Friday saw something of a landmark ruling for South Africa, Penny Sparrow ordered to cough up R150 000 for her racist Facebook rant.

We’re not going to rehash that one, I think we all know the hate that spewed from her fingertips, but now we have the latest batch of online idiots doing their thing.

Yes indeed, over at YouCaring (a “compassionate crowd-funding” website) you can now help poor Penny pay her fine to the Oliver and Adelaide Tambo Foundation.

HERE is one of the two pages:

As you can see things aren’t exactly rollicking along – at the time of writing the efforts have raised just $340 of the $10 000 goal.

That page above was started by Helgard Muller, and a second page was started by Nathalie Moolman (HERE). That is called “Lets HELP Penny Sparrow pay her fine!”, and here’s Moolman’s reasoning according to IOL:

Moolman said she started the initative to help Sparrow escape prison for the comments she made.

“Truth be told, a fair amount of South Africans are racists, but they just keep it to themselves, they don’t post it on social media platforms, like Penny did.

“South Africa only got democracy in 1994, it has been a mere 22 years. So the scars caused by apartheid to blacks and whites are fairly fresh. America got its democracy more than 50 years ago, but racism there is still a rife.”

She said what Sparrow did could never be justified, but said the court issuing her with a fine was teaching the public to never “write such things on social media platforms”.

“You never put up race, sex and religious comments on these platforms. Those topics can offend people, can also create hate among the human race,” Moolman said.

Thanks, I think I’ll refrain from donating to either though. Fighting back was AmandlaAwethu.mobi, a social justice campaign website:

[They have] received 38 of 100 signatures for a petition to get crowdfunding organisations to ban pages dedicated to raising funds for Sparrow.

“We, the undersigned, ask that you close down any crowd-funding campaigns started by fellow racists in an attempt to raise money for her. By allowing such a campaign, you will effectively be endorsing racism,” reads the petition.

It appears being a racist on Facebook isn’t as profitable as being a waitress reduced to tears.

[source:iol]