This was a hectic week in which I moved to a rather larger (if much older) house, while entertaining a tenacious bug that kept me coughing and wheezing. I did manage two columns, however, both in a way dealing with mobs.

The first, published at The Daily Maverick earlier this week, expresses my utter lack of sympathy with striking public sector workers. To paraphrase Mark Twain, it’s been the unspeakable in pursuit of the indefensible. Do strikers deserve anything? It got some attention in the mainstream media, resulting in a brief but entertaining interview on E-News yesterday morning.

Another piece of news that made me think of the mob is the ruling that grants South Africa jurisdiction over the domestic activities of foreign-based online casinos. In short, they’re now officially illegal. Punters, banks and carriers of advertising alike will be in the line of fire. The motive? Protecting government tax revenue, of course. The gambling industry used to be shaken down by mob bosses. Now, government bosses do it. They even call it protection. Protecting mob turf was published yesterday on ITWeb.

There are serious kinds of political activism, and there are less serious ones. And then there are those that don’t take any effort, and don’t make one jot of difference. Online petitions, such as this one which appears to express concern about media freedom, are among the latter. So I signed it. Sort of. Read on at ITWeb.

While everyone is saying all the right things, and making all the right arguments, they’re losing the battle on media freedom. As long as the ANC’s base remains unconvinced, it will side with the ANC, and the ANC will claim a legitimate mandate to push through draconian laws that will, in effect if not in intent, stifle a free media.

Read my Daily Maverick column on the subject here: Why the media will lose this battle.

A number of people at #tech4africa, the excellent conference organised by Gareth Knight (@oneafrikan), asked whether I’d make the copy of my introduction to the panel on Unlocking Mobile Payments available. You can find the text after the fold. Attribution will be appreciated, but feel free to use it however you wish.

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Someone sent me a video that was supposed to convince me of the truth of global warming. It didn’t. At The Daily Maverick: Global warmism needs a fisking.

I thought that headline would grab some attention. It is entirely justified by the ITWeb column on internet pornography censorship above which it appears, methinks: I love my pussy.

I’ve been travelling, so my blog was not updated last week. It was an entertaining week, however. While I was chairing the highly informative ITWeb MobileBiz conference in Midrand, I was ambushed on Twitter by a fellow who took issue with my column on The Daily Maverick.

I thought the column in question was rather sweet and optimistic: Go ahead, have a baby.

This fellow begged to differ, so I wrote a response this week. It is long, and complete with plentiful citations to satisfy the critic. In a way, it is the serious, academic version of the same column: A glass half-full.