Politics

Some things that happened this week.

Monday. Boring.

Tuesday. Memory lapse.

Wednesday. During P.E. lesson, I got hit by a tennis ball that flew over the walls of the tennis court, and narrowly escaped death and/or concussion. I survived to attend third language make-up lessons with some Chinese Hi… I mean Hwa Chong Institution guys. Turns out that Wednesday was their second lesson of the week, which means that I went through the same lesson on Thursday again.

Thursday. Rejected some guy asking for donations.

Friday noon. Rejected the same guy asking for donations for the same charity. His tone and choice of words offended me. Decided never to donate to that charity ever again (I’m pretty sure I’ve purchased a few gazillion of those coupons before). He can pry the $5 from my cold dead fingers.

Friday afternoon. Met with CEO of Asknlearn (heh…) and some people from Ngee Ann Polytechnic for Research Education project. MMORPG idea gets shot down, stepped on and thrown into the Mississippi river.

Friday evening. Collected Moetan II book 1 from Kinokuniya. Was told that my other order was arriving the next day. Damn. Later, met with moot from MegaTokyo forums. He turns out to be a 28-year-old ex-Rafflesian. Surprisingly, that didn’t surprise me. Singaporeans I’ve met within the online anime community have a strange tendency of turning out to be ex-Rafflesians… Some sort of global conspiracy thing.

Saturday. Wasted half the day attending a talk on Singapore’s parliamentary system at Nanyang Girls High. The speaker was subtlely subversive (after all, planting seeds of doubt in the next generation is the best way to change the government’s future status quo without having to do anything yourself), but still outwardly praised the system. Basically, it goes something like this: Executive branch consists of members of the parliament. Legislative branch consists of the PAP-majority parliament. Judicial branch has its Chief Justices hand-picked by the Prime Minister. This means that all three branches of the government and the military are controlled by PAP. Meanwhile, the President has less power than the King of England.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

To be fair, the current PAP has done a relatively good job so far… But that does not mean the future PAP will continue to do the same. It is clear that the current PAP will not use its total power to establish an oppressive regime of any sort. The problem is that it has laid the foundations for a future dictator to do so easily by over-consolidating all the institutions of power into the control of a single party. The people would have forgotten how to exercise their rights, after having lived for so long under a “benevolent dictatorship” and thus be easy-pickings for an ambitious and resourceful organization in a near-future cyberpunk setting that would make for a great action/political movie.

Just exercising my quasi freedom of speech.