Of all things to write on, crappy television

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.

Review of “You’ve Got A Friend In Me”

I wrote a review for Eusoff Hall’s 2009 Dance Production, “You’ve Got A Friend In Me”. Check it out here: Kent Ridge Common: Lovers, Doctors and Imaginary Friends.

In addition, I made a spoof review. It’s almost an internal joke.

Wisdom from George Orwell

When I come back to England, from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners are different from an European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while the feeling that the whole nation had identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not 46 million individuaals not different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to and fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the labour exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the midst of the autumn morning — all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

BUt talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognisable about English civilization. It is a culture as individual that of Spain. it is somehow bound up with solids breakfasts and gloomy sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillarboxes. It has a flavour of it’s own. Moreover, it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantlepiece? Nothing, except you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laughed it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillarboxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.

– George Orwell, “Why I Write” 1946.

Good writing sums up so much in so few words, effortlessly read.
When I post quotes, I post up entire paragraphs. *Slaps forehead*

Labour Politics, Libertarianism and Business Cycles

There are two questions that I would like to ask Prof. Buchanan that are tangentially related to labour politics. The first question would be, how would he explain the second and third wave of democratization? Ths is in part, due to his allusion to democratic transitions and consolidation literature.

Secondly, the one that I’m more particularly interested in is, what does he think about libertarians? Two friends of mine, one here and here, are self-proclaimed libertarians (both also have economic backgrounds) and sometimes when they write from a libertarian perspective, I tend to go, “woah there a sec”. Now, I’m not a very good libertarian so I hope they can enlighten me a bit. But, everything I have encountered in the Political Science department seems to fly against libertarian notions of “small government” and completely free markets.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a socialist. I believe that the free market is definitely a more efficient mechanism for distribution in specific contexts. But the literature seems to imply that the state has a big and necessary role to play — larger than any notion of a limited state.

First is the slippery slope of the limited state: how limited is it? The nightwatchman state as a concept of limited government is clearly untenable in an age of open globalization. Furthermore, When the state enters into corporatist tripartite or concertation agreements, doee that count as against libertarianism (the state overstepping the boundaries of limited since the state actively intervenes in society) or for libertarianism (on the other hand, the state does not dominate labour or capital by coercive force)?

Secondly, the excesses of capitalism seem to be manifold (like Karl Polanyi and Esping-Anderson) and the market has few mechanisms to help ameliorate or curb the inequalities that free-market capitalism tends to exacerbate. For example this Christopher Leo piece, though I’m not sure how to interpret it. He writes about poor city planning, on how slums are made by government withdrawal and by catering only for expensive housing only. One reading is that too much market forces simply can’t cater to everyone, especially the poor with little purchasing power. But like Dr. Buchanan said, whatever your political persuasion is, capitalism generates conflict because of the inequalities of income and inequalities of the relations to to the means of production (which in turn produce different interests and different capabilities to protect those interests).

Thirdly, because of the uncertainties from the cyclical nature of capitalism, I think there is a sort of game-theoretic Nash disequilibrium that prevents libertarianism from becoming a major political force. That is to say, given the choices of other actors in society, most societal actors would rather choose the expansion of government than the shrinking of government. You know how Prof. Buchanan said a few weeks ago that governments have to step in to regulate the ratio of consumption over investment in order to prevent an economic meltdown? Or how workers turn to government to shield them from the cyclical nature of capitalism? That’s what I’m talking about.

A further note about the cyclical nature of markets. I’m beginning to think that the worse excess of free capital markets is overspeculation. I see similarities in the current economic crisis with the last Asian Financial Crisis. While the mechanisms that brought economies down are different, but the root stays the same. The positive feedback is this: investors simply put money in a bubble that continues to rise because people continue to put money into it. Then some exogenous factor kicks in, and suddenly some people wise up and quickly pull out before the bubble bursts (these people are the winners in this game). Then because they pull out, they burst the bubble and everyone else who still stays in the game are the losers — including the government.

In the Asian Financial Crisis, it was “hot money” in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia economies that western banks put into the respective economies expecting their economies to soar. For the American Subprime Crisis, it was property prices that were expected to continue to rise. Not to mention that the whole world is constantly held hostage by oil price booms as well.

Granted that speculation is a problem, what can we do about it? Is there a market solution that counteracts (international) overspeculation? Or is it primarily the duty of the government?

The next few weeks are going to be crunch periods for me with possible multiple deadlines a week. If I can, I’ll update the Lympho blog and pre-write a student society piece and schedule it for tomorrow.