Populist Politics in Singapore and The Trickle Down Effect on Culture

From The Straits Times, and thanks to Mr Wang,

July 27, 2006

PAP wants ‘hip, happening’ image to click with the young

Party’s conservative style needs to be updated to get in sync with younger generation, says PM Lee

By Li Xueying

FROM ‘conservative’ and ’staid’, to ‘hip and happening’: The People’s Action Party (PAP) wants to update its style to connect better with younger Singaporeans.

Party secretary-general Lee Hsien Loong wants the PAP to ‘get more in sync with the younger generations’ culture and be on their wavelength’.

In an editorial in the latest issue of the PAP party organ Petir, he spelt out the challenge for the 52-year-old party: ‘The party’s style is conservative, even retro. But the values, perspectives and lifestyles of our young have moved on from those of our older generations, and will continue to change rapidly.’

……

So while the young had shown strong support for the PAP, more needs to be done to keep pace with them, he added.

He cited as an example the ‘criticism’ from his children, in their teens and 20s, after they all attended a PAP election rally.

On the way home, they told their 54-year-old father what they thought of the experience: ‘Too staid, too logical, not ‘lively’ enough, not at all attractively presented to them’.

Said Mr Lee: ‘I have heard the same criticism from other young people. It is not just our rallies, but the party’s overall approach to putting our message out and involving our supporters in our activities.’

One ‘great success’ when the party connected with younger members was at the Young PAP’s 20th anniversary rally in April, complete with balloon clappers and cheerleaders.

‘But we need to do more,’ he said. ‘We have to build up more groups of active supporters who will contribute ideas and fight for our cause.’

Mr Lee has asked a team of new MPs, born after 1965 and called the P65 Team, to ‘recommend ways to better connect with the young and to make fresh proposals for a more hip and happening PAP’ ….

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There’s something wrong here, not too long ago, I hear PAP doesn’t play populist politics and now they want to connect with the young by being hip, cool, having balloon clappers and cheerleaders?????

Maybe the next thing they will do is to book Zouk and MOS for their PAP Youth parties and have lotsa pple drunk. Ridiculous.

“Hip” and “Happening” are not tags that you slap on easily, especially on a self-respecting political party. Not over-reacting here because of the verbage used by the journalist but if the P65 Team is strategizing in order to build a new Young PAP based on the mantra of “hip and happening”, you are going to attract the wrong people. I think local youths just want you to listen more to the ground and not appear so high-handed when dishing out policies. Respect and build a more civic society, grant more funds and freedom to what we want to do with a light hand on guidelines, be more flexible. Promote more dialogue at the schools and with young professionals to encourage more pple to interact with you and debate on issues. Telling people you want to be hip gives many the wrong imagery.

Dun talk down as if you are the father and we are forever the child. In the same context, we don’t expect our metaphorical “dad” in Singapore’s paternalistic society to suddenly come out and hang out with us by trying to be hip and happening. Its puts people off.

But I see a light.

Becoming Spielberg@Home

Here’s some quick tips on how to make crappy home-made videos look erhmmm… not too crappy, great for anyone tinkering with their digicam or mobile phone vidcam like me…

From Wired,

Clerks II director Kevin Smith has this handy advice for improving your next low-budget flick.Shoot from more than one angle. Get as many shots as you can from as many directions as possible. This is called coverage, and it makes your film more visually interesting.

Use music as a band-aid. You can’t cut your unintelligible mother-in-law out of a birthday party scene by saying, “The running time is a bit long.” Instead, dub music over her. Set anyone to the right song and they come off looking pimp.

Remember that, as with most things, content is king. No one wants to watch a two-hour video of your vacation. But you can dazzle viewers with five Michael Bay, cut-heavy, chopped-up minutes.

If you’re starring in home porn, keep your ass off camera, particularly if it looks like mine.

Stay well lit. Indoor shoots have big problems with backlighting and shadows, so film outside as much as possible.

You’re not making a real documentary, so don’t be afraid to tell people what to do. If someone stutters or slurs, ask them to say it again. This is especially helpful with kids.

Good sound is important; your built-in mike just won’t cut it. Get an external microphone – a nice shotgun model that you can mount on the camcorder. That way, you won’t have to rely so much on music.

I like the part about using music to dub over any boring portion of the video such as mother-in-laws, pesky kids or pesky senators such as Ted Stevens. Proof in point, check out this Youtube audio clip on Ted Stevens.

CrossRoads of Life — Do People Die There?

I think I have less than 100 days of my undergrad life remaining. How sad.

They say college is the best part of your life. The last stage of a carefree life living out your dreams and fantasies with no worries of responsibility towards family and yourself. And then reality hits, some say life grounded to a halt socially after you start working, or should i say slaving. The majority of this world slaves, trapped in the never-ending cycle of working for life.

With 50 years of a 75-year average lifespan of male humans in the developed world left, its certainly a depressing thought to think u study so hard just to endure years of working in a dead-end job in order to feed your family and live up to society’s pressures on you. Do people really have to metaphorically “die” once they graduate and start working?

Death as in: get stuck in an endless cycle of working for others (ie feed family) and live up to society’s expectations of you

I threw this question to quite a number of my friends, just for the heck of it.

Here’s the most in-depth response I got:

“well not necessarily although it happens far too often, you could walk away from the herd, actually this kind of death begins much earlier for some, some start feeding into society’s expectations from a very early age, like……..i must do well in sch………must have many co-curricular acitivities etc… you should try reading the work of nietzsche, or maybe even the book of ecclesiastes in the bible often the price of walking away from the herd is too high for some, so they stay in the herd for others, they don’t even realize they’re in the herd”

So what’s my point?

1. Think deeper.

Or rather, more philosophically about your life. Are you in the herd? Are you happy being so? What’s the benefit of leaving that herd and the effort required?

2. Ask “Why?”

The “what”s in our life are laid out clearly. Work for wages. Follow the rules. Pay taxes, make more babies etc… All these is how you should live your life. But we always forget that we are not robots, and if we dun ask “why?” enough, we are no different from robots.
3. Go explore. Really.

What lies out there once I leave the herd? “Yah, Bjorn, you think u are a smartass asking me to leave my job and career. What the hell am i supposed to do?” THis is the response I am most likely to get once I open up my question to more people. Infact, I think those who did not reply my question think so too. My answer is: go figure out yourself. Its your own life. Your own to explore. Go travel, and I dun mean keep taking pictures, go understand how pple live in other countries outside of picture-perfect touristy cities.

4. Inertia is the “best” anasthesia.

We all hear the common refrain. “But I can’t leave everything behind. My career, my friends, my family.” Dun wait too long. The world moves much faster than those endless nights of you in the office cube staring at Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Word. All the trappings of our modern society. If you continue waiting, fear of trying will kill you and numb you into inaction, forever rendering your life an endless cycle and a repetitive loop. Which brings me to the next point…
5. Do it when young.

Try all the crazy stuff you ever wanted to do. Before you no longer can do it. If you wanted to backpack in Europe, go do it. Bungee jump? Why wait till 65 when your kids are grown up?

6. Follow your passion.

Its YOUR life. Even in Asian society where some say your parents own your life. I say, parents will understand eventually that the best for you is a future you came up with yourself and not one they mapped out for you. If those apron strings are never cut loose, you wun realize your potential and be happy in what you are doing. Think about it yourself, fillal piety, a trait of Asian society, has been evolving for ages since the days we broke free of arranged marriages whom some thought was a great hallmark of fillal piety. Evolve your thinking, dun follow blindly.

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Note I did not ask people to stop working or starting families or simply laze in your life. I just suggested means for people to love their lives more. Many family problems and even societal problems stem from the workplace. And with globalization and a 24/7 workday with advanced communications technology, we will soon rue the day we missed out on what it mean to be young, to live your dream, to be passionate about what you do everyday, to miss out on your kid’s birth due to an important meeting with offshore clients. Yes, pragmatism is good. But at what cost when it meant slogging with no end goal in mind? If you have been exposed to sufficient alternative ways of thinking and theorizing about your future, you attain inner peace with your job and your destiny in life. When that is achieved, no matter how hard you work, you will be contented with your lot.

Have you asked yourself “Why?” yet?

 

Related article: What Drives You?

I Love Viral Videos

Click on this pic to instantly watch some hit viral videos. I strongly recommend the mock news clip of some Alaskan town who resorted to desperate uses of Axe deodorant to boost their mojo, Video 3 of 8.

“Advertisers are creating and distributing videos on sites like YouTube and Google Video, hoping they’ll be distributed by thousands of Web users, reports Business Week. For that powerful chain of events to take place, marketers have to create something compelling enough for a legion of anonymous users to want to share it with friends. “If you entertain your audience, they will get it, and the viral mechanism will make the audience come to watch you,” says Ed Robinson, an ad executive and Web site owner who attracted more than 60,000 people in one week to his Web site with a 12-second spot. Within three months, he had 500,000 visitors. Video could be advertising’s holy grail. It reaches millions of consumers without spending millions of dollars. The big lure, according to research estimates–it’s a $100 million to $150 million industry. Just think of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s “Subservient Chicken” video for Burger King; it’s still one of the most popular viral video ads in history, with 400 million hits. And it didn’t cost millions to make. CPB says after that success, it found competition on the Web to be fresh, different, and fierce. After all, advertisers are competing with content created by millions of amateurs, too. Plus, Web users are an ad-saturated audience, so anything that lacks irony or a little sophistication and smacks of cheap marketing ploys won’t get very far. To be successful, viral video needs high entertainment value. That’s right, advertisers–you’re creating content, too.”

Read the full Businessweek article here.

Sport is War. Business is War. Hence, Sportsmen=Businessmen.

Motivation for me to play more sports for the rest of my life will come from here:

Did you know that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was a member of the Wellesley College swimming and diving team? Or that Vera Wang, CEO of the fashion design company that bears her name, was an Olympic-caliber figure skater? Were you aware that Jan Leschley, former CEO of pharmaceutical giant Smithkline Beecham, was once the 10th-ranked men’s tennis player in the world? How about the fact that eBay’s chief exec, Meg Whitman, played collegiate lacrosse and squash at Princeton? Or that U.N. Secretary General Kofi-Annan ran track and played soccer at Macalester College?

I have a strong belief that the skills and qualities people learn from playing sports are many of the same that develop leaders capable of achieving greatness in professional life: Dedication and hard work, resilience in the face of adversity, decision-making under pressure, confidence, optimism, balancing stress and recovery, honest and direct communication, establishing a clear vision and setting goals, commitment to excellence, a focus on team success, and leadership that inspires others.

From Yahoo Finance.

After Gore, Another “Internet Guru” Ted Stevens Muses about the Internet

Washington DC always thinks they know best. Even the tech sector. After Gore proudly proclaimed his role in “inventing” the Internet in 1999 on CNN, we have a new Internet guru in the form of Senator Ted Stevens who continues to expand on Gore’s good work and derive new theories to think about the web. Now, the Capitol Hill debate and decisions over Net Neutrality is really getting out of hand.

By the way, Ted is the head of the Senate Commerce Committee who’s supposed to regulate the e-commerce, and by association, the Internet. His knowledge of the Internet, no matter metaphorical or not, is simply astonishing, to say the least.

Ok, lets be fair here. The above comments were taken out of context by Jon Stewart. You can check out his hilarious takes via the 2 Youtube videos below:

But lets get serious and understand the context of Ted’s revelatory comments.

(Source: Wired Magazine) Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Seattle Post Intelligencer has a more balanced article trying to balance and explain Ted’s analogy of Internet tubes here.

Summary of it here:

Popping up on Web sites is the “DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix,” in which audio excerpts from Stevens’ speech are set to an electronic dance beat. More recently, a file appeared on the Internet that added video to the mix.The creator of the song, Paul Holcomb, who helps run an advertising agency based in Atlanta, said the song has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

“I think, unfortunately at Sen. Stevens’ personal expense, people see the same irony that we saw when we created the file,” Holcomb said. “I thought it was ironic that a person such as him, someone who has such an influential vote, wasn’t able to articulate the nuances at a basic level of how the Internet works.”

A spokesman for Stevens declined to be interviewed. Commerce Committee staff director Lisa Sutherland said in a statement that Stevens has a deep understanding of the technical, legal and economic aspects of new technology.

“Yes, a few bloggers are going after him because he used the word `tubes’ instead of “`pipes’ – but when you look at the body of his work and how he has crafted a bill that will not only serve Alaska, but the nation, I think the final product speaks for itself,” Sutherland said.

For more Youtube mashups and remixes of Ted Steven’s famous speech above, check out this really catchy video mashup of tubes, 1960’s computer mainframes, techno music overlaid on Ted’s speech. Or how about Ted Stevens + Nas + OutKast + Trippy Shite? You can hear his entire speech where he ranted on and on rabidly as if he had a war agenda on his ISP.

But seriously, Ted Steven’s 82. He’s also the guy who tried to spend $223 million for the “bridge to nowhere” that would link Ketchikan, Alaska, and its airport on Gravina Island, population 50.

Whats the wisdom of getting an 82-year-old more familiar with the Industrial Revolution try to grasp the intricacies and sophistication of the Digital Revolution? Yea, his status might indicate intelligence, experience or plain manipulation through his special interest backers, but maybe he should stick to his turf slipping in little amendments for oil drilling in the Alaskan Reserve in defense bills, STFU, and stop his meddling in MY Generation.

iPod Nation Essentials

Update: the iPoor. A creation by Brian who decided to do something about the iPod Divide in our society. Now everyone can own one.

Cool Leather iThong or Overpriced Leather (Italian) Case from Apple? Is your love for the Apple brand worth a $79 premium?

You can’t deny the iPod White fits the bathroom furnishings flawlessly. Not especially if they even include these features of the iCarta:

• 4 Integrated high performance moisture-free speakers deliver exceptional clarity and high quality sound
• Charges your iPod while playing music
• Audio selector allows you to play iPod shuffle or other Audio device
• Integrated Bath tissue holder that can be easily folded as a stereo dock
• Requires AC Power (AC Adapter included)
• Easy to remove from Wall Mount

Those moisture-free speakers almost makes the iCarta a no-brainer purchase, if you want music to go along with your reading and other hygiene activities in that Private Booth of your home.

You can now truly Enhance that Bathroom Experience. Truly an iPod Lifestyle.