Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
Election results update
Watching the SABC and ETV coverage of the election results is a bit like trying to watch a rugby game blindfolded with very loud and drunk spectatiors sitting all around you. There is a lot of noise but one is not able to gather much hard information from this exercise. And if one analyst or presenter says “It’s early days yet,” I am going to scream.
The leaderboard at the IEC results centre also provides utterly meaningless statistics because one does not know which wards or municipalities have reported their results, whether more results have come in from traditionally DA than ANC strongholds and which province has reported the largest percentage of those results so far. Idiotic.
In any case, this is a local government election, so what happens in each Metro and in each town is far more important than the overall vote tallies for the parties. If one wants to get real information one must go to the Internet. Unfortunately the Electoral Commission site is outdated and is far too complicated to use and unless one is a serious number crunching geek it does not seem of much use.
News24 has probably the best and easiest to use page. It contains a map with both 20o6 and 2011 results, which gives one a far better picture of what is going on than the TV reports. Otherwise, for those on Twitter, it is very useful to search for #LGEResults or #LGER2011 and follow those feeds. From what I gather from my sources the DA did very well in Cape Town and will win in a landslide, while the ANC probably did better than expected in Johannesburg. (And, no, I am not going to caution that it is early days yet.)
