The Mechanist

I've been thinking. It doesn't happen that often these days, but old habits die hard.

I'm doing a masters at a certain university in the west right now in something very esoteric. It wasn't my choice, and it was a mistake.

Many of the modules are poorly taught by foreigners who can barely speak English, let alone communicate complex concepts to the students.

One of the modules is taught by a Professor who speaks English fluently and clearly thinks in a very high-level way. So much so that he, too, cannot communicate the basic concepts to anyone who doesn't think at the same level.

One of our projects involved tens of thousands of computations to arrive at the desired outcomes. After all of two slides - about eight lines of text on the subject. It left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and a desire to ask him :

Nabei. You &*(&*er (yes, asterix and all.) If I give you one lecture on performing a Whipple's operation and then told you to go do it over the weekend as homework how would you feel? What if I made my lecture really really technical and told you to go home and read what Kocherisation is by yourself before I examined you in your operative technique?

How would I like to be taught? I'd like to be taught by people who know what they are doing.

I'd like to be taught by people who can relate to me, who I can relate to as well, who can communicate clearly with me, who take my desires into consideration, and most of all, know what they are doing.

In that light, let's take a look at the elections.

In all honesty, this elections will not see a fundamental shift in power. I was reading Temasek Review until they went down, because, gosh darn it they were funny. The place is dominated by immature, rabid anti-establishment morons with a single agenda : bring death to the "PAPies" (or whatever)... and half of them write like speechwriters for... the Chinese Communist Party or something. But in their vitroil they're actually quite... entertaining, and some of the pictures they put up are pretty amusing. They're baying for blood, and Change RIGHT NOW.

Mr Chen Show Mao knows better - he didn't return as the messiah to redeem the nation from the clutches of a one-party system. He said as much - he was coming back to initiate the process of change, to start in motion the machine that would someday restore a credible opposition.

And therein lies the truth of it : the face of politics has evolved so... far so that our opposition is now in-credible.

Some of the individuals look promising, but there is no dream-team. There is no opposition. Single individuals do not a party make.

This election is not about an overnight shift in political leadership.

It is about the individuals and their candidacies, or claims to candidacy.

Who do I want in parliament?

I want people who know what they are doing. I want people who take my desires into consideration, who can communicate clearly with me, who I can relate to, and who relate to me as well.

There are promising candidates in all the parties - the PAP included. I want to know just how promising these people really are. I'd like to judge them as objectively as possible, because... these are people who will be Governing, for God's sakes.

Take Dr Puthucheary for instance - a man does not get to become a senior consultant in Pediatrics - in KK hospital not less - without an iota of EQ. I'd like to hear more from him - not read second hand what he purportedly said, in response to something he was purportedly asked. Has anyone ever seen that particular interview everyone's so upset about - anywhere online? I'd like to know how he thinks, and what he thinks about healthcare, for instance.

Take Nicole Seah, who looks (comparatively to someone else...) so very, very promising in her razortv speech, having had ample opportunity to do her past-year-paper rehearsels to some very familiar questions. I'd like to hear what she has to say when she's really challenged, and break it all down to understand how she thinks. She sounds very persuasive and mature - but that's what she does for a living - she sells images. She's an advertising executive. What policies would she personally like changed? How would she personally approach them? (not just party lines, but real, off-the-cuff thoughts and opinions)

I enjoy watching interviews when the candidates are clearly thinking; it's a little bit like debating. You see it in their eyes, their eyebrows furrow a little, or their eyes go a little vacant. The wheels spin. Intelligent things happen, or don't. And then the words come out and you Know.

In contrast when everything's been carefully rehearsed, the answers come a little too quickly, without pause. Faces bear relief, or are stony masks while words come flooding out in breathless torrents, and perhaps the words don't quite make sense when lines or words are missed here and there and the recital goes a little wonky but the narrative just carries on, and on... because all thoughts are focused - not on the question - but on the answers.

you Know too, then.

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What is UP with Singtel and Facebook?!

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“The person in the photo is just my friend. He works for a community club. We took that photo during one of the grassroots leaders’ wedding.”

“He was never my boyfriend. I find the episode extremely funny,”

Just a thought.
This is actually the wrong response.
It just struck me why.

If I were in her shoes - or if any of you were in her shoes, would we be finding it amusing that our friend was getting bashed online for associating with us? The guy's been called fat, ugly, unworthy - and a host of other things.

How is his personal life suffering? Is there any backlash to his own relationships? If he's truly just an innocent bystander, he deserves our sympathy. Perhaps even an apology.

And he deserves the sympathy of his friends most of all.

Extremely funny?

Got funny meh?