🇿🇦She/Her | Not 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 kind of Dr | cPTSD badass | ⚡Chronic Pain warrior | 🏳️🌈wife/mom/friend | Tweets are my own views
Cape Town, South Africa
Joined May 2009
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ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
I created this photo using recent research so it relaxes your brain when you pause to look at the details. I'd so love to hear which is your favourite item in this collection (mine are the striped curlew feathers).
As I'm sometimes too unwell to post here & the algorithm punishes creators who don't post every day, it would help so much if you could maybe RT my photo. Many thanks 🌿
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
This is a good question.
So the simple way I like to explain how ward and PR seats are allocated is like this…
In South Africa we have a proportional representative system. When we go and vote for various parties the IEC afterwards must calculate how we voted in the way that seats get allocated PROPORTIONALLY to each party based on how many votes it got.
Now ward seats are easy because whichever party got the most votes in that ward get allocated that ward seat. HOWEVER other parties get votes in that ward too and those voters voices must be heard too. So those votes will help those other parties get PR ( Proportional representative seats) This is too make sure that those votes from those voices don’t get discarded.
The more wards a party needs means the fewer PR seats it will need because it is already represented by having won the outright ward seats.
PR seats help to balance the council by making sure that number of seats a party wins reflects its overall share in that municipality. So a party may not have done well enough to have won a ward outright but it did get votes and so those votes means it can be eligible for PR seats. This makes sure that just because one party may win the most wards it doesn’t skew distort the overall choices of the voters. Our system is a beautiful thing in this way.
So let’s say in a municipality you have 10 seats. You have 3 parties in that municipality party A,B and C.
Party A wins 50% of the Votes
Party B wins 30%
Party C wins 20%
That means in terms of seats
Party A should get 5
Party B should get 3
Party C should get 2
Now when you look at how each party did both for their ward and PR votes you find that
Party A won 4 wards
Party B won 1 ward
Party C won no wards
This is where the PR comes in
Party A has won 4 ward seats but it’s entitled to 5 seats because of its votes so it only needs 1 PR vote to make up its overall share of the seats
Party B won 1 ward seat so it gets 1 PR seat to make up its overall share of the 2 seats it was entitled to.
Party C didn’t win any wards but its overall votes entitle it to 2 seats so it gets 2 PR seats
It important to realise PR seats are not a “bonus” they are there to balance council and make sure that each parties seats reflect their overall share of the vote
Hope that helps. It’s easier to explain when I say it so apologies for any grammar, my brain is kinda dead at the moment from Observer work 😭
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Yes: you may right now have an identity that was shaped by your trauma. Not your fault & not your choice. A core goal of recovery is to create an identity you DO choose.
Remember that it's consistency in self talk, mental focus, & behavior that will create your NEW identity.
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
The weirdest crowd witnessing a historical moment. ✨
The Soil takes their unmistakable sound to one of the world’s most historic stages.
In 2015, the South African a cappella trio performed We Are One (Celebrate Humanity) during the commonwealth Day Observance at Westminster Abbey in London a powerful celebration of music, unity and humanity.
A proudly South African voice on a global stage. 🇿🇦
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Thrilled to announce I’m Ed Sheeran’s new support act 💚
For tickets: seetickets.com/tour/rosie-ho…
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Thank you @zilevandamme for posting this in righteous outrage against the obscenity of @afriforum hosting one of the most evil apartheid war criminals.
It is unbelievable that the same organisation that cynically orchestrated an international campaign to convince the world that there was a 'white genocide' in South Africa, is now platforming and celebrating an actual genocide perpetrator, abusing his medical knowledge for the most evil and criminal ends.
As Phumzile points out, the fact that he was never convicted for the multiple crimes he perpetrated does not in any way exonerate him.
The failure of our justice system to bring him to book will go down as one of the darkest stains of the democratic era.
Here is a summary of some of the crimes he must still be held accountable for.
And @afriforum by celebrating him in this way, you can consider yourselves as accessories to his atrocities. 1/2
“Controversial.”
“Military Doctor.”
Are you out of your mind?
He was the head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast. One of its aims was reducing Black population growth, so insidious he investigated a biological agent intended to selectively kill Black people.
Project Coast scientists testified that the programme provided the drugs and poisons developed for use in murders of anti-apartheid activists.
Frank Chikane, then Secretary-General of the South African Council of Churches, was poisoned through his clothing using a lethal poison. He suffered organ failure and nearly died twice. A Project Coast scientist testified that he had supplied the poison to security police operatives and instructed them how to apply it to clothing.
Clandestine SANDF units testified that SWAPO prisoners of war were given overdoses of muscle relaxants Basson provided before being thrown from helicopters into the sea. One Special Forces officer testified that Basson personally and regularly supplied him with these drugs, which he used on the majority of the more than 200 people he killed and disposed of at sea.
Controversial? Nay. Monstrous. War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity per the Rome Statute. The only reason he was not hauled before the ICC to answer for his crimes is because its rules did not exist during the commission of his crimes.
The only reason he isn’t behind bars in South Africa is because of a botched criminal prosecution in 1999. He faced 67 charges, including murder, conspiracy to murder, drug offences and fraud. The court did not adjudicate the substance of some of the most serious allegations, including those concerning the alleged killing of hundreds of SWAPO detainees in Namibia.
The State appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal, which declined to hear the matter because the papers from the State were lodged late. The Constitutional Court found that the SCA had failed to give proper weight to the extreme gravity of the charges and held that the SCA should have accepted the State’s late filing and allowed the appeal. The Court reinstated six charges that had been quashed, expressly leaving questions of double jeopardy and unreasonable delay to a trial court if the State proceeded with the prosecution.
The NPA nevertheless declined to re-prosecute Basson. A court therefore never got to test those questions.
The programme was only wound down in 1993. 1993. One year before South Africa’s first democratic election. Three years after Nelson Mandela and others were released.
A man who headed apartheid South Africa’s secret chemical and biological warfare programme, involving the development of lethal agents and the investigation of their use against human beings?
He is a deeply disturbing figure in South Africa’s history.
He is a symbol of the machinery of apartheid at its most depraved.
That is why his moniker is “Dr Death.” He was the Apartheid regime’s Josef Mengele.
And that is the history that must never be sanitised or sugar-coated. Bfr.
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
That unemployment rate is concentrated among those with just matric and less than matric. It doesn’t make sense to talk about youth unemployment in the context of jobs that require postgrad qualifications because most people with those are outside the 15-24 age bracket
Imagine a country with 33% unemployment telling unemployed locals that the skill they need “already exists here” while still importing people from poorer countries. That’s the actual argument you’re quoting.
South Africans teaching abroad doesn’t cancel that.
The UK and US aren’t running 62% youth unemployment. We are. Treating those two situations as the same is how you end up defending foreign hires over jobless South Africans and calling it solidarity.
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Watching this testimony really hit me in the gut. It really reminds me of how much our coloured people have, and still are suffering. What hurts even more, is that people like Fadiel Adams use this platform to further their political agendas and to settle scores with opposing parties, by lying, and using our people as an excuse. They are not representative of who we are, and how we speak. Suddenly every colored person is judged by the behavior of these unsavory characters. Whatever it is Fadiel Adams is trying to do, it's definitely not because of our plight, which has become a convenient excuse. Whether it's to smear the PKTT, the DA, and General Mkwanazi,it shall be revealed, and he must face the consequences.
Our couloured people deserve better than the likes of Fadiel Adams, Gayton Mackenzie, Kenny Kunene, and Patricia de Lille, etc. Every colored leader we have had becomes a sell-out to the ANC. 🇿🇦
##MadlangaCommission
Fadiel started off well addressing Chair Madlanga as Chair or Chairperson. Now he's been calling him Chief! Someone tell him during lunch that Chair hates being called Chief! 😭😂
#MadlangaCommission
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
South Africa Must Reject Hate Conference Disguised as "Family Values".
South Africa’s Constitution protects equality, dignity and freedom from discrimination, including on the basis of sexual orientation. Our democracy was built on inclusion — not exclusion.
We respect freedom of religion, belief, expression and peaceful assembly. But these freedoms must not be used to justify discrimination, dehumanisation or attempts to strip others of their constitutional rights.
The proposed conference forms part of a broader anti-rights movement seeking to roll back LGBTQ+ equality, restrict women’s rights, undermine comprehensive sexuality education and promote exclusionary laws across Africa.
South Africa must not become a platform for intolerance or discrimination.
c.org/bQxxQKxhcF
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
I was bullied out of the public service - & it wasn't by men. This @DailyMaverick piece names something too many women stay quiet about: shouting, slammed doors, exclusion, dressed up as leadership. Sisterhood has to survive contact with power, not just Women's Month panels.
dailymaverick.co.za/opinioni…
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Deaths, Burnout and Academic Collapse: The Crisis Unfolding at Unisa ednews.africa/p/deaths-burno…
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Generative AI doesn’t run on magic. It runs on massive data pipelines built on privacy violations by design.
Our new @Amnesty report exposes how big tech’s AI systems are powered by surveillance, data extraction, and abuse of people’s rights, at scale.
We researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
This is not innovation at any cost. It comes at a high price: our human rights.
Read the report: amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2…
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Today’s free newsletter is about how LLMs are the perfect grift to exploit an economy dominated by do-nothing managers and executives disconnected from any real work, and how the facade is crumbling as companies pay the true cost of AI.
wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-…
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Christ. Here are the words in case you’re distracted by his bulging neck pussy. 🤦♂️
“Story, I read a story yesterday where the pharmacies. They're going out of business. They have glass all over the place. You want toothpaste. You have to open up. You have to get a clerk to open up the thing. And they opened and they handed a toothpaste. And in the meantime, other people waiting to steal it.
They got for a guy. They were saying a guy right here, Mr. Lutnick, said Mr. Lutnick is a rich guy. But he was in a store. And he noticed when he was in a drugstore, the people with duffel bags. They're putting sh- crap in a duffel bag and walking. And the clerk says, you're not supposed to be doing that. And the kid said, dah, with your walks out. And if the clerk does anything at all, they arrest the clerk.
How screwed up is our country? How the hell do you make your money if you got to open up glass, expensive glass, to give somebody a toothbrush, or to give somebody some toothpaste? That does not sound like a good business model.
See, I've empty stores. The whole thing, we got to change it. Now, the way you stop that, you know how you stop that? You come down hard on those people. [APPLAUSE]
In one day, you solve that problem all over the country. You just come down so hard that they never forget it, and they'll never do it again. They'll never do it again. It's horrible. What's happening is horrible.
And it's all in the blue cities. It's all blue. The 25 worst cities of blue means Dumocrat. That's a new name I came up with. You've never heard. I was thinking about this character we have in the house. His name is Hakeem Jeffries. [APPLAUSE]
And he's a low IQ person, very low IQ. And I watched what he was saying, and what the horrible things he was saying. And I said, he's a dumb guy. I said, wait a minute, he's a Dumocrat. That's how I got the name.
You take the E out. You don't use the B. A lot of people don't know dumb has the B in it, actually. You don't need it. You discard the B. But you take the E out, and you place it with the U. They are Dumocrats. You know why? Because their policies are dumb. Their policies are very dumb.”
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
#NOOZ
#Trump News Conference on rescued airman in Iran
A NOOZ Summary
- We're superior.
- Our guys rebuilt a helicopter from scraps (spit and prayer)
- It was amazing. I saw the whole thing. I didn't know we had all of that talent.
- Everyone is a genius. Massive.
- Maduro was kidnapped from behind iron doors. Who is Iran?
- Tremendous.
- Geniuses.
- Extraordinary.
- We're gonna arrest some media companies who aired leaked info. Mhm. Entire companies. Leakers gon leak.
- We rescued the pilot by taking off from a farm. There was sand. Wet everywhere.
- We rescued everyone. Boom. Boom. Boom.
- Wet earth and sand.
- Geniuses.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Rescued.
- The CIA was unbelievable. Geniuses.
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
A MUST-READ on the privacy of your convos with AI chatbots. Very little to none. If a tech tool is free, you’re the product. Your personal info is the commodity. For AI, the details of your convos are the commodity. Never share private & sensitive info. Big Tech owners & CEOs don’t love & care about you. They barely know you exist. Snap out of any parasocial delusions.
This Post is from a suspended account. Learn more
ᒪIᗩᑎᑎE retweeted
Idk who needs to hear this (apparently all of twitter) but OpenAI did not just magically get the DoD to agree to the terms Anthropic was asking for.
Sam is blowing smoke up your ass to distract from the fact OpenAI just took the terms Anthropic considered so egregious, it warranted jeopardizing an enormous part of their business.
The DoD does not just break off a massive contract to accept the same demands 5 minutes later from someone else. Until explicitly indicated otherwise, the only logical conclusion here is that OpenAI swooped in and unscrupulously stooped lower than Anthropic was willing to go for the money.
Assume all OpenAI data will now be used for what Anthropic deemed “mass domestic surveillance of Americans”. Plan and prompt accordingly.
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Government officials have contradicted Sam’s claim, saying OpenAI will allow the DoW to use their models for “all lawful purposes”.
This could allow for uses Anthropic refused to engage in, namely mass surveillance tools and weapons systems with no human oversight.
x.com/undersecretary…