cookie-cutter comments

I’ve moved over to reduced and recycled (heh). So long, blogsome. It’s been great while it lasted. I’ll keep this site up for posterity and my immense ego

bleh.

Zero gave me this book, and I’ve been reading it on and off being so tied up with work. I remember reading it and feeling I was tossed back into the darker years of the Dark Ages. It’s something I’ve always liked about post-apocalyptic settings: you are forced into a dystopian future which, being dystopian, finds its underpinnings in the worst periods of human history, in this instance reflected in 10th or 11th Century Europe.

What fascinates me about these settings is how authors envision the behaviours of the various actors on the metaphorical stage; intellectually-able but fascinated with preternatural myths, seeing the symbolic in everything, even in the abused, silvered sliver of candy wrapping. Such a “dark age” is not merely a situation bereft of real knowledge and science, but a situation in which the participants are bereft of the intellectual capacity to grasp the possibilities of science beyond myth-making. [more..]

I can’t get this past my head, so forgive me for sounding quite contrarian: the DAP must learn to be tyrannical to itself. I mean look at it this way: the DAP, whether we wish to believe represents the aspirations of Malaysians for a democratic state, must learn in my opinion to engage in selective tyranny, especially with itself.

We have here a political party run by personalities and not ideals, in my opinion: it’s all been trench-fighting, tossing diatribe after BN’s diatribe. All this is fine, I suppose, and some would say necessary: our political climate is such that with BN’s overwhelming majority in parliament, any incident not turned into a national issue is a lost opportunity.

Well and good. We have had demogogues, with LKS being the most prominent - this in itself is not wrong, I believe, because this in itself reflects necessity. But when you have a party, country or company run by a personality playing the by-lines and blowing up issues, you can’t afford to be seen as tardy in your own backyard. [more..]

I’m in the midst of moving off to another site with my friends, and we’re working out what we should do. In the meantime, I’ve been busy doing up another wordpress site with Zero and luthien, and it’s been taking some time. I think it could take another day or two, and I don’t think I will be migrating any of the posts here to the new site. Oh well.. blogsome’s been fun, but it’s time to move on.

LKS feels people in some quarters are “shooting the messenger” when the plain truth of the matter is, this should’ve been expected. This doesn’t make it any less wrong, of course, but I get the feeling that he’s reacting in the wrong way: defensively. By that I mean, by merely countering the claims made in the media, especially here, in a Berita Harian article.

We all know it’s political opportunism since the whole incident has left a very bad taste, but more: I think we should focus on the fear apparent in this recent UMNO offensive. When the government itself doesn’t know what it was doing when the ear-squat incident exploded on the scene, even supporters of UMNO would trust it less and less. And now the situation is one in which the victim is Malay: whatever we may say about race, imagine how this gets played out in the average Malay voter’s mind.

The government is clearly in trouble. [more..]

Just when you thought crazies with mad theories about mass hallucinations have gone the way of the dodo, the president of Iran comes right out and denies the truth of the Nazi Holocaust. BBC’s having this little newsbit on its front page, because stupidity, especially in such a public figure, should be glorified. I mean, check this out:

“They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets,” he said.

So, here, I don’t know: he doesn’t go and outright denies the Holocaust, does he? He merely posits that the Holocaust has been turned into a myth, the importance of which has taken a far higher precedence in people’s priorities. That’s the best, most favourable way I can interpret that statement. More corroboration for this interpretation, maybe:

[more..]

I thought it couldn’t; on the one hand there’s enough trouble if lokapgal was indeed a Chinese national, and possibly less trouble if she was a local Chinese. Now we have news she’s a 22 year old Malay lady who’s 3 months pregnant (via Star/Maxis sms alert).

Bernama’s carrying a story about the findings to date from the commission over here.

What’s the reaction going to be?

As feared, it appears that these ear-squats are part of “standard procedure” but has no official sanction. Of course it wouldn’t, now would it? A Star report mentions this over here.

The OCPD has advised us that:

[more..]

Conspiracy Theories

1. There has been a meeting of minds amongst various subterranean creatures on the subject of adult torture: make movies based on children’s books.
2. Tthere has been a desert’s worth of good movies because aliens have taken over Hollywood. Spielberg? Confirmed alien, sub species bipedal four-eyeds.
3. If you see mushrooms growing outside your house, watch out for leprechauns. Signs indicate increased activity and missing gold, explaining the sudden hiccup in prices.
4. Porkers caught walking on hind legs and smoking cigars: invasion of Red Ham imminent.

A weird, cloaked guy with rusty scythe was last spotted walking around neighbourhood looking for strange, sand-filled contraption. Promises of death and doom for “those dratty thieves!”; “quick and painless” rewards offered for capture of camo-khakied cats last seen in the vicinity of the local bawah pokok.

[more..]

I didn’t want to quibble with him, so I said nothing.

I had the shock of my life last week when an email I replied, an email solicited by my boss, was rudely answered without so much as a “by-your-leave”. If he wanted to assfuck me, he should’ve had the decency to ask nicely. But he didn’t, and I was left feeling raw and enraged. My fingers twitched and I was dying to reply, but I held back.

It was a matter of simple, practical logic. Let’s put it in more concrete terms: the warranty for the contents of your safe deposit box will take effect if 1) the safe box was guarded at all times, and 2) if the safe box was properly locked and secured. [more..]

i love the numerical certainty of fevers. you catch it today, incubation lasts about 2 days (2.3? 2.1? who knows) and you find yourself sick. i blame zero and luthien (haha!) but i really blame the weather. unseasonally hot, my lips are parched and the air-conditioning isn’t helping much. everything’s cast in a golden yellow glow. i feel the heat radiating off the curtains, like the heat radiating off my forehead. [more..]

call it an internal evolution.

meeting two friends from across the straits of johor was a night to remember: it’s been a hell of a long time since i had a smile on my face when driving back home. our discussions are secret, of course, but i assure you, Subterranean Rats were discussed, as was the spectre of invasion of one’s privacy after death.

a word or two on that. luthien’s talked about it over here and here. we discussed this that Saturday night, and i agree completely with what she said:

sometimes, i wonder how smart these Tomorrow.sg editors are. some of them are simply too egotistical for their own good. a memoriam in the form of a book for her family to read - wasn’t this against her wishes? fighting a losing battle in the hospital, S had more things to worry about than her blog. she didn’t have time to inform her friends of her condition, much less log on to the Internet to shut down her site. maybe she wanted to, maybe she didn’t. we will never know.

the reason for going ahead with the printing, despite some protests, was a lame “we have spoken to her family and at this moment, we intent (should be intend) to fulfill our promises to them”. first mistake, you let the cat out of the bag. second mistake, you make a promise without thinking of the consequences. and the third mistake, you’re going to print that book. which is the worse evil here: to break a promise to her family or to print her diary (that she mentioned before was unknown to the family)? keep in mind that her family members are still alive, so you can still negotiate with them, but she, on the other hand, is dead.

[more..]

This book caused a bit of an uproar among my colleagues a few months back when it first came out. A lawyer friend recommended this book to me, and it didn’t take me long to buy and read it.

It retailed at RM 38.00 at the Popular Bookstore, but is worth much more for various reasons. I wanted to jot down some thoughts chapter by chapter, since I thought this was worth doing, but I think it would be better if people bought the book and read it, then come up with their own judgements about his arguments.

Firstly, a note on copyright: should the publisher wish that I remove the picture, I will do so.

Secondly, I think I can only make general comments on the substance of the book, rather than examine some of the arguments closely since that would be contrary to the ’spirit’ of the book; it’s not an academic treatise, and I don’t think it pretends to be one. [more..]

I suppose when you have grand, long-term goals, you try to coach it in the most general terms possible to allow for a breadth of interpretation. The problem with repeating yourself again and again is, if what you say isn’t backed up with concrete proposals for action, everything remains up in the air and unresolved.

Which essentially means, no one knows what you’re talking about. It’s very much like envisioning More’s Utopia, or Plato’s Republic, except nothing specific is said about it. In the end, this “vision” appears to be nothing more than a Shangri-La shrouded in obscure declarations and descriptive statements about what “it will be like” rather than “how we’re going to get there”. [more..]

It’s probably the impulse to keep private things relating to the family just that: private. Sometimes what’s worse is not actually being poor, or dysfunctional, or broken; sometimes what’s worse is being thought as such by your neighbours.

I notice how this infects alot of Malaysians. There’s probably nothing wrong with keeping what concerns a family within the family; outsiders really have no business with our own internal squabbles, do they?

All the secrecy, however, breeds a few things: a desire to be perceived as ‘normal’ or ‘with it’; an excuse to silence dissenting voices; and the assurance that if things really are going wrong, the family gets to solve it their own way.

That’s what probably motivated our Deputy Internal Security Minister to tell off potential tourists, though I cannot be sure; we could describe this whole incident as one man suddenly having his authority questioned in a land where he and his ilk have control over everything. [more..]