"The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them." - Kin Hubbard

***

HWMNBN:

i was having a long conversation with a guy at the smoking corner about army and chao keng.
he was describing his elaborately budgeted plan ($300 max!) on how to dodge IPPT for as long as possible - combination of

one-off $50 fines and paying specialists for a 1-year "knee pain" MC.

i pointed out that some specialists have been blacklisted for supporting too many pes F people with "back pain" tow hich he retorted "of course a lot of back pain lah. these are back spceialists right??"

my conclusion: it seems like the only enemy the Singapore army is at war with are its own population of conscription dodgers:)


From “Bullshit and the Art of Crap -Detection” (Neil Postman):

"There is nothing personal about Eichmannism. It is the language of regulations, and includes such logical sentences as, “If we do it for one, we have to do it for all.” Can you imagine some wretched Jew pleading to have his children spared from the gas chamber? What could be more fair, more neutral, than for some administrator to reply, “If we do it for one, we have to do it for all.”"

Funny. This matches Slavery to a T!

Later in the essay:

"By far, the most amusing of all our superstitions is the belief, expressed in a variety of ways, that the study of literature and other humanistic subjects will result in one’s becoming a more decent, liberal, tolerant, and civilized human being. Whenever a professor of literature alludes to this bullshit in my presence, I invariably think of the Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich and the ideological head of the Nazi Party, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who at the age of 24 received his Ph.D. in Romantic Drama at the University of Heidelberg. Sometimes, I even think of the professor of literature himself, and wonder if he would dare offer his own life as an illustration of the benefits that will accrue from humanistic studies. In any case, I have not noticed that English teachers are any more humane than, say, garage mechanics or certified public accountants...

It is almost always better to deal with a corrupt man than with an idealist. A corrupt man knows all about bullshit, especially his own; which is another way of saying, he has a sense of humor. An idealist usually cannot acknowledge his own bullshit, because it is in the nature of his “ism” that he must pretend it does not exist. In fact, I should say that anyone who is devoted to an “ism”--Fascism, Communism, Capital-ism--probably has a seriously defective crap-detector. This is especially true of those devoted to “patriotism.” Santha Rama Rau has called patriotism a squalid emotion. I agree. Mainly because I find it hard to escape the conclusion that those most enmeshed in it hear no bullshit whatever in its rhetoric, and as a consequence are extremely dangerous to other people. If you doubt this, I want to remind you that murder for murder, General Westmoreland makes Vito Genovese book like a Flower Child. Another way of saying this is that all ideologies are saturated with bullshit, and a wise man will observe Herbert Read’s advice: Never trust any group larger than a squad. "