People From Johannesburg

"Most people regard hierarchy in human societies as inevitable, a natural part of who we are. Yet this belief contradicts much of the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens. In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy. So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago."

"I still want money to call me … Money must still recognise me and be like, ‘that’s my girl"

"Life has no rules, there is no right or wrong, my wrong could be your right. When I broke into the industry I was the girl living a lavish life"

"People read my actions and not my intentions. I don't blame the media for the attitude people had towards me. The media does not fabricate things. When you act like a diva you get seen as one"

"Life is not about the material things. You can be a success and find real love without losing yourself along the way"

"Living rich was the loneliest time of my life"

"You can’t downgrade hard into hardships because the poverty will follow you. You downgrade into manifestation"

"No wedding bells anytime soon, I believe that having a companion doesn't really mean you have to get married"

"Companionship is when you are both at a space where you are content. Both of us know where we are going but focus on the future. If both of us are still building our careers so let's focus on that then we will revisit that"

"I've been depressed for about 15 years. I'm still dealing with it and I'm still getting anxiety attacks ... I only found out that I was really depressed like two years ago and when they diagnosed me, and I sat down with my shrink, that's when they actually told me that I've been depressed since my daughter was born 15 years ago"

"The industry is quite boring now because everyone is so curated ... there's a certain image they need to put out. For us, what sold was you being yourself"

"No. I worshipped him because I had a 'hero syndrome'. He saved me and gave me what I've always dreamt about. He was like God to me."

"We are broken. My siblings and I are broken because I think our parents couldn't articulate the kind of a family we are in ... So we have daddy issues"

"A man with money will get you everything, but you will pay for it."

"We now have a great opportunity to put land to good use, to take it out of those hands, lazy hands I might say, and put it into the working hands of our people."

"It is therefore important that as we put our vision to the country, we should do so directly, knowing that people out there want to be part of the process and will be responding, because in the end the drafting of the constitution must not be the preserve of the 490 members of this Assembly. It must be a constitution which they feel they own, a constitution that they know and feel belongs to them. We must therefore draft a constitution that will be fully legitimate, a constitution that will represent the aspirations of our people."

"President Zuma‚ from being a child‚ never had a chance‚ because of the situation in this country‚ even to go to school. But he was educated the ANC way. ... President Zuma‚ out of the top six positions‚ [was the only person to occupy] most of those positions – deputy secretary general‚ national chairperson‚ deputy president and now president. ... It shows love‚ respect and adoration. [Zuma's leadership within the ANC was] a long‚ beautiful history but spoiled at the last moment. [The transition is peaceful, but painful also,] because this is telling somebody [that] your time is up when [he] should have known by himself that his time is up."

"Now that I have been convicted, I want to explain my actions so that you ... should understand why I chose to join the struggle for the freedom of my people.... It was during my primary school years that the bare facts concerning the realities of South African society and its discrepancies began to unfold before me. I remember a period in the early 1960s, when there was a great deal of political tension, and we often used to encounter armed police in Soweto.... I remember the humiliation to which my parents were subjected by whites in shops and in other places where we encountered them, and the poverty. All these things had their influence on my young mind ... and by the time I went to Orlando West High School, I was already beginning to question the injustice of the society ... and to ask why nothing was being done to change it. It is true that I was trained in the use of weapons and explosives. The basis of my training was in sabotage, which was to be aimed at institutions and not people. I did not wish to add unnecessarily to the grievous loss of human life that had already been incurred. It has been suggested that our aim was to annihilate the white people of this country; nothing could be further from the truth. The ANC is a national liberation movement committed to the liberation of all the people of South Africa, black and white, from racial fear, hatred and oppression. I am married and have one child, and would like nothing more than to have more children, and to live with my wife and children with all the people in this country. One day that might be possible - if not for me, then at least for my brothers."

"As a people, our unity, determination and resilience has seen us through hard times. Just as this has been a year of great change, we look to the next year with great hope."

"Just as we attained our freedom through the support and solidarity of many people and nations around the world, we continue to stand in solidarity with the victims of injustice in other parts of the world."

"However, our primary focus must remain on the prevention of gender-based violence against the young girls and women of our country. Working with civil society and other partners across our society, we continue to call upon men and boys to stand at the forefront of changing attitudes and behavior."

"There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal."

"The ANC has been the ruling in South Africa since the dawn of democracy in 1994. By the time Ramaphosa rose to speak [in his inaugural State of the Nation address on 16 February 2018], South Africa had experienced nine years of destructive and devastating rule by Jacob Zuma. To give hope to the broken nation, Ramaphosa, in his New Dawn delivery, invoked the lyrics of a song by struggle and music icon Hugh Masekela called Thuma Mina, or Send Me, in a desperate but brilliant effort to galvanise all South Africans to action to reverse the negative effects of the excesses of the Zuma presidency. […] He had struck the right chord with the nation and Thuma Mina instantaneously forced its way into the social and political lexicon of the rainbow nation. […] Hugh Masekela was immortalised."

"They were saying Shangaans must leave [Ekurhuleni]. The Vendas must leave. The next thing they will say the Batswanas must leave. The BaXhosa must leave. Who is going to remain? ... We must defeat the demon of tribalism."

"In Zimbabwe, I was booed by the whole stadium. I had to apologise to the people of Zimbabwe for the attacks. I do not want to call it xenophobic attacks. South Africans do not hate people of other nations. … We had to offer an apology on behalf of the people of South Africa. We are loved in the continent. We are a sought after country. … I had to apologise because those attacks were a national shame, …"

"One of the other things that is going to help to give a boost to our economy is how we reform our state-owned enterprises. … The state-owned enterprises were sewers of corruption, a number of them. … There was rot, there was filth and there was deep corruption. We are rooting all that out right now."

"This conference, with overwhelming agreement, unanimous agreement, has resolved that the expropriation of land without compensation should be among the mechanisms available to government to give effect to land reform and redistribution. It has also been resolved that in implementing this decision, we must insure that we do not undermine the economy, the agricultural production, and food security in our country."

"The US has been unable to imagine a better future that goes beyond four plus one G, where they have been unable to imagine what 5G has to offer. They are clearly jealous that a Chinese company called Huawei has outstripped them and because they have been outstripped, they must now punish that one company. We cannot afford to have our own economy being held back because there is this fight that the US is having."

"The independence, the standing and the role of the Reserve Bank is sacrosanct. It will remain independent, as clearly stated in our constitution."

"The manifesto had a paragraph on a wish and an aspiration, acknowledging that the Reserve Bank is independent and that there is no intention whatsoever to tamper or tinker with the independence of the central bank. The wish that is expressed is, that as it goes ahead with monetary policy machinations, it will keep an eye on employment."

"The last decade has seen many of the gains of the early years of democracy reversed through state capture and corruption, a failure of collective leadership, policy uncertainty and a growing distance between the people and their movement and their government. We have had to come to terms with the erosion of the values of the ANC and confront difficult questions about the quality and integrity of our leadership as the ANC."

"That is the most wonderful training an actor can have. If you can speak Shakespeare, you can speak anything. And it gives you complete poise and grace of movement."

"I don’t know the why of anything, even when I pretend most diligently I do. The truth is the last time I had any idea why or what I was supposed to do I was lying in a shell hole, looking up at the sky. My mind was filled with a Bach keyboard sonata , which was one of the last I’d learned, I forget which one now. I absolutely knew I was about to die and I was completely happy and at peace, in a way I never was before or since, not even with you, in our best moments. It was so easy, you see, a kind of absolute joy and peace, because I knew it was all done and I was all square with life. Nothing left to do but let things take their course. And when I didn’t die, I didn’t know what to do. So I thought, I’ll take my revolver, go out and blow a hole through my head. Only I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew, I just knew you couldn’t do it that way. You couldn’t make it happen, not if you wanted to find peace. So, I thought, then, a sniper can do it for me. But no matter how I tried to let them no sniper ever found me. And all the other times I went out and lay in shell holes in No Man’s Land it wasn’t the same, and I knew I wouldn’t die this time, and of course I never did. I had this mad feeling I’d become some sort of Wandering Jew. And everything for so long afterwards was about dragging this living corpse of myself around, giving it things to do, because here it was, alive. And nothing made any sense and I didn’t even hope it would. I followed paths that were there to be followed, I did what others said to do."

"I grew up in South Africa, so believe me when I say: Israel is not an apartheid state ... The difference between the two countries could scarcely be more stark. Under apartheid, a legal structure of racial hierarchy governed all aspects of life. Black South Africans were denied the vote. They were required by law to live, work, study, travel, enjoy leisure activities, receive medical treatment and even go to the lavatory separately from those with a different colour of skin. Interracial relationships and marriages were illegal. It was subjugation in its rawest form. Contrast that with Israel, a country whose Arab, Druze, Bedouin, Ethiopian, Russian, Baha’i, Armenian and other citizens have equal status under the law. Anyone who truly understands what apartheid was cannot possibly look around Israel today and honestly claim there is any kind of parity."

"Convention dictates that the Chief Rabbi stays well away from party politics — and rightly so. However, challenging racism is not a matter of politics, it goes well beyond that. Wherever there is evidence of it, including in any of our political parties, it must be swiftly rooted out. Hateful prejudice is always wrong, whoever the perpetrator, whoever the victim."

"How far is too far? How complicit in prejudice would a leader of Her Majesty’s opposition have to be to be considered unfit for office? Would associations with those who have incited hatred against Jews be enough? Would describing as “friends” those who endorse the murder of Jews be enough? It seems not."

"MORAL REALITY AND MORAL FACTS -- https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/george-ellis/"

"Actually philosophical speculations have led to a great deal of good science. Einstein’s musings on Mach’s principle played a key role in developing general relativity. Einstein’s debate with Bohr and the EPR paper have led to a great of deal of good physics testing the foundations of quantum physics. My own examination of the Copernican principle in cosmology has led to exploration of some great observational tests of spatial homogeneity that have turned an untested philosophical assumption into a testable – and indeed tested - scientific hypothesis. That’ s good science."

"Attempts to explain values in terms of neuroscience or evolutionary theory in fact have nothing whatever to say about what is good or bad. That is a philosophical or religious question (scientists trying to explain ethics from these kinds of approaches always surreptitiously introduce some unexamined concept of what is a good life by the back door)."

"You cannot do physics or cosmology without an assumed philosophical basis. You can choose not to think about that basis: it will still be there as an unexamined foundation of what you do."

"Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy."

""On the limits of quantum theory: Contextuality and the quantum–classical cut", Annals of Physics 327 (2012) 1890–1932"

"THE ETERNAL TRUTHS OF MATHEMATICS -- https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/george-ellis/"

"TOP-DOWN CAUSATION -- https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/george-ellis/"

"WHAT IS FINE-TUNING? -- https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/george-ellis/"

"As biomedical research continues to provide us with greater understanding and with powerful new tools, the scientific community has, I think, a dual responsibility. One is to push forward the frontiers to make medical advances possible, to understand what cancer is, to develop new ways of treating cancer, to prevent heart disease, and to develop ways of preventing, ultimately, disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and depression. But science also has a second responsibility to society, which is to point out what we need to be concerned about as a society and to bring to bear humane, balanced, and thoughtful ways of dealing with the advances that come from biomedical research. Scientists need to speak to these issues."

"Uri Friedman: Why did the South African government, in the mid-1970s, decide to embark on a nuclear-weapons program?"

"I think movements can indeed force reluctant politicians to take steps. If one looks at the example of South Africa, who would have ever believed that de Klerk would take the position he ended up taking? That was because of the movements within South Africa, the South African movement outside of South Africa, and also the global solidarity campaign."

"You have Palestinians living in Israel with full political rights. You don’t have discriminatory laws against them, I mean not letting them swim on certain beaches or anything like that. I think it's unfair to call Israel an apartheid state. If Kerry did so, I think he made a mistake."

"Our failure to achieve greater income equality is reflected in the fact that our Gini index has deteriorated from 66 in 1996, to 70 in 2008. Inequality has also increased within all our population groups – from 54 to 62 among black South Africans, and from 43 to 50 among whites. The most equal countries in the world – Japan, Sweden and Denmark – have Gini indexes of 25. In these countries the top 10% earn only six times as much as the bottom 10%. By contrast, the top 10% in South Africa earn 110 times more than the bottom 10%. The long-term solution to the problems of poverty and inequality lies in vastly improving our education and training system, in creating jobs and in ensuring rapid and sustainable economic growth. It will also be essential to address the underlying social problems identified by the World Bank. These are precisely the factors that have been diagnosed and addressed by the South Africa’s National Planning Commission in its National Development Plan. The challenge will be to ensure that we successfully implement the National Development Plan. If we can do so, I am confident that we will be able to make continuing progress in reducing poverty and inequality – and thus, in achieving the vision in our Constitution."