An artifact of 1960s anti-communist hysteria, Amercian neoconservatives devise the theory that should any single country in Asia fall to communism, all countries in the continent will subsequently fall as well, like a stack of dominoes... hence, justifying their interventions in Indonesia (supporting 'regime change' and replacing Sukarno) as well as the Vietnam War (assasinating the democratically-elected South Vietnam president, replacing him with a series of authoritarian, war-happy generals, and going to war with North Vietnam).
Let me invent the New Domino Effect theory for my readers:
Should any single country in Asia fall sick from flu, all countries in the continent will subsequently fall as well, like a stack of dominoes...
Like last year's SARS, this year's H5N1 avian flu proves to be an epidemic fit for the globalised economy. And like last year, several governments have been caught with their pants down this year. Cases in point: Thailand and Indonesia, which have had cases of avian flu for the past few months and covered it up until very recently.
Now, here's a map of Asia for us to consider. Let's take a look at the 7 countries that have bird flu, in order of declaration: South Korea (7 Nov), Vietnam (9 Nov. First human deaths on 11 Nov), Japan (13 Jan), Laos (21 Jan), Thailand (23 Jan. First human death, 26 Jan), Cambodia (23 Jan), Indonesia (25 Jan).
Notice anything weird? Big gaping hole in the almost contiguous land-area: China. Are we to believe that the Middle Kingdom is safe from the current outbreak, when it is conspicuously surrounded by 2 countries to the East, and 5 more to the South with the flu?
The scientific facts of the case are stacked against China's denial - H5N1 is known to be spread across borders by migratory birds, whose droppings fortuitously land near chicken farms and hence infect the livestock. Well, not that much of a long shot as it sounds, since it's apparently happened 7 times already. Can we believe that migratory birds don't shit when they fly over China from Japan to Indonesia?
Of course, China will be given a chance to come clean next week in the emergency bird flu conference in Thailand. It had better.
26 January 2004
24 January 2004
Chinese New Year Woes
I'm more than happy to skip all the Chinese New Year visiting; relatives are poison, and all the questioning they subject me with is not worth the ang pow money...
My CNY resolution of the year is: Learn to forget all dialects. This will prevent me from comprehending the longer sermons from my grandfather's sisters, who should really save those sermons for their own grandchildren.
Sample sermon...
"Don't you love your mother? She's brought you up for 27 years now, you should do your fillial duty and make sure she spends the rest of her days in peace and comfort. Find a girlfriend and get married soon, so your mother doesn't need to do any housework. You're a graduate, try to earn lots of money and buy a car, so you can drive your parents all over Singapore..."
Yes, if one day SDU decides to shoot advertisements in dialect, we'll know which kindly great-grandmother to recommend.
Now, compare that sermon to one very practical, encouraging, and uplifting advice my father's cousin gave me. I repeat it here, also for the benefit of Camorenesi:
"So the civil service rejected you last year. Never treat that rejection as final, never believe the doors are
closed... Try and try again. They always underestimate the number of people they need, so they're always hiring."
So, my second resolution for CNY is to try again for that cushy civil service job. Just to show that I haven't given up any hope of beating the underemployment trap, that I have a chance aside from applying for waitering...
So, how did we deal with the Stupid Annoying Questions of CNY?
"Have you gotten a job yet?"
"When are you getting married?"
"Don't be shy, show us your girlfriend someday!"
For my part, I dressed in Black and Grey during the reunion dinner and put on the most bochap face and the "Ask me anything stupid and I'll KILL you" attitude® that no one asked. And perhaps the fact that my aunts and uncles seem to have woken up to the fact that there are an alarmingly high number of graduate taxi drivers in Singapore, probably
saved me from the questions as well...
And yes, I didn't do any visiting this year. It's the best way of avoiding the SAQ... maybe next year, I'll spend the holiday overseas (even if it's in Johore).
That's because I'm too polite to reply to the SAQ the way I want:
1. No, I haven't got a job. May I ask if you have enough money in the CPF to retire? Or how many more years it'll take for you to pay off the housing loan? Or how close your company is to the next retrenchment exercise?
2. No, I'm not getting married. I'd rather live in a free love commune.
3. Well, I could bring along my blow-up Gackt doll next year, if it makes you feel happy...
My CNY resolution of the year is: Learn to forget all dialects. This will prevent me from comprehending the longer sermons from my grandfather's sisters, who should really save those sermons for their own grandchildren.
Sample sermon...
"Don't you love your mother? She's brought you up for 27 years now, you should do your fillial duty and make sure she spends the rest of her days in peace and comfort. Find a girlfriend and get married soon, so your mother doesn't need to do any housework. You're a graduate, try to earn lots of money and buy a car, so you can drive your parents all over Singapore..."
Yes, if one day SDU decides to shoot advertisements in dialect, we'll know which kindly great-grandmother to recommend.
Now, compare that sermon to one very practical, encouraging, and uplifting advice my father's cousin gave me. I repeat it here, also for the benefit of Camorenesi:
"So the civil service rejected you last year. Never treat that rejection as final, never believe the doors are
closed... Try and try again. They always underestimate the number of people they need, so they're always hiring."
So, my second resolution for CNY is to try again for that cushy civil service job. Just to show that I haven't given up any hope of beating the underemployment trap, that I have a chance aside from applying for waitering...
So, how did we deal with the Stupid Annoying Questions of CNY?
"Have you gotten a job yet?"
"When are you getting married?"
"Don't be shy, show us your girlfriend someday!"
For my part, I dressed in Black and Grey during the reunion dinner and put on the most bochap face and the "Ask me anything stupid and I'll KILL you" attitude® that no one asked. And perhaps the fact that my aunts and uncles seem to have woken up to the fact that there are an alarmingly high number of graduate taxi drivers in Singapore, probably
saved me from the questions as well...
And yes, I didn't do any visiting this year. It's the best way of avoiding the SAQ... maybe next year, I'll spend the holiday overseas (even if it's in Johore).
That's because I'm too polite to reply to the SAQ the way I want:
1. No, I haven't got a job. May I ask if you have enough money in the CPF to retire? Or how many more years it'll take for you to pay off the housing loan? Or how close your company is to the next retrenchment exercise?
2. No, I'm not getting married. I'd rather live in a free love commune.
3. Well, I could bring along my blow-up Gackt doll next year, if it makes you feel happy...
21 January 2004
International Criminal Court to Examine Blair War Crimes
News reports from Reuters and the Independent
"Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are considering a request by an international body of lawyers to try the Prime Minister for alleged war crimes during the invasion of Iraq."
The logic of war meets the morality of war. Disproportionate use of force causing civilian casualties is a crime under international humanitarian law.
During last year's invasion of Iraq, the Wonder Duo dropped cluster bombs in dense urban areas, killing many civilians.
The logic behind cluster bombs is simple: efficient decimation. Hundreds of mini-bomblets (ie. 'clusters') are scattered by larger bombs, rockets, and artillery shells, hence enhancing the destructive power by dispersing the area of destruction... Needless to say, where these clusters end up is neither controllable or predictable. That's why many markets and bazaars in Baghdad were hit by cluster bombs, even though they were not targetted.
Reuters reports that British aircraft dropped 70 cluster bombs and British artillery fired over 2,000 cluster shells during the war.
Another hot issue that the prosecutors at the ICC have been asked to consider, is whether the Allies deliberately targetted non-military installations during the invasion, an illegal act under the Geneva Convention.
It would seem that Blair should've considered this chain of events before signing up with Bush... unlike the US, the United Kingdom IS a signatory to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where heads of state are NOT exempt from prosecution.
I doubt, however, that there will actually be a trial, even though the evidence seems quite clear-cut. Two words: political pressure.
The BBC reported the news on radio at 4.30 in the morning, with many interviews and analyses which kept me up till dawn, but apparently this news is missing from their website... Brilliant.
"Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are considering a request by an international body of lawyers to try the Prime Minister for alleged war crimes during the invasion of Iraq."
The logic of war meets the morality of war. Disproportionate use of force causing civilian casualties is a crime under international humanitarian law.
During last year's invasion of Iraq, the Wonder Duo dropped cluster bombs in dense urban areas, killing many civilians.
The logic behind cluster bombs is simple: efficient decimation. Hundreds of mini-bomblets (ie. 'clusters') are scattered by larger bombs, rockets, and artillery shells, hence enhancing the destructive power by dispersing the area of destruction... Needless to say, where these clusters end up is neither controllable or predictable. That's why many markets and bazaars in Baghdad were hit by cluster bombs, even though they were not targetted.
Reuters reports that British aircraft dropped 70 cluster bombs and British artillery fired over 2,000 cluster shells during the war.
Another hot issue that the prosecutors at the ICC have been asked to consider, is whether the Allies deliberately targetted non-military installations during the invasion, an illegal act under the Geneva Convention.
It would seem that Blair should've considered this chain of events before signing up with Bush... unlike the US, the United Kingdom IS a signatory to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where heads of state are NOT exempt from prosecution.
I doubt, however, that there will actually be a trial, even though the evidence seems quite clear-cut. Two words: political pressure.
The BBC reported the news on radio at 4.30 in the morning, with many interviews and analyses which kept me up till dawn, but apparently this news is missing from their website... Brilliant.
20 January 2004
Apologia
Recently certain friends and acquaintances have been asked to give feedback about this site, to choose their favourite articles, since I'd like to assemble a portfolio of my own. There were those who were not really interested in commenting but not forthright enough to say so, or too polite to offer anything constructive beyond "Yeah, I'm reading it...", which is of course the polite version of "no comments", Singaporeans' most popular answer to just about anything... I'm kind of sorry for having inflated expectations of their expressive abilities and imposing on their time. Which is my own polite way of saying "fuck you", in case anyone wonders.
And to those who took the time to read, to consider, and voice their opinions, and for those who posted comments here on xanga, many thanks - you know who you are!
Whether this blog was praised or panned, people tend to agree that
1. Illusio has a high 'bombastic' word count.
2. "The cerebral undertones... come across rather much too strongly".
Apologia
noun. A formal justification, explanation, or defence of one's opinions, position, actions, or belief system.
Note: NOT the plural form of "apology", and has NOTHING to do with making one.
1. I have always tended to write about specialised topics, uncommon things, and tend to push myself to deep analyses of my subjects. It's my prerogative. And, as a sympathetic reader pointed out, "everyday language lacks... conceptual and semantic endowment" for complex and specialised topics such as what I have been writing consistently at Illusio.
I believe that the English language would be impoverished if we refuse to see that even long words, big words, can be appropriately used, especially if it takes too much difficulty to find a short phrase to replace them. Humans keep coining new words to describe the growing complexity of their world... yet we Singaporeans are linguistic beggars because our national newspapers limit their writers to words not more than 3 syllables or 8 letters long, and our major publishing houses, who believe that the market out there consists of people with the mental capacity of 14-year-olds.
However, when there is a feeling that the writer is deliberately and unnecessarily using difficult language or dropping literary allusions and big names, then it really becomes "bombast".
If I cannot convince my readers that the "difficult" language is necessary and appropriate in my articles, I consider that as a failed attempt at writing and a sign that I need more practice, or at least run one round of editing before posting on the blog. (Which I currently never do. And there, doesn't it actually annoy naysayers more, since I don't need to put in any effort at difficult language?)
One can still come across as natural and unaffected even when writing difficult words.
2. Again, I remind my readers that I choose to write on uncommon topics and offer uncommon viewpoints with uncommon depth.
A friend wrote that in his email (and incidentally, he concluded that he still liked my writing :D).
Here's my spin on it: Staying with the same metaphor, I would be the student who realises that one way to succeed would be to differentiate yourself out of the normal market, carve out a niche for yourself, play for different stakes, play a different game from the rest of the classmates.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the rest of the class would mis-recognise the strategy and insist that I'm "spoiling the competition", but the fact is, I'm no longer competing with them, or even for the same prizes as them.
I would probably be - and I have been, on occasion - the student who disagrees with the GP tutor and uni lecturer to present a counter-argument that is nevertheless logically and theoretically reasonable, and hence still ace the assignment. Of course, that doesn't stop the real "muggers" and the rest of the students to give the standard, acceptable, and approved answers and get their aces (or other grades, as dictated by the normal distribution for interchangeable and indistinguishable products).
I'm one of those who are horribly disappointed with the "new and improved" Straits Times Weekend Edition and the intellectual poverty it imposes on Singaporeans. Read the NYT Weekend Edition, and you'll see why it literally takes one an entire weekend to parse through the very thoughtful and thorough news, commentaries, and reviews. Time taken to read ST on Sunday: 10 minutes, inclusive of the Life! section.
Why do I write? I'm sure you would've read my first blog. Given that, there isn't any discrepency between what I write and how I write it, really...
And to those who took the time to read, to consider, and voice their opinions, and for those who posted comments here on xanga, many thanks - you know who you are!
Whether this blog was praised or panned, people tend to agree that
1. Illusio has a high 'bombastic' word count.
2. "The cerebral undertones... come across rather much too strongly".
Apologia
noun. A formal justification, explanation, or defence of one's opinions, position, actions, or belief system.
Note: NOT the plural form of "apology", and has NOTHING to do with making one.
1. I have always tended to write about specialised topics, uncommon things, and tend to push myself to deep analyses of my subjects. It's my prerogative. And, as a sympathetic reader pointed out, "everyday language lacks... conceptual and semantic endowment" for complex and specialised topics such as what I have been writing consistently at Illusio.
I believe that the English language would be impoverished if we refuse to see that even long words, big words, can be appropriately used, especially if it takes too much difficulty to find a short phrase to replace them. Humans keep coining new words to describe the growing complexity of their world... yet we Singaporeans are linguistic beggars because our national newspapers limit their writers to words not more than 3 syllables or 8 letters long, and our major publishing houses, who believe that the market out there consists of people with the mental capacity of 14-year-olds.
However, when there is a feeling that the writer is deliberately and unnecessarily using difficult language or dropping literary allusions and big names, then it really becomes "bombast".
If I cannot convince my readers that the "difficult" language is necessary and appropriate in my articles, I consider that as a failed attempt at writing and a sign that I need more practice, or at least run one round of editing before posting on the blog. (Which I currently never do. And there, doesn't it actually annoy naysayers more, since I don't need to put in any effort at difficult language?)
One can still come across as natural and unaffected even when writing difficult words.
2. Again, I remind my readers that I choose to write on uncommon topics and offer uncommon viewpoints with uncommon depth.
Think metaphorically, if your writing was a student in a classroom where your readers are other students: In the context of our academic history, your writing would be a "mugger" - The over-achieving high-brow kid which we were all too familiar with in our school days. There is one in almost every classroom.
My point is, these kids are never popular with the other kids. They are viewed either as "spoil-market", a threat, or just simple too weird out by the other kids.
A friend wrote that in his email (and incidentally, he concluded that he still liked my writing :D).
Here's my spin on it: Staying with the same metaphor, I would be the student who realises that one way to succeed would be to differentiate yourself out of the normal market, carve out a niche for yourself, play for different stakes, play a different game from the rest of the classmates.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the rest of the class would mis-recognise the strategy and insist that I'm "spoiling the competition", but the fact is, I'm no longer competing with them, or even for the same prizes as them.
I would probably be - and I have been, on occasion - the student who disagrees with the GP tutor and uni lecturer to present a counter-argument that is nevertheless logically and theoretically reasonable, and hence still ace the assignment. Of course, that doesn't stop the real "muggers" and the rest of the students to give the standard, acceptable, and approved answers and get their aces (or other grades, as dictated by the normal distribution for interchangeable and indistinguishable products).
I'm one of those who are horribly disappointed with the "new and improved" Straits Times Weekend Edition and the intellectual poverty it imposes on Singaporeans. Read the NYT Weekend Edition, and you'll see why it literally takes one an entire weekend to parse through the very thoughtful and thorough news, commentaries, and reviews. Time taken to read ST on Sunday: 10 minutes, inclusive of the Life! section.
Why do I write? I'm sure you would've read my first blog. Given that, there isn't any discrepency between what I write and how I write it, really...
17 January 2004
The Logic of Warfare (a selective history)
Charles Tilly is credited with reading the history of Europe since 1000 AD as the history of uninterrupted, ever-intensifying, rational warfare, going so far as insisting that "wars make states as much as states make war". Yet uninterrupted warfare was practised much earlier in China (which incidentally has the same area as Europe), during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods of its history. For 550 continuous years, from 770 BCE to 221 BCE, over 150 kingdoms fought each other, annexed each other, and dwindled to a single polity, the State of Chin.
One does not battle for 550 years without the invention of universal conscription, more efficient economic models, agricultural reforms, and of course, harsher and more complete extraction of taxes from farmers (which would reach an unprecedented 25% in Shogunate Japan later) - hence, the invention of serfdom...
The invention of maiming is tied to serfdom. Norbert Elias reports that less than a millennia later in continental Europe, the barons of Europe regularly tortured 'civilians' as they raided their rivals. Why the disjuncture between the mediaeval celebration of chivalric combat between soldiers, and the torture of non-combatants? Rational calculation: everything the serfs produce, as long as they are productive, will benefit the baron.
Elias unearths diaries of noblewomen, wives of barons, who describe their delight as they joined their husbands in the torture of enemies' serfs and farmers. A certain noblelady personally cut off the breasts of a milkmaid, poured tar on the stumps, and sent the girl back to her enemy, alive. Today, warlords and soldiers in Africa maim civilians as part of a rational "denial of resources" strategy against their opponents.
Over in England, the invention of the longbow in the 14th century finishes off the ideal of 'chivalry' of melee combat between noblemen. Exceptionally efficient long-range bombardment from longbows decimated the French armies even before they could come close to combat, in Crecy, Poiters, and Agincourt. The lesson: Decimate your enemies...
The calvary charge, as popularised by Napoleon's military campaigns, then romanticised by adoptors, effectively ended in Crimea when the Light Brigade fell to "canon to the left of them, canon to the right of them, canon in front of them". From then onwards, we learn to pulverise the enemy with artillery fire, bomb them to bits from planes...
Nerve gas? The subtle art of poisoning and germ warfare didn't just end there. Not when, as part of the terms of surrender, Japanese researchers in the notorious Unit 731 were transfered to the United States to continue their research.
Which of course won the war by dropping 2 atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To date, no war crimes tribunal has been set for the men who planned the attacks. Last year, the Pentagon started research on small-scale nuclear bombs that could penetrate underground bunkers.
Guerilla warfare is strangely justified from the results it produces. It does the job, as just well as any weapon, any method of war.
A morality of war is non-existent, as long as we listen to the logic of warfare. How else do you win a war, except by destroying your opponent? Maim them, decimate them, pulverise them, blow them to bits, launch a megaton bomb, blow yourself up in their public places. They all work, and none of them are more or less morally reprehensible than the rest.
This is the logic of war, and I'm afraid there's no moral standard inherent to warfare; warfare does NOT have morality as its first principle.
One does not battle for 550 years without the invention of universal conscription, more efficient economic models, agricultural reforms, and of course, harsher and more complete extraction of taxes from farmers (which would reach an unprecedented 25% in Shogunate Japan later) - hence, the invention of serfdom...
The invention of maiming is tied to serfdom. Norbert Elias reports that less than a millennia later in continental Europe, the barons of Europe regularly tortured 'civilians' as they raided their rivals. Why the disjuncture between the mediaeval celebration of chivalric combat between soldiers, and the torture of non-combatants? Rational calculation: everything the serfs produce, as long as they are productive, will benefit the baron.
Elias unearths diaries of noblewomen, wives of barons, who describe their delight as they joined their husbands in the torture of enemies' serfs and farmers. A certain noblelady personally cut off the breasts of a milkmaid, poured tar on the stumps, and sent the girl back to her enemy, alive. Today, warlords and soldiers in Africa maim civilians as part of a rational "denial of resources" strategy against their opponents.
Over in England, the invention of the longbow in the 14th century finishes off the ideal of 'chivalry' of melee combat between noblemen. Exceptionally efficient long-range bombardment from longbows decimated the French armies even before they could come close to combat, in Crecy, Poiters, and Agincourt. The lesson: Decimate your enemies...
The calvary charge, as popularised by Napoleon's military campaigns, then romanticised by adoptors, effectively ended in Crimea when the Light Brigade fell to "canon to the left of them, canon to the right of them, canon in front of them". From then onwards, we learn to pulverise the enemy with artillery fire, bomb them to bits from planes...
Nerve gas? The subtle art of poisoning and germ warfare didn't just end there. Not when, as part of the terms of surrender, Japanese researchers in the notorious Unit 731 were transfered to the United States to continue their research.
Which of course won the war by dropping 2 atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To date, no war crimes tribunal has been set for the men who planned the attacks. Last year, the Pentagon started research on small-scale nuclear bombs that could penetrate underground bunkers.
Guerilla warfare is strangely justified from the results it produces. It does the job, as just well as any weapon, any method of war.
A morality of war is non-existent, as long as we listen to the logic of warfare. How else do you win a war, except by destroying your opponent? Maim them, decimate them, pulverise them, blow them to bits, launch a megaton bomb, blow yourself up in their public places. They all work, and none of them are more or less morally reprehensible than the rest.
This is the logic of war, and I'm afraid there's no moral standard inherent to warfare; warfare does NOT have morality as its first principle.
15 January 2004
On War
"No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb."
--- Theodor Adorno, "Negative Dialectics", 1966
We'd like to think we're a civilised people, that a million years of evolution would breed out the animal in us. Violence, according to some historians, has been effectively tamed through the "civilising process", and we are the only species to draw up rules of engagement for war, a code of morality for justified violence...
Why would the technology of war (and the capacity to kill) still march on relentlessly, unless the urge to slaughter remains undiminished?
Whither the morality of war, that sense of justice in combat, that allows some of us today to declare others as "unlawful combatants" undeserving of justice, basic human rights, and exempt from the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners?
--- Theodor Adorno, "Negative Dialectics", 1966
We'd like to think we're a civilised people, that a million years of evolution would breed out the animal in us. Violence, according to some historians, has been effectively tamed through the "civilising process", and we are the only species to draw up rules of engagement for war, a code of morality for justified violence...
Why would the technology of war (and the capacity to kill) still march on relentlessly, unless the urge to slaughter remains undiminished?
Whither the morality of war, that sense of justice in combat, that allows some of us today to declare others as "unlawful combatants" undeserving of justice, basic human rights, and exempt from the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners?
10 January 2004
Great Internet Firewall of Singapore (Singnet outtage edition)
I'm wondering how many of you using Singnet broadband (and whether users on Pacific or Starhub/SCV) have encountered this problem during the recent week while surfing: all webpages from Blogspot, for example:
http://moobie.blogspot.com/
http://the_bone.blogspot.com/
are redirected to http://new.blogger.com, which is the usual page you get, if the blogspot URL you entered doesn't exist.
Meaning, for the past week I haven't been able to read any blogs from blogspot.
Now, the weirdest thing is, you have to manually set your proxy settings to proxy.singnet.com.sg:8080 in IE/Netscape/Mozilla in order for the blogspot pages to load properly and not get redirected.
This is weird, since from 3 years ago, Singnet users didn't need to set their proxy servers; everything is automatically cached/filtered/blocked at the server end. Yet this week, something comes up to remind us all that proxy servers are not just for "speeding up internet access", as our ISPs call it, but to block/filter webpages.
Nowadays, it is considered impractical and heavy-handed to block entire websites, so our ISPs are experimenting with targetting and blocking specific pages from websites. Officially though, our ISPs do not have the technology to block specific pages, and are not acquiring the hard/software for this technology.
Jim Carey too, had this feeling in The Truman Show, when he discovers the stars in the sky to be huge stage lights. It's only the imperfect implementation of proxy blocking that reminds people of the existence of proxy servers behind our "Internet experience".
Latest Update:
I've been told that the blogspot problem has disappeared since yesterday noon, so you don't have to manually set the proxy server in your browser... Although, there might be longer loading times for singaporean pages on blogspot o_0
Don't ask me how that can happen, but a few friends told me the same thing. I'm sure in a day or two, the technology will be perfected, and everyone can have a wonderful internet experience without realising the amount of spying our ISPs do behind our backs
http://moobie.blogspot.com/
http://the_bone.blogspot.com/
are redirected to http://new.blogger.com, which is the usual page you get, if the blogspot URL you entered doesn't exist.
Meaning, for the past week I haven't been able to read any blogs from blogspot.
Now, the weirdest thing is, you have to manually set your proxy settings to proxy.singnet.com.sg:8080 in IE/Netscape/Mozilla in order for the blogspot pages to load properly and not get redirected.
This is weird, since from 3 years ago, Singnet users didn't need to set their proxy servers; everything is automatically cached/filtered/blocked at the server end. Yet this week, something comes up to remind us all that proxy servers are not just for "speeding up internet access", as our ISPs call it, but to block/filter webpages.
Nowadays, it is considered impractical and heavy-handed to block entire websites, so our ISPs are experimenting with targetting and blocking specific pages from websites. Officially though, our ISPs do not have the technology to block specific pages, and are not acquiring the hard/software for this technology.
Jim Carey too, had this feeling in The Truman Show, when he discovers the stars in the sky to be huge stage lights. It's only the imperfect implementation of proxy blocking that reminds people of the existence of proxy servers behind our "Internet experience".
Latest Update:
I've been told that the blogspot problem has disappeared since yesterday noon, so you don't have to manually set the proxy server in your browser... Although, there might be longer loading times for singaporean pages on blogspot o_0
Don't ask me how that can happen, but a few friends told me the same thing. I'm sure in a day or two, the technology will be perfected, and everyone can have a wonderful internet experience without realising the amount of spying our ISPs do behind our backs
04 January 2004
Wisdom from Unexpected Quarters
I found an interesting and wise quote, taken from the first line of an editorial from the above link.
A wise man said this shortly after WW2:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Which probably summarises neatly, last year's invasion and occupation of Iraq by the Wonder Duo, Bush and Blair.
And the wise man? Herman Goering, founder of the German Gestapo and Air Force.
Sieg Hiel! Or, as Radiohead puts it, Hail to the Thief!
A wise man said this shortly after WW2:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Which probably summarises neatly, last year's invasion and occupation of Iraq by the Wonder Duo, Bush and Blair.
And the wise man? Herman Goering, founder of the German Gestapo and Air Force.
Sieg Hiel! Or, as Radiohead puts it, Hail to the Thief!
03 January 2004
On the New Year
I am not in a habit of making resolutions for the new year or to reflect on the passing of the old. Somehow, these traditions seem nothing more than distractions from the purpose of human existence, that they achieve the complete opposite of what they intend to do.
Everyday living requires some form of planning ahead to set personal goals, and some form of reviewing to reflect and re-appraise one's position and direction in life. We ask ourselves questions like "Did I set out to do what I promised?", "Did I live well/correctly this year?", "What do I hope, plan towards, for the next?"
My quarrel is with the institutionalising of this natural self-reflexivity into an annual affair. The new year tradition is a caricature and perversion of this human instinct. Most people end up making wildly ambitious resolutions that they never keep, and never bother to keep once they articulate the plan. And on reviewing the previous year, they sadly remark that the previous year's resolutions were not met either. And blithely live on in the new year.
This new year tradition then dulls the impulse to review and plan constantly, consciously, every so often in the days of our lives. The space of one year is too long a wait between self-assessment and reflexivity.
If we made our self reviews/plans much more frequently, we'd end up making more reasonable and realistic goals, and constantly monitor satisfaction with our lives. That, I believe, is more meaningful and useful than the annual tradition.
Everyday living requires some form of planning ahead to set personal goals, and some form of reviewing to reflect and re-appraise one's position and direction in life. We ask ourselves questions like "Did I set out to do what I promised?", "Did I live well/correctly this year?", "What do I hope, plan towards, for the next?"
My quarrel is with the institutionalising of this natural self-reflexivity into an annual affair. The new year tradition is a caricature and perversion of this human instinct. Most people end up making wildly ambitious resolutions that they never keep, and never bother to keep once they articulate the plan. And on reviewing the previous year, they sadly remark that the previous year's resolutions were not met either. And blithely live on in the new year.
This new year tradition then dulls the impulse to review and plan constantly, consciously, every so often in the days of our lives. The space of one year is too long a wait between self-assessment and reflexivity.
If we made our self reviews/plans much more frequently, we'd end up making more reasonable and realistic goals, and constantly monitor satisfaction with our lives. That, I believe, is more meaningful and useful than the annual tradition.
31 December 2003
The Year in One Minute
(or 1 minute and 15 seconds)
I had the honour of getting the Video Renegades' film shown at Zouk yesterday. On the whole, I think the audience liked it. Then again, it's rare to see a non-abstract, non-experimental short film. I can't remember the last local short film that had an overt commentary on current affairs. The mainstream attitude is "We're Singaporeans, no politics, please."
A One Minute Review for a One Minute Film
The agenda was simple: the Video Renegades are a recently-formed association of underground filmmakers who have taken to refine their skills at producing short films on shoestring budgets.
"The Graduate" was shot in one day (4 hours, in fact), the props cost less than $5, and the humour in it is probably priceless.
When we made this film in February as a tribute to the tenacity of Singaporeans in this annus horribilus, we didn't expect the film to get more and more relevant as the months went by.
For one, the $1.99 Shop line announced its closure a month after we shot the film at its Far East branch (and with it, went our hopes of getting that shop to bless our film). Then, more and more grads remained unemployed... and our leaders said we should be more price-competitive with the workers in China. Of course, they never managed to get our wages cut to $1.88 an hour, but I suspect they're still plotting.
And yet, no matter how lousy this year was, we must agree that excessive misfortune becomes, all too easily, the blackest and funniest of comedies, especially if all this misfortune takes place in everday life, around us.
I had the honour of getting the Video Renegades' film shown at Zouk yesterday. On the whole, I think the audience liked it. Then again, it's rare to see a non-abstract, non-experimental short film. I can't remember the last local short film that had an overt commentary on current affairs. The mainstream attitude is "We're Singaporeans, no politics, please."
A One Minute Review for a One Minute Film
The agenda was simple: the Video Renegades are a recently-formed association of underground filmmakers who have taken to refine their skills at producing short films on shoestring budgets.
"The Graduate" was shot in one day (4 hours, in fact), the props cost less than $5, and the humour in it is probably priceless.
When we made this film in February as a tribute to the tenacity of Singaporeans in this annus horribilus, we didn't expect the film to get more and more relevant as the months went by.
For one, the $1.99 Shop line announced its closure a month after we shot the film at its Far East branch (and with it, went our hopes of getting that shop to bless our film). Then, more and more grads remained unemployed... and our leaders said we should be more price-competitive with the workers in China. Of course, they never managed to get our wages cut to $1.88 an hour, but I suspect they're still plotting.
And yet, no matter how lousy this year was, we must agree that excessive misfortune becomes, all too easily, the blackest and funniest of comedies, especially if all this misfortune takes place in everday life, around us.
27 December 2003
Great Classics II
I had an interesting ICQ chat with a friend. Life is treating him well relatively well, you could say. Even as an overworked and underpaid management trainee with a bank, he still has one more job than me, and that's where it counts the most.
We exchanged employment histories for the past 2 years (I had the longer story, in and out of temp jobs and freelancing), and he concluded: "You know, you're not stupid. If you just stopped being a critic, the civil service would be an easy job to get. If you're not from the cookie-cutter, and you are not, you'll never get employment from them, not with that kind of attitude... Challenging ideas should be done in academia. The civil service doesn't hire dissenters or mavericks..."
The civil service is a kind of Holy Grail for Singapore graduates. Like the imperial examination system in old China - which gave us the word "Mandarin" to denote any civil servant - the best products of our education system move on to a job with the bureaucracy. Or at least, that was the way life was supposed to have worked till not so long ago.
Because of the lasting strength of the civil service, and the fact that it IS the pillar of society (You can throw away the leaders, but you can't throw away the cookie-cutter!), thousands of grads still aspire to a cushy job. It helps that with the new year, a grad's starting pay as Mandarin has been adjusted to the more 'reasonable' rate of $2100. A very modest adjustment of 20% downwards in light of the economic realities, given that the starting pay of grads in the private sector is $1500 (if you're very lucky).
Eventually, as my friend hinted, even the mavericks and dissenters have to feed themselves or secure a fatter wallet, and join the Mandarins. We should resist the urge to deny the interviewers, just give them the answers that they want in their essay questions. You're smart enough to get the job, if you just say the right stuff.
Indeed, one of the "great classics" of Chinese literature, the Outlaws of the Marsh (水浒传), depicts a band of rebels, dissenters and mavericks during the waning years of the Song Dynasty. 108 bandit chiefs led a wider resistance centred around Mount Liang against the corrupt and inept administration of a weak emperor, and believed that their dissent - robbing the rich to give to the poor, killing corrupt officials - was justified.
The 'civil service' had failed the system, producing either scholars who said the right things in the exams (but were incapable of fixing the real problems), or officials who were content to receive their guaranteed salaries, pensions, and bribes.
Much is remembered from the Outlaws of the Marsh, especially the exploits of the 108 Heroes: Wu Song killing the Tiger, the Golden Lotus, the Cannibal Inn... But the least-mentioned story is the most important, and it comes at the end of the great novel: the Dissolution of the Outlaws.
The leader of the outlaws, 宋江, used to be a low-ranking civil servant who couldn't get promoted because he wasn't corrupt enough, who believed in some principles, until his desertion. For 100 chapters in the book, Song Jiang frustrates the venal and incompetent administrators and paper generals who come to destroy the bandits. Yet, in the end, the bandit king himself was bought off with an amnesty, a high rank in the civil service, praise for his "patriotic duties", and his bandit army recognised and given official military titles.
Join the civil service. You can't go wrong.
The comeuppance for the Song Jiang was swift. In return for his amnesty, his title, his recognition, the weak Emperor orders his army to combat the Golden Horde of the Mongols in the north. A quarter of the 108 Heroes (and their soldiers) are sacrificed.
Then, on the urging of the same venal, corrupt, and incompetent civil servants, the bandit army is sent south, to quell a rebellion from another group of bandits. The civil servants were farsighted: the capable Song Jiang won the war for them. And his bandit army was exterminated in the battles, eliminating any challenge to their control.
A great bandit leader, a gracious robber is lured by promises of Respectability and a position as a Mandarin, and crosses over. Nothing in Western Lit prepares us for a noble hero "selling off" his principles for a position in the Establishment.
It would be as though Robin Hood, another righteous bandit leader, gave up his fortress in Sherwood Forest, disbanded his Merry Men... for a position as a general. And then, getting sent off to fight a bunch of rebels in some other forest, and having his own army exterminated.
I'd like to prove my friend wrong, of course. I hope... not everyone wants to sell their soul to the civil service, not everyone will say the "right things" just to get the job. But seriously, how many of you here would?
We exchanged employment histories for the past 2 years (I had the longer story, in and out of temp jobs and freelancing), and he concluded: "You know, you're not stupid. If you just stopped being a critic, the civil service would be an easy job to get. If you're not from the cookie-cutter, and you are not, you'll never get employment from them, not with that kind of attitude... Challenging ideas should be done in academia. The civil service doesn't hire dissenters or mavericks..."
The civil service is a kind of Holy Grail for Singapore graduates. Like the imperial examination system in old China - which gave us the word "Mandarin" to denote any civil servant - the best products of our education system move on to a job with the bureaucracy. Or at least, that was the way life was supposed to have worked till not so long ago.
Because of the lasting strength of the civil service, and the fact that it IS the pillar of society (You can throw away the leaders, but you can't throw away the cookie-cutter!), thousands of grads still aspire to a cushy job. It helps that with the new year, a grad's starting pay as Mandarin has been adjusted to the more 'reasonable' rate of $2100. A very modest adjustment of 20% downwards in light of the economic realities, given that the starting pay of grads in the private sector is $1500 (if you're very lucky).
Eventually, as my friend hinted, even the mavericks and dissenters have to feed themselves or secure a fatter wallet, and join the Mandarins. We should resist the urge to deny the interviewers, just give them the answers that they want in their essay questions. You're smart enough to get the job, if you just say the right stuff.
Indeed, one of the "great classics" of Chinese literature, the Outlaws of the Marsh (水浒传), depicts a band of rebels, dissenters and mavericks during the waning years of the Song Dynasty. 108 bandit chiefs led a wider resistance centred around Mount Liang against the corrupt and inept administration of a weak emperor, and believed that their dissent - robbing the rich to give to the poor, killing corrupt officials - was justified.
The 'civil service' had failed the system, producing either scholars who said the right things in the exams (but were incapable of fixing the real problems), or officials who were content to receive their guaranteed salaries, pensions, and bribes.
Much is remembered from the Outlaws of the Marsh, especially the exploits of the 108 Heroes: Wu Song killing the Tiger, the Golden Lotus, the Cannibal Inn... But the least-mentioned story is the most important, and it comes at the end of the great novel: the Dissolution of the Outlaws.
The leader of the outlaws, 宋江, used to be a low-ranking civil servant who couldn't get promoted because he wasn't corrupt enough, who believed in some principles, until his desertion. For 100 chapters in the book, Song Jiang frustrates the venal and incompetent administrators and paper generals who come to destroy the bandits. Yet, in the end, the bandit king himself was bought off with an amnesty, a high rank in the civil service, praise for his "patriotic duties", and his bandit army recognised and given official military titles.
Join the civil service. You can't go wrong.
The comeuppance for the Song Jiang was swift. In return for his amnesty, his title, his recognition, the weak Emperor orders his army to combat the Golden Horde of the Mongols in the north. A quarter of the 108 Heroes (and their soldiers) are sacrificed.
Then, on the urging of the same venal, corrupt, and incompetent civil servants, the bandit army is sent south, to quell a rebellion from another group of bandits. The civil servants were farsighted: the capable Song Jiang won the war for them. And his bandit army was exterminated in the battles, eliminating any challenge to their control.
A great bandit leader, a gracious robber is lured by promises of Respectability and a position as a Mandarin, and crosses over. Nothing in Western Lit prepares us for a noble hero "selling off" his principles for a position in the Establishment.
It would be as though Robin Hood, another righteous bandit leader, gave up his fortress in Sherwood Forest, disbanded his Merry Men... for a position as a general. And then, getting sent off to fight a bunch of rebels in some other forest, and having his own army exterminated.
I'd like to prove my friend wrong, of course. I hope... not everyone wants to sell their soul to the civil service, not everyone will say the "right things" just to get the job. But seriously, how many of you here would?
24 December 2003
The Gift of the Gab
or, Why the Great Library of Alexandra Burned Down
LIBRARIAN of the Great Library: ...
MOTHER of the Librarian of the Great Library: Look, this place is in a mess! The scrolls are everywhere!!! Look at this shelf! It's full of SCROLLS!
Librarian: ...
Mother: There are scrolls dating from a few hundred years ago! Are you inviting the bookworms to eat this place up?
Librarian: ...
Mother: Look, are you listening to me or not? I'm going to start spring cleaning in an hour, and I won't be able to clean this place with all these scrolls here!
Librarian: I never asked you to clean the Great Library.
Mother: Look, this chest of useless pamphlets! "Aristotle's Poetics: The Tragedy and the Comedy"??? These lecture notes are worthless, and you're still keeping them?
(hauls chest into the incinerator)
Librarian: !!!
Mother: Now, you listen to me. I'll not have this MESS! These scrolls have been lying here for a few hundred years, and you're collecting them, piling them on the shelves, on the tables, on the floor...
Librarian: Well, I told you we needed more shelves, but you just prefer to throw things out.
Mother: I'm not going to do that this year, oh no... Why should I do the job and SUFFER? It's such a thankless task. You lazy, worthless, pathetic fool who can't even keep things in order...
Librarian: ...
Mother: Blahblahblah yakettyyakyak nagnagnagnagnag just throw the damn scrolls away, idiot blahblahblah don't understand why you're keeping all this trash yakettyakyak oh, you're torturing me to death on purpose aren't you, you're putting all this mess to annoy me aren't you nagnagnagnagnag
Librarian: ...
(Burns down the Great Library in a state of madness)
There, you happy? Next time you EVER mention about 'a mess' again, or throw stuff out without asking me, I'll knock out every tooth in your mouth.
Mother: WHAT DID I EVER SAY? You're the unreasonable one here! That's it, I don't want to see you for the rest of today, I'm going shopping.
(picks up phone): Yo, Euphygenia, you can't believe what my AUNT said yesterday. She's the most insufferable woman I've ever met... Any sequence of words from her mouth would drive the listener stark raving mad! I don't understand why people like her exist in the world! And why I'm related to her! Blahblahblah yaketyakyak, oh poor me, nagnagnag...
And this is how today, more than $500 worth of CDs, manga, books (notably: Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival - bought TWO DAYS AGO, Hillary Clinton's Living History, Roland Barthe's S/Z, an English translation of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) were thrown down the chute by my mum and me. I'm not counting the board games in my cupboard that I threw away so that I could move all my "piles of worthless thrash" in. Risk, Monopoly, Scrabble (and not the cheapo mini "travel version"), a full-sized Chess set, 2 photo albums...
LIBRARIAN of the Great Library: ...
MOTHER of the Librarian of the Great Library: Look, this place is in a mess! The scrolls are everywhere!!! Look at this shelf! It's full of SCROLLS!
Librarian: ...
Mother: There are scrolls dating from a few hundred years ago! Are you inviting the bookworms to eat this place up?
Librarian: ...
Mother: Look, are you listening to me or not? I'm going to start spring cleaning in an hour, and I won't be able to clean this place with all these scrolls here!
Librarian: I never asked you to clean the Great Library.
Mother: Look, this chest of useless pamphlets! "Aristotle's Poetics: The Tragedy and the Comedy"??? These lecture notes are worthless, and you're still keeping them?
(hauls chest into the incinerator)
Librarian: !!!
Mother: Now, you listen to me. I'll not have this MESS! These scrolls have been lying here for a few hundred years, and you're collecting them, piling them on the shelves, on the tables, on the floor...
Librarian: Well, I told you we needed more shelves, but you just prefer to throw things out.
Mother: I'm not going to do that this year, oh no... Why should I do the job and SUFFER? It's such a thankless task. You lazy, worthless, pathetic fool who can't even keep things in order...
Librarian: ...
Mother: Blahblahblah yakettyyakyak nagnagnagnagnag just throw the damn scrolls away, idiot blahblahblah don't understand why you're keeping all this trash yakettyakyak oh, you're torturing me to death on purpose aren't you, you're putting all this mess to annoy me aren't you nagnagnagnagnag
Librarian: ...
(Burns down the Great Library in a state of madness)
There, you happy? Next time you EVER mention about 'a mess' again, or throw stuff out without asking me, I'll knock out every tooth in your mouth.
Mother: WHAT DID I EVER SAY? You're the unreasonable one here! That's it, I don't want to see you for the rest of today, I'm going shopping.
(picks up phone): Yo, Euphygenia, you can't believe what my AUNT said yesterday. She's the most insufferable woman I've ever met... Any sequence of words from her mouth would drive the listener stark raving mad! I don't understand why people like her exist in the world! And why I'm related to her! Blahblahblah yaketyakyak, oh poor me, nagnagnag...
And this is how today, more than $500 worth of CDs, manga, books (notably: Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival - bought TWO DAYS AGO, Hillary Clinton's Living History, Roland Barthe's S/Z, an English translation of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) were thrown down the chute by my mum and me. I'm not counting the board games in my cupboard that I threw away so that I could move all my "piles of worthless thrash" in. Risk, Monopoly, Scrabble (and not the cheapo mini "travel version"), a full-sized Chess set, 2 photo albums...
21 December 2003
Review for Stray
So you’ve written a sardonic, anti-establishment play that pokes fun of, even punctures straitjacketed Singaporean society. Knowing smiles broke out in the audience each time Stray highlighted the insanity of a nanny state that produces conservative, play-it-safe clones. Silent laughter, the most dangerous kind, erupted each time the play held its mirror to a citizenry which has been so disempowered, deprived of most liberties (especially creative ones) that it is only free to participate as vacuous actors in the futile and fashionable pursuit of consumerism and the sham social charades that include televised charity drives, National Day parties, celebrity-watching, economic restructuring exercises... And of course, the obligatory, but oh-so-stinging deconstruction of sound bites from our leaders and typical Singaporeans by the chorus, never failed to bring the house down with genuine laughter.
Yet, to the credit of its playwright Emeric Lau, director Aaron Tan, and talented cast of Stage Pals, Stray never comes across as heavy-handed or polemical when it expresses the rage, alienation, and irreverent, iconoclastic humour of the 20-somethings, its ideal audience. It helps that the humour is always at the expense of the powers-that-be - and the 20-somethings are the first generation in Singapore to openly and savagely mock their leaders in everyday speech - but more importantly, this play is the honest collaboration of people who know and love Singapore too much to want to present the topic in any other way, and in such damning detail.
In his preamble, Lau writes of his struggle against the “dearth of well-written, well-performed original material in the local theatre scene in recent years”. It is a fact that most ‘big’ Singaporean productions are either adaptations of acknowledged Great Plays of the civilised West (modern or classic); huge musicals (any of the interchangeable Dick Lee productions); or “seem to pander to niche audiences” - a code for the Gay Play, which can be dissected into the Gay Martyr Play where every gay person emotes existential angst (the recent stage adaptation of Cyril Wong’s poetry), or the Gay Camp Play that merely celebrates the spending power of its niche community (the vulgarly shallow and consumerist Asian Boys Vol. 1, Shopping and F***ing, among others); or the multi-disciplinary, multilingual, multinational “Pan-Asian” play that has no real message aside from its own salad-bar conception of an ersatz, exotic, and auto-erotic Asian identity. Lau and Tan are right in lamenting that the tradition begun by Kuo Pao Kun seems to have been forgotten.
In this respect, Stray has managed to avoid the pitfalls its creator identifies as endemic to current Singapore theatre. The play is unapologetically original and Singaporean - its themes and issues, sensibility and psyche are undeniably “20something Singaporean”, and most importantly, the play has a real heart and soul; it grapples with real issues. In other words, an attempt to resurrect the tradition of Kuo Pao Kun, a tradition of writing and performing original Singaporean plays while maintaining the intercultural and eclectic osmosis of creativity.
Yet, to the credit of its playwright Emeric Lau, director Aaron Tan, and talented cast of Stage Pals, Stray never comes across as heavy-handed or polemical when it expresses the rage, alienation, and irreverent, iconoclastic humour of the 20-somethings, its ideal audience. It helps that the humour is always at the expense of the powers-that-be - and the 20-somethings are the first generation in Singapore to openly and savagely mock their leaders in everyday speech - but more importantly, this play is the honest collaboration of people who know and love Singapore too much to want to present the topic in any other way, and in such damning detail.
In his preamble, Lau writes of his struggle against the “dearth of well-written, well-performed original material in the local theatre scene in recent years”. It is a fact that most ‘big’ Singaporean productions are either adaptations of acknowledged Great Plays of the civilised West (modern or classic); huge musicals (any of the interchangeable Dick Lee productions); or “seem to pander to niche audiences” - a code for the Gay Play, which can be dissected into the Gay Martyr Play where every gay person emotes existential angst (the recent stage adaptation of Cyril Wong’s poetry), or the Gay Camp Play that merely celebrates the spending power of its niche community (the vulgarly shallow and consumerist Asian Boys Vol. 1, Shopping and F***ing, among others); or the multi-disciplinary, multilingual, multinational “Pan-Asian” play that has no real message aside from its own salad-bar conception of an ersatz, exotic, and auto-erotic Asian identity. Lau and Tan are right in lamenting that the tradition begun by Kuo Pao Kun seems to have been forgotten.
In this respect, Stray has managed to avoid the pitfalls its creator identifies as endemic to current Singapore theatre. The play is unapologetically original and Singaporean - its themes and issues, sensibility and psyche are undeniably “20something Singaporean”, and most importantly, the play has a real heart and soul; it grapples with real issues. In other words, an attempt to resurrect the tradition of Kuo Pao Kun, a tradition of writing and performing original Singaporean plays while maintaining the intercultural and eclectic osmosis of creativity.
16 December 2003
A New Dream
Kill the 30somethings, they ruined Singapore with their naive borrow/spend/re-sell/upgrade cycle, their economic bubble that burst on us. And while we're reaping their bitter fruits, they're cosily planning on the next upgrade, the next job, the next baby.
No matter. I have an alternative dream to their 6Cs dream that's easily achievable, and has lower expectations fit for the dire straits of our generation.
30something Dream:
Career
Card
Condo
Club membership
Certificate
Car
20something Dream
Contract
The new economy for the 20somethings is a contracting economy, in both senses of the word. Gone are the days of the Singapore salaryman, and the Career. Companies are only interested in giving out contracts, so that you, the 20something worker, will never get any medical, leave, and seniority benefits that the 30somethings have managed to cling on to.
Cashcard
Credit is out, as most 20somethings are temp workers in this economy, with no guaranteed income to qualify for a Credit Card. Debit is in, and the cheapest debit card that doesn't require a bank charge is the Cashcard.
2nd-hand HDB flat
While those evil 30somethings upgrade their old flats for condos, we will get their cheap castaways, instead of buying direct and incurring a 30-year debt from the HDB. Besides, the worst thing that can happen to an old flat is leaky pipes. I prefer that to the new flats that show signs of premature aging even before 5 years have passed, like: exploding bathroom screens, popping marble tiles, falling windows, leaking walls....
Friendster membership
Here's a social club that allows people to do heavy-duty networking, for free. Members gain social recognition with each additional testimonial they receive from other members.
Diploma
With the new economy, everyone's realised that the higher your certificate, the less help it gives in your job hunting. The diploma is now the in thing for this, and the next generation. For once, 30somethings can rest assured that they will be more educated than future Singaporeans.
NEL
It's not a case of sour grapes. 30somethings can go on upgrading their cars every few years... but I'm banking on the Northeast MRT line. At the staggering pricetag of One Billion Dollars, it far outranks their cheap cars. And in two years' time, I'll upgrade to the Circle Line, which will probably cost even more. Now, for this kind of expensive transport, shouldn't the social prestige be correspondingly high?
No matter. I have an alternative dream to their 6Cs dream that's easily achievable, and has lower expectations fit for the dire straits of our generation.
30something Dream:
Career
Card
Condo
Club membership
Certificate
Car
20something Dream
Contract
The new economy for the 20somethings is a contracting economy, in both senses of the word. Gone are the days of the Singapore salaryman, and the Career. Companies are only interested in giving out contracts, so that you, the 20something worker, will never get any medical, leave, and seniority benefits that the 30somethings have managed to cling on to.
Cashcard
Credit is out, as most 20somethings are temp workers in this economy, with no guaranteed income to qualify for a Credit Card. Debit is in, and the cheapest debit card that doesn't require a bank charge is the Cashcard.
2nd-hand HDB flat
While those evil 30somethings upgrade their old flats for condos, we will get their cheap castaways, instead of buying direct and incurring a 30-year debt from the HDB. Besides, the worst thing that can happen to an old flat is leaky pipes. I prefer that to the new flats that show signs of premature aging even before 5 years have passed, like: exploding bathroom screens, popping marble tiles, falling windows, leaking walls....
Friendster membership
Here's a social club that allows people to do heavy-duty networking, for free. Members gain social recognition with each additional testimonial they receive from other members.
Diploma
With the new economy, everyone's realised that the higher your certificate, the less help it gives in your job hunting. The diploma is now the in thing for this, and the next generation. For once, 30somethings can rest assured that they will be more educated than future Singaporeans.
NEL
It's not a case of sour grapes. 30somethings can go on upgrading their cars every few years... but I'm banking on the Northeast MRT line. At the staggering pricetag of One Billion Dollars, it far outranks their cheap cars. And in two years' time, I'll upgrade to the Circle Line, which will probably cost even more. Now, for this kind of expensive transport, shouldn't the social prestige be correspondingly high?
15 December 2003
Rivalries and Competitions
Recently, Annhell made mention of a certain Asian Blog Awards where he was nominated. The good writer was not impressed by the competition itself, or by the very personal attacks between some of the Singaporean nominees.
Perhaps we Singaporeans do have some unique national trait that enable those few to behave very badly in their blogs, but then again, I believe some sniping is inescapable in literary contests. Unlike other contests or competitions where talent or accomplishment can be gauged objectively on say, the Guiness Book of Records or its TV show ("Biggest Eater", "Most Pierced", "Fastest X"), the literary is entirely a field of strategic positioning, or as some might more pointedly put it, strategic posturing. Hence, it does make sense for any interested literary participant or observer to stake out their own position, to articulate their view on what makes a good blog, play, poem, film, novel, etc...
Ten centuries ago, Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon were the leading diarists, poets, and novelists of their time (and I believe they still count in the all-time top 5 of Asian writers), in the Japanese court. Yet, from the diary of Murasaki, we find her writing:
"Sei Shonagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese writings of hers that she so pretentiously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections..."
What Sei Shonagon would've said in response is not known to historians, but we might have a clear idea. Literary critics and historians dub Shonagon as "the witty diarist": frank, sarcastic, witty, and young. In other words, someone who would get away with her sharp comments, as long as they were tastefully done.
In comparison, Murasaki would've been the dignified "Elder Stateswoman". Widowed at 30, she enters the Japanese court at a ripe old age, schooled in Chinese and writing more like a sensitive scholar. One must wonder if the "dull people" in Sei Shonagon's diary entry of "Things I hate in people" might've been a dig at her rival...
Such sniping... even 10 centuries ago! And they didn't even have a competition or award for diary-writing. Then, as with the modern "invention" of the blog, the great Japanese diarists never wrote for themselves, but for a public audience, who waited impatiently for a new entry in anyone's diary.
Then, as now, literary competitions were an exercise in posturing and poseurship for their contestants and nominees, and perhaps much more significantly so for the organiser. The ability to confer "greatness" is greater than the gift itself, and organisers and judges are not unaware of this fact, when they set up or adjudicate at awards... even when that ability is mostly dependant on the social illusion on the part of a number of people, who by their participation, comments, and other behaviour, give "credibility" to the organiser, the judges, and the competition itself.
It is here that I disagree with Annhell on what makes a credible competition: it doesn't matter whether the awards are handed out by a panel of judges, or by a "democratic" vote from the public. There is zero credibility in literary competitions; it all boils down to posturing again. A panel of judges will make annoint a contestant that best represents the political negotiation of their literary agendas and positions on what is "suitably literary", and which judges are the more influential. Pure audience voting will boil down to how well-connected the nominees are to their voters, and how well they marshall these people. Hence, the best blogger might not even be in the XYZ polls, if his/her readers don't tend to read the site where that poll is from. In addition, how the categories for prizes/awards are constituted will also signal clearly the agendas and biases of the organiser.
In real life, it's pretty easy to find horrendous and comic examples of all that. The Asian TV Awards, for example, consists of 140 entries from 15 countries in Asia. Now, how many countries are there in Asia? How many entries did each TV station enter in this competition? (Which is a really sneaky way of asking how few stations dominated the entire "competition").
The Singapore A Cappella Awards decided to go for the online voting system, starting from 2 years ago. As I recall, in 2001, a certain group won the Audience Favourite Award without appearing for any performance on the public showcase dates at Suntec.
For the Asia Star Search award... the organisers must really hope that audiences don't not get too deep into questioning why "ASIA" is represented solely by Singapore, Hongkong, China, and Taiwan. Or, for some other Asian awards, why the first few categories are always from these few countries, then some other technical categories, and then followed by a few other Asian countries, as if they are an afterthought. Or why "Miss UNIVERSE" doesn't have any extraterrestrial contestants.
I don't believe in any credibility of competitions. But a literary competition I'd give two hoots about would rather have
1. Consistent and coherent, meaningful poseurship and strategic posturing from judges, organisers and participants.
2. Not too much of inbreeding, such that the winner is the one with more friends, or a blog circle that marshalls voting from members.
As thebeastz has pointed out, it is unlikely that the Asian Blog Awards would be repeated next year. For the sake of serious bloggers everywhere, I hope that it will never be repeated in its current state/concept.
Perhaps we Singaporeans do have some unique national trait that enable those few to behave very badly in their blogs, but then again, I believe some sniping is inescapable in literary contests. Unlike other contests or competitions where talent or accomplishment can be gauged objectively on say, the Guiness Book of Records or its TV show ("Biggest Eater", "Most Pierced", "Fastest X"), the literary is entirely a field of strategic positioning, or as some might more pointedly put it, strategic posturing. Hence, it does make sense for any interested literary participant or observer to stake out their own position, to articulate their view on what makes a good blog, play, poem, film, novel, etc...
Ten centuries ago, Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon were the leading diarists, poets, and novelists of their time (and I believe they still count in the all-time top 5 of Asian writers), in the Japanese court. Yet, from the diary of Murasaki, we find her writing:
"Sei Shonagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese writings of hers that she so pretentiously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections..."
What Sei Shonagon would've said in response is not known to historians, but we might have a clear idea. Literary critics and historians dub Shonagon as "the witty diarist": frank, sarcastic, witty, and young. In other words, someone who would get away with her sharp comments, as long as they were tastefully done.
In comparison, Murasaki would've been the dignified "Elder Stateswoman". Widowed at 30, she enters the Japanese court at a ripe old age, schooled in Chinese and writing more like a sensitive scholar. One must wonder if the "dull people" in Sei Shonagon's diary entry of "Things I hate in people" might've been a dig at her rival...
Such sniping... even 10 centuries ago! And they didn't even have a competition or award for diary-writing. Then, as with the modern "invention" of the blog, the great Japanese diarists never wrote for themselves, but for a public audience, who waited impatiently for a new entry in anyone's diary.
Then, as now, literary competitions were an exercise in posturing and poseurship for their contestants and nominees, and perhaps much more significantly so for the organiser. The ability to confer "greatness" is greater than the gift itself, and organisers and judges are not unaware of this fact, when they set up or adjudicate at awards... even when that ability is mostly dependant on the social illusion on the part of a number of people, who by their participation, comments, and other behaviour, give "credibility" to the organiser, the judges, and the competition itself.
It is here that I disagree with Annhell on what makes a credible competition: it doesn't matter whether the awards are handed out by a panel of judges, or by a "democratic" vote from the public. There is zero credibility in literary competitions; it all boils down to posturing again. A panel of judges will make annoint a contestant that best represents the political negotiation of their literary agendas and positions on what is "suitably literary", and which judges are the more influential. Pure audience voting will boil down to how well-connected the nominees are to their voters, and how well they marshall these people. Hence, the best blogger might not even be in the XYZ polls, if his/her readers don't tend to read the site where that poll is from. In addition, how the categories for prizes/awards are constituted will also signal clearly the agendas and biases of the organiser.
In real life, it's pretty easy to find horrendous and comic examples of all that. The Asian TV Awards, for example, consists of 140 entries from 15 countries in Asia. Now, how many countries are there in Asia? How many entries did each TV station enter in this competition? (Which is a really sneaky way of asking how few stations dominated the entire "competition").
The Singapore A Cappella Awards decided to go for the online voting system, starting from 2 years ago. As I recall, in 2001, a certain group won the Audience Favourite Award without appearing for any performance on the public showcase dates at Suntec.
For the Asia Star Search award... the organisers must really hope that audiences don't not get too deep into questioning why "ASIA" is represented solely by Singapore, Hongkong, China, and Taiwan. Or, for some other Asian awards, why the first few categories are always from these few countries, then some other technical categories, and then followed by a few other Asian countries, as if they are an afterthought. Or why "Miss UNIVERSE" doesn't have any extraterrestrial contestants.
I don't believe in any credibility of competitions. But a literary competition I'd give two hoots about would rather have
1. Consistent and coherent, meaningful poseurship and strategic posturing from judges, organisers and participants.
2. Not too much of inbreeding, such that the winner is the one with more friends, or a blog circle that marshalls voting from members.
As thebeastz has pointed out, it is unlikely that the Asian Blog Awards would be repeated next year. For the sake of serious bloggers everywhere, I hope that it will never be repeated in its current state/concept.
14 December 2003
Snippets
A haunting line from a short film. Listening to it articulate my innermost.
我知道,有一天,我会离开这里
一直以来,我就想去一个地方
不知道哪里,但我知道我一定要走.
这个时候,我只想见一个人...
我知道,有一天,我会离开这里
一直以来,我就想去一个地方
不知道哪里,但我知道我一定要走.
这个时候,我只想见一个人...
12 December 2003
09 December 2003
Long post on cutting things short
As old as the human urge to create art is the equally human urge to creatively truncate art. Call it what you will - editing, expurgating, censorship, summarising, adaptation - this urge has remained with us ever since the First Reader yawned on the umpteenth sentence of the First Writer's manuscript. Today, we bring you on a magical mystery tour across the ages on the fascinating and underappreciated human will to cut things short, to simplify, to reduce.
The Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, whom Harold Bloom credits with "The Invention of the Human", is regarded by most of the English-speaking world as the greatest dramatist in history. Whole forests are sacrificed for scholarly criticisms of Shakespeare's plays.
Yet, there is precious little in these criticisms concerning the bawdy language, crude jokes, and blasphemies that the Bard used. Perhaps the most inventive Shakespearean line that combines all three elements comes from Ophelia, in Hamlet: "Young men will do't, if they come to't; By cock, they are to blame." Act 1, scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet begins with two Capulets making the infamous "maidenhead" joke...
There is no surprise then, that for every William Shakespeare, there is a Thomas Bowdler. The easily-offended prude decided in 1807, that in the interests of family values and politeness, the legacy of Shakespeare should be preserved in an edition where "nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." Enter well-meaning censorship. And the world has never quite been the same ever since Bowdler's The Family Shakespeare.
Not that Shakespeare was terribly prolific with blush-inducing phrases and jokes; most of his contemporaries like Ben Jonson had the more inventive phrases like "whoreson base fellow" and "I fart at thee" (not to be confused with Monty Python's "I fart in your general direction"!).
Ever since performance art was unbanned here and with WWE showing at prime-time, our censors have precious little to protect Singapore's morals from. Perhaps they should take a leaf from Bowdler, and produce The Family Diablo: "Re-introducing a popular computer game in a palatable form to the God-fearing Christian family"...
Shakespeare still has fans even in this modern, post-colonial age. The Reduced Shakespeare Company puts on very concise plays (or comedy skits?) that summarise all of Shakespeare's plays AND sonnets in just 97 minutes. And that's just one of their takes on the Bard. There's another offering that claims to present Hamlet backwards and forwards in just 30 seconds flat... In contrast, Kenneth Brannagh's Hamlet runs for an amazing 4 hours.
I'm hoping someone would produce a Complete LOTR (abridged). Doesn't matter whether it's on film or text... but a very abridged version of the book should be top priority.
Or, since the RSC has proven that Shakespeare's plays are so similar to each other that they can be hilariously summarised together as a single play, I'm hoping some guerilla filmmaker will produce a Reduced Wong Kar Wai. Many people point out that the characters from different WKW movies like In the Mood for Love, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, are all similar right down to their personality traits and quirks, as well as what happens to them in the movies.
Speaking of adaptations, do any of you still remember The Illustrated Bible? It had most of the books intact, except for Psalms, Proverbs, and some of the Epistles, which couldn't really be illustrated. What could be achieved was still spectacular: the Bible as a brilliant, visually-captivating story. Of course, sans graphic nudity (I don't recall many panels with Adam and Eve in Eden, the entire sequence was very abstract and subtly handled) and violence, although graphic, realistic depictions of leprosy and plague were okay.
As a lesson from the inspired creators of the Illustrated Bible, our tax department should put in more effort to release The Illustrated Guide to Filling In Tax Forms.
So, next time we hear about great artists, let's not forget their even greater editors, censors, summarisors, and adaptors.
The Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, whom Harold Bloom credits with "The Invention of the Human", is regarded by most of the English-speaking world as the greatest dramatist in history. Whole forests are sacrificed for scholarly criticisms of Shakespeare's plays.
Yet, there is precious little in these criticisms concerning the bawdy language, crude jokes, and blasphemies that the Bard used. Perhaps the most inventive Shakespearean line that combines all three elements comes from Ophelia, in Hamlet: "Young men will do't, if they come to't; By cock, they are to blame." Act 1, scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet begins with two Capulets making the infamous "maidenhead" joke...
There is no surprise then, that for every William Shakespeare, there is a Thomas Bowdler. The easily-offended prude decided in 1807, that in the interests of family values and politeness, the legacy of Shakespeare should be preserved in an edition where "nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." Enter well-meaning censorship. And the world has never quite been the same ever since Bowdler's The Family Shakespeare.
Not that Shakespeare was terribly prolific with blush-inducing phrases and jokes; most of his contemporaries like Ben Jonson had the more inventive phrases like "whoreson base fellow" and "I fart at thee" (not to be confused with Monty Python's "I fart in your general direction"!).
Ever since performance art was unbanned here and with WWE showing at prime-time, our censors have precious little to protect Singapore's morals from. Perhaps they should take a leaf from Bowdler, and produce The Family Diablo: "Re-introducing a popular computer game in a palatable form to the God-fearing Christian family"...
Shakespeare still has fans even in this modern, post-colonial age. The Reduced Shakespeare Company puts on very concise plays (or comedy skits?) that summarise all of Shakespeare's plays AND sonnets in just 97 minutes. And that's just one of their takes on the Bard. There's another offering that claims to present Hamlet backwards and forwards in just 30 seconds flat... In contrast, Kenneth Brannagh's Hamlet runs for an amazing 4 hours.
I'm hoping someone would produce a Complete LOTR (abridged). Doesn't matter whether it's on film or text... but a very abridged version of the book should be top priority.
Or, since the RSC has proven that Shakespeare's plays are so similar to each other that they can be hilariously summarised together as a single play, I'm hoping some guerilla filmmaker will produce a Reduced Wong Kar Wai. Many people point out that the characters from different WKW movies like In the Mood for Love, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, are all similar right down to their personality traits and quirks, as well as what happens to them in the movies.
Speaking of adaptations, do any of you still remember The Illustrated Bible? It had most of the books intact, except for Psalms, Proverbs, and some of the Epistles, which couldn't really be illustrated. What could be achieved was still spectacular: the Bible as a brilliant, visually-captivating story. Of course, sans graphic nudity (I don't recall many panels with Adam and Eve in Eden, the entire sequence was very abstract and subtly handled) and violence, although graphic, realistic depictions of leprosy and plague were okay.
As a lesson from the inspired creators of the Illustrated Bible, our tax department should put in more effort to release The Illustrated Guide to Filling In Tax Forms.
So, next time we hear about great artists, let's not forget their even greater editors, censors, summarisors, and adaptors.
04 December 2003
With Apologies...
Because our national arts council chairman recently gave a speech denouncing "avant garde art", and any art that was too deep for the public and the market, this is my reply to him.
High art isn't inaccessible, you moron.
Today, I will take a break with the politics. Instead I will take three very difficult artistic texts - a very surreal tale from a Czech writer, a very postmodern collection of interconnected short stories from an Italian novelist, and a campy, sardonic stage remake of an old Hollywood movie - and re-interpret them, make them understandable, and speak out to any Singaporean reader.
I. "This is Not Kafka"
How would we tell Metamorphosis without turning K. into a cockroach? I don't believe we've seen a version of the story that's stripped away of its fantastical elements. Can audiences connect with a socially realist and bleak drama?
This phenomenon happens frequently in Japan: a young man, bothered by either work, depression, or even lack of work, will lock himself in the bedroom for years, sometimes more than a decade. Hikikomori is the name given to this affliction of self-isolation.
That's K. Passive, unwilling to become a burden to his family, he enters seclusion in his bedroom one morning. Because he has lost his job, he considerately removes himself from life in the family. He will not be a burden to them as he searches for a job from his room...
After all, Kafka wrote and set Metamorphosis in a turn-of-century Prague, where an earlier economic miracle had turned into a distant dream very suddenly. And instead of a bright future, a bleak desolation lies ahead for everyone. A bleak desolation that will drive young men to despair, seclusion, and self-negation.
II. "This is not Italo Calvino"
This is not "If on a Winter's Night A Traveler..." But something of conspiratorial proportions has been stifling the development of art in this small city for the past 30 years. An art historian, a student, takes up a research project on "the great unfinished works" of a small circle of artists, now dead and forgotten.
In the forest of images, where a painting tells the story of a book about a film documentary on musicians, can the student find the key to the mystery of the disappearance of artists in the city?
III. This is not Sunset Boulevard
Lydia is an aging comedian. An old pal who got invited to take over a TV station in a foreign land gives her a chance to resurrect a career on its last legs.
Reality-TV style, an expose on the disaster follows. The megalomaniacal diva who doesn't realise her star has faded. The lame jokes from the uninspired scriptwriters who would rather work on something else, except they're TV station employees. A series that is watched by very few, yet qualifies as a "hit" only because Lydia has sufficient clout to demand/bargain for more seasons.
And the final insult? When the scriptwriters finally walk off the set, a completely unknown bunch of maverick writers going by the name of "The Video Renegades", with a secret plan to take over the world beginning with the TV station, con themselves into the job. And perhaps, just perhaps... their offbeat humour might work.
High art isn't inaccessible, you moron.
Today, I will take a break with the politics. Instead I will take three very difficult artistic texts - a very surreal tale from a Czech writer, a very postmodern collection of interconnected short stories from an Italian novelist, and a campy, sardonic stage remake of an old Hollywood movie - and re-interpret them, make them understandable, and speak out to any Singaporean reader.
I. "This is Not Kafka"
How would we tell Metamorphosis without turning K. into a cockroach? I don't believe we've seen a version of the story that's stripped away of its fantastical elements. Can audiences connect with a socially realist and bleak drama?
This phenomenon happens frequently in Japan: a young man, bothered by either work, depression, or even lack of work, will lock himself in the bedroom for years, sometimes more than a decade. Hikikomori is the name given to this affliction of self-isolation.
That's K. Passive, unwilling to become a burden to his family, he enters seclusion in his bedroom one morning. Because he has lost his job, he considerately removes himself from life in the family. He will not be a burden to them as he searches for a job from his room...
After all, Kafka wrote and set Metamorphosis in a turn-of-century Prague, where an earlier economic miracle had turned into a distant dream very suddenly. And instead of a bright future, a bleak desolation lies ahead for everyone. A bleak desolation that will drive young men to despair, seclusion, and self-negation.
II. "This is not Italo Calvino"
This is not "If on a Winter's Night A Traveler..." But something of conspiratorial proportions has been stifling the development of art in this small city for the past 30 years. An art historian, a student, takes up a research project on "the great unfinished works" of a small circle of artists, now dead and forgotten.
In the forest of images, where a painting tells the story of a book about a film documentary on musicians, can the student find the key to the mystery of the disappearance of artists in the city?
III. This is not Sunset Boulevard
Lydia is an aging comedian. An old pal who got invited to take over a TV station in a foreign land gives her a chance to resurrect a career on its last legs.
Reality-TV style, an expose on the disaster follows. The megalomaniacal diva who doesn't realise her star has faded. The lame jokes from the uninspired scriptwriters who would rather work on something else, except they're TV station employees. A series that is watched by very few, yet qualifies as a "hit" only because Lydia has sufficient clout to demand/bargain for more seasons.
And the final insult? When the scriptwriters finally walk off the set, a completely unknown bunch of maverick writers going by the name of "The Video Renegades", with a secret plan to take over the world beginning with the TV station, con themselves into the job. And perhaps, just perhaps... their offbeat humour might work.
30 November 2003
The Power of Three
Recently, an ancient incantation popped up after years of disuse, when first our Minister of Labour and then the heir apparent to the throne threatened, not subtly, to close down the union for the national airlines.
The heir apparent, Mini-Lee, specifically plagiarised his father's 1980 confrontation with the same trade union, threatening that "I don't want to do you in, but I won't let anyone do Singapore in".
"Tripartite Relations"
Attention, shoppers: the magical phrase is Tripartite Relations. Following a venerated tradition, the "leadership" of Singapore plagiarises and then bastardises key political, economic, and social theories from academics, and then attempt to pass off the product as "uniquely Singaporean", thus excusing themselves from the usual obligations of democracy and accountability.
But let's not get sidetracked here... the issue is "tripartite relations" between the State - which in Singapore, always means the Party, Capital, and Labour. To understand what this magical phrase means, it is necessary to take a magical journey back in time for 150 years... to October 1847.
Like all good stories, this one begins "in media res", in the middle of the plot, so as to speak. The Industrial Revolution had been under way for almost a century in Western Europe. Poor William Wordsworth had much to lament in the 19th century about the despoiling of nature, so much that his muadlin verses on flowers and clouds gradually became nostalgic in his countrymen's eyes within his lifetime, due to the ravages of industrialisation, urbanisation, and rural migration in England. For that eventual rapproachment with his initially unreceptive readers, Wordsworth became the poet laurette.
Too bad then, that the poet never pointed to the real ravages of industrialisation on the human soul. The industrial revolution created a new class of people, the Capitalists, who owned the factories where hundreds of thousands toiled, in very abysmal conditions and very low pay.
By 1799, one year before Wordsworth's famous "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey", the capitalists got smart enough to bribe the very corrupt government of William Pitt, to ban the formation of trade unions. The unions would've had sufficient bargaining clout to negotiate for higher pay and more humane conditions.
Back to 1847, fifty years on. By that time, unions are banned in most of Western Europe, and the exploitation of workers boiled to crisis proportions. Enter Marx, with the Communist Manifesto. The rest, they say, is history.
Marx might have been a poor Communist philosopher (and he expressedly insisted that he was never a Communist), but he was a brilliant economist who saw the problems of early capitalism, which probably would have "did capitalism in" if Marx didn't publish his analysis.
It did however take almost a century before economists began to take Marx seriously, and only because of the great crisis of industrial capitalism, which we know as the Great Depression. The great arch-Capitalist Henry T. Ford eventually gave in and reversed his opposition to labour unions within his factories, and hence started the ball rolling on modern trade unions.
And tripartite relations? Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programme echoed most economic-political reforms in capitalist countries across the Atlantic Ocean.
The "welfare state", maligned as it is in today's discourse, is a valid description for every modern capitalist country.
The state's policy basically guarantees the near full-employment conditions in the economy for the capitalists.
For Labour, the state guarantees basic working conditions, such as instituting minimum wage laws, and safegauarding work conditions.
Since the state's aim is for an economy operating near full-capacity, it takes out "unemployment insurance" for workers caught in the wrong part fo the economic cycle, hence the dole.
To provide a decent workforce for the factories, the state heavily subsidises education, as modern industrial economies require a workforce schooled with a foundation in Math, Science, or Engineering.
In general, this agenda sounds like most of the modern "capitalist" countries. What we practise then, is a reformed capitalism, reformed by Marx's analysis of the flaws of the early system.
The heir apparent, Mini-Lee, specifically plagiarised his father's 1980 confrontation with the same trade union, threatening that "I don't want to do you in, but I won't let anyone do Singapore in".
"Tripartite Relations"
Attention, shoppers: the magical phrase is Tripartite Relations. Following a venerated tradition, the "leadership" of Singapore plagiarises and then bastardises key political, economic, and social theories from academics, and then attempt to pass off the product as "uniquely Singaporean", thus excusing themselves from the usual obligations of democracy and accountability.
But let's not get sidetracked here... the issue is "tripartite relations" between the State - which in Singapore, always means the Party, Capital, and Labour. To understand what this magical phrase means, it is necessary to take a magical journey back in time for 150 years... to October 1847.
Like all good stories, this one begins "in media res", in the middle of the plot, so as to speak. The Industrial Revolution had been under way for almost a century in Western Europe. Poor William Wordsworth had much to lament in the 19th century about the despoiling of nature, so much that his muadlin verses on flowers and clouds gradually became nostalgic in his countrymen's eyes within his lifetime, due to the ravages of industrialisation, urbanisation, and rural migration in England. For that eventual rapproachment with his initially unreceptive readers, Wordsworth became the poet laurette.
Too bad then, that the poet never pointed to the real ravages of industrialisation on the human soul. The industrial revolution created a new class of people, the Capitalists, who owned the factories where hundreds of thousands toiled, in very abysmal conditions and very low pay.
By 1799, one year before Wordsworth's famous "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey", the capitalists got smart enough to bribe the very corrupt government of William Pitt, to ban the formation of trade unions. The unions would've had sufficient bargaining clout to negotiate for higher pay and more humane conditions.
Back to 1847, fifty years on. By that time, unions are banned in most of Western Europe, and the exploitation of workers boiled to crisis proportions. Enter Marx, with the Communist Manifesto. The rest, they say, is history.
Marx might have been a poor Communist philosopher (and he expressedly insisted that he was never a Communist), but he was a brilliant economist who saw the problems of early capitalism, which probably would have "did capitalism in" if Marx didn't publish his analysis.
It did however take almost a century before economists began to take Marx seriously, and only because of the great crisis of industrial capitalism, which we know as the Great Depression. The great arch-Capitalist Henry T. Ford eventually gave in and reversed his opposition to labour unions within his factories, and hence started the ball rolling on modern trade unions.
And tripartite relations? Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programme echoed most economic-political reforms in capitalist countries across the Atlantic Ocean.
The "welfare state", maligned as it is in today's discourse, is a valid description for every modern capitalist country.
The state's policy basically guarantees the near full-employment conditions in the economy for the capitalists.
For Labour, the state guarantees basic working conditions, such as instituting minimum wage laws, and safegauarding work conditions.
Since the state's aim is for an economy operating near full-capacity, it takes out "unemployment insurance" for workers caught in the wrong part fo the economic cycle, hence the dole.
To provide a decent workforce for the factories, the state heavily subsidises education, as modern industrial economies require a workforce schooled with a foundation in Math, Science, or Engineering.
In general, this agenda sounds like most of the modern "capitalist" countries. What we practise then, is a reformed capitalism, reformed by Marx's analysis of the flaws of the early system.
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