Are South Africans being racist in their condemnation of racists?

DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this article is not to make out that one group of racists is worse than another. All racists of all skin colors are equally vile. The purpose of this article is to highlight that racism in South Africa is not just a "whites only" problem, and to highlight that white racists are no better or no worse than black racists. I have included a small sample of the comments made, so should not be considered an accurate reflection of racist ratios or anything like that. It was never intended to be. The single most important point this article makes is.... not only whites are racist, and the second most important point it makes, we (us South Africans) are appear to have double standards on how we treat racists. 

So this is a pretty hot topic, one that I am a little nervous about speaking up about, but the inner liberal in me cries out for equal social justice. I am an equal opportunity offender. I despise racists of all colors and all stripes. 

So I was pretty shocked to see a white South African make a really silly, insensitive and racist comment (that is embarrassing to anyone who reads it).

Here is the original comment and her "apology". 

Now Pennys comments are trending all over social media. Rightfully so. She said something horrible and she is being held accountable for it. However, I noticed a racist trend in the condemnation of Penny's racism. It seems the majority of South Africans will only criticize a white racist. Apparently all racists are not equal and South Africans mostly ignored the thousands of racists comments coming from other commentators. I have included a handful of these comments to give you an idea at what I am talking about: (this is not meant to be a volume counter or meter of the amount of racists, there were also white racists who made more comments, but this is to highlight it not a whites only problem - white people already know they have a problem, and its unlikely you will hear a white person say, "but white people cant be racist").

Almost no one had anything to say about Lucky's racism, and he was not the only one.

Now all the comments above seem to show varying degrees of racism, call for violence, give out her personal details (including phone numbers, ID, etc) or other forms of dehumanization.

When I confronted these people to let them know they are fighting a racist by being racist.... my words and the irony of their actions appeared to be lost on them.

Or if acknowledged, a racist response like these was given:

The media and a huge portion of South Africa attacked and rightfully condemned Penny for her racist comments, but that same huge portion of South Africa did not say a word, or ignored the words of Lucky and the other racists.

Why do we seem to have such serious double standards with black racists and white racists? Are we racist in our racist condemnation?

By condemning one group of racists and doing nothing about the other group appears to legitimize the views of those racists. We need to be careful in our condemnation and apply it equally to all people of all colors. Every group has racists. We need to confront ALL racists. Not just the ones of a skin color that is not ours.

OFFICIAL DA RESPONSE TO PENNYS RACIST COMMENTS

A good move from the Democratic Alliance. Racists will not be tolerated on any level within the party. The DA is a liberal party building a multicultural, nonracial society. 

Not all political parties fire the racists in their parties:

http://www.citizen.co.za/419775/whites-must-fkoff-anc-councillor/

UPDATE:

JOHANNESBURG – Jawitz Properties says it's taking serious action against its former employee for posting a racist comment on her Facebook page.
Penny Sparrow took to social media on Saturday and referred to black people as monkeys.

The funniest thing here, is we are all children of Africa. This highlights the levels of ignorance in Penny's comments. We are primates that learnt to make machines. As the quote goes, "these beings with soaring imaginations, would eventually find themselves and their machines in interplanetary space". We are an amazing primate species. I consider myself a proud African primate.

UPDATE:

The EFF`s official response. If you swapped the word "white" out for the word "Jew", you would think you were at a rally in Germany in 1941. Basically their response makes outrageous, hyperbolic claims about how white people in South Africa are, attributes the actions of a few idiots to all white people, complains just about white racists, and contains a motion they want to pass that is a basically a blatant racist law designed only to protect one group of people.

How to copy and restore Fallout 4 to Steam

So a friend of mine recently convinced me to to purchase Fallout 4. I wanted to play it right away and did not want to wait for my slow Internet (10Mb) to download 24GB. So I copied his game folder. It was a bit of a mission to get working and non of the instructions we met worked correctly for it (as it is such a new game). So without further ado, here's how to copy your friends Fallout 4 folder and import it into Steam.

1) Purchase the game and start the Steam download. Let it download around 50MB of data.
2) Browse to your Steam Folders download folder. For me it was:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\downloading

In this folder where a bunch of new files and a folder with a number. In my case it was 377160 (take note of this folder name).

3) Go back to Steam and pause the download.
4) Go to your Steam Library and right click on the game, and select Delete Local Content
5) Close/Exit Steam
6) Copy your friends Fallout 4 folder into the numbered downloads directory (mine was 377160)
7) Go to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\

7.1) There may or may not be a common folder there, if there is not one, create one and then browse to it:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\

8) In the 'common' folder create a folder called 'Fallout 4'
9) Copy the game files into this folder.
10) Startup Steam.

Hopefully now Steam will verify the data and you will not have to wait for a long download.

Temp Article, will come back later and clean this up. 

IOL.co.za Independent Media Agenda

I have been online for a very long time. I remember when the website IOL.co.za first came to be and I watched its growth over the years. However, things have changed in recent years.  This all happened when the Sekunjalo (a heavily ANC connected company) bought out Independent Media.

Over time IOL.CO.ZA has become a political mouth piece for the ruling African National Congress. For my American readers you can liken the ownership of IOL.CO.ZA and its relationship to the ANC in the same way that Rupert Murdoch and the Republican Party in the USA are connected.

There have been multiple incidents where very obvious ANC influence has shown itself. Independent journalists like Tony Weaver got fired from the Cape Times (a media publication in the Independent Media stable) for not bowing down to ANC pressure. Recently a respected journalist by Max Du Preez quit because of the strong political influence. He could no longer suffer the attacks of journalist ethics in silence. 

People high up in Independent Media are well known to go grovel for forgiveness if Zuma is upset at an article rather than maintaining any type of integrity. IOL.co.za is also well known for publishing articles supportive if the dictator Robert Mugabe. Basically in a nutshell, IOL.co.za have become a cesspool of propaganda and bad news. 

However the reason for me writing about IOL.co.za was not to inform you about their terrible propaganda but to you inform you about a current and insidious propaganda tactic currently underway at IOL.co.za

The corrupt ANC can not handle that the Democratic Alliance (DA) runs the Western Cape. The DA is a pretty honest political party that has not been corrupted like the ANC has. They run the Western Cape well and the Western Cape is often known as the best run province in South Africa. However, the DA has lots of white people in it, so the ANC are trying their best to portray the DA as a racist white party that wants to being back Apartheid. In almost every reference to the DA or anything the DA is involved in... they will try portray as racist. Zumas ANC are so racist, they try make it out that all white people are racist.

So right now the current campaign by IOL is to try portray the city of Cape Town as a racist city. Racism happens everywhere. Some black people are racist and some white people are racist. Cape Town is actually a very liberal and multicultural city where most people get along. If you read IOL.co.za you would never get that impression though. Almost weekly they run a story about a racist in Cape Town. Sometimes they`ll even go back a year or more to try dig up an old story where something racist happened. They are very specific in their coverage of the racism. The racist story can only involve a white person being racist to a black person. It will never cover black racism. It hardly every covers racism from anywhere else in the country. It almost completely focuses on racism in Cape Town.

Why is IOL doing this? They are trying to create that false perception that a DA governed city is a racist city. In the last 3 months there have been a large amount of "white on black" racism only involving Cape Town. If you search "Cape Town" on IOL this is what you get:

Please note, these articles are the latest articles from the last several months. I only copied about 20% of them. There are many many more on the actual website, but this will give you an idea at their theme

Black in Cape Town? Brace yourself

ANC threatens to ‘contaminate Cape Town’

Elite Cape Town restaurant denies racism

Cape Town a racist city

Load shedding schedule is racist

Cape Town's secret white club 

Cape restaurant changes ‘racist’ name

Cape mayor tackles HRC racist label

CPUT suspends student for racist rant

Not easy being black in the colonial Mother City

Workers at call centre cry racism

‘I don’t care if I pee on a black man

Racist tenant ad sparks outrage

Porta potties are racist

Design Capital appointments racist 

'Where do all the black people work?'

DA keeps Western Cape divided

Man knocked out after K-word

‘Racist store turned me away’

Gardener whipped on his way to work

Woman charged for K-word, Taser attack

Please note, I am not defending any of the deplorable racist incidents that happened above. The above articles generally represent peoples opinions, suspect studies and a handful of actual incidents where there was racism. Racism is everywhere, but if you read IOL you would think it just happens in Cape Town.

The IOL agenda is pretty clear. They have lost all credibility.  They have become has become a puppet mouthpiece to Zuma's corrupt ANC.

Its a sad day in South Africa, when the ANC acts more like the Apartheid government every year. T

IOL have become as useful to South Africans as Steve Hofmeyr. Independent media are in my opinion, a cancer to journalism and journalist ethics. South Africans need to be careful. ANC corruption is spreading to the media as well. 

Four Easy Steps To Improve Your Wordpress Security

So you have a Wordpress website? Congratulations on choosing this awesome and power content management system. Now the bad news. Out of date and badly secured Wordpress websites are hacked every minute.

If your Wordpress is one version behind in updates, runs an old theme or has an outdated plugin it is probably being hacked right now. Hackers have automated scripts that find your out of date website and use it for nefarious reasons. Almost everyone who has had a Wordpress website for longer than a couple of months has experienced this.

However, there are some precautions you can take to bring down your risk. Here is my recommendations on how to deal with Wordpress security.

1. Never allow your Wordpress system to get out of date. This includes the themes and plugins. If you are a web developer and create multiple Wordpress websites this can become a bit of a pain to manage. Well you kinda have to. The best way to keep up to date on multiple Wordpress websites is to run a plugin called InfiniteWP.
   
   InfiniteWP ( http://infinitewp.com/ ) is a plugin that tracks out of data Wordpress websites and its plugins. You can easily update your sites and plugins from one central point.
   
   If you install a website through Softaculous, I would recommend installing the default Wordpress install through it, and then using the automatic backup and update system that comes with it.
2. Change the default Admin username. By default hackers will try brute force hack your website with the username, “admin”. This is because that is normally the default admin username. There are multiple plugins that can be used to change your admin username.
3. Install a powerful Wordpress firewall. After years of experience we have found one of the best defence systems out there is a powerful plugin called Wordfence ( http://www.wordfence.com/ ). They have both a free and a premium plugins to choose from. In most cases the free plugin comes with more than enough useful features that it is on our “have to have” list. If you have a some loot in your pockets, dont be cheap, and buy the premium version.
4. Use DNS filtering. This is also on our, “have to have” list. We use a system called CloudFlare ( http://www.cloudflare.com/ ). Cloudflare comes with multiple systems to protect and enhance your website. It is a very powerful firewall. It stops almost all DDoS attacks launched at your website. It comes with a CDN (content distribution network) that enables you to serve your site faster. It also comes with a neat ability that automatically filters out most hackers and that hides the IP of your server from hackers. You will need to install the Cloudflare plugin to get accurate statistics.

The steps listed above are easy to get going and anyone with a Wordpress website should be able to get it right. For those of you with more advanced knowledge of Wordpress and who want more information on hardening your Wordpress website I would recommend that you read the following guide:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

Two other things you should consider. You should always have regular backups of your website and if possible, use a system that monitors and alerts you of changes in your website code. A system like Codeguard ( https://www.codeguard.com/ - Not Free ) is recommended for that.

I hope you find this information useful, and I really really hope you implement it. You can take control of the security of your website, and if you dont, I promise you that some dodgy little hacker will.

Happy Wordpressing