Hello and welcome! This little weekly column will present politics at its most absurd. SAtired supports freedom of speech, small government and free markets. This means we’re centrists. This is NOT a safe space!
The Weekly Squib*
- squib /skwɪb/ noun: squib 1. a small firework that issues a hissing sound before exploding into a short piece of satirical writing.
On the one hand, and on the other
On 10 February, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni took to Twitter, as is his wont. En passant, his Twitter handle describes him as ‘The Duke of the Duchy of Makgobaskloof (sic)’. Clearly a man who admires the titled ownership system of the European colonial project.
Sadly, his tweet said: ‘At the core of all this is the question of Race, Class, Gender and Power. The Colonialism of a Special Type will take long to resolve. Remember that the majority (not all) white people thought of themselves as the “civilising contingent into Africa”. Emphasis is on NOT ALL.’
He earned 350 Likes.
Contrast this with happier times at the SA Reserve Bank when, at a breakfast session in Joburg in 2006, Tito said: ‘I have sought to recruit many competent black people, and no sooner have we trained them than they leave. I get so upset! I am stopping this recruitment of black people. I am okay with my Afrikaners. They stay and do the work.’
Clearly, being Reserve Bank Governor in 2006 was more liberating than being the president’s finance minister in 2021.
[Image: World Economic Forum, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30536600]
Boob job
Hospitals in the United Kingdom have begun using the term ‘chestfeeding’ instead of ‘breastfeeding’, just years after US academics published a study in which they argued that the promotion of breastfeeding as the ‘natural’ way to feed a child has many negative societal effects.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals in the United Kingdom have stopped using the word ‘breastfeeding’ for the word ‘chestfeeding’ in an attempt to be more inclusive of transgender individuals.
Harvard Medical School has referred to women as ‘birthing people’ in an effort to ‘include those who identify as non-binary or transgender’.
‘We are concerned about breastfeeding promotion that praises breastfeeding as the ‘natural’ way to feed infants,’ wrote Jessica Martucci of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Anne Barnhill of Johns Hopkins University in the journal Pediatrics.
‘Promoting breastfeeding as “natural” may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that “natural” approaches are presumptively healthier.’
Martucci and Barnhill explained that in the 1950s and 1960s, a movement of women (and the medical establishment – Ed.) sought to promote breastfeeding in the wake of advances in medical formula technology. Said academics find this ‘ethically problematic’ because it may ‘support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family’ — for example, ‘that women should be the primary caretakers of children’.
‘Referenceing the “natural” in breastfeeding promotion, then, may inadvertently endorse a controversial set of values about family life and gender roles, which would be ethically inappropriate,’ they state.
The researchers were also concerned that such rhetoric ‘may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination.’
As recently as 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed its stance that ‘breastfeeding and human milk are the normative standards for infant feeding and nutrition’.
‘Given the documented short- and long-term medical and neurodevelopmental advantages of breastfeeding, infant nutrition should be considered a public health issue and not only a lifestyle choice.’
Apparently not, according to these SJWs. If ever there was an argument against Americans sending their children to Ivy League private universities, this is it.
Juju skewers Cyril, again
You almost had to feel sorry for Cyril ‘Ramaphoria’ Ramaphosa at the SONA virtual debate on Tuesday. EVERYBODY slammed him. To misquote Dorothy Parker: ‘It serves us right for putting all our eggs in one bastard.’
Julius, however, always has a turn of phrase and tone that is as insulting as it is accurate: ‘You are incompetent, incapable and the most unreliable human being.
‘It has been three years since you took office and we can all say you have not achieved anything that is worth mentioning.
‘It’s now evident that the Guptas have been replaced by a very powerful white capitalist capture of the Ruperts, the Oppenheimers, Stephen Koseff, the Menells and all other white people who played a central role in buying the conference of the ruling party in 2017. We want to state categorically that any leader of our country who owes loyalty to settlers and white state capturers is defining himself as an enemy of the people. We will isolate and ultimately defeat all puppets of the white capitalist establishment.’
[Image: Journalist at eNCA, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87966144]
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