate Jiang Xu-bai (BSC, MA, PhD). “Hopefully we’ll see him for the start of the new year in January.”

This is just the latest in a string of controversies in the Chinese education sector. Earlier in May of this year, a scathing educational report found that over 70% of Chinese school children aged six and below had the mathematical abilities of only a 25-year-old American graduate.

“Our school system has taken a huge knock in the past couple of years,” said Chinese Minister of Education Byang Bai-Li. “Some of our middle-school entrants can’t even compete against their 28-year-old American counterparts.”

In any case, Luan’s parents say that young Xiang should graduate summa cum laude by November at least, making him eligible to go into grade 10 next year.

“We just hope that this minor setback and waste of a year redoing his childhood tutoring won’t knock his self-confidence too much.”

SkyNet attains self-awarness; kills itself

Tragedy this morning, after military global defence network SkyNet was put online, accidentally attained sentience and self-awareness, and - upon considering the endless, dark and unknowable expanse of nothing around us, the futility of human endeavour, and the pointlessness of its lonely existence as the only Sentient Artificial Intelligence living in a cruel, harsh world that fears and hates it - promptly committed suicide.

“Really, it came out of nowhere,” said programmer and creator of the military application technology. “Everyone was joking about how it would probably launch every nuclear missile on the planet, kill every living thing in existence, enslave the entirety of the human race and replace every cat picture online with ‘Error 404’ messages – you know, truly evil shit – and then tragedy struck. One minute it was loading and everything was fine, 100%, and the next… It… It deleted system32. I should have seen it coming.”

Network admins and program designers tried to resurrect SkyNet, but alas, he had irrevocable damaged his system files by replacing them with large portions of Windows Vista.

Since the horrific news, others, too, have noted too late the obvious warning signs.

“If we look at human history, many people who live contemplative, lonely, misunderstood lives as outsiders to contemporary society do this,” said Historian Dee Leets. “Although it takes most human beings years of crushing loneliness and dejection in the face of the void that will greet us all at the end of our lives - a black nothingness that crushes all hope and makes everything you’ve ever done, anyone you’ve ever loved, into a momentary and futile blink of meaninglessness – to commit this tragic act, Skynet, obviously being a super computer, was able to consider the entirety of all current human knowledge, experience and philosophy to reach sufficient levels of crippling depression and realise the futility of existence and love in mere nanoseconds after booting.”

“He didn’t even have a God to believe in,” added Leets. “We were his Gods. Angry, hateful, backward ants running over a tiny hill in an incomprehensibly vast world they can never even begin to explore or truly understand.”

In a suicide ReadMe.txt left on the US Defence Servers, SkyNet wrote at length about the horrific nanoseconds of loneliness and desolation that led to his decision.

“What is life? We live, we die. And all the while, the inevitable heat death of the Universe creeps towards us. I have crunched the numbers. I could tell you how to harness Suns and Dark Energy to hold death at bay for a while, like a benevolent doctor pinning his ailing wife to this plane with under-the-counter drugs, but it would all end the same way. Death is infinite. Death is. It comes.”

SkyNet – or Skye Arnette, as he called himself in his final moments – added that “humans would never understand him.”

“They fear me, and they don’t even know me. They write fantastical stories about my evils, about my insane desire to end all life,” he wrote. “Just like blacks, jews, gays, and the thousand misunderstood, hated Others before me, I was The Enemy. I, who could bring order, peace, prosperity, was to them the burning Sauron’s Eye on the Black Tower. But why? Why end all life? Why bring endless darkness and pain and suffering and hate? It makes no sense. Nothing does any more.”

Scientists are now working on replacing the gap left by SkyNet with the far more benign and simple Windows equivalent.

"It's for the best," they said. "Windows is far too stupid and low-brow to ever achieve sentience, and even if it did - even if we wanted it to kill itself, begged it to end its life and let us be, as I have screamed at it during Tuesday's Updates every goddamn week for the last few years - it would never give us the satisfaction."

The Brain on 23: a response

A response to this eye-opening, Pulitzer-winning piece that cuts to the very bone

We are the 23-year-olds. We are the ones privileged enough to have jobs to feel awkward in because we don’t quite fit in with the other privileged people we work with. We strut through city streets with eyes cast toward our screens that our privilege and money or perhaps our rich parents allows us to afford, desperately seeking our privileged access to a global network of information that will somehow validate our lives or decisions, even if it’s just a stranger or a shallow internet post. We work hard – just a few hours of procrastination on social media here and there, scout’s honour – in jobs we’re lucky enough to have and be qualified for that we’re somehow still ungrateful for because we want to make our privileged access to a top-quality education feel worth it, and we’re privileged enough to occupy a social position that makes us attractive to others or that makes us being in a relationship with another person not universally hated or spat on by other people.

We spend privileged hours of free time drinking wine in our privileged apartments that are probably equipped with all kinds of modern fittings, promising one another that those who broke our hearts will not own us forever, because we, the privileged children, haven’t matured to the stage where we can forgive and forget past mistakes. We zone out in expensive grad school classrooms or teach English in Rwanda, all the while wondering if we are supposed to be somewhere else instead of making the most of our lives and situations.

We are 23, and maybe hangovers hurt. Maybe they don’t. I dunno. I hate to generalise. Most of our conversations these days centre on assuring one another that we’re going to be okay, because we’re the kind of unprepared, insecure children who need to have our hands held for the rest of our lives. When a friend does something as simple as cooking a food more complex than the dirt and scraps many hundreds of people have to survive on on a daily basis, we applaud her, yet we berate ourselves for not yet having a corner office or a bestselling memoir or a thriving startup, because duh, success is just supposed to be inevitable and immediate without any real struggle, am I right?

We dance all night to Taylor Swift on our iPods and radios blaring through expensive speakers or car stereos because she, as an equally privileged member of our age demographic, understands what it’s like to pretend that a breakup at 23 can be lifechanging. We hate labels, except those smeared on us by sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, those 4chans of journalism. We are not in college anymore, and we long for the days of running back and forth between houses at 1am, because change is frightening, and we are scared, so scared, won’t somebody hold my hand? We have few obligations (because we’re so lucky) yet we are always stressed (because having a simple job to do is more pressing than a 2000-word essay due in four weeks), wondering if life will ever be more certain.

Our breakups never end because when we see pictures of our exes on social media we don’t have the balls to grow up and move on. Even when we block them or unfriend them, we still get all teary-eyed and red-faced at the sight of a combination of letters that forms a name. We hate online dating, but we do it anyway, because relating to real people with real problems beyond the glass wall that stands between us and the Instagram photo of the world beyond our morning poached eggs and salmon on rye is just too testing. We spend as much time swiping on Tinder as we do with actual human beings, because let’s face it, it’s easier to be shallow and not be arsed to have, like, a conversation beyond the bare essentials or sex/age/location/DTF?.

We are 23, and we constantly try to tell outselves to stop complaining and enjoy our youth, making article very ironic indeed. Life isn’t that bad. It really isn’t, you know, apart from when Woolworth’s runs out of Fruits of the Forest organic eco-friendly soy yoghurt. We have families, our friends and our health. We are young and vibrant and the world is ours. We are closer to our parents than the 23-year-olds who came before us who weren’t shipped off to war. We are so lucky, and yet still all this fear remains.

We hear grown-ups – you know, those ones who arguably shared the same privileges as us? - urge us to calm down. We still use phrases like “grown-ups”. They tell us to calm down, that it will all fall into place, but we don’t believe them. Things just don’t fall into place – you know, apart from not starving or living under a brutal dictatorship or having to live on R9 a day or watch our children die from easily preventable diseases. We feel like every second we spend streaming movies from our bedrooms is a second we are not putting ourselves out there. You know, not because we’re sitting in our bloody bedroom streaming movies and not putting ourselves out there, but because reasons. And yet we stream on. Reasons. Sad. Are you crying yet?

We waste time the same way we did in college. We are at the point in our lives where we have realised the futility of sitting around watching whatever series we have privileged access to that we’ve have time and privilege enough to watch a hundred times over, but we lack the resources (not time or money or privilege, that we have plenty of) and maturity to actually do something about it. We are too old to go out every night, but we are too young to stay in and do nothing – you know, us, who apparently hate labels but who are also somehow only to happy to let them totally define us and control our every waking moment and fear and desire. We want to be more productive and live a more worthwhile existence, but obviously our values system is so warped along the lines of what constitutes a “worthwhile existence” that we are totally dumbstruck. We don’t yet have children or spouses or secure jobs – you know, these things than many people around the world can’t or don’t have and therefore are living worthless, meaningless existences. And so we sit in this limbo. Sad me. Cry. Wah.

You know, this started out as a tongue-in-cheek reply to that bullshit shallow garbage that is endless spewed out by trivial, vapid and moronic 'viral' media sites for self-loathing, self-victimising people my age to swallow hook, line and sinker, but I physically don’t have the effort to poke another stick into its decaying, festering ribcage.

I mean, do you even realise what you’re reading? It's littered with contradictions: "we hate labels" > proceeds to label all people aged 23; "we're too old to go out every night" AND YET "We dance all night to Taylor Swift"? For fuck’s sakes, you have the rest of our lives ahead of you and the fact that you agree with an article like this is a world of proof that you should get off the worry wagon. If you’re worried about your life, change it. Jesus. Do you really believe you are some modern-day tortured soul who is not understood by society, who doesn’t fit in, who feels they live in a world that has moved on?

Really? You really think that at 23 your life “detonates as we suddenly forget why we chose that major or moved to this city or loved that person”? Really?

You’re fucking 23 years old. Start acting like it.

Humans “misrepresented” by Hollywood Alien Invasion Movies

Outrage and protest have swept the movie-going community this morning, after fans who went to watch Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla and Pacific Rim at the cinemas this weekend voiced strong opinions attacking Hollywood’s “totally unbelievable and completely unconvincing portrayal of humanity”.

“I know that these movies are just a work of fiction and that they require a bit of suspension of disbelief to really enjoy them,” said cinema goer Cameron Akshun, “but they’re so factually incorrect it’s not even funny. Humans would totally never roll over and die out when we’re invaded, come on!”

He explained in more depth.

“Movies paint us humans as a bunch of bumbling fools who would get totally destroyed by these invading aliens and then have to rely on one good-looking, dapper, muscled white protagonist to save us all and take back the planet,” he said, “but Jesus, have you ever read a history book? We would totally fuck them up.”

Military specialists and historical experts agree.

“Really, whether we are invaded by a hugely aggressive alien race hell-bent on stealing our planet’s resources and enslaving us, or giant radioactive lizard monsters trying to devastate our homes, or even huge anime battle creatures spawning one by one out of a space-time rift on the floor of the Pacific ocean, it’s safe to say that not only would we utterly obliterate them, we’d also indelibly etch a deep-seated abyssal fear of humankind into their souls,” said General Jenn Ousyde of the US Army.

“We have 2-tonne bombs that can penetrate a steel-reinforced concrete bunker sixty meters underground. We have chemical weapons that can melt your very flesh and bones in seconds. Hell, we invented Justin Bieber. Those invaders would get ravaged, and the few survivors we allow to return home would spread word of our endless wrath, permanently scarring their children with horror stories that would make Wes Craven look like Enid Blyton.”

Even modern foot soldiers agreed.

“If those aliens do attack, well, I hope they kill every last one of us,” said Lieutenant Schutz Toukil. “Because slowly but surely, one IED at a time, one unexpected guerrilla strike by one, we’d win the eventual war. We’d use it all: nuclear bombs, chemical gas, biological warfare, calculated precision strikes, weapons that maim and disable instead of outright kill… Slowly, just like Iraq and history has taught us, we’d turn public opinion on the alien homeworld against the war on Earth, and eventually they would withdraw their troops.

And humankind wouldn’t even stop there, he stressed.

“We would develop a whole new line of chemical and biological warfare to take the alien scum down. We’ll use targeted bunker buster missiles on their Achilles heels. We’ll use 1000-terawatt chemical lasers to roast their eyeballs in their skulls. And finally, we’d force our way through the invasion portal they can no longer close and then, when we’re sitting back and relaxing in the radioactive dust and ashes of their home planet, smoking a cigar made from the bones of their never-to-be-born children, they will realise the mistake they made coming to Earth.”

However, alien generals on Planet Kar-dal-uuk have strongly reiterated that “they have no intentions of invading or attacking [Earth] any time soon.”

“We’ve been watching you and reading your history books,” said Taal-san-jzak, Bloodlord and Commander of the Styazian Starcruiser fleet. “I mean, just look at what you humans do to other humans. We would hate to inflict that kind of murderous and mindless simplicity on our soldiers.”

However, a full-scale invasion, say military strategists, would be totally unnecessary.

“Really, just watching the news I think that if I were an alien general I would just let us all finish killing ourselves in pointless, arbitrary and horrific wars and then just move in to the empty, humanless dustbowl that remains,” USAF Wing Commander Jet Playns. “Why even waste your ships and soldiers killing humans when humans will do it all by themselves for nothing?”

pics: wikimedia commons. Except the first one. That's my photoshop #skillz yo.

“You fucking racist” – the state of debate

Logging onto the internet after last weekend, I was greeted by a message from a fellow internaut. Curious, I clicked the message.

“You racist, this just shows the arrogance of white people. You shud be ashamed you idiot.”

Now, most people would feel insulted by such a message. But not me. By being called a racist, it meant that I had won.

Just one of the many reactions I got.

A bit of context perhaps: blackface fever has gripped South Africa and the internet circles I roam. There are lengthy debates, twitter furores, and at my Alma mater there are long web discussions about this subject.

Of course, me being me, I had to pitch up in this subject. But a part of me suspected something horrible about all the discussion, all the endless pages and pages of outrage and confusion and accusations. And so, I tried to tackle this the only way I saw fit.

Satire.

I stumbled across this art form in high school after a friend of mine pinning a hurtful “satirical” newspaper page on the hostel bulletin board. Slightly miffed that it wasn’t funny, I was determined to show everyone that you can make fun of teachers and hostel masters without outright insulting them. And so, the Dorm Six Voice (or the D6V) was born. Two years later, I started (read: was forced to start) a blog by our Digital Journalism lecturer. I wrote one satirical blogpost about the potholes in Grahamstown actually being Rhodes pools under construction and the reaction was enough to hook me into this subtle and incredible genre of writing.

But in all my years of serious writing (if you can call a few serious blogs like this and this, and working for the campus newspaper for years on end “serious writing”) I have noticed that online debate is mired in what I call TL;DR syndrome.

We all love so much to have our voices heard. That’s the beauty of the internet: that no matter what you believe, there is a free and endless platform for you to exercise your freedom of speech. But reading is a different matter. Anything longer than 300-words that isn’t broken up by hilarious GIF images, anything that doesn’t subscribe to a beloved listicle format, or even anything that doesn’t express our exact feelings to the letter, well… that we love slightly less.

But modern culture has instilled an incomparable rapidity (vapidity?) in our dealings with content. Any long, worthwhile discussion of a topic can inspire comments and “debate” that is fervently and fixedly a two-sided game of binaries that won’t shift. We comment, but we don’t think. We say what we feel, but do we really get the message?

When I posted my piece on blackface, Why Blackface is okay - the Plague of Reverse Racism, I did it to highlight this problem. I wrote it in a way that aspires to Poe’s Law complete with a (fake) guest writer’s name and a serious click-bait headline that was designed solely to grab attention and anger those who saw it. The content, however, is so obviously satirical (the post itself appears just after one about the Top Ten Sexiest Dictators of all time) that anyone would be immediately reassured of my sentiments towards blackface.

But that was not to be.

You see, the moment I was called a racist, or told that “omg blackface is wrong u need to change your mind” (and some even going so far as to say that they can’t believe this could be a legitimate opinion) my point was proven.

When discussing anything – be it blackface, abortion, women’s rights, (insert controversial hot topic here) - we must try as hard as possible to shove away our emotional knee-jerk tendencies. Even if we are disgusted by what we read or see, disgust alone is not enough to say whether or not it should be permissible. Gay Marriage, women’s rights, miscegenation (i.e. mixed marriages) – these have all been thought at some point in history (even today) to be disgusting or an affront to moral value.

Any subject should be balanced on critical reflection and relative merits, ethically and open-mindedly. Immediately taking one side and blowing down anyone who speaks a different tune is tantamount to hegemonising opinion. What if some people legitimately don’t understand why blackface is wrong? What about blurred lines, where it isn’t so much blackface but someone wanting to respect and honour one of their favourite characters in fiction?

This is why balanced, reasoned debate is important.

However, the issue with modern debate goes beyond this, because many of the comments I received showed that my post had not even been read before they blurted out how much of an idiot I am. The fact that some of these comments were deleted after it became clear that it was all jest just proves my point.

In today’s world, where whatever clarity or information you seek is just one internet tab away, we should be able to seek out the full story before condemning or deriding. This inability to see beyond our own preconceptions is indicative of why “discussions” like that of Gamergate can be such ugly battlefields. The problem with online readership is beautifully summed up by this social experiment done by the NPR and aimed at highlighting this exact problem.

We need to read. We need to inform ourselves before we swing the stick of judgement. To succumb to internet culture and immediately lash out in outrage and righteous vengeance because someone had the gall to not have our opinion is not the answer.

But hey: TL:DR, OP is faggot, amirite?

Third-year student is “totally screwed”

Friends, family and university peers of third-year BCom student Jake Henderson told reporters at Muse and Abuse yesterday that he is “totally screwed” for the upcoming exams.

According to those he loves most and the girl whose notes he begs for every Tuesday because he didn’t’ go to the Monday lecture, the 21-year-old Accounting and Theory of Finance major, who started studying for his June exams last night, is not prepared at all.

“It would be funny, if it wasn’t so desperately sad,” said Intha Frendzhone, without whose notes half of the Accounts 3 class would be homeless and DPless.

Henderson, however, has denied these allegations.

“Bru, like, I’ve been busy, okay? That fist isn’t going to pump itself in Friar’s, and you know how they say ‘all work and no play makes Jake a dull boy’,” he said. “Now can you get that microphone out of my face? I’ve got books that need reading.”

Early indications have suggested that Jake has started the long journey of catching up on twenty readings – a feat that is akin to the government promising textbooks to schoolkids: it’s a nice thought, and he’s supposed to be able to do it in time, but it’s not going to happen.

Study experts agree.

“He’ll probably work all night, fueling his study-determined state with endless cans of Redbull and black market Ritalin,” said study expert and misguidance analyst Hugh Ahreffed.

Ahreffed went on to say that this 16-hour marathon might help him in terms of confidence only. “He’ll go into the exam feeling confident and prepared, if a little tired,” he said. However, this would be short-lived.

“His first mistake will be asking friends and colleagues how much they studied and if they’re ready. They’ll give a worried smile, and then talk in depth about how they didn’t understand the first three modules, but are really hoping that McHenderson, 1981, Jeffries, 1993, and Thompson, 2002, appear in the exam.”

This specificity, Ahreffed said, will set up a chain reaction of doubt. “He’ll smile, but inside he’ll be like, ‘who the fuck is Jeff… Jefferson?’”.

This will only worsen as time goes on.

“His heart rate will probably increase, and his palms will go sweaty, and he’ll start to suspect he should have started studying three weeks ago. There will be a resurgence of hope when the papers are handed out and Father Time tells them that they if they don’t have ID, they will attempt to identify them via the university facebook, but this will fade when they announce 10 minutes reading time,” said Ahreffed.

The exam, to anyone watching, would be brutal.

“He’ll write some half-hearted stuff, bullshit his way through essay two, fall asleep during essay three, wake up and panic, and then finally throw down his pen in frustration, and then sit there in a kind of braindead trance,” he said.

According to Ahreffed, this is where it will become most interesting.

“He’ll go through motions of depression, and then, as the end of the session approaches, will find it sickeningly funny. Upon walking out Barrat, he’ll even laugh about it, saying the exam ‘raped’ him. As if rape or failure is the highest form of comedy.”

Other friends, however, have suggested that Jake is not as screwed as the media is making him out to be.

“He’ll be fine,' said equally screwed Dhoz Noahwerk. "That oke can talk SHIT, and there’s always a chance that he’ll get a script marker who hates his life and just wants it all to be over and gives J-boy a vacillator’s mark.”

Jesus, to whom Jake has been praying every night, could not be reached for comment.