As a podcast on iTunes, listenable/downloadable onscreen at Taki’s Magazine, or as a transcript here.

This week’s broadcast of course notes the death of Nelson Mandela, news of which came as the show was going to tape.  I think I got it pretty much right.

My first reaction was nostalgia.  When I went up to university in 1963, the very first meeting of the college student union that I attended was given over to a motion to make Nelson Mandela, who had just been put in jail, our honorary President.  The motion passed.  So Mandela’s been shuffling around in the background of the news for my entire adult life.

He mellowed with age, of course.  I'm not a huge fan of Marxist revolutionaries who want to blow up white people, but I’ll cut Mandela some slack: When he at last had the power to be vindictive, he wasn’t.

That aside, I can’t say I care much; and I look forward with weary resignation to all the gushing from the liberal media.  A black African leader who’s not a crook or a thug— Mandela was a white liberal's wet dream.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, though.  Mandela had the opportunity to be vengeful, cruel, corrupt, and triumphally arrogant—and he passed it up.  That’s pretty good as human beings go.  As Africa goes, it’s sensational.

The full Radio Derb playbill:

• The Middle East still has nations. (Saudi Arabia awakens from their 40-year folly of importing cheap foreign labor.)
• Waiting for cyberdildonics.   (Britain’s naughtiest town is in . . . Northern Ireland?)
• The logic that leads to war  ( Getting a bit worried about China.)
• Onomastic adventures. (“Norgestrel, did you take out the trash?”)
• Improbable aliens. (Send astronomers home, bring in Organic Chemists.)
• Golliwog jurisprudence. (Golly, this is getting ridiculous.)
• What a nation of laws looks like.  (Or should.)
• Pad kid poured curd pulled cold.  (World’s worst tongue-twister?)
• Nelson Mandela, an African sensation.  (See above.)
• Cutting-edge music.  (Better than rap, anyway.)

It’s all there at Taki’s Magazine.