The class struggle is over: long live the class struggle

Posted on 20 July 2015 by stuff writer

In South Africa, the class struggle between the capitalists and the proletariat has been won by the proletariat.  As a result we have the popular rule of the ANC, and largely friendly relations with COSATU (representing the proletariat) and the SACP, providing ideological guidance.  They struggled, they won.

So what now?  Is it all over?  Has heaven descended to earth?  Is there welfare for all?  Not quite.  There are voices trying to keep the class struggle alive – stirring up industrial discontent, fanning the dying embers of racism – but this cannot produce anything of value.  What is the barrier to prosperity?  What is beyond the class struggle?

A very large problem that the country now faces is the emergence of a new class: a class of people sold out to wickedness and selfish anti-social pursuits: the criminal class.  Criminals, for better or worse, were an important ally in the struggle against apartheid.  Now, however, the criminal element has started to define themselves more clearly in society. This brings us an epidemic of rape, murder, thefts and a continual stream of anti-social behaviour.  The law is routinely flouted, and the courts are mocked as they flounder under the flood of criminality.

The proletariat face a struggle against crime, which is clearly seen in areas where criminality has organised into criminal gangs.  Criminals brazenly oppress regular people who are trying to make ends meet, and convert the victory against capitalism and apartheid into a bitter defeat.  Even among heroes of the class struggle, criminal corruption is seen.

The new class struggle is the working class against the criminal class: the righteous class against the wicked class: the upright man versus the corrupt man.  This is the current struggle.  The old is gone: it’s not about the means of production any more.

What methods should be employed in this class struggle?  How should the criminal class be destroyed?  What must be done to neutralise the wicked?  What will convert the wicked into the righteous?  What example must be set by leaders?  What message must the leaders give to the people?  How must the community be helped to deal with criminal aggression against their class?

There are two things that should be used without apology in this class struggle against the criminal class:

  • The law: the law puts criminals on notice of the consequences of their criminal acts.  The law must be in humble submission to the law of Almighty God, and must be published widely and broadly.  Trial and punishment should be executed speedily to send a clear message to the criminal class.  Whenever it is done correctly, it should be done visibly, loudly and in public.  The law should put the power in the hands of upright men, and do away with the current arrangement where the power of life and death is only in the hands of criminals.
  • The gospel: the gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: from the criminal class men can be, and are converted to righteousness.  Men promoting the true gospel by preaching and teaching and by good works should be given every practical support, and people opposing sound doctrine should be silenced.

The old struggle against capitalism is done and dusted: the capitalists are neutralised, and as far as they are not, it is easy to fix, as their political power is gone, and any scheme against the proletariat can be trivially crushed.  Criminals may have been allies in the class struggle against apartheid and capitalism, but they did not get the permission of the workers to form a new ruling class, and rule with cruelty and unrelenting wickedness.

Long live righteousness!  Down with wickedness!  Panzi!

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Book review: Life Talk for a Daughter

Posted on 14 April 2015 by stuff writer

A copy of a book by Isabella Little (now Isabella Little-Gates, congratulations Isabella) came into our possession – “Life Talk for a Daughter”.  It’s this one: http://www.tugoflife.com/life-talk-for-a-daughter.  You might think that this is a book to introduce your little girl to life, and avoid having “the talk”.  You might like to think again.

After reading a few chapters of this book, our little daughter of 11 said:

Can we burn it?

She’s just 11.  She was not making a fire at the time, and looking for more fuel – no, she was just reading the book, because her little brother hoped that it was a story and she would read it to him.  She said this after coming to the chapter about sex, and because she has read other books of better quality on this topic.

This contains the following “ideal” script for your daughter’s life (is this modeled on the author’s experience?):

  • Grow up wondering what’s up with your deadbeat dad.  Or maybe your dad is a wash-out.  Dads – who can understand them?
  • Let out the tiger of sexual experimentation from its cage some only when you think it might be fine.  Try not to get pregnant.
  • Indulge in whoring with a string of boys until you find the one (or catch a disease, or get pregnant, in which case, try to find help or something).
  • Alcohol and drugs happen.  But somehow they might not happen to you so very much.  Be good or something.
  • Get into a committed relationship with someone (maybe a man, or you might be a lesbian, see).  This is why you need to start early with the whoring.
  • Maybe get married.
  • Maybe go for a walk in the countryside to get away from it all.

And this is why, after reading just a few chapters of this book, our little daughter said:

Can we burn it?

Despite being very young, she knows that the ideal script for life is:

  • Grow up with your dad and your mom.  If your dad’s a deadbeat, tough – you have to honour your father and mother anyhow.
  • Get found by a man who is made of the better stuff (or a deadbeat like your dad).
  • Get married: if he’s going to keep you, he should tell the world and give you a ring – an expensive ring, preferably.
  • Kiss the man, and let loose the tiger of sexual expression on him
  • Take the man and your children for a walk in the countryside as a special treat, packing a picnic basket like your mom did.

This script is absent from this book.  The book says you should aim low, and be prepared to surrender your lowest moral standard (if it seems like the right time).

Hopefully the disclaimer I have inked on the cover will prevent damage before we send it to the paper-recycling people:

Life Talk for a Daughter
containing the very worst of worldly “wisdom”

EXTREME CAUTION
Warning: errors within

We haven’t yet disposed of the book because we want to find out the answer to “what on earth were you thinking” from the chain of well-meaning people who passed it on to us (hopefully without reading it).

After the shock of this woman telling our little girl that she should freely prostitute herself to every and any nice boy (if it seems like a good idea) it was a big laugh to read the back cover: she is a successful this and that, an accomplished whatever, the mother of a daughter and … no, wait – there’s no “and”?  Something is missing.  Whatever could it be?

Update: I think I should update this some time, when I have the book in front of me again.  I’m going with publish early, publish often here.

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Five diagnostic questions for email

Posted on 7 April 2015 by stuff writer

I used to face a lot of problems with e-mail of this sort:

  • The e-mail is not working
  • Person X is not getting an important mail
  • There’s something wrong with the mail system
  • Please check that the mail servers are working – people are saying something’s wrong
  • Nobody can send mail
  • Nobody is getting mail
  • Person X is getting spam
  • Company X says they can’t send mail to any of our servers

Eventually I figured out what specific information actually helps to get to the bottom of the problem – and it is these five things:

  1. Sender e-mail address
  2. Recipient e-mail address
  3. Time of sending the mail
  4. SMTP server that handled the mail
  5. What was the error

Experience says that without all of these bits of information, or a reasonable facsimile for each, you have a pretty good chance of being led a merry dance – fishing for a problem, and maybe finding it, but probably not.  (The not-so handy acronym “STRES” is not in the dictionary, and really doesn’t help much, so don’t bother with it.)

The reason for each of these questions is:

  1. Sender e-mail address: appears in log files, might be invalid in some way, might be blacklisted.  Actually, the envelope sender appears in the logs, and the From: header does not.
  2. Recipient e-mail address: appears in log files, might be invalid in some way, might be affected by DNS, IP routing, SMTP server failure, local delivery failure (e.g. long queue), spam filtering failure or “incorrect” success.  This is the most important part of the report: if you have to choose just one thing to know about the mail failure you are diagnosing, choose the recipient address.
  3. Time of sending: appears in the log files, tells you which particular log file to look in, tells you whether it’s possibly a transient failure, related to an outage, related to an update.
  4. SMTP server that handled the mail: you have to start somewhere – the last place the mail was seen alive is a good place – sometimes the mail has not even left the sending computer, and the answer to this question tells you that.
  5. What was the error: it is amazing how many times I get asked to solve a problem with nobody telling what the actual problem is.  It’s obvious to the person asking the question, but somehow the telepathic message never gets through.  Knowing the actual error makes such a difference.  Sometimes the error is not even a failure – “the mail system is broken” can mean “I am getting my mail, and some of it is spam.”

So what kind of errors mess up your mail?

  • Sometimes mail disappears into the void – although if you know which SMTP server last handled it, the void is less formless – especially if that server is under your administration.
  • Sometimes that server cannot deliver it because of blacklisting, greylisting, load.  Knowing the last SMTP server and the time can identify the problem.  Often enough, the error says what the problem was.
  • The weirdest failure is people who will not take mail from you, because they cannot verify the sender address, because their system is misbehaving (e.g. it doesn’t speak SMTP properly, like exim’s verify_sender callout)
  • The same mail is received over and over: at the bottom of the pile you find that either it was sent over and over (not often though), or it was forwarded in some kind of loop, or the end-user system is downloading it over and over.  When you have the sender and recipient address, you can verify that there is only one of these mails in the end-user mailbox, and that it is marked as already-read.
  • DNS failures: the worst DNS failures are the ones where someone thinks they have two DNS servers, but they have just one overloaded virtual machine with two IP addresses and a congested and contended network interface.  When you have the sender and recipient addresses, you can test the DNS configuration for each of them.
  • Sometimes the system administrator deletes your mail.  Yep.  If you’re sending spam, you can expect that.  If there’s a large system failure (e.g. one server out of 17 fails for a week after building up a large backlog), then working through the backlog of mail can be impossible because of available resources of CPU time, network bandwidth on the sender and the recipients.  Late delivery generates its own problems and queries in any case.  It’s one of those “if it’s important they will phone again” moments.  Anti-spam systems discriminate against old mail as well – if it spent its time sitting in a mail queue somewhere, it may be because it overwhelmed that system’s capacity by its sheer spammyness (spamosity?).  When you have the last SMTP server you can properly assign blame.  If you are to blame, you can confess.

Additionally, since these are the correct questions for almost any mail problem, you can reject all mail problem reports that do not include these details.  ☺  (Don’t try this at home folks.)

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The sound of outage

Posted on 26 March 2015 by stuff writer

Here’s a song to sing the next time your network goes down.  Click the play button on the youtube karaoke, and sing it yourself:

Hello outage my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because of vulnerability creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the virus that was planted in my main()
went fork() main(),
within the sounds of outage

In restless streams I do not own
Narrowband and telephone
Beneath the pressure of a growing lump
I turned my caller to the hold and dump
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a warning light
That blinked so bright
… and made the sound .. of outage

And in the L.E.D. I saw,
Ten thousand packets maybe more
Packets sending without routing
Packets dropped without parsing
Packets writing logs but admins never care
No-one dare
Disturb the sound of outage

Fools, said I, you do not know,
Outage like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Add my IP that I might reach you
But my packets, like silent raindrops fell,
.. No echo, just dev null, of outage

And the people all had paid
For that upgrade that we made
Though the changelog had a clear warning
That the system could have some stalling
And the worst of the profits are written off the day they call,
for support
whispers …
of the sounds of outage

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White paper

Posted on 9 March 2015 by stuff writer

All sorts of organisations want you to download white papers: vendors with amazing storage, virtualisation and security solutions. This would be great if these papers contained something of value, but universally they do not.  Instead they are behind a registration-wall (or pay-wall), and identified completely by a catchy title with nothing more, and when you do get one, it contains no useful information whatsoever, having been written by marketing droids.

If you find that you are looking at a white paper when trying to fix an implementation problem, you know that you are not going to make progress.

Since this concept is so popular, I made one of my own.

Click here to download the white paper: Amazing White Paper

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Computer insomnia

Posted on 16 February 2015 by stuff writer

I updated my Ubuntu system installation on a laptop.  This went fine.  I installed more memory.  This went well.  But on the second day, I discovered that my laptop had insomnia.  It could not sleep.  Close the lid?  It’s still on.  Laptops that won’t sleep do not travel well.

To cut a long story short (by not telling the long bits), neither the upgrade nor the additional memory caused the trouble, but a file left by the crummy “Validity Sensors” fingerprint scanner software did.  Mind you, it didn’t work, so I should have removed it, but instead I forgot about it.  Don’t buy Hewlett Packard laptops, as they use the USB device 138a:003d Validity Sensors, Inc. which is unsupported, except for this faulty binary-only software, which causes systems not to sleep.

The thing that gave it away after many days of trying to figure it out was these entries in /var/log/pm-suspend.log:

/etc/pm/sleep.d/ValidityServiceSuspend.sh suspend suspend: Returned exit code 1.
Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/65ValidityServiceResume.sh resume suspend

The crummy HP/VFS sensors software added a file /etc/pm/sleep.d/ValidityServiceSuspend.sh that said:

#!/bin/bash

. /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions

suspend_FPS() {
    # Signal the vcsFPService about the suspend/hiberante
	echo " Sending Suspend Event"
	pkill -SIGUSR1 vcsFPService
}

case "$1" in
	hibernate|suspend)
		suspend_FPS
		;;
	*)
		;;
esac

exit $?

This code only works correctly when the vcsFPService is running. When it’s not running, then pkill returns an error, and exit $? passes it back up the chain (just like simply exiting the script would do – the fact that exit $? is always unnecessary at the end of a script, and yet is present, is an indication about the quality of this code).  The program says “do not sleep unless you stop the fingerprint reader!”

So in summary, my computer couldn’t kill something, and it couldn’t sleep as a result.

For they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong;
    they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble.

The fix was something like:

sed -i 's/exit $?/exit 0/' \
    /etc/pm/sleep.d/ValidityServiceSuspend.sh \
    /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/65ValidityServiceResume.sh

Being unsupported software, I can’t have it fixed. I am reduced to whining.

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The pill, uncritically accepted

Posted on 15 January 2015 by stuff writer

In the movie, The Matrix, Neo is offered a red pill and a blue pill.  Not one movie goer thought to ask why he should take a pill at all.

Things I only recently found out about the contraceptive pill:

  • It has been around for just 50 years.
  • Previous contraceptive remedies and methods were less effective and had significant side effects (other than pregnancy).
  • Research was funded by Margaret Sanger, whose odious organisation performs abortions to this day.
  • The pill is but 99% effective in preventing pregnancy per year (or “worse”, depending on the concentration).  This means that every year, 1 out of 100 women who think they will not, does in fact become pregnant (congratulations!)

Before this I only knew things like:

  • It can cause infertility (duh) (yes, even after it is discontinued)
  • It can cause serious medical conditions, e.g. death

Things I’ve only recently realised about the pill:

  • The western fertility rate is low as a result of it.
  • People’s thinking about sex and children has become disconnected
  • People’s thinking about marriage and children has become disconnected.
  • It has been uncritically accepted by society
  • The people who brought it into society were very unpleasant folks with sad and twisted life stories

Fertility rate: when there are fewer children to work, then immigration becomes a “cheap” source of labour, but immigrants have their own beliefs and practices, some of which are destructive to western culture.  In Europe, Muslim immigration has become a social issue because Muslims refuse to integrate into western culture, and fill the country with their private ghettos designed to resemble the countries they fled from.  Having done this, they set out to turn their adopted countries into the same quagmire of evil that they have demanded for themselves.

Sex, not children: When sex appears to not involve children, rampant immorality becomes an option.  There is no perceived risk of innocent little babies, so sex is a matter of consenting adults seeking pleasure.  And since each thinks his own pleasure is a wonderful thing, who is to object to other deviant forms of sex, designed for pleasure or spectacle?  As a result there are plagues of sexually transmitted diseases.  These have wiped out entire villages in Africa.  Perhaps they didn’t get the contraception, but they did get the message of free irresponsible sex.  And what is there to be responsible about when there are no children?  Of course, there are children, and that is where  it gets messy.  (But for that inconvenience there is murder abortion.)

Marriage, not children: When marriage appears to be an arrangement for comfort and pleasure, not involving children, then other intimate arrangements for comfort and pleasure may have an equal claim to the status of marriage.  So what if a man and woman are not married?   So what if a man occasionally finds comfort and pleasure outside of a marriage?  And if marriage is only for comfort and pleasure, there is no reason to preserve it if that comfort and pleasure turns to discomfort and misery.  Seeking pleasure and comfort in the short term yields neither in the longer term.  Our courts have caved in, and brought us “no fault divorce” so that routinely, without a proper investigation of what went wrong, a marriage is summarily terminated with judicial resignation to the consequences.

Uncritical acceptance: For good measure, because people believe that the instruments that they use carry moral authority, they believe that having a child is merely a technical failure of the contraceptive, and not a gift from God with a life for which they will give an account.  The complete acceptance of contraception as part of the structure of society goes together with a surprised loathing for the results of its inevitable failure.

Whodunnit: The source of an innovation often says a lot about it.  Kind and thoughtful people make useful innovations.  Cruel and ruthless people make cruel and ruthless innovations.  Immoral people tend to make immoral innovations.  The direction that an innovation takes once it is set free often betrays the hidden defects in its creator.  Margaret Sanger’s organisations have romped all the way from contraception to abortion and the willful destruction of third world populations, all the while putting forward their bloodthirsty work as an ultimate good.

Are these things good for society?  Do they lead to happiness or to misery?  Well, you might be able to guess what I think, but one thing is abundantly clear:

  • “effective” contraception is a new innovation, and
  • there has been no proper examination of whether contraception has brought good or evil.

Okay, that’s two things.

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Adobe XFA forms do not work, no really, Adobe sucks

Posted on 1 October 2014 by stuff writer

Our friendly tax collector has automated their personal inefficiencies into a relatively efficient system called SARS e-viling.  This amazing system allows you to confess your tax sins, after which they will perform their happy little calculations and tell you whether you owe money or not.

A few years ago, their site worked on anything that ran “flash”, but lately their site doesn’t work in more and more browsers – it did however work in Google Chrome.

Once the tax man knows your height, weight and how much he can hit you for, his e-viling site says “Download your assessment” or something, and provides a .PDF file called GetNotice.pdf.  I downloaded the file and discovered that … it doesn’t work.

Inside the PDF is the following text:

To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade
to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html

That’s it.  You can follow the links to your heart’s content, but one thing you will not find is … anything to use this amazing file on Linux (never mind BSD and more esoteric operating systems).

The reason for this is that the PDF includes XML Form Architecture Forms (XFA Forms).  Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, added this extension without telling anyone how it works outside of Adobe products.  Things that used to work (PDF’s) now suddenly do not, unless you happen to use Adobe’s latest and greatest offering. Of course, everyone wants to install Adobe’s software, don’t they? so the form extensions have no backward compatibility, except to tell you they have no backward compatibility. To see what they say as a document that you don’t want to edit, you have one choice, and only one choice, and that is to install whatever it is that Adobe is offering.

Now this is why Adobe sucks: they used to provide this program for Linux.  With this edition of their bloated software, they could tell the folks who forked out the big bucks for the Adobe form designer that their forms and stuff work on all sorts of platform.  Now they have stopped supporting Linux.  That’s interesting.  However, you cannot get the old software that did work.

Don’t worry though if you are running Windows XP – an operating system that nobody loves anymore (except armies of botnet herders) – Adobe will support your malware infested system with fresh application software forever, even though your operating system software is teetering on the edge of oblivion, and has already been abandoned by its manufacturer.  For this operating system, they supply their software, but for a current version of Linux, they have removed their support.  You can’t even download the one that worked.

This means that it’s broken, and it’s not getting fixed.  They broke it on purpose.  Since they did it without a word about why or what, I can only assume that …

  • Adobe hates Linux because they can’t control it
  • Adobe’s only programmers that care about Linux have been shifted out of the way
  • Nobody at Adobe knows the difference between Linux and Android
  • Adobe executives said that they will not provide free software for free operating systems
  • Adobe sucks.
  • Adobe hates me personally.

What am I supposed to think?  It’s not like there’s a statement on their download page about the truth of the matter.

Adobe Software is protected by international copyright law

Adobe Software is protected by international copyright law

I was reduced to downloading the Windows version and running that under Wine, but it failed to install (Windows installers do this all the time, although more so under wine). The installation actually seemed to be going swimmingly, but it stopped after installing pretty much all the files. As its last official act, it deleted everything it installed, and then explains that it’s my fault somehow.

I did find something that works though: PDF XChange Editor running under Wine 1.7.18.  I should have done this first, without messing about with Adobe’s junk.

PDF XChange Editor

PDF XChange Editor

It’s not free, as in Free Software, but it is free as in Beer. and for a document that is produced by the tax man, I don’t care to care about the difference.

The insult of this all is that:

  • The actual PDF does not contain any information that requires a form – it’s not a form – it’s a document.
  • SARS say they don’t give a hoot about my medical aid contributions and expenses.

Did I mention how I feel about Adobe?

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Halal is not kosher

Posted on 20 September 2014 by stuff writer

Those that follow the teachings of Mohammed are told that they must not consume …

  • alcohol
  • meat not slaughtered with a sharp knife, especially pork

Wow.  What a list.  These poor people.  They are so restricted.  How will they keep track?  How will they manage?  Well, meat is easy: Muslims that care to buy specially slaughtered meat do that, and they pay a small premium.  That leaves all other meat: if it was not slaughtered by one of theirs, they might not want it.   This makes the list of things to avoid easier:

  • alcohol
  • meat

Clearly Muslims are indisposed to having a scientific mind, and being entirely untrained by their five times daily, weekly or monthly visits to the mosque, they are completely unable to distinguish between wine and wine gums, between sugar and ceiling boards, and between milk and beef.

In a world where everything from white sugar to pineapple rings might possibly be made of meat and alcohol, how will they survive?  Who will arise to educate these poor people in the basic principles of chemistry and cooking?  Who will defend these helpless souls against the relentless onslaught of a world of bacon-laced foods, so that they may seek to obtain their salvation by abstaining from them?

Enter the certification agencies, who will certify everything from cake mix to curry powder that it does not contain:

  • meat
  • alcohol

This is apparently necessary, because of the proliferation of meat based cake flours and alcoholic curry powders.  No Muslim is competent to read the list of ingredients and determine that the cake contains baking powder, not bacon powder.  This is too hard for them.

The certification agencies market their unnecessary certification as a way of making sure that that large and significant discretionary spending of the Muslim population is spent not on funding their favourite Muslim propagation group, but on your particular brand of milk powder.  The other part of their marketing budget is spent convincing gullible Muslims that they are committing a heinous sin for which they will be eternally condemned to hell if they dare to buy a hair growth formula that lacks a halal certification mark.  (Don’t worry about lust, pride, evil thoughts and following lies, just buy halal).

Actually, this certification has precious little to do with Islam, except that it is administered by Muslims and against Muslims.  Any marginally inoffensive cause could do this.  If hypothetically 1 percent of people in the country supported our soccer team, then they could certify all manner of product as “soccer friendly” and then tell the producers of the remaining products that if their products are not “soccer friendly” they will face the wrath of angry football hooligans, and besides, soccer moms prefer “soccer friendly” products.  Fortunately, this cannot happen, since our soccer team is, for the moment, incapable of sustaining a winning streak or keeping a coach.

A muslim writer, Shafiq Morton, says:

Halal certification in South Africa (and elsewhere in the Muslim world) has become a billion dollar industry. A recent international Halal conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, attended by hundreds of representatives, confirms this.

The sad truth is that the Halal industry preys mercilessly upon the ignorance of its subjects, and its fears. I have seen this in the Far East, the Middle East, the Indo-Pak, the US, Great Britain and now South Africa.

However, Islam’s legal schools of thought reveal that the understanding of Halal matters is based upon common sense. The corpus of Halal legislation was never designed for obscurantist scholarship, but practical application.

Apart from the view that South Africa is part of the Muslim world, the writer’s observation is excellent: the halal business of today has nothing to do with the teaching or practice of their prophet, who was quite happy to eat the meat of Christians and Jews.

One has to wonder what this thriving unnecessary certification business does with their profits.  Actually, you don’t need to wonder.  One of the agencies that administers a halal certification is the “Muslim Judicial Council“.  They have something in common with other many well known international Muslim movements: they believe deeply in Islamic jurisprudence, also known as sharia law.

Sharia law and the methods of those who promote it are well known in Nigeria, Palestine, Syria and other places of the world consistently unfriendly to non-Muslims.

When you give your money for goods marked “halal”, you give your money for the works done in the name of sharia law.

Just for the record, Kosher certification is just as much a scam as Halal certification, if not more. You have to be some kind of moron to believe that there may be milk or meat in your strawberry jam.

What Kosher and Halal have in common that they both do violence to the law of Moses, while claiming to uphold it, and rejecting the prophet that Moses promised.

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NIV1984 switcheroo

Posted on 5 July 2014 by stuff writer

Three years too late, I’m running into this controversy that is now starting to hit our shores.

In 1984 the International Bible Society published a new English translation of the Bible: the New International Version, NIV1984.  This was welcome, not only because few English speakers are conversant in Hebrew and first century Greek, but because in many ways this translation proved readable, while managing to represent the original language fairly fully.  The NIV1984 plots a course midway between overly interpretive translation, and the stilted language of overly literal translations.  It reads well.  It’s good English.  (Well, it reads mostly well: they did invent a term, which went down very poorly – instead of “flesh”, they used “sinful nature” – an abstract term to replace a concrete term, which was not a good choice.)

In 2005, having merged with another organisation and become “Biblica”, they published a new edition, the TNIV.  This edition was widely rejected and flopped.  And in 2011, they made a number of revisions to the TNIV, and published it as the NIV.  The packaging of this NIV of 2011 is the same as the original NIV of 1984.  And more recently, they withdrew publishing rights for the NIV1984, so if you find a NIV1984 for sale today you can be sure that you won’t find it next year.  Soon you won’t get it anywhere except in Skunkware phone apps.

The NIV1984 translation has 350 million copies in print.  It’s fair to say that there is significant interest in it.  For 20 years it has been read, spoken about and memorised.  This is a big deal, because the NIV2011 is a different animal.

Now there’s a problem here – while the packaging is the same, and the name is the same, the content of the NIV2011 is not the same as the NIV1984.  They are selling the sweepings as wheat, it’s marked as NIV, but it is not.

Instead of proper English, we are treated to sentences like

Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need. (NIV2011)

One must work with their hands?  How many people have these hands?  Why is this change made?  It is to avoid “he” and “him”:

He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.  (NIV1984)

The NIV2011 rendition doesn’t apply to anyone in particular.  The NIV1984 applies to a specific man: a thief.  (If women thieves believe they are excused, all the best to them.)  A woman may well believe she is excused in the first version though, because anyone can tell you that if something applies to anyone, it applies just as well to no-one.  I don’t know that you will actually find anyone to tell you that – it’s all hypothetical when you don’t say “man”.

Now there is a fair bit of bad English going about, and some people do think that they and their are as good as him and his, but this is not the reason that there has been a search and replace job done on the text.  From the extent of the changes and what was targeted for changing it is clear that men, fathers, brothers and anything male are targets for elimination.  Eliminating maleness may agree with the spirit of the age, but it does not accurately reflect the text that the NIV2011 claims to translate into English.  Works of fiction have their own aisle.

One of the great things about the internet is that it is trivial to see how this text is translated in other languages – it’s very male:

  • Que celui qui volait cesse de voler; qu’il se donne plutôt la peine de travailler honnêtement de ses propres mains pour avoir de quoi donner à celui qui est dans le besoin.
  • Wer bisher ein Dieb gewesen ist, soll aufhören zu stehlen und soll stattdessen einer nützlichen Beschäftigung nachgehen, bei der er seinen Lebensunterhalt mit Fleiß und Anstrengung durch eigene Arbeit verdient; dann kann er sogar noch denen etwas abgeben, die in Not sind.

This was a pretty random sample.  What they did to Psalm 1 was awful.  Psalm 8 they removed the important part, so it makes no sense.  The creative headline in Matthew 1 (“Joseph Accepts Jesus as His Son”) was absolutely beyond belief.

So, I’ve said it poorly, this NIV2011 is bad.  Others have said it better:

This post was meant to be vitriolic, so I will now plagiarise someone else’s vitriol on the matter (you can find it on your favourite search engine):

The NIV 2011 is evil, catering to the homosexual agenda (which seeks to make men effeminate). By watering down and diminishing the masculinity of the Word of God in the NIV 2011, the Committee on Biblical Translation (CBT) has actually produced an effeminate and feminist Bible of the Devil.

Fiddling about with gender language is not without effect.  I am growing weary of losing friends to this evil cause.

A word of moderation after the vitriol: if this is the only Bible you have, read it.  If you have another, read that rather.

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