Do you know just how much of modern technology is thanks to people who 'lack the intellect' – women

Had it not been for women...

For hundreds of years, men have been scared of one thing: a smart woman.

And scared men are dangerous men. They didn’t just fear smart women – they destroyed them. They brutalised them, ridiculed their intellect, and gutted their legacy from history –only to replace truth with a poisonous myth: Women’s minds are inferior to men’s.

And then lied: “See? Women were never great,” gaslighting the human race. If a woman cannot answer a general knowledge question, the stereotype is confirmed: “Brains aren’t your department, huh?” But if she can answer it, the goalposts shift – “She must have memorized it,” or, “She’s just lucky”. Intelligence in men is applauded; in women, it’s interrogated.

If women truly weren’t intelligent, then history’s greatest moments would not have been shaped by women’s brilliance – shattering the sexist narrative.

Marie Curie didn’t merely study radiation – she opened Pandora’s box of atomic science. She uncovered radioactivity, advanced its science, and made history as the only dual-Nobel-winning woman. No man has ever matched that. In fact, her research was later used by those very “same men” to build the atomic bomb.

If women were “less intelligent”, explain Curie’s impact on both medicine and physics. You can’t.

Hedy Lamarr, famed actress and brilliant inventor, co-created frequency­-hopping technology – the seed of Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Without her, you wouldn’t be reading this on your phone or laptop.

Katherine Johnson, a Black mathematician at Nasa, calculated the flight paths that put the first American in orbit and got Apollo 11 to the Moon. Without her, the US space programme could have been a disaster.

About 150 years before your smartphone, in the 1800s, Ada Lovelace invented programming (the first computer algorithm), despite the technology not yet existing. She literally predicted modern programming. Without her, the tech world as we know it wouldn’t exist. Today, the entire field of software development owes its origins to Lovelace’s visionary algorithm.If women were truly “not smart,” none of this would exist. No space travel. No Wi-Fi. No computer programming.

People claim women’s minds work differently from men’s. Men brought us war, greed, and domination – perhaps women’s reasoning might heal us instead. | Yumna Zahid Ali Karachi, Pakistan.

National dialogue an absolute sham

The assertion by Brett Herron of the Good Party that a national dialogue is more pertinent than ever is naïve and unrealistic not only because of how the ANC has structured the intended process, but because the 2024 national election was the national dialogue.

On that day voters declared the ANC’s time as sole ruler was up. It had had 30 years to deliver a “better life for all” and had failed atrociously.

The GNU is a disingenuous means for the ANC to pretend it still has a mandate to ruin South Africa although it lost that on May 29 2024. Mr Herron deludes himself when he says a national dialogue is necessary to “awaken the government from its slumber and deliver”.

The ANC is fully alive to what it is doing. It is delivering on its Marxist national democratic revolution and using the GNU to facilitate it.

Ramaphosa’s purpose in wasting R700 million to facilitate a so-called national dialogue is a face-saving pretence to project the view that the ANC is in earnest about addressing the ills of the country.

It is a pretence because in advance it has been made clear that the final outcomes of the dialogue must align with the ANC’s ideological world views. That means views challenging their narrative will not be reflected in the decision-making process.In an attempt to give credence to the process and its outcomes, an eminent persons’ panel has been appointed whose members’ views echo those of the ANC.

From those parameters it should be obvious that no improvement in the state of the country can result when it is predetermined that the same policies which have brought about dysfunction, dereliction and distress will not be challenged. In other words, the so-called dialogue is a window dressing sham.There can be no salvation for South Africa until the ANC and its communist cadres and cronies are removed root and branch.

To initiate that process will require a clear anti-communist mandate in a general election. From there a national convention premised on commitment to free enterprise, unambiguous property rights and Judeo-Christian values should follow.

Then, as is being initiated by the Trump Administration, there must be consequences for those who have looted, defrauded and corrupted the system. Unless this process is followed, there is no hope for South Africa – unless God intervenes. | DR DUNCAN DU BOIS Bluff

Orwell’s vision of the future has arrived

The article by Dr Iqbal Surve’ in the Sunday Tribune in which he uses the basis of the George Orwell book 1984 as the benchmark for his article is right on the money.

The book, written in 1949, was prophetic and is being played out right now in the US. Orwell wrote about a new world order where all freedoms were banned – freedom of thought, the written word, literature, history and opinion.

Orwell’s book describes the surveillance police who monitor the population with transgressors facing the death penalty.

Fast forward to America 2025 which is fast becoming dystopian under Donald J Trump. The world order that has been in place ever since George Washington’s inauguration has been turned upside down in 6 months by Trump.

Gone is democracy to be replaced by Trumps authoritarian rule.

Dr Surve’s suggestion that the AI era is distorting the facts on hundreds of search engines is correct … after all these “facts” are merely the opinions of hundreds of people and correlated by the search engines into an artificial version of the truth – truth isn’t an opinion.

There is an old saying: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”Orwell could have written his book based on Trump’s first 6 months in office! | Colin Bosman Newlands

Kudos to DA minister for doing right thing

Congratulations to DA cabinet member and minister of Public Works Dean Macpherson for again doing the right thing, stepping up and exposing, confronting, challenging and criminally charging wrongdoing in his orbit of influence and control.

Unlike other DA cabinet ministers, Macpherson is not only beavering away behind the scenes doing good work that nobody ever gets to know about, but he is chasing publicity as hard as he is chasing the crooks.

This is the ONLY way to justify the DA’s continued participation in the GNU and his fellow DA cabinet ministers (including DA leader Johnny Jelly Tot Steenhuisen and the famously competent Home Affairs minister Leon Schreiber) and deputy ministers would all do very well to start doing the same. Their continued participation in the GNU – effective but largely silent, with little or no publicity and arrest of crooks – may well be doing “good work” somewhere, somehow but, politically and strategically for the DA, it is a hiding to nowhere.

If nobody knows about it then it’s not happening and, with South African voters and their notoriously short memories, the DA will pay a heavy price at the next election. | Mark Lowe Durban

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