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It seems that some people are eager for my responses to the Kent Ridge Ministerial Forum, especially since I happened to be there. Some people were also expecting me to ask questions, but I didn't have any good question in mind, so I spent the time transcribing a summary of the goings-on (available on request), and anyway Jamie Han did the Premier Institution of Social Engineering proud by asking the sort of thing people were expecting me to ask.
But anyway, my 1 cent's worth (sick lah, and got essay to do some more) is that MM Lee (and the PAP's) response whenever someone advocates change and liberalisation is to ask them to set up a political party, roll our their own platform and take over the government, so that they can implement their agenda, because 'this is how a Democracy works'. This is a false dichotomy: democracies are not supposed to have free reign to impose whatever policies they will on a population just because they have a simple majority of the (contested) vote, they are supposed to ensure that individuals are protected and given certain liberties, while protecting minorities. Besides which, how does one try to stop gerrymandering by garnering sufficient parliamentary seats when the gerrymandering itself is what is preventing one from getting said seats?
Furthermore, people choose which parties to vote for based not on single issues or even groups of issues, but the party platform as a whole. Just because people generally accept the political agenda of the PAP, especially with regard to economic policy, does not mean that they accept the entire basket of policy proposals. Also, proclaiming that, being returned to power, the Party now has carte blanche authority to implement whatever policies they want, is a specious argument. Elections are not the sole time during which politicians are held to account by the electorate: they have to be ever aware of the Singapore Heartbeat (sorry).
At the same time, they talk menacingly of how Singapore will crash and burn, our economic miracle will suddenly end and the end of the world will come if the PAP loses power. Meanwhile there is a $13,000 deposit which independent candidates will most likely lose, and people fear (fairly or otherwise) that they will be made bankrupt if they too hard.
The other interesting point was MM Lee's seeming tacit acceptance and endorsement of people setting up their own websites to spread their political views.
Vive la résistance!
Amusing comment:
Well, I think the poor Jamie Han has set a pretty bad example you see. You know, we cannot go against the official view, no matter how distorted it is. Our parents taught us that you see, that's why MM Lee ask about his father.
(My Kinda Life)
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My newly decorated bag. Above three badges can be seen, and below is a dangly thing given to me by my favourite Engineer.
And now, an examination of the badges in greater detail, starting from the one on the top left and going in a clockwise direction.
This badge features a painting of Descartes with the words: "I Think, Therefore I Am Part Of The
Evil Atheist Conspiracy"
Besides being an expression of my lack (and indeed, active disparagement) of religious faith, it is also a subtle dig at crazy fundies (fundamentalists).
This badge shows Kimberly, the Pink Power Ranger, morphing with her power coin, from MMPR Season 1 (1993).
I chose this particular picture because the morphing shot from Season 2 is ugly (I don't like the lighting, or her top), and the one from Season 3 has irritating light beams shining from her face, which makes getting a good screencap (screen capture) difficult. But that's not what you want to know.
My instant messaging alias since 1998 has been 'kimberly' (though it debuted in 1997 in an IRC session in a RI computer lab session, to cries of "who the hell is 'kimberly'?!"). 7 years with the same nick: it's not often you see such faithfulness.
This badge is a symbol of my Power Rangers interest(/obsession/fetish), and anyway, even after 12 seasons, Kimberly is still my favourite ranger, not to mention one of my 5 (at last count) idols.
The face of Wo-hen Nankan, the Asian Prince (aka Tuan Anh). (Incidentally, another idol of mine)
What can I say? He's handsome, cute, manly, sexy, rich, has eyes that just pierce right into your soul, has loads of Possible Princesses and Possibly Gay Men just throwing themselves at him, and - best of all, his hair is soft, thick, and easy to style. Oh, and he can vibrate his hands. He's everything I aspire to be!
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Page Animation Extension
"Page Animation is a XUL extension that attempts to damp down some of the movement that web page designers and advertisers seem universally to have decided is fair to plaster on websites. I don't want to be remembered as an enemy of advertising or of animation. It's only that these very powerful attention-grabbing techniques are very overused of late; the favorite tool of every amateur marketing employee who would set your house on fire if he could make the flames spell out a message to your neighbors.
My browsing experience suggests that every fourth website contains a flashing, jumping swath of ugly rectangles alternating in primary red and blue, vibrating in a prominent location on the page to the pace of a hummingbird's heart. Personally I've developed an aversion that prevents me from looking at moving objects on my screen. I resent this training. It's unnatural and I figure it will get me killed some day while crossing the street. Animated in-show advertisements on television have led me to rediscover the joy of books. I think TV will never recover and I wake every morning to remember what a lovely invention paper was. But your computer is not your television.
There are many good Mozilla solutions available to control these retina-scratching abhorrations."
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Irritated by the "Lord, Liar or Lunatic" false trichotomy? Now someone has come up with an alternative trichotomy: Killer, Bumbler or Fake!
"God: killer, bumbler or fake?
There are only three main ways to reconcile traditional concepts of God with the horrific carnage of the Asian mega-tsunami. Each way is a hypothesis that depends on whether God cause the tsunami. And each leaves God with a lot to answer for.
· Suppose that God caused the tsunami. Then the first hypothesis is that God is a murderous fiend.
This murderer hypothesis follows if God not only caused the tsunami but intended to cause it. Causality is easy to show for an omnipotent or all-powerful being. Such a God can cause any event by simply willing it and then His will be done. Indeed tsunamis are just the kind of force majeure that we call an Act of God.
The sharper question is whether God intended to cause the tsunami and its disastrous aftermath and thus whether He deliberately killed over 150,000 innocent children and adults. The law defines intent as either desiring an outcome or being substantially certain that the outcome will occur. Assume that God did not desire to cause such death and destruction. That still won’t get Him off the hook.
The clincher here is God’s alleged omniscience or complete knowledge. Set aside the argument from philosophers that omniscience is logically impossible because it requires knowing all truths and because there is no set of all mathematical truths (a consequence of Cantor’s Theorem: a set always has less size or “cardinality” than the set of all its subsets). So go ahead and grant that God has omniscience and perfect foresight. Then God does not play dice because for Him there is no probability or uncertainty. God knows with certainty the causal consequences of everyone’s actions and of His own actions.
So God intends His actions — and so God is a mass murderer.
The verdict is worse than this because God shows no remorse and because He deliberately continues to compound the problem. It does not matter that He may be all-loving. God’s alleged omnipotence lets Him resurrect the dead tsunami victims and fix the other damage that He has caused. But He refused to do so. Instead God lets the victims’ relatives grieve and lets disease spread and lets children suffer abuse.
· The second hypothesis is that God caused the tsunami but He did not intend to.
It just sort of happened after He unleashed the Big Bang 15 billion years ago and imposed the laws of physics on all matter and energy. The Universe Maker is still responsible for His dangerous product.
This careless or negligent God does not really count as God because he lacks omniscience — since omniscience implies intent and thus no intent means no omniscience. Yet this might be the God that many inadvertently pray to. It is pointless to pray to an omniscient God because he already knows the content of the prayer. Prayer itself is nothing more than asking for a divine handout and thus borders on blasphemy. The request is not a waste of time and effort for all concerned only if it tells God something that He did not already did not know. But then He lacks omniscience and that in turn suggests that He is not all powerful or omnipotent. How can you have total power over everything for all eternity and yet not know everything?
Such lack of knowledge would itself be a lack of power and hence there could be no omnipotence either. So this creature would not be God — but He would still be liable for multiple counts of wrongful death if not criminal negligence.
· This leaves the third category where God did not cause the tsunami.
Here there are many variations on the simplest hypothesis of all: There is no God. So God did not cause the tsunami or anything else.
The no-God hypothesis is what statisticians call the null hypothesis. It is the default hypothesis that we try to reject or refute with evidence to the contrary as when physicians test to see if a new drug has a predicted effect. Failure to reject the no-God hypothesis does not mean that we accept it as true although it does point in that direction. It technically means that so far the evidence has not knocked down the claim.
So it goes with God.
Science has not found a single footprint or miracle that would refute the null hypothesis that there is no God and thus support the claim that there is a God. The microscopes and telescopes have found no trace of Him whatsoever. This negative evidence is strong but not completely conclusive because the universe is a big place and a God signal may still turn up.
Until then what science can explain with God it can explain without God. The tsunami arose from natural causes — and did everything and everyone else in the universe."
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One of my gmail accounts suddenly got 50 invites. wth?!
