Home » Posts tagged 'conservatism'
Tag Archives: conservatism
𝗦𝗘𝗕𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗔, 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟮
𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 – 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝘆𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘁.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Donald Trump reminds me of sethotsela in South Africa, the land of my birth. Sethotsela is the outcome of a once-buried corpse returned to life by witchcraft methods. This is a creature of the night. It is meant to spread terror in certain human-populated areas, although it may be met in the wild of the night in the forests or mountains. In dark mountain caves, sethotsela can be encountered at any time of day.
With the years, and especially since I started writing and publishing books since 2015, I find myself resorting to my mother tongue, Sesotho, in my efforts to understand sociological phenomena in the world. Growing up and going to school in Lesotho during my formative years in the 1960s, the expression bohlale ba hloleho was used to describe children and adults of exceptional intelligence.
Intelligent children shone at school, and socially. Intelligent adults shone in all human productive endeavours, from agricultural work to national leadership roles. Translated to English, bohlale ba hloleho means natural intelligence, or intrinsic wisdom. People with bohlale ba hloleho are the kind of people who just know it. They just have it. They are effortless problem solvers, ever with viable explanations of how things in nature and society work at all levels.
It is in the concepts and metaphors of bohlale ba hloleho abound in deep Sesotho language speakers that I have found greater clarity in my strive to make sense of my world, its joys, and traumas. The calibre of our world leaders and the outcomes of their work for the good or bad of their respective societies and the global community fascinates me profoundly.
Donald Trump features in this presentation for what I perceive of him as his abundantly manifest disconcerting unhinged intrigues of being. No other prominent incompetent pseudo-politician in the world today does it worse than Trump.
The Donald Trump brand enshrines amongst others, blatant extreme White Supremacist racism, bravado, career suicide, condescendence, denialism, fascism, fraud, idiocy, incongruity, inconsistency, indecency, infantility, ingratitude, lies, manipulation, mockery; there is also misogyny, mayhem, obstinacy, petulance, rigmarole, shamelessness, vindictiveness, vulgarity, and white privilege. It beats me that there exist pro-Trump racial interest groups under the banners such as Blacks for Trump, Chinese Americans for Trump, Indian Americans for Trump, and Latinos for Trump, to name a few. And, then, there are Women for Trump. Jeeezzzus!
CLARIFICATION
This presentation is an extended and updated version of an original essay I wrote and published on my blog, Chilembo Warrior Moves. The publication was on January 13, 2022. I’ve been following with fascination as to how, with his cult of personality intrigues, Donald Trump has managed to polarize the American society.
I do not expect that the stuff that I write or say about Donald Trump will ever make any difference if ever they got to him, or his cohorts. It is not my goal either. I neither write nor speak about the man for his sake. I do this for myself, for the preservation of my sanity. Donald Trump is not my cup of tea.
People have the right to hold opinions on anything or anybody they like or don’t like. However, I am ever so baffled by people who say that they don’t know anything about politics, and that they neither are interested in the concept and practice of politics.
Politics is the science of governance. People that are indifferent to, or ignorant of the various aspects of politics, myopically distance themselves from basic human relations management mechanisms that engineer society at all levels. From society to society in different epochs with time, human collectives will either spontaneously, or through force, arrange themselves in particular ways. The intention being to influence human behaviour contra existential imperatives such as the search for, production, and distribution of food and shelter. That’ll include the creation of systems and structures that enhance and sustain the people’s general well-being, ensuring the propagation of the species.
Historically, different ideologies have emerged in efforts to explain the roles and positions of people in the processes of living in a world of limited survival resources. Marxism looks at how classes emerge in society as to what and how much access the people have to the ownership and control of the means of production. The upper, ruling classes own more at the expense of the lower classes, who are the oppressed. Socialism propagates ideas that the workers shall share ownership of the means of production.
In Capitalism, the means of production are in varying magnitudes owned by individuals or corporate structures. Those that don’t own shall be in perpetual servitude to the Capitalists, the former selling their labour cheaply to the latter. Capitalism aims to earn profit upon selling their goods and services at prices higher than production costs, which include labour costs.
Ideally, Communism eliminates private property and socio-economic classes. Here, the state owns the commanding heights of the economy and manages the economy for the people, who are co-owners and shall be equal beneficiaries of the bounty of the land according to their respective needs. Communism takes Socialism to the next level.
Regardless of where we are in the world, politics permeates all aspects of our lives. It doesn’t matter whether one is oblivious to the intricacies of politics or not. It is the politically ignorant and/ or indifferent that make for the rise of pathetic politicians as to the likes of Donald Trump. To understand politics is to understand humanity and its place in the universe.
If USA’s January 6, 2021, insurrection is anything to go by, politicians of personalities like Donald Trump are some of the most dangerous national leaders we can have anywhere in the world. Being the most powerful country in the world, whatever good or bad happens in the USA has enormous positive effects or repercussions in the world. This affects us all, irrespective of whether we are interested in politics or not.
If you are a practicing or an aspiring International Trade business person, follow events in America in your wealth creation and management endeavours.
Those who follow local and international politics with critical thinking minds are never taken by surprise when world peace conditions or world economic trends point north or south. The well-informed can predict potential outcomes of events at home and/ or abroad. Therefore, because I can see the potential danger that Donald Trump poses to his country, and subsequently the rest of the world, I write and talk about him to quell my frustration with the American Nightmare.
Furthermore, I write and talk about Trump to repeal my anxiety, and to fortify my soul in the threat of the World War III outbreak peril he’d pose to humanity should he return to power in the forthcoming USA Presidential Elections 2024, on November 5. First, there’ll be the 2nd American Civil War. People, get ready! I’ve done my part: I’ve told you so.
SETHOTSELA (continued)
Sethotsela scares the living daylights out of those who encounter it. The unfortunate can even die. Those who have been in the presence of sethotsela and survived can become so traumatized that they begin to worship its mystic; doing everything possible to avoid crossing paths with the dreadful spectre.
This creature can also be deliberately made out of various materials, making a mannequin to represent a likeness of a marked dead person. Witchcraft rituals are then applied to give life to the mannequin. At worst, a sethotsela can be a silent, elusive killer; an instrument of coercion. Amongst others, the idea may be, on behalf of the witchcraft practitioner, to eliminate people from, or to force them by fear to vacate certain areas. That way, enabling the witchcraft people to acquire more land and property, enhancing their power over their fellow citizens.
SEBOPUA
In my mother tongue, Sesotho, the verb ‘to mold’ (with clay) is ho bopa (ka letsopa). By extension, ho bopa describes ‘to form’, or ‘to create’ a tangible, inanimate object out of clay or any other similar malleable material. The objects made may be of functional, ornamental, or both values. They may also be aesthetically attractive or repulsive according to the eye of the beholder. And, they may either be destructive or life-supporting, either by design or accident, through intentional application.
For purposes of this presentation, we shall work with the concept of ho bopa in terms of creation as a force. In this case, creation manifesting a dysfunctional output; a thing, with a potential for destruction of the self and/ or its environment. I define creation here to be the supra-human force that is responsible for the existence of the universe and all that exists or doesn’t exist in it. What is, how, and when creation made the universe is a question answered relative to earthlings’ capacity to fathom the extent of the universe as to the universe’s magnitude and its functional attributes.
Human beings’ capacity to understand creation as a conceptual or objective reality is a function of the individual’s cognitive wiring. This influences the individual’s reasoning power contra existential questions, big or small. Therefore, whilst one person might attribute creation to the power of God, another will attribute it to the Big Bang. In-between, there are alternative explanatory models as numerous as there are humans on earth. I won’t go there.
Etymologically expanding ho bopa leads us to, amongst others, the adjective sebopua. The latter approximately translates as ‘a product of creation’. i.e., a thing, an object the existence of which is acknowledged simply because it exists as a result of creation’s infinite creative potential. Creation gets it right most times; it screws up badly sometimes.
Sebopua is thus used to describe people of various degrees of physical handicaps and intellectual disabilities; often from birth. It may be due to birthing complications, illness, inherent neurological or genetic aberrations, accidents, and many more. The expression sebopua is often applied derogatively. It may also be used in exasperation as a manifestation of grief against a condition of hopelessness, extreme suffering for the afflicted, and the next of kin as well; including national social welfare authorities, where applicable.
On the one extreme, there’ll be a wholly physically disabled person of any age; drawing sympathy from others: harmless, poor, unfortunate product of God’s creation.
On the other extreme, there’ll be a borderline, apparently normal person. But they will have all kinds of eccentricities. These render the sebopua incapable of functioning within socially conventional boundaries of human interactions. Much so in adulthood, people in this category tend to live in parallel universes contra mainstream social wisdom concerning how society is organized; from the smallest family units to the larger national entities. Here, the term sebopua is applied derisively, and it may attract animosities towards the concerned.
Sebopua people break all the rules, either purposely or because ‘it is what it is’. They don’t know anything else but their unique ways of looking at the world. They cannot understand that others can think or act differently from them in given situations. They simply don’t know how to empathize: it’s their way or no way at all. Civility is a concept unknown here. Sebopua people are ever such spoilt brats, from childhood to the grave. They are bullies; outright dumbheads. They are deceitful charmers capable of gross manipulation of the emotionally and/ or mentally weak; instilling lasting loyalty to the self from the subjugated through fear: The Ruthless Rule.
Nevertheless, some of human history’s greatest thinkers and inventors the works of whom society benefits from even today can easily be drawn from the eccentrics above. These often tend not to be too much of a burden to society. For example, love or hate Elon Musk for screwing up by X-ing Twitter; he has given us the Tesla brand, SpaceX and Starlink. It is those that are inclined to destruction that are a curse to humanity. Some of the most perilous leaders in human history have emerged from the latter category of sebopua, a freak of creation. Donald Trump fits into this category. Perfectly.
The thing about sebopua is that they are just a thing. They are devoid of coherent feelings and thoughts expression, be it verbal or written. Sebopua are one-way-traffic dysfunctional communication machines. Their language skills often leave much to be desired. Sebopua given to verbal diarrhoea crap-talk inclinations, talking to one could as well be as good as talking to a clay-molded human figure.
Sebopua can be indifferent to the elements; they might know no pain. The only form of pleasure that matters for sebopua is their staying alive at the expense of their perceived and real enemies, not understanding how anybody can be so stupid compared to their, sebopua’s superior intelligence. Sebopua brutality can be horrendous. Woe to the spineless that fall for sebopua’s deceptive charisma. Woe to non-stayer enemies of sebopua. Find Yevgeny Prigozhin, he’ll tell you about Vladimir Putin. Mike Pence barely survived Trump’s Maga lynching mob
Another thing about sebopua is that an eccentric sebopua is a sebopua. The condition knows no colour; it knows no race. The only difference is the relative extent of power exercised, and access to weapons of destruction according to sebopua’s location on the planet. This here debunks racism as an ideology that claims and pushes ideas that some races are inferior to others. In a perfect world of the free, people group in cliques not always out of racial identity solidarities.
Both for the good and the bad, people are drawn to and bond with one another out of shared mental constructs; i.e., shared world views as to common fears, or other human passions. Opposite poles attract is a magnetic studies principle in Physics. In human relations, bonds reflecting and upholding certain innate behavioural attributes are captured in the idiom birds of a feather flock together.
There’s sebopua in a cul-de-sac in America today: Donald Trump. The walls are closing in. I wonder what he’s going to do when he can’t breathe anymore. They say he farts all the time. In England, another one bit the dust: Boris Johnson with Brexshit. The world must now learn to stop political experiments with dibopua (sebopua plural form) if we have learned anything from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
In the old days, dibopua used to be hidden away. Or worse. Democracy is a wonderful thing in our times: everyone has the right to live. In principle. Whatever the cost. However, there’s a tipping point to everything in life. May the fair and just prevail in all holes and surfaces of the planet. May light reign supreme. Ultimately. The future must be bright for all.
SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
January 13, 2022
Updated: 20.05.2024
RECOMMENDATION: Do you want to start writing own blog or website? Try WordPress!
𝗢𝗡 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: 𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗧 𝗜𝗜
ɪɴꜰᴏʀᴍᴇᴅ ꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ ᴏɴ ᴡᴏᴍᴇɴ’ꜱ ꜱᴇxᴜᴀʟ ʀᴇᴘʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛɪᴠᴇ ʜᴇᴀʟᴛʜ ʀɪɢʜᴛꜱ
I came to the world via South Africa, where I spent the first fourteen-and-half years of my life, June 1960-January 1975. As I get older and older for each new year that comes and goes, the impact that growing up in that country has had on my fundamental views of life becomes ever more glaring. That as I strive to make sense of the multitudinous manifestations of horrendous sociological choices outcomes in the world today. In that sense, I was born at the right place, in my time.
The horrendous sociological choices outcomes I mention above arising from apparent mental derangement states in which some of our national and global political leaders thrive as they pathetically engineer society to perpetual dysfunctionality. They think out, formulate, and work to impose outrageous rules and laws that are obviously detrimental to the well-being of society. In fact, these lunatics present an existential threat to human and other life on earth. This as evidenced by national social upheavals owing to ever degenerative leadership quality across the world.
Social collapse attendant to dominant degenerate ethico-political leadership characteristically culminate in civil and international wars, ill-management of potential and actual natural catastrophes, including pandemics. The current Covid-19 pandemic is supposed to have given the world a wake-up call. Of course, this is an outlandish idea to many a national-global leader, and, not in the least, a segment of the new socio-cultural influencer class at the same scale. The latter extensively prevalent in the vast and ever so rapidly growing internet social media platforms sphere.
In the world today, Rocket Science knowledge is not a pre-requisite for the ability to pinpoint where on the globe the scum of society are all out to deprive people of the right to live free and happy in the abundance of survival resources existence provides for all. It’s all on Google. It’s all in the news. If you read and/ listen to conspiracy theories news publications, you are no different from the scum of the earth. Wretched souls beyond redemption. Shame.
Growing up in South Africa, I was from an early age mentally conditioned that I might at some point have to sacrifice my schooling opportunities for the benefit of my younger sister, Sisi. Prime assumption being that misfortune could somehow befall my parents. In that event, they would eventually fail to finance my siblings’ and I’s education, caught up in the doldrums of endemic Black South Africans’ poverty-stricken existence.
Seen from a global human perspective, parenting and all that it entails is what it is by default. It is not my intention to want to trivialize the challenges of parenting elsewhere. But parenting in the then inherently doomed, dysfunctional, systemically racist Apartheid South Africa was an arduous, unpredictable endeavour for Black people: unemployment, disease, violence, rampant sudden death. Other than the new faces on drivers’ seats of post-Apartheid South African socio-economic transformation state machinery, not much has changed for the masses of the underprivileged in the country, though.
It was never difficult for me to understand that in the event that some tragedy would befall my parents, especially my father, I’d have to stop schooling, go find work, and earn some money to continue where they’d have left to financially support the family. The idea that I’d defy the misfortune fate of my people had already been long engrained in my head. Therefore, it wasn’t accidental that my mother encouraged me to earn my own pocket money by selling oranges on the streets during school holidays. I was ten years old the first time. Three years later, 1973, I landed my first ever formal employment job as a junior waiter at a then Whites Only Italian Restaurant in my hometown, Welkom.
I’m still alive. With variable rates of success over the years, I have lived to fulfill my obligations as a supportive elder brother to my two surviving siblings from my mother. Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I haven’t been able to be there for my half-siblings from my father’s other procreative endeavours exterior to my mother, prior to or after their marriage.
Any fool ought to know by now that education is a historically powerful facilitatory tool to appreciable degrees of progressive participation in, and gain from socio-economic activities of our modern, digital age global society. Indeed, some guys with all the luck and some other special attributes will become economically and politically high and mighty without having gone far by way of academic education attainment. These may or may not be partners in crime vis-à-vis upliftment or destruction of society.
The unabashed manifestation and relentless growth of misogyny in the later years of my life boggle my mind. That’s because I grew up aware that upon having weighed the options in time, it was a trend in my neighbourhood that priority was given to pushing girls to acquire as much education as possible. The girls could be nurses and teachers when grown up. Costs of more specialized education in medicine, engineering, and other such related fields of academic or professional training were prohibitive. This fact, combined with generally demotivating Apartheid state policies towards Black education, created a major barrier for my people’s pursuit of higher education ambitions.
It made sense to empower girls because, ideally, they grew up to be mothers of the nation, starting with their respective family units. An educated girl subsequently getting married to a well-bred young man was worth gold to her family. In my then community’s perfect world within the context of the imperfect Apartheid world then, boys having sacrificed their own education for their sisters could always come back and continue schooling once their sisters had at least completed pre-university studies. If the plan didn’t succeed, the boys would simply continue working, get married, have children, and see the latter go through the same cycle of sacrifices with little prospects of sustainability in practice.
From my generation in my childhood neighbourhood in Thabong, Welkom, I don’t know of even a single girl that ever obtained at least full high school education level. Although possibly true in some instances, this is not necessarily mainly a result of family economic constraints nor personal cognitive inadequacies.
My only concern, if not fear, about the idea of me delaying my academic advancement for my younger sister’ sake was the potential of her getting pregnant whilst still at school. In that case, that’d be the end of dreams, for both of us, of a better life derived from well-paying jobs education aspiringly led to. Experience showed that once the boys entered the labour market, not many ever got the opportunity to continue with their educational ambitions later on as life progressed.
If anything, the boys would also soon make other girls pregnant and then get caught in the trap of lasting poverty as they get overwhelmed by economic hardships of their own. Paradoxically, once a young girl got pregnant, that was it: she was finished. No more school. Never. As a general observation, which to a large extent remains true to this day, early-age pregnancy totally destroyed girls’ lives. The situation would be worse if the impregnator refused to take responsibility for looking after or supporting the immature mother-to-be.
My mother-tongue, Sesotho, is the most disparaging, derisive language I know. In Sesotho, a young girl getting pregnant is described as ‘o senyehile’. It means that ‘she is destroyed’. And she’ll be treated as such by both her family and the community. She’s brought shame not only to the family but everyone around her. At worst, she’d be treated with much disrespect. Boys and men now seeing her as cheap, and, therefore, reduce her to a readily available sexual object moving forward. Consent not a concept adhered to by the male sex predators in this case. Many a girl’s life has been destroyed this way, culminating in suicides in the extreme.
‘O ntshitse mpa’ translates as ‘She has taken out the stomach’. Abortion is described as ‘Ho ntsha mpa’ in Sesotho, therefore. Graphically, ‘Ho ntsha mpa’ as a process means ‘to remove the stomach’. Consequently, I’ve since my childhood days associated abortion with excruciating physical pain for the girls concerned. As I grew older in my mid-late teens, I began to be cognizant of, and think independently on ethical and moral issues. It was at this point that I concluded lastingly that regardless of the circumstances prevailing around a pregnancy, it must be an extremely tortuous decision for a woman to choose to terminate it.
As a firmly held philosophical stand-point, I concluded that it took much resolve and courage for a woman to choose to endure the physical and emotional pain that abortion necessarily entails. This is one area in which I feel and think that women manifest magnanimity deserving the highest and unreserved admiration. To force a woman to carry to the full a pregnancy that’s uncontestably detrimental to her physical and mental health, if not life-threatening, ought to be the crime.
Abortion as a medically defensible procedure to safeguard and enhance the well-being of women in the living ought to be a right understood from a woman’s perspective. Stupid old men who have no practical idea at all about what it takes and feels to be pregnant and subsequently give birth must stay out of promulgating laws that interfere with women’s sexual reproductive health rights. Anti-abortion women dancing to the tunes of stupid conservative old and young men are traitors against their own kind. These women need help. When one woman appallingly postulates that another woman can opt for abortion at the point of actual birthing, it suggests some serious mental imbalance issues. Another one is about women aborting children already born. Jeeezzuzzz!!!
SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
July 25, 2022
Simon Chilembo 