Yes. South Africa really did have a tricameral Parliament under the 1983 Constitution, in force from 1984 until the democratic transition. But the phrase can mislead, because it sounds more pluralistic than it really was. The system created three racially separate parliamentary chambers: a House of Assembly for whites, a House of Representatives for Coloured South Africans, and a House of Delegates for Indian South Africans. The black African majority was excluded altogether from this Parliament.

The key to how it worked was the distinction between “own affairs” and “general affairs.” Each chamber could legislate for the “own affairs” of the racial group it represented; these included areas such as education, housing, welfare, local government, culture, and recreation. But the central levers of power—“general affairs”—remained matters such as defence, finance, foreign policy, justice, law and order, commerce, internal affairs, and agriculture. Those were handled at the center, not by the separate chambers acting independently.

Formally, then, it was a three-house legislature. In practice, it was a system of segregated representation plus retained white dominance. The constitutional text itself says Parliament consisted of the three Houses. But the white chamber was far larger and more institutionally powerful: the House of Assembly had 178 members, while the House of Representatives had 85 and the House of Delegates 45. The Constitution also vested executive authority in the State President, with different advisory structures for “own affairs” and “general affairs,” which further centralized power above the chambers themselves.

Here is the full GPT discussion, with links as well.  As Harrison points out to me, in history tricameralism of any form is extremely rare.

The post Tricameralism in apartheid South Africa appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

As the war with Iran  enters week number three, the left wing media has managed to keep up the narrative that it is a war that we can not win, a war that will have chilling effects on our homeland both economically and otherwise, and  perhaps the most hyped narrative, a war that should never have have been started by President Trump. That last point was discussed Saturday on MS NOW's Velshi. Ali Velshi played part of an interview that fellow MS NOW Host Ayman Mohyeldin conducted earlier that morning with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who represented Iran in the three way talks with the U.S. and Oman in the days leading up to the start of the war, and questioned the honesty of our men in the room.  MOHYELDIN: Do you believe Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were good faith negotiators conveying accurate information back to the White House about Iran's position during these negotiations? There's been some reports that you shouted at Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that you threatened that you had enriched uranium to make 11 nuclear weapons. I want you to set the record straight on on those negotiations in the final days before the war. ARAGHCHI: Well, I don't know what they have conveyed to their boss. What I know is that on 26th February, when we met in Geneva, we were able to make a good progress as Omani Foreign Minister the  intermediary said it was a significant progress....They want to justify and unjustifiable act of aggression. So they are trying to make some excuses for themselves. I never said that we are going to make bombs.... We are ready to dilute them to down, blend them into lower degrees.... But how they have interpreted that, I don't know, maybe, maybe because the lack of enough knowledge, maybe because of, you know, their intentions to justify, as I said, the act of aggression which cannot be justified. So Mohyeldin trusts a spokesman for a tyrannical regime that's slaughtered thousands of protesters as the straight shooter in any negotiation, not the Trump team. That account is not how Witkoff heard it. And as he began his interview with Ben Rhodes, former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor, and MS NOW Contributor, Velshi failed to mention that Rhodes, according to a 2016 House Oversight Committee Report, "made misleading statements about the ability of inspectors to have “anytime, anywhere” access to Iranian nuclear facilities" under the JCPOA which President Trump withdrew from in 2018. Nor did he mention the $400 million given by Obama to Iran in 2016. And Rhodes didn't disappoint, eventually praising Araghchi, while trashing Witkoff and Kushner, after Velshi made a surprising remark about Araghchi. VELSHI: You know this, but the the Iranian diplomatic corps and their foreign ministers tend to be very sophisticated. And so it becomes hard to know what they're whether what they're saying is true or not, it becomes hard to parse that. From day one of this war, we've had conflicting reports about what happened in Geneva between the Americans, the Omanis and the Iranians. The Omanis seemed to back up the the Iranian, the Iranian position that there was progress being made. How do you interpret that exchange that Ayman just had with the Foreign Minister? RHODES: I mean, it's, it's pretty plausible to me, Ali, in part because it's backed up by other information. And first of all, Araghchi the Iranian Foreign Minister, he was the lead negotiator for the Iranians during the negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, under the Obama administration. He's been and I this is relevant because, number one, he's been in negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program for well over a decade, right. Steve Witkoff was, you know, selling real estate like a year and a half ago, right.  And Araghchi also was a part of a government that could be tough negotiators. They could have shifting positions, but they actually kept their commitments under the JCPOA. Right. It was Trump who pulled out of it. So this is a guy who knows what he's talking about. On the substance of nuclear negotiations, much more than Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who found themselves in that room for reasons that we still don't understand. Were they just there as a smokescreen because Trump was going to bomb all along? Certainly feels that way to me, Ali, because we were moving the largest military force to the region since the Iraq war while this negotiation was going on. Right. So you don't have to like Araghchi's politics to think he's a more credible voice on these issues than Witkoff, who seemed to not know what the International Atomic Energy Agency was before he walked into this negotiation. We are at war, and treating the authoritarian enemy as the more credible source of information in all this is simply obscene.

Thursday was a day of terror at a Synagogue in Michigan and at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and it was the latter incident that provided what must have been an uncomfortable situation for those in charge of making editorial decisions in the liberal media. No one was killed at the Synagogue, except the person who drove his bomb filled car into the building in an obvious terror attack, but one person was killed and two wounded in the other, obvious terror attack at an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion, but would the media tell all about that attacker? The answer for the big three network nightly newscasts is mostly yes. Mohammed Jalloh, the shooter who was killed in the attack, served in the National Guard, and in 2016 pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS, and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. That's the easy part. But would the media specifically raise the issue of his early release, and would they play the clip of the FBI Agent in charge who said that Jalloh shouted  "Allahu Akbar" during Thursday's attack. ABC's Pierre Thomas did both on ABC's World News Tonight THOMAS: Tonight terror on the campus of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, with members of the school's ROTC program targeted by a suspect with ties to ISIS. The suspect has been identified by the FBI as 36-year-old Mohamed Jalloh, a former member of the Virginia National Guard. Sources tell ABC News he calmly walked into the classroom, asked if it was an ROTC class, and then shot the instructor several times, and two students who were wounded. The instructor later died. And then came the key statement from FBI Special Agent Dominique Evans, "We have confirmed reports that prior to him conducting this act of terrorism, he shouted, or stated Allahu Akbar." And Thomas concluded his report by providing specific information, and raising some good questions. THOMAS: Jalloh was convicted in 2016 of attempting to provide material support to ISIS and trying to acquire weapons for an attack on U.S. Soil. He served eight years of an 11-year prison sentence and was released in 2024. Jalloh was under five-year supervised release in which he was to check in with his probation officer regularly. He was also subject having his internet activity reviewed. But Tonight so many questions, including how a convicted felon got a gun and whether he's recently been under surveillance. MUIR: Yeah, major questions moving forward. Both CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News also presented Agent Evans saying that Jalloh had stated Allahu Akbar during the attack, but left the viewer to do the math on his sentence, without spelling it out the way ABC's Thomas did, that he served only 8 years of an 11 year sentence.  Based on past performance it can certainly be considered surprising that the big 3 networks all edited in the Allahu Akbar remark. Meanwhile, both The PBS News Hour and FNC's Special Report With Bret Baier skipped the statement while each one did say that the attack is being investigated as an act of terrorism.

National "Public" Radio can NOT find the story of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife Rama Duwaji putting "Likes" on pages celebrating the October 7 massacre in Israel. But it CAN find stories where Mamdani is the victim of cruel Republican social media posts. GOP 'Islamophobia' is hot news, and Muslim Democrat antisemitism is not. Reporter Brian Mann's online article was splashed on NPR's home page with this headline:  NYC's Mamdani condemns Sen. Tuberville's anti-Muslim posts as 'bigotry' It began: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is condemning a series of anti-Muslim social media posts by Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama as "bigotry." On X, Tuberville reposted an image of Mamdani next to a photo of the deadly 9/11 terror attacks in New York City, along with the words "the enemy is inside the gates." Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, has been the subject of repeated verbal attacks during the Ramadan season now underway. Tuberville's second image was Mamdani hosting the first official Ramadan iftar at City Hall. NPR, normally so hostile to the mingling of church and state, makes an exception for socialist Muslims. On Wednesday, the NPR talk show 1A devoted a whole hour to "Christian nationalism" and how "concerns grow over the crumbling of the separation between church and state in the Trump administration’s military."  Mamdani also hosted an iftar dinner on March 8 for Hamas-backing Mahmoud Khalil, who drew a laudatory victim profile on NPR this week. Khalil's protest group at Columbia University not only backed the October 7 slaughter like Mrs. Mamdani, they boasted online that "We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization." They suggest oppressed territories of the world include Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Most Americans would consider that an "enemy" statement. On March 12, a Washington Free Beacon article by Jon Levine had a new scandal, that Mamdani's wife "provided a featured illustration for an essay by an author who called Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack 'spectacular,' has frequently decried what she describes as 'Jewish supremacist vampires, and said Jewish Israelis are 'rootless soulless ghouls.'" NPR couldn't find that, but Mann platformed Mamdani's lecture on tolerance: "When I hear such hatred and disdain unchecked in its rancor, I feel a loneliness and isolation that I know many of you have felt as well," Mamdani said. "Who here has been told, you do not belong in New York City? Who here has been told, go back where you came from?" On Thursday, Tuberville also claimed falsely that "Americans are being gunned down in the streets almost daily by Radical Islamists." Experts say attacks in the U.S. by Muslim extremists are rare and are "not resurgent," according to a 2025 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Republican leaders have been largely silent about Tuberville's anti-Muslim posts. A growing number of Democrats, meanwhile, have condemned his statements. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, described Tuberville's posts as "mindless hate." Can you believe that? We don't have daily shootings by radical Islamists. But in a week filled with violent attacks by radical Muslims -- in Virginia, Michigan, and outside Mamdani's mansion in New York -- NPR is going to say attacks are RARE?  Even then, NPR "domestic extremism correspondent" Odette Yousef and host Scott Detrow never breathed the word "Muslim" in a March 13 evening roundup of the Muslim violence. The next morning, Yousef did it again -- the assailant in Michigan was a "naturalized Lebanese American citizen," and host Scott Simon only used the M-word to refer to "an attempted attack on anti-Muslim protesters in New York." In addition to Mann's article on Sen. Tuberville, NPR has been on a streak of GOP "Islamophobia" stories, leaping off Rep. Andy Ogles tweeting about Muslims being incompatible with America. March 9: Tennessee GOP Rep says Muslims 'don't belong in American society'  March 11: What role do politics play in increased anti-Muslim rhetoric? March 13: Muslim voters react to Rep. Andy Ogles' comments that they 'don't belong' March 13: Unlike past eras, anti-Muslim GOP rhetoric draws little pushback from party leaders March 14: House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements This whole trend is revealing, since vicious antisemitism among Muslim politicians, from Mamdani to Omar to Tlaib, "draws little pushback" from so-called "public radio" journalists.

"One of Machiavelli’s most famous ideas is that it is 'better to be feared than loved.' He observed that, in power struggles, being feared can prevent betrayal or confrontation and can command a certain kind of respect.
    "My goal in life is not to pursue power at any cost. I also reject the false choice between being feared or being loved by others. 

    "What I seek instead is happiness—achieved through my own independent effort. I do not wish to live as either a master or a slave to anyone. 

    "Whether others fear me or love me cannot be the foundation of my happiness, because that would make my well-being dependent on them. True happiness, for me, comes from independence: from using my own thinking and actions to create the things I want to see existing."

~ Felipe Lapyda from his post 'The independent man rejects Machiavellian false alternatives'