Jack Neo

I don’t love or hate his movies. There is a crassness to his movies, but they are targeted at the HDB folk. I’m generally willing to overlook their crassness (after all I’m mostly guilty of the same.)

About his affairs, it was a shock all the same. But a movie director has the great temptation to stray. He’s the alpha male, and he has access to a lot of ass. But we didn’t think of that sort. Then again, it’s like making the same mistake that most people make, that nerds are not human beings.

It's true that he looks a little bit pathetic now, because as opposed to Tiger Woods, who has been up to his neck in deep shit but nevertheless praised as an excellent lover, only one person has admitted to being Jack Neo's mistress. He looks a lot like a loser now. I remember that in college somebody said that if you're a professor hitting on his students, that is one of the most pathetic things because you're using your power over them to get your way with her. Well you could say that about Jack Neo.

Then came the infamous press conference, where he read a very short statement, his wife read a short statement, and then she collapsed, and then Ah Nan screamed at all the journalists to go away.

What was very interesting was the Life report on that press. They were universally condemnatory. One article on life, curiously said "Jack Neo didn't say sorry". Well he admitted that he was wrong, and that's almost the same thing. Another article said that he should have said sorry to the public as well, contravening a more common- sensical notion, expressed on a few forums, that he owes his wife and family the apology, not the public. Brian Miller wrote that he packed the 60 strong press pack into a small room, and further more got his people to occupy the first row.

I suppose the press released was staged managed to some extent. But I believe that Jack Neo already said exactly what he needed to say: I'm sorry. That was all he owed the press. It was very unfortunate that his wife had to be dragged along, and many people said that it was the most distasteful aspect of the press conference. What if it was deliberately distasteful? The only rational purpose for the wife to be there is to say what she said, which was: could the media please leave me alone. That was simple enough. In fact, the whole affair of that press conference seems to have one consistent message: fuck you, media scum. The trooping out the wife to show everybody how much she has suffered. The making her faint in order to make the media look bad.

The psychology of the wife was interesting. I think she probably thought, you just close one eye if he has the occasional affair, so long as the family is not compromised. Hardly ideal, but not a disaster. It's true that what you don't know can't hurt you. But what you know but not everybody knows, can't hurt you very much either. It's totally different if this thing gets publicised, and you suddenly become the talk of the town. It's that much more unbearable.

As for the press, I think they decided to play up Jack Neo's abhorrent behaviour in order to deflect from the main message, which is that they are harrassing Jack Neo at least as badly as how Jack Neo harrassed the young chicks. But do they want to keep on demonising him? Well, they would. Because in the Chinese entertainment scene, nobody fucks with the press. The press maintains its God given ability to make or break stars. Jack wanted to upset the prevailing order, so they had to fix him.

Another rumour going all around is that somebody told the press to deflect attention away from the Silviu Ionescu case. Maybe, but it would be a 180 degree turn from the massive amounts of media coverage that the case has been getting.

I think that he'll take a break from film making for the time being. Any way his shows' quality are going downhill.

Any way, I can cynically say that with this Jack Neo case, I have not been entertained that much in quite a long time.

Punk

I think a lot has been written about punk. What does it mean? Why is it a movement? I’m not a good anthropologist, but punk is obviously something that I identify with. The punk movement became fashionable in Britain, and some parts of the USA in the late 70s, which was coincidently the time when I was born.

The fact that it exists means that the potential for it has always been there. There are always young people around, and some of them will always be rebellious. But probably it would not have been a worldwide movement until the 60s. That was the time when a privileged generation, the baby boomers was growing up in the West, and for the first time a large enough group of people actually had time on their hands to express rebellious attitudes towards society without being thrown into prison.

In 1968 there was a spontaneous wave of student rebellions all over the world. Many unis in the states had riots or had buildings taken over by students, including the one I went to. There were student protests in Mexico, and it ended up with the students getting fired upon. In Paris, where it ended up with Charles De Gaulle being forced out of power. In Prague, and the Russians ended up having to send in the tanks.

It was bizarre. I don’t really know what they were fighting about, but they were probably like young people everywhere, they thought that the older generation were corrupt and too conservative. They were going to build a better and more idealistic world. Sounds familiar isn’t it? They were protesting the Vietnam War. There were a lot of communist sympathisers. Ho Chih Minh, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara were their heroes.

I supposed that was one of the high points of radical leftist politics, because from the 1970s onwards, America slowly became a more and more conservative place, until you had the age of the Reagans and the Bushes.

Anyway, the way I knew about the punk movement was through music. In the beginning there were a few bands who wrote the blueprint of what punk was about. There was the Velvet Underground, who took a lot of minimalist ideas from modern classical music, and fused it with rock music. They used to be more influential than popular. Now they’re influential and popular. There were bands like the MC5 and the Stooges. They played a very abrasive and loud form of rock music, but it was stripped down and simplified. Iggy Pop is still alive and kicking today, even though Dave Alexander and Ron Asheton are not. He is as indestructible as a cartoon character. A heroin habit did not kill him. The propensity to slash himself over and over on stage did not kill him. Rolling around on broken glass in performances did not kill him. You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at him but he topped his high school.

Thereafter, there was a scene in New York, where bands like Blondie, Television, the Talking Heads (David Byrne performed in Singapore recently), the Ramones and the Patti Smith group developed a more arty form of punk. Punk music briefly became popular in 1977, through the music of the bands Sex Pistols and the Clash. Wire. There was a band in Australia called the Saints. Suddenly everybody was forming a band.

Inevitably (because punks are by nature very self destructive) the punk movement burned out. But even though it faded away from the scene, there were a lot of bands that carried on the tradition. There were Sonic Youth, REM and Husker Du, who were very heavily influenced by punk, and would very heavily influence generations of bands that followed them. There were Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Germs, who would be more faithful to the bare, stark angry ravings of the Sex Pistols.

More crucially, punk mutated into New Wave. The simplicity of punk music inspired many to do likewise: you had Duran Duran, Joy Division and U2. It wasn’t around anymore but it had a huge influence on 80s pop.

Suddenly, in the 90s, it took over the world. Around the time I started following music in a big way, a band called Nirvana took over the number 1 spot on the albums chart from Michael Jackson. For a few years after that, many bands which had toiled in the underground movement start putting out albums on major labels. Thus, you had Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees following in its wake. The Smashing Pumpkins. Radiohead. Stuff like that.

After that, numbernine grew up and switched to listening to Jazz, and has not concerned himself with matters of the punk world anymore.

Anyway, what characterises punk music? What’s it all about? In 1977, the first time it became popular, it was a rebellion against the idea of a rock star. The rock stars had become fat and lazy. They were too rich and flaunted their wealth too ostentatiously. Their music went down in quality, and their concerts dragged on for too long. So when punk music came along, it was a rude blast of fresh air.

Punk is anger and rebellion. It is simplicity. It is about revolution, railing against whatever happens to be the current system. Punks like to think of themselves as straightforward and true to their ideas, although sometimes I think they’re just confused. They despise folks who carry themselves in a courtly and aristocratic manner. Those people sometimes have to say things they don’t really mean in order to avoid giving offence. Punks dispense with such formalities. Punks are like guerillas, and they live in an austere environment. Punk is the confused teenage years. Punk is about sex, not love, although one punk love song that comes to mind is “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have” by the Buzzcocks. Even then it is important to note: punks seldom get the girl.

On the good side, they are energetic, and they signal change. When you hear one of the greatest punk bands, the Clash, you will be amazed at how simple and effective their early music is. They can write simple songs like the Beatles, although the Beatles never took their music to such extremes. Later on, Clash would throw all sorts of influences into their music, even though the main thrust was still punk.

I always thought that good punk music is very methodical and disciplined. You are forced to finish saying everything under 3 minutes, and you are only allowed to use 3 chords. (If you are Wire, then you are only allowed to use 1 chord, and your songs are shorter than 1 minute.) And if, in spite of all these self imposed constraints, you can still come up with something worthy, good for you.

On the bad side, they are lazy, good for nothing, irresponsible and blame “society” for the plight they are in. It is no surprise that they came up in a bad economic environment, as the UK found itself in the last few years before Thatcher took over. Bad punk music is repetitive, uninspired and mediocre. They get drunk and take drugs. Punk is about being defeated by the system. Note that the Clash chose to cover “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”.

Bart and Lisa Simpson are a little too different to be siblings, but in a way they represent two faces of youth culture. Bart is a punk, simple as that. Lisa is the idealistic activist. But there are similarities between the two. Deep within the spirit of punk, under that rebelliousness and love of freedom is an idealism that you can shape the world into your own image. After all, the other face of the coin of cynicism is idealism - in order to be that disappointed with the world, you probably had to have pretty high expectations of it in the first place. And lying deep under the idealism, is the realisation that left on its own, the world does not make itself a better place. Part of wanting to shake things up or turn a bad situation around is to stand and rebel against the status quo.

Punk is not for everybody. I have a cousin who’s fairly open minded about music, but he did not understand punk music. I suppose you need to have it in you to identify with the chaos and rage.

I have something of the punk in me, obviously. People are what they are - you can’t change them. If you put them in a school which is very obsessed with its own image and how it presents itself in public, people like me would spend hours plotting how to rebel against that. I spent 10 years being educated in classical music, but it never feels natural to me. Because classical music is the music of the aristocratic class, which I have no affinity for. I appreciate its intricacy and complexity, but I could not appreciate Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Haydn. Beethoven - he’s the nearest to a punk in those days. And I like modern classical music better because they were starting to do all that edgy, shrill, dissonant stuff.

For me to identify myself with many (not all) of these values, I think I have an innate predilection towards being rebellious. It’s OK, I guess. I have 2 halves sharing a tense co-existence with each other: one of them the rigorous geek. The other the punk rebel. Somebody has to be the bad egg. Somebody must have the chip on his shoulder to be critical. Somebody has to be the poison pen. We can’t all be sheep. A good scientist is also a rebel. Think about Noam Chomsky. Albert Einstein. Charles Darwin. OK, Chomsky is a nutcase when he’s not talking about Linguistics, but I still think his heart is in the right place. Everybody must have something to contribute to society. I contribute my middle finger.

I don’t really know why have these personality characteristics. So very unChinese of me. A lot of the more interesting fellars in all those old Chinese stories were the rebels, because if you were brought up in that kind of environment, and still ended up as a rebel, you really had to be crazy.

I’ve always seen my father as a boring accountant. But in the last 10 years he has gotten himself into a fair bit of activism, that has seen him get up the noses of some fairly important people. So I suppose I have had a lot more respect for him.

But it is not straight forward hero worship. He told me he just didn’t have it in him to be a brown noser. He couldn’t be a yes man for a long time. That would be true for me as well. There’s something to clarify - it’s not completely true that I have made the choice to be a rebel. Some things we do well, others we don’t do so well. To a large extent the role that you play in society is not yours to choose, it’s fate. Fate gives you a hand of cards and you just play them the best that you will. In a way, I have a very perverse respect for people who can control their gag reflex and suck up to people. In a way I almost think that they deserve their exalted place in society because it is their reward in a society which rewards that peculiar talent. Just as people think that it is unfair that great talent for being able to control a ball with your feet is so lucrative, it is inevitable that other useless talents are so well rewarded.

Asian male

On Facebook:

#9's sister: An unpaired sock seems more distressing but less futile than an unpaired chopstick. I have both in any case.

Some random angmoh chatting up #9's sister: What about unpaired humans?

#9: What about I unpair your nuts?


When Obama was inaugurated, there was plenty of talk about how America had become "post racial", and suddenly the colour of your skin didn't matter. That was until last week, when a Harvard professor was arrested for breaking into his own house. In spite of his vehement protests that he was the occupant of that house, the police held him in a cell for 4 hours, before he got released.

Skip Gates was one of the most famous black professors in the USA, and the irony was that he wrote a lot about racial profiling: examples of police officers picking on black people and checking them out because they were black and more likely to be criminals. On one hand the more likely to be criminals part is true, and on the other hand, you could also call this blatant racism.

There's a lot of hoo-hah in the media about that incident. OK, Obama is PUSA, but it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people in prison in the US are black. This is not reparation for slavery because he did not descend from slaves (although Michelle did).

Of course there is hope that the majority of Americans have indicated that they would not mind a black man in the White house. But this does not mean that all the racists have gone away. With every action there is a reaction, and the reaction here is that some extremist minority will feel so threatened that he will start being a terrorist (like that guy who bombed the holocaust museum earlier this year.)

A digression here - the way that Obama handled this incident showed that he is a very good politician. He did not hold back from criticising the way that this case has been handled. He called the officers "stupid", knowing that the majority of Americans would have either agreed with him, or otherwise not blamed him for saying that. After the police union criticised Obama for that comment, Obama said that he would invite the officer over for a beer, and also Skip Gates.

He knows that he's the first black president, and the black community would be looking to him to at least make 1 comment about this incident, and he duly obliged, without killing himself politically. He didn't shy from making a statement as a leader. Later on, he invited the policeman over for a beer. This shows he's in touch with blue collar culture. If the policeman accepts, he's also accepting a reconciliation. If he keeps quiet, both parties treat it like a joke and there's no harm done. As for him turning down such an invitation, I hope that police officer only says that in private. That's something that a good leader does - he brings up issues, thrashes them out, and then reconciles people afterwards.

In any case, race is only but a form of class warfare. Class warfare will never go away. The notion of social status is deeply wired into the human experience. Race is different from class warfare, but in a way it is a form of class warfare. There will always be a means for people to differentiate who's the haves and who's the have nots. That will never go away. The rich will always get richer and the poor will always get poorer. The only exception is if a revolution or a war destroys everything and people start from scratch.

This is not a pleasant topic to talk about but what the hell. There are different dimensions of racism in western countries. I have learnt that it is not precise enough to talk about how East Asians are treated. It’s well known that East Asian ladies are quite attractive, and they get better treatment. At the same time, East Asian males are – well, less masculine, so they get a little more stick. It is quite well known that most heterosexual relationships between a Caucasian and a Chinese / Korean / Japanese / Viet / etc will involve an angmoh guy and an Asian woman. It is also true that more angmoh guys than women travel to Singapore, but you don’t know whether that is the cause of this phenomenon or whether the direction of causation is the other way around.

It is strange because Asian males have been the driver of incredible economic growth – we’re not slouches. But we are subservient and not very pushy, at least on the outside. These are traits that are considered attractive in a female and – frankly – unattractive in a male.

You will observe that for different races, the different gender will be more attractive. Black men are considered more attractive than black women, partially because of their reputation of having large dicks. Black women are – well the fact that I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be stereotyped as, that tells me that they’re low profile. I also suppose that black women suffer because the conventional standards of beauty hold that fair women are prettier. There are exceptions, eg David Bowie has a taste for black women in general, not just Iman, but he’s always been a little weird.

For angmohs, the guys are more attractive. The average angmoh male is considered more attractive than the average Chinese male, and the average Chinese female more attractive than the average angmoh female.

Who’s the first Chinese American in the US cabinet? Elaine Chao, a female. Who’s the first Black President? A male.

I suppose this is an undercurrent of the race debate that people don’t pick on. It’s already complicated enough to talk about gender alone, or race alone. But I think this is significant. I wonder why people don’t always mention this more often. It hasn’t bothered me a lot for quite a few years now, but I remember this fact for two reasons: the recent Virginia Tech murders. Both were committed by Asian males.

Yes, here’s another stereotype you can add to your collection. Asian males are ticking time bombs. I read this article that said that one of the differences between southern and northern Chinese is that southerners have a slow burning fuse and northerners have a quick temper. It may be true. Southern Chinese are notoriously passive aggressive. Singapore is one of the most passive aggressive places I have ever seen. People just bottle it in until the time comes, and then they explode. Anyway Edward Yang, the Taiwanese film maker who is my favourite director makes films about people bottling their anger inwards until they explode.

It’s not only the East Asians who have this, I think. I heard somebody say this about the Turks – they will smile back at you the first 10 times you slap them in the face, and on the 11th time, they will kill you.

Myself, I used to get very annoyed whenever I noticed a white guy going out with an Asian female, especially if she's Chinese. Now, much less so. These days I'm much less horny (which is true). Also I have gotten angry at this before, gotten into flame wars with people I'm sure are Caucasian males and after a few times, I've grown tired and seen the futility. Also, I've learnt the futility of anger, and also I've learnt that after you have rationalised something, and thrashed things out, it is more difficult to get emotional about things, good or bad. (Incidently that is one important function of criminal trials - families of victims, after a trial is over, after all the facts are pored over, are less likely to seek revenge, unless they are totally pissed off at the way the trial was handled.)

I've learnt to understand some of the gains that Asian males have made in this world. I've reminded myself - the tide is turning, the future is Asia. I've even thought of the racial stereotypes of the Asian male, and it is not all negative. You could call us timid but we could be circumspect. You could call us nerdy but we are hardworking. You could call us slavish, but is individualism really such a great idea? You don't get taken for a thug, which is the problem a lot of black people face.

You look at some of the Asian stereotypes that have made their way into popular culture, they are not that bad. The hyperactive Stephen Yan in Yan can Cook. Geeky but very knowledgeable and friendly. Mr Miyagi, one of the best teachers there ever was. Bruce Lee - OK, a little violent and narcissistic, but the hero of the underdog. It could be a lot worse.

Political Philosophy

Some of the courses where I learnt the most interesting stuff in school didn’t even have anything to do with my major. One of them was political philosophy. I asked a senior which courses she liked taking, and she told me that a good course was political philosophy, so that was one of those that I took.

It was not bad, and the teacher was lively. 2 lessons stuck out in my mind.

First was Hobbes. His theory of society was something that was truly dark. He saw people as atomised entities, a rowdy mob of people who just did whatever they felt like doing unless they were restrained by violence. His theory was an argument against anarchy. Basically people will take advantage of each other to the fullest extent. They will fuck each other over for nothing. Moreover they are so equal in strength and abilities that nobody will really win. There will be a permanent state of chaos and anarchy. In his most famous phrase, he says that life like this will be “nasty, brutish and short”.

And that is why we need a government. We need to have a person who is king. We give away some of our rights, and pay him for protection. It might be a tyranny, but it’s still better than nothing.

I supposed in a way it was an extension of what I saw in America. People hardly had any deference to each other. Not to say that they are necessarily rude, but they don’t really have that keen a concept of structure as we do in Asian culture. But then again, having grown up in Singapore, deference to authority was more or less automatic. If I was disobedient to my teachers or my parents, it was because of a moment of weakness, like I didn’t do this piece of homework, or I didn’t do what I had to do because I was lazy. But to stand up and challenge them, or outright defy them, that was totally out of the question, even though we did discuss with our classmates the strengths and weaknesses of our elders.

But thinking about an atomised society made me see human relationships in a completely different way: what if a lot of the people I saw in real life didn’t have any kind of special relationship with me? Like they weren’t a teacher who I had to defer to, a drill sergeant I had to obey or get assraped in detention barracks, or a parent who at one point in my life was some kind of a deity? What would all these people be like if I were to relate to them as though I were a peer?

Now, I suppose, this is one reason I had never heard of Hobbes until I got to America. What he was proposing was in some way the opposite of Confucius, although they are some similarities. The crucial difference is this: Confucius would never start from the standpoint of everybody being of equal status. This situation, even if it were hypothetical, must be completely inconceivable, which is probably why I had never thought of it that way, no matter how rebellious I had been when I was a teenager.

The similarity is that both of them come to the conclusion that there has to be some higher authority in any society. But their attitudes towards this higher authority are different. For Confucius, this is simply the way that it is, that it always has been. Hobbes will ask “why should it be this way?” But Confucius will never even allow this question to be asked. Just shut up and listen. Confucius will say that deference to authority is the highest virtue. Hobbes will say, well, anarchy is really bad and messy, so I guess we’ll have to settle for tyranny instead.

But after this, my attitude towards people was going to be very different. I would be more judgemental of people, even my elders. Before, I would ask, “who are you in relation to me?” And if that person was a superior, I would treat that person as a superior first and foremost, then I would think about what that person is like as a human being. After that, the reverse would be true. Some part of me would defer to a higher-up even though he’s a dick, because there is a limit to the amount of unrest that I’m willing to cause. But primarily I would think about what sort of a person he is as a human.

I suppose all this is part and parcel of growing up, that there are no more superiors like the ones you had as a kid. That you have to make your own decisions, your own mistakes. I suppose I would have picked this up after spending enough time in a western country. But I think it was Hobbes famous story of the war of man against every man which sealed it for me.

Plato and the noble lie.

Nowadays when it comes to the big argument between Plato and Aristotle, I’m more inclined to side with Aristotle. Aristotle is more the realist, and Plato the idealist. But Plato appealed to me more at first.

He held that there were 3 types of people. First was the philosopher, the educated scholar. Second was the warrior. I forgot what the 3rd category was. The first one would be king, because he is wiser and smarter than the rest. (Sometimes I believe that this is just a geek fantasy on his part). For the second type, the problem was how to tame him. The warrior had to believe in a cause so great that he would lay down his life for his country. He had to believe that this made him a great person, a bigger person than he would otherwise be.

You have to construct meaning out of the miserable life of being a soldier. You have to give him prestige, and make him out to be a great man. Even though he's not the real leader, or the one running the show.

The last thing I did before entering uni was to be a soldier. I wasn't much of one, actually, and spent 1 whole year being a clerk. But unfortunately our NS is long enough that I still spent a substantial period of time being a soldier. It made me think about what it was all about. At first, during BMT, I bought the whole thing hook line and sinker. When you're fresh, you don't always know what it's all about. But later on, we did start to question the absolute authority people had over us. We were being fed the noble lie, and some of us bought it whole.

To be sure, the noble lie is not entirely a lie. It is heroic to stand up for your tribe, no doubt about that. There was a disturbing book that I read not long ago which argues that somewhere deep inside of the human psyche, we love war. I would guess that is true, because war is so terrible that it is difficult to imagine anybody engaging in it unless he loves it in some way. The noble lie was there to make us love it.

But what were the 2.5 years? I had very little expectation of the 2.5 years except that my parents were always nagging at me that if you don't get your shit together the army's going to eat you up. But there was a lot of pointless bureaucracy in the early days. A lot of having to wait for the rest of the company to get things done. A lot of lousy food. A lot of pettiness and backstabbing. A lot of pretending to work. A lot of janitor work.

I could have approached it with a better attitude than I did. After 6 months I was completely in the mode of "avoid all possible work". And sometimes I wondered if this attitude did spill over in other aspects of my life.

Let's ask ourselves whether this lie is even a noble one. In the early days of the republic, we definitely needed an army, because we never knew whether our neighbours were going to kill us. But after 20-30 years of nothing happening, everybody doing great, you had to wonder about the war.

In a place like the armed forces, it is full of people who give up an easy life for the security of an iron rice bowl. Are they predisposed to change? I don't think so. Even when the army wants and needs to change, you will have a few stubborn buggers fighting till the last breath against that, everybody defending his turf. It was a very bloated army in those days, with a lot of people shuffling around and not doing very much. I thought that it was a great thing that they cut down the length of service to 2 years, because seriously, we don't need such a large army.

After defending our sovereignty for so many years, the armed forces risks having the rug pulled out from under them. The concept of sovereignty is somewhat perverted because this world has become so inter-connected. Can you imagine Toa Payoh waging war against Ang Mo Kio? That is never going to happen. There are some times when I wonder whether Singapore vs Malaysia is going to be like that.

The nature of the threat has also changed a lot. In an introduction to his book "The Utility of Force", a British general who served in Bosnia points out that the old model of the war, which had 1 state fighting against another state, is gone. The last such war took place in 1973 between Egypt and Israel. Practically all other wars since then have been guerilla wars.

Is our army up to this task? Have we evolved?

Understandably, the fact that such a war has not happened is not the reason why we can dismantle our army. It could well be that the reason why these things don't happen is that every nation in the world has armed forces which prevents this from happening. But the fact is that we can still cut our armed forces by a very significant amount, and that will not change the fact that nobody wants to invade us.

The other thing is that somebody wrote a book on a more pernicious and pervasive form of the noble lie. Thomas Frank, "One Market Under God". In the 1990s, in corporations all over the world, rights have been taken away from the workers at the bottom of the corporation, as it exposed the dark side of America's miraculous economic growth.

Workers were all persuaded to work harder and tougher for the company even though their wages were being cut. They were being told "this is for your character." They were given a substantial amounts of "freedom" in return for their medical benefits being cut away. Starbucks aimed for "flexibility" and not telling their workers when they were going to show up for work until a few days beforehand. They were to act as though they were perpetual college students.

There were a few main reason why the big companies were able to get away with this. One of them is the hype surrounding the "new economy" that was being remade by the advent of the internet. You could believe that "everything's changed" and the old rules didn't apply. I'm sure that a lot of bosses had fun making up the new rules. You had internet startups where a few of the earliest employees had to work like slaves for a few years, in the belief that they were this close to conquering the world, only to see the bubble pop and all their efforts come down to nothing.

Another reason is that bosses had changed their image, and wisely (for them) decided to become more hip and trendy. You could come to work in T-shirts and jeans. You bosses listened to rock and roll, just like you!

Another reason is a whole slew of management theorists which line up to persuade you that the whole meaning of your life revolves around hard work. I agree that a lot of your life revolves around hard work, but this is just emotional manipulation. People now came to work to have fun and attain spiritual fulfillment (which probably means they didn't need to have fat paychecks anymore, I suppose.)

Thomas Frank is a cultural critic, so he didn't touch on many of the economic reasons, chief of which is this: China and the rest of the world are driving wages of all people in developed countries down. But I will refer to his work because it tells us all that the noble lie is alive and well.

My workplace instituted a training program that tried to develop management talent at work. It is a good thing that is long overdue, because training is the best way of transmitting values that we want in our organisation. One training aid raised my eyebrows, though. It came from a booklet written by various SAF personnel, a series of essays where people talk about their "defining moments". A lot of the essays - well they talked about "I must do my best for this, for that, etc etc. I should push my limits a little further". Others were in the vein of "I must be more thoughtful of others".

There was a bit of ambivalence about reading that book. There are some parts, which are in the vein of "more effort", which I don't like - asking them to work harder is not unimportant, but the effects are temporary. You can inspire people, but can you inspire people to work harder every day? You can do this by making a systemic change. You can change the environment in which they work. Otherwise, getting people to put in more individual effort alone is not going to work.

Elsewhere, though, I liked it that you see the workplace as a community of people, and I like it that people are actually thinking about the values in the workplace. That a team is more than just numbers and performance.

I don't completely agree with Plato - he talks about the noble lie, but it is not a lie. It is something that has basis in reality. I would call it a half lie, no more than that. There is this social divide between people who think for a living and people who work for a living, Plato doesn't seem interested in overcoming that.

I know that I always appear quite philosophical to people but my family, at least those in the older generation are people who have always worked for a living, and who have always believed in the practical over the ideals. For me, ideals serve only one purpose: they are a means with which we seek to understand the world, they are a framework with which we learn about our environment. Once that purpose is served, it's time to throw away those ideals, open your eyes, and see how things really work in reality.

Dead Hobbies

1. This isn't really related but I sometimes think about the hobbies that I used to have. One of them was Transformers. They were really a big thing during my time. I didn't have transformers toys but I liked Mask toys. Had quite a few. Zoids too. And then the miser genes I inherited from my old man kicked in and I said to myself, "why am I keeping all this junk in my house?" Some people never get rid of these hobbies, which is why you see grown up men still having Transformer toys in their cabinets. I'm different, and while I will still marvel at the ingenuity of these toys, they're done for good.

Also I still remember the time when I had the burning desire to be a playwright. I used to watch a lot of sitcoms and analyse the flow of the dramas and plots. I only paid attention at literature classes when they are talking about literary devices, because they are the working tools of a playwright. I usually don't give a shit about memorising essays and getting A1s for literature. My literature teacher bragged that one of her former students who was a good playwright didn't take her advice to write simple and uncontroversial essays, and he got an A2 instead of the A1 everybody expected him to get. I can see her point but if you asked me to get an A2 in lit instead of writing a school play, I would have taken the school play instead. (I got A2 for lit and I was happy with it because I used to get Bs all the time.)

But my playwriting career is over. It will take work and effort to get back the momentum I once had. I entered the 24 hour playwriting competition in 1999 (I won something) and in 2004 (I didn't) and I considered entering again in 2009 but I eventually didn't.

I still remember 6 months ago when I was still running 5-6 hours every week, in order to get myself ready for the marathon. Considering that I am a little reluctant to run half marathons in the future, this is another vanished hobby of mine.

Blogging? I used to blog a lot more often than I do now. I used to entertain thoughts of having a very well read blog until some unfortunate flame wars have put paid to that notion. Once a week, I can still maintain that momentum now. I still have something to write about. I'm blessed with a lot of creativity - it takes an extraordinarily long time for me to run out of ideas. But maybe one day I will.

So a lot of people call me a bookworm. Yes, but the mountain of books I used to have on my reading list is now a small pile and eventually it will go down to nothing. I don't know if it's coincidental. I used to look forward to the weekend because it would be time to myself to read what I want, and now I'm a little sick of reading, I have problems doing it for more than 1 hour at a go. And then I will have to find my next hobby to occupy myself.

I have another hobby - not really a hobby because I can't do it all the time. It's songwriting. I've been thinking about how to take it to the next phase, so that will occupy my free time for a while.

A new hobby of mine would be learning about computer science. I once considered that as a major but took Maths instead. Now I'm wondering. Of course this is reading, but it does mean that another subject that I really used to enjoy reading about would be slowly phased out - that's history. I now have a framework of world events and their significance, how we got to what we are today, so further study is no longer necessary.

2. As for work - I thought about how I looked at it. In around the 4th or 5th book, Harry Potter learnt that he was placed in the care of his aunt and treated like a Charles Dickens character for a reason - that whole place was magically protected against Voldemort. Unfortunately that's my attitude towards work at the moment. They're treating me better than Uncle Dursley is treating Harry Potter, but that's not saying much. If you want to think about how long you're going to stay in a place, think about how you'd feel if you were asked to take over your boss' job. Would you like the work? Or is it just a fatter paycheck in the end?

There are many worse places than my job, I know that. It protects me from idleness, having a completely purposeless existence. But are all thinking jobs like that eventually? Just sitting behind a desk, and churning away at data? Would I find some other job, and eventually, run into the same problems, getting tired of it all? That's the issue. I think this issue could be far deeper than something you could solve by switching lines.

I think that when you’re doing something – anything, actually, there are 3 stages – the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning is usually quite rough, and you’re trying to learn the ropes, trying to be good at what you’re supposed to do. The middle is more comfortable, you’ve found a group of people you’re comfortable with, you’re getting by in your work. The end is not very comfortable, knowing that another new beginning is ahead of you, trying to make that new beginning happen, having to do a lot of things at work that you’ve been putting off because you were never comfortable doing them in the first place.

I’m getting old. I look at people at work who are 5 years younger than me and I think that I am looking at myself in a funny mirror, because that is the destiny that I could have taken, a road that I could have gone down, but instead I chose not to go down. And every time you go past a big big junction in life, you’re always wondering, could I have gone the other way?

They are articulate, polished. More conscious of their self image, and usually thinking about how other people are going to interpret what they say.

If people project a good self image, is that good for the company, or are they merely selfish people who are looking out for number one? I don’t know. What I do know is that this method of doing things was so foreign to me that I simply did not bother to try to take it up. I could have done that, but I wouldn’t be me. (Which may not be such a bad thing, considering the number of people who have come up to me and advised me to “stop being yourself”)

They believed fully in their careers, and the primacy of their careers. I gave up on it almost as soon as I had begun, in a fit of pique, when I was going through some difficult period. At that time I was totally sure that my future lay elsewhere.

But something strange happened. I developed a curious respect for the way that things were done at my workplace. Why do I use the words “curious respect”? When I was in secondary school my bio teacher took the whole class out on an excursion to a mangrove swamp. At first I thought that it was a very dreary place, and it is the epitomy of unproductive land. But later on he explained how things worked in the ecosystem, how the mangrove prevented the river from washing away the soil from under the rainforest, how it was a home to many animals like Kermit the frog. I wrote at the end of my report that I had developed a curious respect for the mangrove and he wrote back that he liked that comment. As with the mangrove swamp, so with my work place.

As for my workplace, it is the closest thing you get to a war zone. As a student in school I despised the military, and swore never to join the SAF, and how I got to join something that’s even more war-like than the SAF (let’s be honest here, the SAF doesn’t fight wars) is one of the big quirks of fate. But you always have to remember that all harsh words are said in the heat of the moment, all mistakes are made in the heat of the moment, it is so difficult to judge them because this is war, and all sorts of crap takes place when there is a war going on.

I look back at those guys, who developed the right attitude towards the place, and I wonder if it was possible to have a positive attitude win over the lazy cynical attitude that eventually took over me. For me it is a constant battleground between those two. Among my colleagues there are a few who have that positive attitude, a few whose lazy cynical attitudes have won, and the rest, for the most part, are battlegrounds. I think my bosses were not good enough psychologists to realise that I was a battleground, and at first only saw the lazy and cynical side. Eventually, though, they found out.

I also think about that one part in my life when I did try to overcome my snide and cynical attitude, and try to be nice to everybody at the same time. It was a happy, hopeful period in my life and not coincidently it was also the one time in my life I was going after a chick. Who knows how differently history would have turned out if I had won her over? (But I made the judgement call - probably a correct one - that she wasn’t worth the trouble.)

Well in a way all roads are connected and just because you turned this way on one junction, it doesn’t mean that you can’t turn back. And sometimes it might be fun to just wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t taken this particular turn.

So even at this late stage in my work, I still feel like I'm learning new stuff. I'm taking my time. Eventually the time will come when I feel that this is no longer the case, and after that... toodle loo....

3. There’s this mahjong game that I won’t forget. I played it on Bintan, with a few friends (Shingo may have been one of them, I can’t remember.) Now I’m a mahjong novice, and not that experienced, I take too long to think of my next move, people usually get a little irritated with me. Usually that’s what happens. My brain works better in parallel rather than in series. I excel at solving problems which require some unusual and novel solution, rather than doing something repetitive over and over again and doing it well. So making fast and good decisions in mahjong, I’m not good at it.

There was this incident where I already had what it takes to "hu" and I didn't even know it, it took Totoro's husband, looking over my shoulder to tell me.

But there was this game, I had basically a formation, and was just missing one more tile to complete it. After a few moves, I began to sense that the tile was never going to come, so I set about dismantling 1 section of that formation, and building something else, and I won that round.

Leonpix who was overlooking it was surprised, and he started off in his machine gun Mandarin about what I did (I roughly got the gist). It was probably something he wouldn’t have done, something that he perceived to be really risky.

As you might know, risk is all a matter of perception. Risk is about something that is unknown, and people have a different set of criteria when they are talking about risk.

The way I saw it, I had 2 of a kind and I was waiting for a third. It was possible that somebody else was also holding on to the other 2 tiles, in which case I would never be able to get it. The chance of success, in continuing on my current path, was approximately zero. Better for me to break that 2 of a kind (this is risky too, because it could allow somebody to game. But it was still a risk worth taking.) and then risk building up another formation. I would at least have around a 50% chance of success. In this calculation, what I was doing was not risky at all, but an oblique way of maximizing my chances of success.

But I suppose we all have this thing about holding on to what we have. We think that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. But sometimes the bird in your hand is not the bird you want, and there are more than 2 on the bush.

What I have read about psychology is that people usually have a very distorted view of risk. People tend to over exaggerate the sensational ways of dying. For example, terrorism. If I were to take a cold hard look at terrorism, I would not believe that I would die like that. OK, maybe my not working in an office tower has something to do with that belief. But I commute to work, and I use one of the most crowded MRT stations, and every morning, there is a traffic jam. All it would take is 1 suicide bomber with a backpack, and he could take out approximately 200 people if he’s in the middle of a

In other things, we tend to underestimate our risk. Land travel is risky. The number of people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks is 3000. In America that year, between 2-3000 people died in car crashes. So why does 9/11 “change everything”, whereas car crashes don’t change anything?

National Day

What is the meaning of National Day?

Why did we call the anniversary of Singapore’s independence “National Day” and not “Independence Day”? Let’s think about the circumstances of Singapore’s independence. Relatively ignominious. We didn’t achieve independence. We had it thrust upon us. We couldn’t get along with the Malaysians, and they wanted us out. We were born of a divorce. We could have called it Succession day, or Divorce Day, it would have been more accurate. In the end, I suppose we just wanted to remember that it was a day to commemorate Singapore, rather than one event – the birth of Singapore as an independent entity.

After all, it doesn’t really matter what happened on Aug 9th 1965, that affects how we think about National day. Suppose Mr X had a divorce. Was it a good thing, or a bad thing? And we will always look towards what happened both before and after that date in order to help us figure it out. There was no heroic revolutionary war (but the Japanese Occupation partially served that function.) There was no great struggle against injustice. You could say that LKY’s fighting against the Malaysian bumiputra policy being implemented in Singapore was partially a struggle against injustice, but it was hardly the same heroic stuff like, say, the fight against apartheid.

You could look at Zimbabwe as a comparison. It was a struggle against a supposedly racist Rhodesian government. Mugabe was acclaimed as a worldwide hero for a while. He made a lot of grand speeches about national reconciliation shortly after independence. But after that it was mostly downhill. Mugabe turned out to be worse for Zimbabwe than anything the white government could ever come up with. Thus a heroic independence was subsequently tarnished by subsequent events.

If Singapore has a great amount of confidence in itself, it is largely because of the nation building that has taken place after independence. A high standard of living for many (if not all), the avoidance of racial conflict and a safe and secure environment, these are not easily sniffed at.

What Singapore has achieved, I would argue, is a death knell for the national myth. You used to think that a successful country not only has to enable their citizens to live a good and full life, nationhood should evoke some romantic and glorious feelings.

Singapore has actually shown that nothing is further from the truth.

In a way, I would say that Singapore is not really a nation, and it will never be a nation. A more accurate description of Singapore is that it is a principality, much like those little states that used to pepper Europe. We are like Andorra, or Luxembourg, or Athens or Venice.

It is not for me to discuss what nationhood here, and what it means, because it is such a big and complex topic, and also because, having read Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”, I find that others before me have done it so much better. But Anderson points out that nationhood is a juxtaposition of 2 very different visions. First, a nation is an entire landscape, a sort of an entire universe unto itself. He points out that nationhood came about around the same time when the literary genre of the novel came about. The idea of the nation is echoed in the scope of a novel, which attempts to describe to the reader an entire landscape of sights and sounds. Just as the novel encapsulates events that take place in a large community of people, this is also the idea behind categorizing an entire region as a nation. The second idea is the seeming opposite: that the nation is not universal, that it describes your tribe, and not somebody else’s tribe.

This (partial) definition of a nation as a landscape is something that makes a lot of sense, because there aren’t a lot of other definitions that make sense. It is difficult to categorise Singapore in terms of language (although Singlish is almost our unique national language, Malaysia notwithstanding). Race? Forget it. But if you’re not Chinese, Indian or Malay there might be a bit of difficulty getting used to you as a “real” Singaporean. The thing that makes you Singaporean is that you have lived in Singapore for a long time, hung out with Singaporeans, have Singaporean friends. The true meaning of Singapore is the Singaporean environment.

Singapore, I feel, is far too small to be an all-encompassing landscape. It is a city. I feel that a lot of the resentment felt at Singapore is really about the smallness of this place. Walking around with a Singaporean nationality is like being a short person, one would feel. While it is not a handicap or a deformity, you do feel a little squashed all the time. Yes, people get unhappy at the government, or the dysfunctional Singaporean behaviour, but for me a lot of it is the smallness. Of course, the caveat to this is that there are many forms of smallness, and physical size is just one of them. In terms of per capita GDP Singapore is a giant in our region, and sometimes when we go to neighbouring countries we act like kings. But these are just some of the many contradictions in Singapore.

Singapore also suffers from another form of smallness which is quite intangible. Singapore is spiritually small. We don’t feel, like Americans, that we are some kind of chosen people. We don’t feel like we have something fresh and new to offer to the world. Singapore is not the spiritual ancestral homeland of our race, and anyway Singapore does not have its own race, unless you’re Malay.

Singapore, however, is the land of opportunity. It was founded as a land of opportunity, that’s the way that Raffles saw it, and it still is one. In a way, Singapore reflects the characteristics of our Great Leader Lee Kuan Yew, who was a giant in all aspects except for his emotional quotient.

But do you really need a great founding myth to find meaning in your own life? I mean your life is yours to live and therefore also yours to make some meaning out of. You can always go your own way, forge your own identity, mythologise your own life, since you can’t always mythologise your own forefathers.

What we need to understand about nationhood is that it is something that came out of the Western tradition, particularly the enlightenment. Nationhood is an abstract idea, and a lot rests on the peoples’ willingness to believe in abstract ideas such as these. Westerners have always been more accommodating towards abstract ideas than, say the Chinese. For them, even in the Dark ages, the whole society was dominated by the Church. Can you imagine there ever being a Chinese theocracy? There is a lot of earthiness in Chinese culture in contrast, and there is a definite limit to how much we can believe in abstract ideas. An American might cry out, “give me liberty or give me death”. The Chinese would die, but for something more tangible, like the Chinese people, or the Chinese nation. You might go to church and pray for the well being of the spirits of the departed. If you’re Chinese, you do something more concrete, and

In a way, Singapore illustrates this pragmatism. We didn’t invent the golden straitjacket (a term coined by Thomas Friedman) but our nation played its part in making this acceptable to people. We might just have discerned some truths that a lot of political scientists were heretofore reluctant to acknowledge: that people generally value material wealth more than abstract notions of freedom, like free speech, right of assembly, right of dissent.

There are things that Singapore have granted to its citizens, which can be thought of as forms of freedom, although not commonly accepted in Western political thought. If we make the streets safe for people to walk around at night, that is a form of freedom. If we impose restrictions on discrimination on the basis of race, that is also a form of freedom, albeit for a minority of people.

Our national pledge rests on a highly negative definition of what Singapore is about. We say that we are citizens “regardless of race, language or religion.” Singapore is not about race, language or religion. In fact, the very idea that there would be a national myth is partially discredited when you add in “creed”. This almost precludes the possibility that there would be such a thing as a national ideology! Incredible – it’s almost as though you are saying, that there are so few things upon which you could build your national identity upon.

Elsewhere, though, we have borrowed heavily from the intellectual tradition of the. “So as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”, that sounds a lot like the “pursuit of life, liberty and happiness”, without the liberty, unfortunately. But they are fairly concrete objectives. No hairy ideas like “freedom”. Are you happy? Are you rich? Do you feel like your life is going forward? These are easier questions to answer than “what is freedom”.

The pledge distinguishes between means and ends. It says, “To build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. But do we want all these things of themselves? We only tolerate the philosophical stuff because these things help us achieve what we really want, which is “happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”.

So, what is Singapore? I see something very pragmatic about our existence. And what we have done, is we have used that pragmatism well, we have achieve some degree of prominence, at least as much as what our small size can allow, and we have showed the world what this pragmatism can achieve. We have made a contribution to the political debate: just how important or not are ideals? We have achieved a lot, compared to what some more idealistic and well meaning nations have accomplished. We have not won the argument, but we have made a point. The triumph of Singapore is the triumph of pragmatism.

Peak Oil

Every now and then when I use my mother's van I will chip in for fuel. Not very often - I think it's expensive. But I still drive, slightly less often than once a week. And since the tank was nearing empty when I last drove it, I decided to go fill up the tank again.

So I took the Shell card from the other car, and drove down to the petrol kiosk. I parked it there, let the attendant fill it up, and went to pay up. When I got to the cashier, there were 2 pleasant surprises. First, I got a free large slurpee. (For those of you familiar with 7-11, "large" really means small because the only other size is "giant". But I wasn't complaining.) The other pleasant surprise is that they told me that I could redeem $20 worth of diesel from the shell card. Which I did, since that would lessen the pinch a bit. So a full tank for just $27, and a slurpee thrown in.

And I was feeling real good about all that until this morning, when I saw this. Yes, fellars, it's true. Peak oil is not an invention by crazy people. It is really true. Some people think it has already happened. There will be a day, and for most of us, it will take place in our lifetime, when most of it is gone, and there is a permanent shortage. So either people quickly discover a new source of energy, or ... can you imagine what it's like? You think it was terrible, in Iraq, people killing and fighting each other over oil? What's going to happen will make that look very very trivial in comparison.

Yeh, you might say. But aren't the oil prices back to normal? No, not really. What happened was that the credit crunch was a stay of execution. First, the slowdown in the economy means that demand for oil dropped. Secondly, somebody probably persuaded the Arabs that we need world peace, so please pump out as much oil as you possibly could, because we aren't smart enough to deal with two crises at the same time. So oil prices went all the way down. But sooner or later, it will go back up to what it was like in 2006 / 2007. And then we'll see.

Yes, don't try to deny it. Most people are in denial, and the shittier the situation, the more vehement the denial. They denied that World War II was going to happened - that's why it happened, because if enough people believed that it was going to happen, it wouldn't happen. They would have stopped it, stopped all the mistakes that led to it.

Well, whatever. Yeah yeah. Toodle loo...

Kool Aid

A friend of mine recently attended a course and she wanted to spread the gospel to everyone. It’s not a religious course, even though parts of it sounds like being a born again Christian.

We had a long conversation. We were uni mates: friendships formed during those days can last a long time. I suppose you would have had to rely on each other. She confessed that she hadn’t thought very much about life up till that point other than being the “typical Singaporean”.

I suppose we got to talking. There were 2 years in my life that I would call the spiritual years, I would call them periods in my life when I achieved spiritual breakthroughs. We compared notes. I suppose it’s quite funny when you’re young, you think you have had a great spiritual breakthrough, and 10 years later you find yourself in a rut – again. But I digress.

In the end, I said, no no no. There was no way I would fork out $1K, even though it was going to change my life. But she managed to get me to attend an introductory session which was free.

The course is wonderfully unspecific. The premise is very simple: you are in a rut and you want to get out of it. This happens to all sorts of people, the best people. It helps you to look beyond yourself and tap into your blind spots.

Your situation that you find yourself in is entirely the result of you putting yourself in a context and, through habit, you find yourself trapped in it. The course probably aims to break through all these habits that hinder your personal development, and help you achieve your “break through”.

There were a few eyebrow raising turns of phrase. One of them was: “we are not trying to affect change. Change is difficult. What we are aiming for is transformation.” Yeh? What’s the difference? Suppose they were different. Suppose you were going to be able to transform yourself, but your external circumstances did not change. Then what’s the bloody point?

There were some concepts like “enrolling”. I suppose that had something to do with the Buddhist concept of living in the moment, and not letting thoughts of the future of the past affect you. There were others like “making a declaration”, where you just had to announce the change you were making to the world, and that was one of the steps.

Before the talk began I said loudly, “is this where we sign up for the 12 step program?” But people either didn’t get the AA allusion or they didn’t think it was funny.

There were people who gave testimony: a “graduate” is somebody who went through the course. There was one, a woman nearing 40 who was quite successful in her career and justifiably so: but her workaholic lifestyle had cost her a marriage. So she resolved to lead her life with more grace. She very self-consciously admitted that she liked to talk a lot.

There was this Malay guy who was always told by his father that he wouldn’t amount to anything, and was always second best to his elder brother. He felt that he got more self esteem for himself by getting over his shyness and getting some people to introduce himself to the course.

There was an Indian lady who was stuck in her entry level job for quite some time, but later on took the initiative and made her long overdue step up.

Then there was my friend. She thought that she was doing fine, and keeping within the analytical aspects of her job without being able to make that switch over to the operational part. Although I wish she had not mentioned the fact that she had attended prestigious universities. People should never mention that until you get to know the other person better. She should also not have said stuff like “I didn’t really know about it but I had been going through life with a paper bag over my head.”

It was a fairly developed set-up, with offices all over the world (although mainly in the English speaking world. There was even one in Kenya.)

The course always begins on a Friday, and it’s 3 consecutive days of starting at 9 in the morning and ending at 11 at night. Then you go back to your own life on Monday, you have 2 days to start changing the rest of your life, and you go back on Tuesday night to report and reassess.

Well 3 full days is pretty damn intense. At first I rationalised it away as being a more intense form of training, where you need that intensity in order to break down your mental resistance, and enable you to really change your life.

There was the brochure, which doesn’t say very much. The website is actually more informative. The cover of the brochure says, “Of course, everyone wants an extraordinary life. The question is, what does it take to have an extraordinary life every single day?”

Wow. Sounds like it’s as painful as having a permanent erection. I don’t want an extraordinary life. Spiritual experiences may lead to people trying a lot of interesting things to get out of their rut. But they also lead to some personal upheaval, and after everything is settled and done with, they want a nice quiet life for a while.

At the end of the day, I pulled that excuse on her, that I didn’t want to part with $1000. They don’t call it “course fees”. They call it “tuition”. I suppose, if you call it tuition, like you call uni education, then that sorda justifies it being expensive like uni tuition.

I thought there was something to this training. I thought that it’s possible to be ambitious enough to change – sorry – transform yourself and go out and do something that you never thought was possible. I suppose I want to achieve something like that. But I don’t want to go splash out on a course, when I can just go and do it myself. Yes, not much has happened since I declared that I was going to quit being a bookworm 1 week ago, but it’s still early.

Out of curiosity, though, I followed up and started looking up landmark education on the internet. I was a little surprised to find that people had charged that it was a cult, although that question was playing in my head.

Turns out that Landmark education is a continuation of what was called “est”. This was a school which conducted self-improvement courses in the 1970s. During the 70s, new age philosophies and weird cults were quite fashionable.

Some people criticised est for being very exploitative of their students. What happens is that you sign up for a 3 day seminar, and you find that your life is getting better. Then everything’s good. After that, they start getting you involved in recruitment activities, like they involved my friend, and suddenly you find yourself working for them for free.

I never really had very much patience for “self improvement” courses. Even the more mainstream ones, like Anthony Robbins. I thought that a lot of them just played on your low self esteem. They gave you a placebo to make you feel better: sometimes the placebo really is the cure, but sometimes it ends up screwing up your life instead, or at best, it doesn’t do anything.

My mother used to listen to these self-improvement tapes a lot. I got very irritated by them, but I couldn’t say anything: I was just a kid. Some of the things they said were very wise and useful. A lot of it was just psychobabble, mumbo jumbo. They appeal to your vanity by telling you that inside that ugly veneer of yourself there is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. When I see a beautiful woman something in my trousers is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. Otherwise I don’t believe in that shit.

In part I didn’t believe it because I didn’t see it as having positive effects on my mother. On one hand I grew up with my father telling me stories of his childhood, especially the part where he was schooling, having a heavy ECA workload, working part time, disciplining his siblings (grandmother was not at home), and fending off loansharks (that’s the reason why grandmother was not at home). OK, I had stories like that. So why do I need the mumbo jumbo psychobabble to inspire me?

Do you know what true beauty is? True beauty is not the “I take some collagen pills every day and my skin is shiny” beauty. To me it is “I spend 4 hours in the gym every day and suddenly I have the perfect ass”. That is true beauty for you.

Nevertheless I attended a seminar. It was a “superteen” seminar conducted by some Ernest Wong guy. I was only 11, and was the second youngest guy there. (My sister was the youngest.)

OK, some of the stuff there that they taught was useful. Like how it was important to approach the task with the right mental attitude, and if you tried to karate chop a block while thinking “I love you” it wouldn’t work. (For me it was not about being too tender with the board, but being completely grossed out by the thought – yes, numbernine has been grossed out before.)

There were the mind maps, which were later used in Tony Buzan’s stuff. OK, it was alright for cramming, but my style of learning things is always that I had a very in-depth understanding of what I was supposed to learn. I was only 11, but my intellectual snobbery was already there. I sniffed at that stuff.

There was what music was suitable for listening when you are studying. The answer? Baroque music, like Handel or Bach. Maybe Mozart. Beethoven? Absolutely not. I don’t know about you guys, but even if there’s music playing in the background my mind will gravitate towards it. So I never listen to music while studying.

Was it all useful? I don’t know. Sometimes I was a good student, sometimes I was a mediocre student. When I was good, I survived largely on my talent for understanding things quickly. I don’t know if the mind mapping helped me much. Maybe my talent was precisely that my brain was good at organising facts, and everything found its proper place quickly.

Then, at the climax of the (rather expensive) 3 day course, there was this touchy feely session, where we get all precious and the instructor tells us to value ourselves a lot more. We are all champion sperm! (I’m not kidding, he said that.) Every ejaculation contains 25 million sperm and we are the winners of an incredibly difficult to win lottery. The fact that we are living today is a result of an incredible coincidence of conditions: water on earth. Low concentrations of CO2. Land and sea. Ozone layer. Etc etc etc. How could we not understand that life is precious, a miracle, nothing to be fucked around with?

Being the class clown that I was, I could not resist throwing in 1 or 2 snide remarks. I may not be the smartest person in all respects, but my nose can smell kool-aid from a mile away. I am famously resistant to being a cult member. If I were older and wiser, I would have just shut up. I would have rolled my eyes at this spectacular piece of buffoonery, and just laughed at it later. But I had to be the motherfucker who tells the emperor that he’s naked. At first, Ernest Wong ignored a few of my comments. But later on, he got worked up in such a rage that he ended up screaming into my face, and he told me to leave the room.

I was stunned, and too shocked, and then I burst into tears. Later on, he said to me, “you’re a smart kid, but you just weren’t getting it.” Soon after, I began to grasp that there was something hollow, showy about his act. I really really hate being emotionally manipulated. My verdict was that was a really polished, well executed act, but also a big waste of money.

Then there were letters written by my mother to me. To my great surprise, I read that she had always loved me in spite of everything. (It is always a surprise when a grouch tells you that she loves you.) I was touched, until my sister and I exchanged letters and found that, except for a few words, the letters were identical. Then we were touched that she was so fair minded as to treat the brother and the sister equally.

There is an expression in American English. In the 1970s (yes it’s that decade again) there was a cult, led by the Reverend Jim Jones. He managed to persuade 1000 of his followers to go to his camp in Guyana, and it was called Jonestown. At the end, he persuaded everybody to drink Kool-aid, which is like American ribena. Except that the Kool-aid had cyanide in it. Thereafter, “to drink the kool-aid” connotes some sort of susceptibility to being enrolled in some religious cult.

I’m not a kool aid drinker.

Homosexuality and me

OK first things first: I am as straight as an arrow. I'm just writing this because I feel that maybe some people out there won't understand.

I had commented before that I was a little surprised at how many of my colleagues at work, including people I like, are completely uncomfortable with gay people. I'll just put in some snippets of gay ppl I've encountered, or ppl who have talked to me about gayness.

Now my mother used to be very concerned about my mind being corrupt and I suppose, filial child that I am, never ever set her mind at ease. My mind is too open. You can't put a barrier and say, don't cross this line because it will eventually end up on the wrong side. But it won't stay there, because my mind is wandering all the time. I do not have an unhealthy fixation on sex, no matter what my friends think. I swear like a longshoreman. (Maybe I am one in real life.) It's partially her fault because she used to swear "bloody shit, male driver" whenever she drove us out in the car.

From other people's accounts, I have heard that my paternal grandfather has a very uncouth way with the language as well.

I consider myself a fairly open minded person who accepts ideas readily, until I have turned them over and found them to be illogical and unworthy. I have so far been unable to convince myself that being gay is wrong.

When I was a kid, I went to Thailand, and I saw a show by transsexuals. Later on my mother told me that those people lead pretty miserable lives. I asked why, she said, you know, they're not normal and they'll regret it. I thought, well they look nicer than they would have if they were men. As usual, I was smart enough to glimpse part of the truth. As it turns out, we wasted money going to Thailand when 10 years later you can go to Orchard Towers and see free shows every day.

I have always thought that homosexual people were good to make fun of. Good harmless fun, like people with a big nose, or somebody who's too tall or too short. Yes, these people are not normal but who the hell is normal anyway? We are all strange in a specific way. When Cantonese people greet each other, they say "lei ho mo?" I always end up sniggering.

The older generation is not very friendly towards gays, or at least they think of them as a disadvantaged minority. There was one time I picked up my grandmother at the hairdresser's. She said that the hairdresser's brother (a hairdresser himself) was a nice guy, a few years older than me, trained in the UK, and for some strange reason not married. I looked at him and my gaydar said : 8.5. I explained to her later that he's probably gay, and she said, "how can you talk that way about innocent people like him?"

I had a form teacher in Sec 1. Some people made fun of him behind his back for being fat and gay. We started a funny story that he lusted after his students. I suppose back then we didn't understand that he was a big shot in the Singapore drama scene.

I must have told you before the story where during Drama Feste, a house put up a production that dealt with homosexuality, and the judges symbolically judged it the winner. It was a shit play, and I should know because I was one of the extras. But I suppose that left a deep imprint on my mind. It's OK to poke fun (no pun intended) at gay people, make jokes about them fucking each other in the ass. But at the end of the day, you shouldn't discriminate against them. In a way, yes, the worst fears of some parents are true. If you teach in school that gay sex is normal, people will think that it is normal.

But the lesson we learnt was also a little more nuanced than that. We also learnt that gay people suffer more than normal people.

My best friend in sec 3/4 is gay. I didn't always know that. People picked on him because he was very weird and flamboyant. I didn't pick up his gay vibe, we always suspected him and we weren't sure. I sometimes felt a little strange around him but I always assumed that number 1 he's weird (which is true) and number 2 it's also weird that I have such a close friend of the same sex (which is true). After all he was so good with women. One of the lessons I learnt is: if a guy is very good with women, you have to suspect that he's gay.

I hung around him because he was very smart and always had very original opinions about everything, even though he had a very big chip on the shoulder and I felt that he was wasting his talent away. He went to another JC from us (another one of this chip on the shoulder antics) and got "engaged" to a JC classmate. It was probably a sham to mask the fact that he's gay. Nowadays when I bumped into him, he's always dressed outrageously, and he's always with his boyfriend.

He did tell me a few things about gay sex, like how to go about finding your G spot when you're a guy. (I didn't want to know). And how, when a guy fucks another guy in the ass, the guy who gets assfucked also enjoys it to some extent. (I also didn't want to know.) Unfortunately I have such a lust for knowledge that I was grateful that he told me. He also told me that Perrier bottles are a hidden code for identifying gay people. So years later, when a colleague had a Perrier bottle on his desk with the expiry date the same as when his bond ended, I had to laugh.

I credit him with giving me a lot of interesting ideas and I learnt a lot from him but we drifted apart because we're so different. I was not happy, not because I had feelings for him, but because it's not good to lose a friend when you didn't have that many to begin with in the first place.

I'm also a weird person but I like to keep my weirdness well hidden because it's always more outrageous when a seemingly normal person says something shocking. Why spoil the element of surprise by giving things away?

Another one of my gay friends, I knew him since pri 2, and he had such a blase attitude towards everything, his parents were so permissive. I remember the Chinese teacher throwing his file across the classroom and the pages flying everywhere. Not surprisingly he sucked at Chinese. I'm not close to him, and I was startled when he came out.

Another gay ex-classmate of mine was one of the most detested people in my cohort. He was unhygienic, dug his nose in public, always felt that people were out to get him. I think he had this attitude that everybody was out to get him because he had some special qualities that other people simply "get". By a twist of fate we were in BMT together. Unsurprisingly he couldn't complete the course.

There was another guy, the most brilliant mathematician in my cohort. He represented Singapore in the Maths Olympiad and got a silver medal, which is like having your test paper graded B. That is good because no Singaporean before him ever got a gold medal. He's completed his PhD now and he's lecturing around.

So I know 4 gay people fairly well, looked at them while growing up. It's difficult to see what they have in common. Smart ones, dumb ones, motivated ones, slack ones. Yes, maybe their being in a more permissive environment enabled them to get away with being gay. I think that with the exception of my BMT mate the rest of them are fairly well adjusted people. According to gossip reports, though, none of them make good soldiers. Maybe they are not the hyper masculine gay types.

There were a few classmates of mine who were uncomfortable with the fact that there are gay people in their midst. But those few know that they're in an environment that doesn't let them express their homophobia. They know if they open their mouths they will be criticised.

People I know from SAP schools are less westernised and I think they are less tolerant of gay people. Someone I knew didn't think that anybody in his school was gay. I asked him whether it was possible, the gay ones simply learnt to keep their mouths shut. He said it was possible.

I hardly knew any Americans who were gay in the US. During one of my years in the States, a gay person called Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay, and there was widespread outrage on his behalf. My university is like most universities in the US, one of the most gay friendly places around. But there was once when I pointed out a gay parade to my first year roommate, a black guy. He's a very friendly and polite person, but he screwed up his face and said, "who gives a damn about them fags?" I suppose generally black people aren't very friendly towards gays.

One of the most paradoxical attitudes towards homosexuality comes from my sister. She's often very amused by male gays. She used to laugh when her classmates quoted Oscar Wilde, when EM Forster wrote about "Maurice", and when Lt Gruber from "'Allo 'Allo" always hit on Rene. But when I asked her about lesbians, her mood changed. "They're gross. Yuck." I asked her why is it so strange? She said, "lesbians can hit on me, and male gays can't. They're completely harmless to me."

So what do I think about homosexuals?

On a gut level, I am to some extent uncomfortable. I don't think I would welcome guys hitting on me. I have, with one or two exceptions, never had any homosexual behaviour. And those exceptions involved me trying to gross out somebody so that doesn't count as being sexual.

But I will tolerate them, that's not going to stop me being friends with them. I know many talented people, especially musicians, who are gay. I don't think that you should discriminate against them, and if you do, think about all the wasted talent.

I believe in being lax with them because I have heard about stories where people tried to convert them towards being heterosexual, they failed miserably and the gay people started getting miserable. I have been in love before and I know that people are miserable when they can't be with the people they love. I suppose it's the same with them. This is the primary reason why I am so lax with them - because they get a lot of shit (no pun intended) and they don't need any more from me (no pun intended either.)

There is no evidence that it is inherited, or natural, or simply learnt. Scientists can't make up their minds. But I believe that once a person is gay, it's extremely hard to convert them.

I'm a little uncomfortable with some liberal attitudes. There's a little smugness in the attitude, "I can tolerate gayness better than you can. I'm more enlightened than you are." That's also obnoxious.

Because of my liberal attitudes towards gays, I get to learn that certain people are gay, much earlier than others do. And, big mouth that I am, when I casually let this slip, there are noticeable gasps, and then people suddenly feel they have to act nonchalent, well, what to do. There's a bit of "are you sure?" And a lot of the time I'm never 100% sure but a lot of evidence is there.

What do I think about how my kids are taught? I want to impart my values to them, of course. My attitudes towards these things are not that simple and I have thought long and hard about them. It won't be as easy to teach them if they're not going to think as hard as I am. It's simple: gays are your friends, they are your brothers and sisters. Just don't ever be one of them.

You can be neutral towards gays. I think it's great that they are all fighting hard for their rights, it is heroic and it makes for great drama. But can I be neutral towards them to the point where I say "being gay is as good as being heterosexual?" Of course not. I believe that if you had to choose, you have to choose being heterosexual. Unless you're just being gay in order to rebel against society. That's a different matter, I have a soft spot for rebels.

Do I think that it's OK if people experimented with gay sex? I didn't want to try. (But then again, I didn't want to experiment with girls either. I guess I'm just cold and frigid.) What if you liked it? What if people became gay simply because they experimented and they grew to like it? I'm not going to be gay! I don't want to be gay. I don't want my dick touched by a guy! There was this guy who did it - he's not gay but he just wanted to piss me off. Well he pissed me off alright, I hit him back.

I believed that all human behaviour is a mix of natural and learnt. I didn't want to mess around with the learnt bit. I'm quite happy to lust after women, thank you very much.

I don't like people discriminating against gays. But sometimes they bring up the "homosexual life style" and I can understand why they're offended. It's not so much the "different ass every night" as it's the irresponsible hedonism. Playboys who are hetero are guilty of it too. You see, if homosexuality is a choice, and I'm not entirely convinced that it isn't, doesn't it mean that some people will choose homosexuality because they enjoy the carefree, hedonistic lifestyle? No kids to bring up, no permanent weddings, nothing to do but to spread funny diseases.

Lesbians? Duh. All guys love watching lesbians. Even the homophobic ones.

I think that the formula: there's nothing wrong with homosexuals, just don't be one is something that can find a lot of common ground with people. There are many people who take the view that homosexuality is a sin, but you shouldn't discriminate against them. Not surprisingly, a lot of Christians take this view. I have never understood whether Christians are judgemental or not. Some of them will say, "judge not lest ye be judged". Others will abhor the "moral relativism" of modern society and yearn for more traditional (ie judgemental) values.

There was a friend who agreed with me for this formula, and later on he added that while he felt that it was wrong to discriminate against homosexuals, he couldn't see how it was possible that homosexuality was not a sin. I put that formula not because I think there is anything wrong with homosexuality, or anything sinful. I chose not to be homosexual, if you can really choose these things. I would choose my kids to be not homosexual, not because homosexuality is wrong, but because they will be discriminated against, and they will suffer.

I read with dismay a lot of arguments advanced by Christians about why homosexuality is sinful. On one hand they say, "liberals cannot blithely say that just because they are permissive it is the morally superior position". That much I agree. But after that, they say, "There has to be values in the world. We can't just allow moral relativism to hold sway." Which implies that just because other people judged something to be completely harmless, and you judged that something to be sinful, that is the morally superior position. That's crazy.

It was never about permissiveness. It was never about saying, “we’re right because we can be so open minded”. That does not make sense. Just as there is no moral superiority to be inferred from permissiveness, there can also be no moral superiority to be inferred from the ability to make arbitrary judgements about human behaviour. You cannot condemn a form of human behaviour for nothing, and say, “see, we have higher moral standards”. Unless there are good, solid reasons.

When liberals say, “there is nothing wrong with homosexuals”, they are accused of not having values. When the same argument is reformulated to “it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals, and it is wrong to label homosexuality as a sin”, they are accused of being judgemental and betraying a moral relativism they never had in the first place.

This is a clash of values. This is not a clash where one side has all the values and the other has nothing.

The distinction “hate the sin, not the sinner” does not make sense. We throw a thief into jail and we will love him there. That is still discrimination. If we say that homosexuality is a sin and we throw that person into jail, to me it is unjust, because homosexuality is not a sin.

Conversely, if we were to say that X is a sin, but we do not discriminate against X, that is also a travesty of justice. Would you let a murderer go scott-free? No. Once you pronounce an act a sin, you are discriminating against that act. Either it is a sin or it isn't. Love the sinner, yes. But punish him.

It is very clear. There is an incredible amount of confusion over the Christian position. They almost want their cake and to eat it to: first to follow the party line spelt out in the Bible, that homosexuality is a sin. But at the same time, lest they be accused of being hateful, they don't want to be seen as being discriminatory.

So my attitude? Yes, I'm liberal, but my liberalism is highly nuanced.

The real significance of the Gay Debate

When reading a book about the US Supreme Court, I read: “there are 2 types of cases that go to the Supreme Court. There are abortion cases and there is everything else.”

In this sense, Singapore is more liberal than the US. Everybody has a right to get an abortion. It is not something that is bitterly fought over. Unlike homosexuality.

When we look back on the late noughties, we might find that homosexuality is one of the big issues of Singapore. It is almost the first issue to be dealt with in a democratic manner. The casino issue was not a democratic decision. The government knew they were going to build it, no matter what, and it was simply a matter of them promising that they would take appropriate measures to prevent problem gambling from being an issue for Singapore citizens. The rest of the world, on the other hand, is free to fuck up their lives however they want.

Anyway, this issue was one that got seriously debated about in parliament. An NMP (and he’s only a couple of years older than me) first raised the motion to get an archaic anti-sodomy law struck down. The motion didn’t get passed but there was a lot of debate over the issue and nasty words exchanged. There always was a lot of gay activism in Singapore but it was mostly underground. Now everything’s come to the surface.

Gay activism has been around since at least the early 90s and I saw quite a bit of it in my school. I think at that time it was basically assumed that it was a progressive idea that we accept all Singaporeans as they are, gay or straight, that this idea would take root and eventually people would accept things as they are.

That was not the whole story. I don’t really think that Chinese culture is homophobic. There has never been an explicit philosophy that accepts something like that but never an explicit condemnation of it either. Unlike western culture we don’t glorify the “real man” because so many senior government posts have gone to eunuchs. There is also the Dream of the Red Chambers, which depicts some homosexual activity. No problem with that either. Should we be surprised that Lee Ang is the director of “Brokeback Mountain”? But that’s not even his best homosexual movie. That honour should go to “The Wedding Banquet”.

It is worthwhile to go back to “The Wedding Banquet” because I see that as the typically Chinese attitude towards homosexuality. The son goes to the US and has a gay lover. The father thinks that the son’s going to marry a woman. Later on he has a stroke, and eventually we know that that’s when he started realizing that his son is gay. But at the end of the day, his love for his son triumphs and he accepts everything.

You see, it’s incidents like this where I feel that Chinese culture is very practical and secular. I feel that Chinese people are both highly conservative and highly practical, but in the end, the practical side will win.

I don’t think the government has any definite stand on this. It has always been the style to seek consensus on issues, and if there are issues which are controversial enough that you can’t really have a consensus, it will not act. Maybe people will think of LKY as a dictator, but he is first and foremost a pragmatist. His attitude, revealed in a IHT interview is “eventually people will come round to accepting this”. Given that the speaker is an 80 something year old man, you can translate this as follows: “I’ll be dead and gone by the time this issue is resolved so don’t bother me with this.”

He thinks that maybe 20-30% of Singaporeans have accepted this. He also thinks that as Singapore gets more cosmopolitan, people with their cosmopolitan attitudes will come round to the idea. Apparently he has less patience with the fundamentalist Christian groups, who are not pragmatic.

His own views? He’s a peranakan. Men are not really men, women are not really women. They don’t really care about homosexuals.

For me they have always been around, like the sun has always risen. Why have a view on things that always exist? Even if you think they are weeds, if you pluck them away they will grow back. It is stupid and wasteful to try to eradicate them.

What do the Muslims think about this? Well the way things have gone since 9/11, they have been very quiet about their religion. If they are moderates, and I believe most Singaporean Malays are moderates, you will not have anything to say about the fundamentalist Christians. There is nothing great about what Islam has to say about homosexuals. If you are an extremist, then you’d be better off giving night classes to aspiring terrorists, and not open your mouth and alert the ISD to your presence.

There has been a lot said about the AWARE saga. The new guard has a point when they say that AWARE needs to be rejuvenated. But not like that!

In a few years’ time, though, what is really significant about this incident is that democracy is taking place in Singapore. You actually get to see people taking sides over an issue, arguing, thinking through their arguments. You may or may not agree with them, but you will engage. When you have studied enough history, you start to realize that there is no such thing as the One Great Truth, because peoples’ attitudes towards things have varied so much over large periods of time that such a notion (of a One Great Truth) frankly looks a little ridiculous. What is right is in large part influenced by the prevailing norm.

People have argued that repressive laws in Singapore are mainly responsible for there not being much of a democratic movement here. But that’s only one aspect. The fact is that you cannot have a democracy without a critical mass of people, a sophisticated and educated bunch thinking about issues, and then voicing their opinions on it. This iterated process of forming and opinion, listening to other people and then revising your opinion is actually more crucial to democracy right now.

So even if Singapore were to repeal all the detention without trial clauses and relax all constraints on the media, there wouldn’t be democracy. As the invaders of Iraq learnt, democracy doesn’t automatically come to a population just because you mandate it. (such a contradiction – how do you mandate a democracy?) It has to be bottom up. And bottom up movements are slow and messy.

So I think in the long term, this issue, ironically provoked by a small group of the Christian Right in Singapore, is one of the things that will eventually lead to democracy being practiced in Singapore, more so than a Chee Soon Juan type clown facing off with the policemen in Hong Lim. Democracy is not a political movement. It is a process.

I watched the situation from my laptop. The Online Citizen were reporting live from Suntec. It was great. For the last 2 weeks, my old secondary school form teacher, who is a bit of an activist, had been putting up plenty of articles urging the ladies to go down and help oust the Thio Su Mien faction. I think there has been a lot of canvassing going on over the last 2 weeks.

Up till the end, I wasn't sure which side was going to win. Ostensibly the government doesn't take sides on this, but there are signs. First, it was the Straits Times who broke the news. Straits Times does not break news unless somebody who is somebody winks at the editor.

Then you had statements by Vivian Balakrishnan who says that he is very displeased at how AWARE is fighting among themselves. Does he mean that he's displeased at both sides or displeased at the side who started the fight? Hmmmm. Then he said that AWARE should be a "rainbow coalition". Does that mean that he supports the side who is more inclusive? (ie the old guard). Hmmmm... And one of my friends commented on the rainbow innuendo - the rainbow is the symbol of gay pride. (The way that se in Chinese means both "colour" and "lust").

But most importantly, I think that the government is probably very displeased at how a christian fundamentalist group managed to hijack AWARE. The government is very clear about this: Singapore government is secular. Keep religion out of everything. If they could make Singapore a-religious they would. Now a christian fundamentalist group wants to test the system

Do you not know that if the Singapore government is sick and tired of you it means that you are fucked? They put up with TT Durai for years because they were afraid of the consequences - what would happen if TT Durai was exposed. Until one day they had enough, end of story, TT Durai is fucked. Now the feminist mentor has stepped over the line, well, she's fucked too.

But the turnout was incredible. They managed to get 2000 people to turn up at the AWARE EGM. Of course poor Josie Lau has to be the one footing the bill. From the reports, the atmosphere was electric. Somebody bitched that Josie Lau had exceeded her 3 minutes. At one point, the Thio Su Mien faction told people to "shut up and sit down". There are a few phrases that just become symptomatic of the occasion and it seems that "shut up and sit down" is it.

Because "shut up and sit down" is the way the Thio Su Mien exco have been running the show. They cut the non-TSM faction out of the loop, they make their decisions in closed rooms, they dress their decisions in the fancy corporate- speak, they are not transparent about their intentions.

In the end, people are offended that AWARE, an organisation that speaks for women's rights, are taken over by a faction that speaks out against the rights of gay people. They are offended that AWARE, for many years a bastion of liberal thought in a (probably conservative) PAP system, are taken over by conservatives. They are offended that the TSM faction have brought their Christian ideologies into a secular organisation. They are offended that the TSM faction are so sneaky and underhanded. And arrogant.

But before today, the question on my mind, and other peoples' minds, are - do Singaporeans care enough to turn up at the EGM? Well we know the answer. We knew already that the good church going folk of Church of Our Saviour are going to turn up. They were part of the well organised system which had taken over AWARE, and had more than 700 votes. It was a question of how many pro-old faction people were going to turn up. In the end, more than 1400 did.

Who were they? I don't know, but thank goodness they turned up.

There was still some uncertainty towards the very end about whether the TSM faction were going to concede defeat. They were thinking about how to challenge the results of the vote. Legally, they didn't have to go. A vote of no-confidence may not be binding. But at the end of the day, they must have realised that if they had stayed on, they were as good as lame ducks. So they left.

Alfian said this about Singapore: if you care too much about Singapore, it will first break your spirit and then it will break your heart. But I have always felt that he didn't have enough patience.

That night I had a dream. I dreamt that AWARE had changed their name to AROUSE, and voted me in as the first "fully erected male member". It was a great dream.

Anyway, in 1973 the US Supreme Court voted to legalise abortion, or rather the ruling was that states may not pass laws to legalise abortion. Unlike in Singapore, abortion is something that strongly influences whether a couple stays together or not. As in the homosexuality issue, one of the main concerns is about family values.

Like the abortion issue, this is also something highly controversial that will never go away. The gay issue is being fought right now in other parts of the world, not just Singapore. Considering that Roe vs Wade was more than 30 years ago, it is somewhat surprising that it's still being fought over in the US, but it is. This gay issue has the potential to be something polarising for Singapore in the years to come.