Donald Low:
"It just occurred to me that the teenager who exemplifies all the qualities we want to teach our children is... Amos Yee. He's resilient, creative, capable of self-directed learning, comfortable with digital technologies, and of course he's gone from being a victim of state persecution to seeking an independent life in a foreign country. How many of us can say that our children have these qualities? If you abstract from Amos' (political) values and preferences—which are indeed offensive to many—you cannot deny that the kid's got all the traits that we want in our youth.
That we take offence at everything Amos says and does is more a reflection of the kind of society and people we are. Our instinctive revulsion at him comes from the same place as the instinctive offence many Singaporeans took to the Jingapore mural at an MRT station. It reflects a certain narrow-mindedness and a lack of imagination. Not just artistic imagination, but also political imagination.
Finally, our reactions to Amos reflect the common bias of binary thinking. We tend to think of the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. But of course, the world is usually far more complex than such simple categorisations, and our tendency to think only in binary terms handicaps us."
Similarly, The New Yorker manages to spin trolling/talking cock as a good thing:
It’s part of Yee’s precocity to realize that a population molded into sheeplike complaisance is ideologically vulnerable. If his opinions sometimes tend toward the extremes (in a more recent video, he urges young people to drop out of school, the better not to, you know, go to learn the words of fools), his goal seems to be to unsettle the existing Singaporean power structure enough that young people have no choice but to broaden their expectations. His flamboyant thought and language is part of the best tradition of dissension, from Voltaire to the Velvet Revolution
Of course, this doesn't mean his persecution in Singapore was justified, but it does show that his sanctification (or as Bertrand Russell called it, The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed) was unjustified (though many, including me, already saw it as silly back then), due to incidents such as:
Amos Yee says ex-bailor molested him, then admits it was all a lie to trick the media
Someone: "Even then it was clear that he had issues.
For example he harassed a cosplayer and posted publicly about masturbating to her pictures.
But because he was trolling the government, people who hate the PAP decided to ignore all the red flags, give him a free pass, and turn him into a hero."
