If this is your first time here and if you like what I write, I’m sorry to say that I won’t update often. It’s just the nature of thought, sometimes you have an epiphany, other times you’re just slogging through life.
The best way to keep abreast of updates is through RSS, which you can access at the following URL:
https://thoughtstreak.wordpress.com/feed/rss/
and I’ll make sure that they’re always be something to learn and think about when I update.
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For the non-Malaysians, The five keris and the four stripes represent the nine Malay states with sultans.
Dignity or Efficiency: Malaysian Royalism at the Fringes (Project Malaysia). Click to be redirected.
This is another supplementary blog post on another article I wrote for a platform that is not Kent Ridge Common. Project Malaysia is aptly subtitled, “an experiment in nation building”, and headed by prominent human rights lawyer, Malik Imtiaz Sarwar. They explain that, “Project Malaysia was created to respond to a need for solution-driven, informed opinions on issues affecting Malaysian society as a whole… Through these essays and commentaries, we aim to inform and persuade readers as well as writers, to engage with the Malaysian audience at large – in seeking viable solutions for this non-profit, nation building exercise.” I’ve also made some commentary about their articles in some of my previous posts.
I’ve always wanted to do some research and write something on Malaysian royalty, especially from the political science perspective. I initially wanted to do something like this for Ferrara’s class on Political Institutions, but he was not keen on Malaysia. This is my way of making up for it. I spent the last few hours of my NUS library membership using the material there writing this article. I only hope that it is up to snuff in the real world.
Saying that is weird, because the “snuff” of the real world is SO different from academic writing. Academic writing caters to the academic mind. These are people who have spent years of their life refining their thought and studying the thought of others and one can safely assume that your reader is familiar with some popularly-unheard-of theory. If the average person has something to say about subject x, a decent professor would know how to argue it from several perspectives. If not, a professor would at least have an armload of arguments justifying his dogmatism. If you’re writing an essay, you’re coming up against that and you need to do your research against that.
The worse you could get academically is a near-fail grade (granted that I wrote the essay coherently). The worse I could get in the real world, depending on where and when I was born: imprisonment, torture, death. It’s a balancing act. In Malaysia, the worse is an ISA arrest for the individual and then a civil unrest afterwards. That’s what I have in mind when writing the piece above on the Malaysian sultans.
I wouldn’t say that The Malay royalist-nationalists love their culture, that would open up a lot of philosophical questions about the nature of love. However, I would say that they would go to great lengths to defend it from perceived threats, and their emotions perhaps run too deeply on the subject. On the other hand, non-Malays are also short-sighted in criticizing monarchy in the sense that it’s not what the royalist-nationalists are going to accept on face value.
So therefore, this piece. The real goal is to foster an objective understanding of a political institution that is considered archaic and unnecessary in the modern world but remains with many South East Asian countries today. Most people could ignore it if the institution was symbolic. However, the sultan, the conference of rulers and the Yang di-Pertuan Agong have real constitutional responsibilities in politics today — as the constitutional crisis in Perak has highlighted. It would be intellectually irresponsible for us to consider monarchy without knowing where they have failed. This is a valid model of inquiry — For instance, on democracy, South American studies have focused on why some democracies there have failed and reverted back to authoritarianism.
But talking to my dad, he also said something quite relevant: it’s topical. It will never be something mainstream. There are my S Factor articles, and there are the articles that nobody will read. Moving on.
Paul Barter, Ups and Downs in Plaza Singapura. Edited. http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbarter/2878161851/in/photostream/
Meritocracy: Look at the method, not the substance
(Kent Ridge Common).
Another piece at Kent Ridge Common. This was a relatively fast piece done on Tuesday. It stated out pretty slow as I tried to get a good introduction. I’m still not entirely happy with it because I’m not sure if its catchy enough for the first paragraph. I’m also quite afraid that the debate has been there before, and I’m just independently arriving at the same conclusions as everyone else.
It was also written in response to Kelvin Teo’s article, “Multiple Intelligences and A Redefinition of Meritocracy”, also at the Kent Ridge Common. I’ve had more recent thoughts on meritocracy, and I wanted to bring that to the table. With my humble photoshop skills, I did some photo manipulation of a creative commons piece to show some people going faster and slower on a walkalator. Not terribly happy with that either but its not worth spending that kind of time for perfection.
Under that article, I argued for two different kinds of meritocracy, egalitarian-survival meritocracy and elite fast-track democracy. Each type of meritocracy, while upholding the primacy of talent and skill, have different ideas about how to train people to that level of skill required. Meritocracy looks an ends, when we haven’t talked about the means. I’ll leave the explaining of the two types of meritocracy there on Kent Ridge Common.
One sort of “means-to-a-meritorious-end” I have mentioned before about egalitarian meritocracy is that there isn’t a way to be pro-meritocratic. By that, I mean that under egalitarian-survival meritocracy, you cannot actively promote meritocracy. You can only passively support a meritocratic system, what I clumsily term being “anti-unmeritocratic”. Under that sort of logic, actively helping a set of people is not meritocratic because its done under artificial circumstances.
Such groomed under elite fast-track meritocracy people might seem to have merit, but we can’t tell if they have any true demonstrable innate talent or merit because of the extra privileges granted to them. If you’re a supporter of social darwinism, it’s also a bad position to take because we might be allowing bad vestigial habits to form under privileged circumstance rather than exposing it to open competition.
Still, what is the relationship between meritocracy and pragmatism? Is there philosophical harmony and sufficient justification of support by both concepts by each other? If the relationship is qualified by some reason (i.e. pragmatism implies meritocracy under x conditions), what are the conditions where meritocracy is NOT qualified?
Max Payne and its sequel, Max Payne 2 are two games that I truly look up to. It was one of the first games ever to use the slow-motion bullet-time mechanic — the ability to slow down everything else in the game so that you can aim better and watch the bullets in slow motion.
However, even though the developers are Finnish — as in from Finland — they’ve decided to set it in New York. I’m sure they’re as proud of their own Finnish culture and they probably know more quirky little things about Finalnd they could show off in a game. So why New York? Is it to pander to their target audience? Are games only as successful as their source cultures are successful in being a politico-economic success?
On the other hand, Max Payne, while set in New York, has never struck me as set in New York. As a non-American, I didn’t see the popular landmarks of New York — the Empire State building, the World Trade Centre (the game was released mid 2001), or the statue of Liberty. So there was no in-game significance of it being in New York. It was just something familiar for the American masses to latch on to mentally to situate the characters in.
So how do you make a game based on South East Asia (SEA)? It’s certainly much easier to make a film on SEA or any particular narrative that is set in SEA. It’s because its difficult to create a game — in the purest sense of strategic interaction of players — informed by local cultures that is meaningfully reproduced in a game. After that, its internationalizing the content so that as many people can relate to it as possible without diluting the unique influence of SEA.
For example, let’s take spinning gasing. The problem with spinning gasing is something like playing a sport game on a keyboard. Imagine the last time you played golf or pool on a keyboard — something’s missing. The control is simplified to smooth the learning curve. It’s not as exciting or awesome as actually watching a pro play golf.
Something more ideal would be like Crusader Kings, or Europa 1400 which are games specifically informed by the politics of feudal Europe that sets it apart. Sid Meier’s Colonization, draws from the Colonial experience of the American settlers. (it is also an excellent game.) The last game I want to cite is Oregon Trail, which is not only educational in immersing the player of how early Americans travel from the eastern colonies to their new home in Oregon, but also very fun to watch your travel party die from dysentry. It was popular in the 80s amongst schoolchildren.
(On a sidenote, did I mention how many Romance of The Three Kingdoms titles Koei has published already? Apparently, eleven and an MMO.)
All these games prove that it is possible to be informed by culture — more specifically, a historical experience — and make a game. The question is, what historical experience and culture do we wanna choose?
Of course, we can just cop out, and make a 3D shooter in exotic locales in South East Asia like Bali, Bangkok, the Petronas Twin Towers and Orchard Road, and at the end of the stage, our hero be able to bang all them hot exotic Asian chicks. Talk about orientalism, it would sell like hot cakes but be forgotten in two months. That would be TOO easy.
This was the game I made after a week. It’s pretty crappy, actually.
Two weeks ago, a week after my last exam at university, I disappeared from my social life. No lunches together, no meet-ups, no IM, no facebook. Just hermiting it on my little netbook. I would wake up close to noon, turn on the computer, bang away for 24 hours straight into the night and morning and then sleep until the next cycle. Repeat several days in a row. It’s a horrible experience that I don’t want to experience again, and it was all to do some programming.
I will never try that again, and I will probably never be as motivated to do that again ever. But when I was in the cycle, it was so… addicting. Almost as addicting as a playing a really, really good game.
Over the course of my last year in university, I got my foundation in Java and mySQL (and thus a bit of PHP as well), and now I’m looking at Game Maker Langauge, the language for a 2D game-making suite called Game Maker 7. I set my sight on writing a 2D turn-based combat engine similar to Final Fantasy-style battles. Not that it was any original, althought I had thought of a few new mechanics, but it was good to practice using the engine I had designed other games for.
I would wake up fresh from dreamless sleep. With new eyes, I would try to think of a solution to a problem I was having the day before. I reminded myself that I still have had a feature to implement, like different character classes or a tool-tip style mouse-over. Worse of all, I would take a look at bugs and glitches. I would think over the data structure and how variables would pass between objects and how game maker would accept one syntax over another.
So I’d make the necessary modifications to the code. I’d type for about half an hour. Once I was satisfied with my code, I’d try to compile and run the game to see if my new feature would work. It never does the first time, so I’d go hunt down what I’m doing wrong. I would look again at the manual. I would look again at the code.
Eventually something like a working feature would emerge. I would go like, that was cool, but what if it also did something else which was cooler. So I’d get back to modifying the code, and trying out again. Repeat several times, with each cycle taking 2-3 hours until I was too frustrated or too tired to code any more, where I would grab something to eat and go back to sleep.
What was really getting to me was how it is like playing a really good game. In a good game, there would be multiple ways to defeat the current level. In a sandbox-styled game, you would set your own objectives and try to achieve them. Programming a game by myself is very similar: I would set the objective of implementing an objective, and find a solution within an uncertain environment.
When it would actually work, it was such a relief; I’d feel like I had achieved something. Not just a gaming achievement, but something I was proud to learn to do in real life. So I’d try to pick up on something else that could potentially work. And I was stuck in this risk-reward structure for DAYS.
After about a week and a half of embarking on the project, I finally decided this was a terrible way to live. I was completely obsessed, and I was not eating, exercising or talking to people. Suddenly, I began to sympathize with computer science majors and its perceived that they lack social skills. I’m not saying that every single one of them do, but I now I can certainly see why the nature of what they do tends to make them lose social skills.
It’s just so rewarding to program and have immediate results, and that cycle doesn’t need human interaction. As a political science major and an participant of organization, human interaction’s not always as great as we think it is. All activists and organizers know that to get what they want, they have to beg, wheedle, and politick their way to where they want to be. Why do that, when the computer can offer you meaning without giving you lip?
I have a small little program now. My non-programmer gamer friends look down at it, and they don’t appreciate how many tears and hairs I’ve torn out from my head just to get it where it is. On the other hand, they’re completely right: a lousy game is not worth playing.
What have I learnt from this? I have a newfound respect for programmers and hackers now. They have an intuitive sense of the logic that a cold, unyeilding machine poses and tames it, shapes it and builds it into something beautiful. I’ve quit working on that program for the moment, going back to my political science roots to research and write an article I’ve been meaning to write for some time. I’ll probably not work on the turn-based battle for some time. But I have been dreaming about another game…
R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy, “Politics and Government in Malaysia” Singapore : Times Books International, 1980.
page 78-79:
Numerous accounts, which do not always agree with one another, have been given of the events of May 1969… The alliance won the elections, although not as conclusively as in 1964. However, strangely, the non-Malay parties who “lost”, particularly the DAP, were elated, while the “winners”, the Alliance, were depressed… In the mood of exuberance, the DAP and the Gerakan held several ‘victory processions’ in Kuala Lumpur, some of which did not have police permission. … Malays, reacting, also planned to hold a procession, which was to have been led by Dato Harun, the Selangor Mentri Besar. But instead of a procession racial violence broke out, which culminated on the night of 13-14 May. As fighting spread, the police were unable to deal with the situation on their own adn the military was called in. Actual violence, as opposed to tension, terror and fear of violence, was limited in space and time. THe riots were confined to almost entirely to Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding areas in Selangor. Even in Kuala Lumpur a few days after 14 May, there were only scattered incidents, althoguht fierce fighting broke out again, briefly on 28 June. … The official statistics wihch may be an underestimate, give a figure of 196 deaths…
Page 81:
On a longer-term perspective, […] government leaders formulated their ideas on the underlying causes of the riots which necessarily gave indications about the course of future policy. Two main trends emerged, both of which were mentioned in a 1971 government booklet. One attacked the calling in question of the provisions of the constitution or the “bargain” which represented agreement among the views of the different races. […] Often it was the non-Malays who were balmed for questioning these key elements of the Constitution. According to Tun Ismail, the Government in the past had been lax in seeing to it that Malay special privileges were not questioned. But according to the Tunku, there were also some young Malay students who didn not question the bargain on specific points, but simply repudiated it. “These people only want Malay rule. I asked them: ‘can you really do without the other races?’ And they replied: ‘We don’t care’. Tun Tan Siew Sin concluded that the elections had shown that the easiest way to get votes was to play up racial issues in their most extreme form. Therefore, before there was a return to parliamentary rules there had to be a change in the rules of the game to ensure that fundamental policies and principles could not be questioned under any circulstances.
Looking back, there is some similarity between 1969 and 2008, except look now, no racial violence. But the themes remained the same. The opposition is elated to win a better portion of government, while the government does some soul-searching to answer why it did not manage to secure a safe majority in Parliament. I think that kind of sentiment points towards a certain pathology of democracy, although what yet, I am not too sure of.
But looking back, the dream of true multiculturalism, of the type Francis Lok calls “new politics” of Malaysia, has been around for a long, long time. But — with Marx’s understanding of history in mind: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” — I hope that our collective meanderings lead us to some blessed place between egalitarianism and special rights.
High Drama In The Perak Constitutional Crisis
This is my third article on the Kent Ridge Common. It took me two afternoons, or otherwise a full working day to read information and collate articles from around the web, talk to a few people on what they thought about it and finally write it up. Sadly, I’m not too proud of it because there’s nothing much that people haven’t already said. However, I hope that it fills that informational gap between knowing enough details so that our understanding of the consequences is justified, and enough for beginners to sufficiently grasp the gravity of the situation. The wikipedia article is really, really verbose and I hope I did a good enough job to make a difference.
I’ll use this space to explore a few issues that I didn’t want to touch in the article.
Rajan’s “The End of Malaysian Constitutionalism” is an even better and shorter summary than my article. Mine breaks 2000 word but his article caters to those people who are already “in the know”.
I was pondering on the “end” of constitutionalism. Much like the “end of
history”, it doesn’t seem like a strict picture. Does one instance of abrogation point means that it will always be abrogated? Has it never been abrogated before? If constitutionalism died, what killed it? Nevertheless, there’s little reason to argue the point, the crisis is indicative of the state of the state of Malaysia and how much the state is captured by the political parties involved.
As a dispassionate and neutral student of the political science, it’s just the politics of the developing state. Many other states face the same problems of political capture of institutions and lack of institutionalization and cooperation between interests and powerholders in society. I wish I knew more about how such a resolution can be resolved, but it could take years.
But as a Malaysian political science student sympathetic to the opposition for the obvious race-based politics engendered by the Barisan coalition, we risk losing sight of strategy in place for tactics. I would argue that we’re not winning the “war of position”. Antonio Gramsci, in his theory of revolution, argues that the war of position fought as though trench warfare. He was writing in prison against a Unlike the trenches of open warfare, the trenches in society are the schools, the political parties, government and non-government organizations, and churches. The incumbent government has the advantageous defence position, and the opposition has to infiltrate the trenches one by one.
What the opposition needs to do is court the nationalist vote. While it derives its support primarily from liberal elements in the DAP and the PKR, they will never win the critical votes of the nationalists. Without the nationalist vote, UMNO loses its legitimacy, and the constituent parties of BN will find less and less reason to support UMNO. The courting of the nationalist vote represents democracy at its finest: moderation of all parties preferences to a solution that is amenable to all, if not most, of society.
However, in order to achieve that vote, the opposition needs to infiltrate those organizations, and begin dialogue and convincing people of a solution. Every society and every organization no matter how small needs to have its plural voices to encourage the voice of centricity. There’s no point in calling out who’s right and who’s wrong if it alienates the other side and further polarizes society.
Another issue raised by my friend was that, why didn’t Pakatan raise the bar? If they were seriously wanted to stay in power, why didn’t they do more? Bring food! Bring a giant lock and chain to keep people out! Chain Sivakumar to the chair! Prolong the session for days until Barisan capitulates! I said that maybe we could model it as a strategic game theory interaction. Barisan decides to escalate, but if Pakatan escalated further they would face an outcome which was far worse. However, it’s just a conjecture. Maybe she is right. I just don’t have enough information on that either.
Back to the article. Anyway, the front picture on the article is crap. I wish I had a stronger, harder-hitting picture capturing the “drama” as stated by the title, but I can’t find one in respect of copyright. So I just picked the most official portraits of the dramatis personae and cobbled together a montage. It was very frustrating to use GIMP because I am used to Photoshop and I didn’t have a copy on hand.
My (mostly Chinese) friends are very blah and disillusioned about it. “Not paying attention”, “disillusioned”, “didn’t realise”, are some of the reactions. Oh well, another day living in Malaysia (or Singapore).
I’m planning to write a critique on Red Thread for The Kent Ridge Common. I’m not going to publish it while the AWARE storm is wrecking havoc around the blogosphere, so I will watch another few more episodes to do the critique some justice. Until I do publish it, here are the notes for last night’s episode (Ep. 6)
Li Ann explains to Alex why she had to lie to her parents that they are dating. Kong has a heart to heart talk with Alex about Li Ann and makes it clear that he will make Alex suffer if he breaks Li Ann’s heart. A DVD from an anonymous sender wrecks Pamela‘s engagement party and causes her to flee from home.
Officially, I only watched half the episode. However, the parts that I did catch was (1) Justin catches Pamela running away from home, (2) Alex accompanying Li Ann home and subsequently get a talking down from Patrick Teoh Kong Wah, (3) Justin taking care of Pamela while she has her alcohol medication at the pub, and (4) Pamela waking up in Justin’s bed *dun dun dun*
I’ll refer to them as Scenes.
Scene 1 was pretty terrible. Pamela needs to cry better and her sorrow is unconvincing. While she may be heartbroken, a one-off glance doesn’t tell me she’s heartbroken. In real life, cries of sorrow attract attention and is recognised in a snap. She’s just walking briskly and talking at Justin. Justin has a pretty aloof role here, so even if he is non-acting, it certainly works here. If there was a time where overacting and melodrama could be used, it would be here.
Scene 2 was well done. Patrick Teoh as the Patriarch of the Kong family conveyed a “nobody-talks-shit-to-me” attitude well, and was the first time that I felt his character was treated with justice after 2 epsiodes (especially after Episodes 4’s poolside scene which was crap). There was some liberty being took with the camera in this scene with three different angles of Patrick Teoh talking Adrian Pang down. There was a side profile of Patrick; a foreground-background one with a silhouetted Patrick in the fore, and Adrian in the back; and the blandest frontal shot ever. I have no idea whose idea to film a webcam angle shot. Did they rescue that from his audition tape? The director seriously needs to use the camera to depict Patrick as an august, world-wearing but unfliching dictator.
Scene 3 was okay in general, but a few bits marred it. Pamela wants some revenge over her cheating fionce, and the (half) kiss with Justin felt terribly untense. Like it was supposed to be shocking, but everybody was expecting it anyway. Justin’s expression and non-reaction is priceless though.
Scene 4 is only a few seconds long, but deserves its own paragraph to comment. Pamela wakes up in bed. It’s instantly obvious that it’s not her bed, and it could have been shot or acted better to seem that it is her bed to increase the shock value of what would happen next, which is Justin walks in half naked in a towel, presumably just out of the shoower. I can accept that it’s probably a compromise to appeal to the “fan girls”, even though any person with any shred of EQ says that you fully dress yourself in the washroom if there’s a person in the other room. The following female shriek is cliche, and ends the episode on a downer. Omigod, did they sleep together? He wasn’t responsive to her in the first place but she’s like dressed down in bed and he’s naked and maybe he gave into temptation and she was drunk anyway but whatever, I don’t care. The tension wasn’t build well enough for me to get more involved. They’ll surely fall in love within several episodes, or otherwise the Pereirra family wouldn’t have been touted as ‘intertwined’ with the Kong family.
In conclusion: overall, there seems to be good set-up for plot-driven cliffhangers. However, this episode like getting an injection at the clinic. You get all tense when the doctor pulls out a needle but on the other hand you were expecting it anyway. Something happens, you forget how you felt in the first place, pay the man and go elsewhere for a lollipop.
Oh, and Alex’s sexual tension with the women? Nada.
It’s reading week and I’ve barely started reading. Monday was “pass up the final paper” day, Tuesday was one of those horribly bad days, Wednesday was a lost day, Thursday was the beginning to catch up day, and finally today, after 20 kilometers on my bike at 6am in the morning I got down to work.
Which isn’t great because every page I read a paper for social policy, I reflect on everything else. For example, I wanted to write a large commentary about a link Rajan put up about liberal-utilitarianism and how I disagreed with some of the premises there but I don’t want to spend time on it at the moment. Like how the dude went like it’s okay to reduce one segment of society’s utility if it meant huge gains for others, which I don’t think is justifiable by other moral standards. Yeah, I’m paraphrasing here and I don’t want to argue… yet.
Also Hafiz commented on why pay taxes if the government is going to misspend it, and the short answer is that the government is going to put you in jail for tax evasion. The longer answer would be, under a more authoritarian government, people would have even less say where your tax money is going. Under a representative democracy, it should be taken that leaders will have a life of their own and people only have an indirect power over the content of government. He argues that the government needs to convince people that they have a stake in government. To add to his point, I would argue that people necessarily have a stake in being governed, even by a mediocre government (although not a completely dysfunctional one where there is effectively no state at all). A mediocre government always trumps the absence of government, and because demand for security is inelastic, government can always charge high taxes, although a weak government would make tax evasion possible because , which in turn cause a free-rider problem in a collective action dilemma (ooo big words). It’s essentially Hobbes’ Leviathan. They are thugs, they always will be thugs, it’s just a matter of how nice they are. I should throw in some Gramscian hegemony after this but I’m not in the mood for it.
Kent Ridge Common writing is down, there’s the exams and there’s been a brief spike of publishing. I have some material written down for the next article on Red Thread, but after reconsidering it I may have to scrap half of the current draft (which is about 300 words of a written 600 of an intended 1200) because it’s just not punchy enough. Also, I’ve sent out invitations to write a labour day special for KRC. Yaaaay.
In other thought, it struck me that the three things that are considered impolite conversation subjects (politics, religion and sex) are also the three things I consider the most important to talk about.
I’ve been listening to a podcast between William Lane Craig and Shelley Kagan on the necessity of God to have objective moral values. I don’t buy into Craig’s arguments, especially moral accountability. What interests me is that Shelley Kagan uses the veil of ignorance and the natural position to objectively base moral values, which essential says that Rawls was right in positing the natural position but perhaps was too quick to conclude the Maximin principle.
Oh, the author cited by Rajan also discussed the Maximin principle. Uh, yeah, not going to talk about that. Ok, mental diarrhea over!
Just a thought, speculating on Thailand. I don’t know enough of PM Abhisit’s personality, but what the new emergency in Thailand is indicative to me.
A foreign-educated technocrat like Ahbisit, can be relied to be good at managing the economy, bringing in investments, helping Thailand succeed internationally.
However, he’s poor at managing state-society relations. He’s poor at being a politician. He can’t rein in the different political factions in Thailand.
I believe that if you become a leader and you know that the opposition still has cards in their sleeves, you better cut a deal with them and make sure they don’t put you in a tight spot. Sometimes, you just have to compromise on smaller issues to achieve bigger priorities.
Now see what they’ve done. They’ve rejected constitutional means to changing government, caused a lot of trouble and they’ve no reason to stay within the system. You’ll be breeding hate and animosity by declaring an emergency.
Just incorporate them already to keep them on a short leash. If you want to be a great leader of your people, try thinking about getting the other side on your team.
There’s only one thing I would really want to watch right now, and it’s Battlestar Galactica. Maybe some House M.D., but I would love to get my hands on The Wire.
And when I saw the ad for the next upcoming series for Mediacorp, I slapped my forehead to make sure my brains didn’t fall out and couldn’t help but write: Can Local Television Get Any Worse? (Kent Ridge Common).
I really do want to see something good produced by Mediacorp though. I really really do. And with the publication of this article, I will never get my job there.
The most difficult thing about writing this piece was trying to reconcile the moral guardianship with my liberalism. I’m pretty liberal, I think people should be able to do what they want, so I can’t tell them what to do unless it affects my liberty in any way. So I upped the angle on programming and corporations. Would have pushed for 1200 words with more analysis of different programmes, but I have work to do. I have to thank Fong Yee for her helpful comments.
Since I’m talking about television anyway, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is crap too. It’s Saturday morning fare, I couldn’t care less about the characters in it especially, Jar Jar Binks. He’s the antithesis to the idea of Jedi. Instead of the expanded human agency granted by the Force, he achieves the same thing by sheer luck. Besides that, I seem to care more for everyone else other than Obi-Wan and Anakin. Maybe I just have more expectations that they would be deeper characters because of the movies. It is much prettier than Roughnecks: Starship Trooper Chronicles though.
One last thing: why can people accept Star Wars but not Battlestar Galactica?
Update:The article was republished in full at The Online Citizen, where it garnered over 2000+ views. Currently, at the Kent Ridge Common, it’s the most read article with 3000+ views. What can I say, it’s an easy target.
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