Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus is living on borrowed time I suspect. Last week she made a speech echoing pretty much everything I wrote in last week's column thus committing the unforgivable sin of negativism (see below). Thanks to pernicious campaigns like the propagandist and money spinning Lead SA those of us who are a mite critical of the current administration are no longer permitted to speak our thoughts, however sensible they may be.
Well we are but be assured that the lefties will be down on us like a ton of bricks. As poor Ivo Vegter found out last week when he posted a piece on the Daily Maverick website defending the use of "rape" as used by Free Market Foundation executive director Leon Louw in an opinion piece he had written for BizDay.
Louw had used gang rape as a metaphor for how governments get business to agree to absurd new legislation, in this case the controversial Business Licensing Bill. He made it quite clear that he was referring to regulatory gang rape. Before you could say Jimmy Savile the wrath of the entire feminist/activist/professional victim movement was upon him.
The Twittersphere was full of swivel eyed lunacy and poor Louw apparently received a letter from 40 outraged (what else?) wimmin activists presumably demanding an apology and refusing to accept the use of the word "rape" to mean anything other than the violation of a woman against her will. So bad luck Alexander Pope.
Louw was his usual decent self and discussed the problem with the complainants but faced with 40 spitting harridans he probably had no option. Ivo Vegter then wrote his piece and got into even more trouble for trying to defend Louw's freedom of speech. The favoured tactic of the loony left is to drown out civilised discourse and resort to insult. One particularly poisonous comment was from Charlene Smith, an ex SA struggle journalist who has pushed off to live in the US of A where she could dispense her dubious wisdom in comparative safety.
Her contribution was thus "Ivo Vegter has always been a rather boring little man. The sort who resorts to adolescent shock tactics-dropping his pants or someone else's-to get attention away from the fact that he is a dull writer. I suspect he has small dick syndrome". Hardly impressive stuff from someone who claims on her Facebook page to be a multi award winning journalist. Such was the level of debate from the outraged wimmin activist crowd.