Tropical Camel

Should 18-year-olds be allowed to vote?

If you don’t trust your twelve years of indoctrination nation-building National Education, that your people will choose what is good for them, then I am sad for the fate of the country. The extra three years for what, people to appreciate more of university life or army life (ooh, must NS their brains senget then can vote – eminently SENSIBLE!) or what not?

Anyway practically speaking, a hundred fifty thousand more voters in Singapore ain’t gonna make much of a difference. Unless, of course, the Gahmen is scared that badbad youths will not vote the way they want.

Mas Selamat escaped so long already, if you say you didn’t know, I will stick you back under the pebble you were hibernating under. And if you tell me you didn’t know PM Lee’d made a bullshitty statement about it, I’ll give you more pebbles to build a nice house in. (And a PAP flag to hang over your windows and kowtow to every morning.)

 Still, for reference read this from the Straits Times, just to get a rough idea of the proceedings, in case you’ve been hibernating under a pebble.

Just a few comments, though. I quote PM Lee once:

‘Whether it’s a big mistake or a small mistake, if they are responsible, they have to answer for it,’

And again:

I do not believe that Wong Kan Seng should resign over this issue alone. Whether or not he should resign, in addition to other failings, is something else altogether.

He also said that he wouldn’t sack the ISD Director, for approximately the same reasons.

The reasoning in the rest of the transcript explains PM Lee’s justification. In summary, a person who doesn’t have direct influence shouldn’t be punished?

Ministers never do have direct influence. All their work is saikang-ed by their juniors – the upstairs kick it to the downstairs, and if there is basement, will kick from ground floor to bottomless pit. The people with ‘direct fault’ are the Gurkha guards, ISD low-level staff, etc – all the people lower down the chain. Eh wait, aren’t they taking cues from their superiors’ attitudes?!

Aiya don’t know lah. I only learned one thing. Must aim to work as a high-high official in Gahmen next time. Diamond rice bowl orhh! (credits to him)

Eh I heard that somewhere outside Singapore (aka 夜郎国) got some dunno-what countries, sack their PM and ministers for smaller issues. Another country kicked their leader out for promiscuity. Tsk tsk, such evil unforgiving peoples! They should understand their country’s leaders have their unique challenges, must 体谅体谅 cut them lots of slack!

The Chua sisters (Ah Mui and Ah Lee) have spoken! O Holy Sirens. Let’s see what Mui has to say here.

Just to prove to our happy, innocent must-be-protected-from-evil-unknown-media Singaporeans, our dear MDA has decided to ban another film! YAY!!!!

Read this and this (see even Egypt also bandwagon-ed) and this!. And just to not waste uploading space I shall link you to the video. Have fun. (Well, it’s just him talking.)

There’s a very interesting chunk of information from the first article;

The Ministry said “Zahari’s 17 Years” was an attempt by Zahari “to exculpate himself from his past involvement in communist united front activities against the interests of Singapore.”

“The government will not allow people who had posed a security threat to the country in the past to exploit the use of films to purvey a false and distorted portrayal of their past actions and detention by the government,” the ministry said, adding that this may “undermine public confidence in the government.”

Hmm. No idea how reliable this is, considering it’s from Reuters, but it can’t be that bad. It IS an international news agency. And quotes aren’t usually twistable much, but who’d want to twist this soundbite? I shan’t bother dissecting the quote, but I am very annoyed by the bit that says “[the film] purvey[s] a false and distorted portrayal of [his] past actions and detention by the government …. (and may) undermine public confidence in the government.”

Aaaah. I feel insulted! BOO HOO MY GAHMEN THINKS I STUPID DOAN KNOH HOW TO SEE MOVIE SEE UNTIL I KENA BRAINWASH! MAMEEE! HE IN-SHPAI-YER ME TO REBEL! YOU SEE HE TALK CALM CALM, SO EHKS-SHAI-TING WANN! Hmm. Nevermind.

I am so sad. Every time I start to gain faith in MDA’s sensibility and goodness, they wreck it. Maybe because they know that if they allow it, the response will be shitty, so they ban it so that in reality MORE people will watch it. Reverse psychology!

P.S. Because I’m scared later gahmen really delete from Internet so I download! Oi, Martyn See never say got copyright you angry for what 0.0

The Internet’s a huge bouncy trampoline of hyperlinks, so as I was clicking around I ended up on a rather thought-provoking page. Read this website which was linked from the Wikipedia article on intifada, as well as this series of comments and responses to the issue. It is a rather late (by online standards) reaction to this, but I hadn’t known about this when it happened. (Maybe I was just lazy to read the news )

The responses to Ms Debbie Almontaser’s explanation of ‘intifada’ were, to me, quite out of proportion. I shall quote;

Ms. Almontaser’s remarks, made last weekend, were in response to questions from The Post over the phrase “Intifada NYC,” which was printed on T-shirts sold by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media, a Brooklyn-based organization. The shirts have no relation to her school.

“The word basically means ‘shaking off,’ ” Ms. Almontaser told the paper. “That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic.”

It’s an explanation of what intifada means. Right? In what way is that sentence, like what lots of hyper journalists say, “defensive” of the Intifada NYC T-shirts? I smell a bit of discrimination here; in the book The God Delusion it was quoted that a 13-year-old boy got the right to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with anti-Semitic, hate-choked slogans – based on ‘religious freedom’. This isn’t even religion; what IS so wrong about explaining a phrase in a language that most Americans don’t know, and sadly just have an alarmist attitude towards. (By the way, I don’t understand Ms Weingarten’s slamming of intifada. Yeah, it’s violent and all, but the people in Gaza strip do actually have their reasons for rebelling. Tell me USA’s reasons for helping Israel and I’ll dissect the [il]logic for you, FOC.)

Oh no! There’s a Hebrew-English bilingual school round the corner. RUN!!! They’re going to poison you minds with Zionist thoughts! AAAH DIE! BRAINWASHING! WARMONGERING! (I’m quoting Weingarten, I know it sounds lame, don’t mind me.)

I guess, though, in that sense most (not all, remember the jailed bloggers?) Singaporeans are actually quite priviledged in being able to be in close, glorious proximity with people of all types. And not think that this is at all unique or special, at that, until we read such insane and illogical foreign articles. =)

This is pasted over from my other blog:
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On the news, the word’s out that apparently Singapore’s world’s 8th greatest forex hoarder.

This is remarkably and deeply disturbing.

Singapore is facing spiralling inflation, price hikes, wage stagnation and a coterie of other factors designed to harden people’s lives but not put them in a state where they actually have perfect justification to complain. (Or even if they do, one can just deport them and claim that they either ARE foreign and have no business complaining, or are just instigated by bad ol’ foreigners that harbour ill intent. Against what, our foreign exchange? 0.0)

Singapore also has significantly tinier populations than the top seven hoarders, namely China, Japan, the European Union zone, Russia, India, ROC (Taiwan), South Korea, and Brazil. Let’s compare populations, shall we?

Singapore – 4.5 million, approx.
China – more than 1.3 billion
Japan – 127 million
EU – 320 million
Russia – 142 million
India – 1.12 billion
ROC (Taiwan) – 22 million
South Korea - 49 million
Brazil – 183 million

Let’s be nice for now and see that, oh, Taiwan has the tiniest population out of the honchos who have more forex reserves than tiny vulnerable us. But they ARE still about 5 times our population size, and has a grand 36188 square kilometres of land. (No matter how Mrs Ho says they’ll narrow out, they can’t become our land area.) While we, Singapore here, proudly squishes all our people onto about 700 square kilometres.

We have no authority nor backing to pass judgment on other countries’ forex reserves. Take in mind, too, that despite their huge reserves countries like Brazil and China have renowned high Gini coefficients; huge income disparities.

We have no right to have income disparities. Swathes of land big enough to be big on the map inevitably make up countries that cannot be fairly expected to manage perfectly its widely-spread population. In Singapore, the artificial country (for we are not some messiah-declared nation like Israel, or an always-there country like China), where it takes less than 2 hours to drive from one end to another, how is it unfair to expect far better-managed fiscal and political duties to (so many, admittedly) people that are compacted into an easy-to-reach tiny space?

As our often-boasted ‘resilience’ and ‘ability’ and ‘foresight’ in our small populations provides an economic dividend, so has that dividend its duty to perform; if we have more capability than bigger countries, we have, too, less difficulty in fulfilling our obligations. If we are an experiment in the definition of nationhood, so should we uphold future standards for nations like us.

/portion deleted/

Bye.
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I read this article linked by Singapore Daily; go here to read.

It is remarkably disturbing, this issue of brain drain, as was utterly and tiredly covered in P5(or was it P6) during the FPS topic of Hong Kong’s brain drain.

Yet, in this case, there is another, more callous and frightening aspect. The so-called bred intellectuals borne of the system are often the very ones disillusioned by it, thus emigrating; it is disheartening to know that one’s country would rather just import some more foreign talent (in hope that they’ll stay and not hop to USA) instead of retaining their own cream of the crop.

 YawningBread had one article (forgot the title) which quite highlighted the idiocy of the current modus operandi. E.g. a) Chinese engineer that is really good and professional b) born-and-bred Singaporean engineer/etc that is also good and professional. So if B emigrates, gahmen just decides to import A to make up for the net loss? It’s not that simple; a country is not the grand total of its economy, GDP, and cleanliness. There’s also the little something called a sense of belonging, of nationhood (inasmuch as it may have been created from years of increasingly artyfarty NDPs) and of identity. Immigrants who do change passports ultimately would never be as Singaporean as one born, educated, and matured here. Just as it took a vast effort to create a nation out of our forefathers’ sojourner-attitudes, so will it take a long time to inculcate Singaporeanness in immigrants. They come not because they like your very free media and very (‘)clean(‘) city and very efficient country, but because there’s money. That’s that.

 Singapore Inc is a common caricature; sadly caricatures often have some basis in truth. Nobody feels like staying where one is unappreciated.

(Update: Today’s (15Feb) Singaporedaily update has an intriguing take on this by Leelilian)

Hmm. This being the first post on my WordPress?

Read the recent online flurry about someone who was slamming theonlinecitizen as a PAP mole. What does it matter, anyway? Online articles are meant to be taken for their content and quality, not the partisan nature of the author. If blogders are so annoyed by PAP ‘moles’ somehow perhaps ’subconsciously brainwashing’ them through blog posts, maybe they should read something else? Undiscerning people that can be so easily affected and swayed by what they read might as well go read mainstream media. In any case, even if the TOC people are actually moles, would that be very different from the Straits Times?

 I’m bored. And since I’m not supposed to be online, I think I’ll log off. Will comment about other stuff I read online; might copy/paste some posts from my Blogger blog.