BLOGGER



Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Monday, March 17, 2008
ON PERSPECTIVE AND THE ELECTION

On the morning after the elections, i woke up to the thought that abdullah might have to step down as prime minister. but a few conversations and a lot of nonsensical press later and i'm retrieving that thought. put differently, if mukhriz mahathir is on one end of the spectrum, i'm not there with him.

i want my leaders to take responsibility for their failures as much as the next guy. but what world do we live in where winning an election by 62% is considered a failure? are we so accustomed to landslides that our perspectives have been seared? are we going to judge abdullah by the autocratic standards of the past or get used to the actual standards of real democracies? on the morning after the election, i was reminded that most governments would be happy with 50.1%. it's a very sobering thing to hear.

take australia for example. kevin rudd won the last election with an 8-seat majority in a parliament that sits 150. that's like a 12-seat majority in malaysia's parliament. they're calling that a big win. bn have 58 seats more than the opposition. they're calling for the prime minister's head. i'm not an abdullah supporter but if he needs to resign, it's for all the promises he never tried to keep. not for election results. in as much as one is related to the other, when it comes down to apportionment of blame, there's still a big difference between the two. he failed the people but he still didn't lose the election.

and while i'm on this quasi political rant of sorts, can i just say that i'm tired of reading bn leaders say things like "we need to sit down and see what went wrong". for crying out loud. you are what went wrong! the only post-mortem you need to conduct is the one on why you've been a jerk for at least the last four years.

but i digress. yes, i was talking about perspective. bn leaders need to get some perspective and stop trying to find scapegoats in their post-mortems. and abdullah's detractors need to get some perspective and stop knee-jerking just because they didn't get another landslide. and if we want to go down the road of great democracies, then maybe mukhriz mahathir should shut up and wake up to a post-8 march malaysia. because our country is different now. you got your simple majority. learn to be happy with it.

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Genusfrog [ 11:37 am ]

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