- It is a strange thing to grieve for. A herd of like-minded people. A vehicle for pursuing, seeking, maintaining political power and domination. A collective of similarly-faced, similarly-named, similarly-garbed humanity, named and marked and made intelligible with insignia and flag and song and creed.
- But also a community of people who understand one another. Who band together to yoke the human powers of a young nation, its sinews and hopes and grit, into sprawling roads and gleaming spires.
- “Keramat”. Hallowed. Noble. Dignified. A rather pompous word to describe a seething mass of ambition and belief and camaraderie and struggle. But deeply felt. More than just a name on a card or an official form. Not merely an annual general meeting of the believers and the strivers and the schemers. A movement. A people within a people.
- To remember a glorious past. Demonstration. Mobilisation. Negotiation. Declamation. A young people claiming their right to exist. To govern themselves. To give deed to promises made. To forge a nation out of the disparate and messy strands of migration and immigration – the grime of lives made and remade. Deeds now hallowed in history books.
- Deeds now made into shallow and mocking echos, mouthed by a mongrel mob. Thin and hollow and blasted – these are the calling cards of an army of pygmies, claiming the mantle of past glories with which to cloak their cowardice.
- The emperor is clothed in lies and deceit and self-deception, but the imperium marches on, wilfully blind and mute and dumb. Ever onwards, ever loyal, ever grieving.
Today’s Reads XI – Income Levels and Stress, Old Politicians, and Cats Purring
- “Higher income amounts to lower stress.” No shit, HBS. But yeah, it’s a good reminder, that money can’t buy happiness necessarily, but it can smoothen away a lot of the wrinkles that crop up in life from time to time. It’s not always good to be rich, but it’s very very helpful to not be poor.
- American gerontocracy! I haven’t seen similar analyses for Malaysia, but if we have a 90+ year old former PM still hankering for the top job, I’m willing to guess that Malaysia probably has similar problems!
- Why and how cats purr. What a wonderful thing it is to make another creature happy, for no other reason than love and mutual care.
Today’s Reads V – The Benefits of Monarchies, the Responsiveness of Democracies, and the So-called Price of Success
- “Constitutional monarchies, like established churches, tend to be theoretically conservative but progressive in practice.” – an interesting, and (to me) surprisingly cogent argument for why monarchies (especially constitutional monarchies) are actually helpful in staving off extremist tendencies in polities.
- On the other hand, recent developments such as US gun control reform demonstrate that Democracy (yes, with a capital D) is still the most robust and responsive of all political systems out there. Anyone (be it religious mullahs, or fascist white nationalists) who tells you that “the common people cannot be trusted to govern themselves” are clearly self-interested wannabe-tyrants that ought to be kept away from polite company.
- Those of us who are less successful in life tend to imagine – as a means for palliative self-soothing – that those at the top are paying a price in terms of psychological stress, broken relationships, etc. “Wrecked by success” is a popular trope, but it seems that it might just simply not be true!
Today’s Reads IV – Communist Fashion, M40 Voters, GLC CEOs
- In turbulent times, some resort to…. fashion. #commiestyle
- I guess that in the coming Malaysian general elections, the M40 voter will be an important battlefield.
- Is it “soak the rich” season in Malaysian politics now?
Poem I – Perplexed
I hold myself in state perplexed,
Wherefore these so-called friends have flexed
their blind obeisance to a thief
Who gladly lends this nation grief.
Affrightened, shocked, we then did gasp
at tales of nation’s riches grasp’d,
In revelations of ill gain
and debts of billions now retained
at cost of our own public purse
And echoes of our children’s curse.
And herein lies my ill content
My queried mind in bafflement
What makes these fools of certain grief
to take up cudgels for a thief,
To make false claims of justice bent
When Justice was what God had sent?
Perhaps our own minds were athwart
Too bubbled up to see the art?
Or mayhaps those who know facts well
were flummoxed at the blatant spell
T’was cast by Power’s heavy wand
That Great and Good would dumbly stand
aside as thieves ruled in their prime
with robes of gold to hide their grime,
and riches piled for those with might
to plunder all in broad daylight.
And in minority we stand
The few and frazzled of the land
Accused of being “out of touch”
We’re told that politics is such:
That “Bossku”’s cause is of the right,
That white is black and black is white!
Then destined are we for the fall
a nation that would not stand tall
to judge a thief a criminal,
but rather praise a convict’s gall.
Three Things I am Thinking about Today #10
- We should not be surprised when autocrats abuse their powers to pursue their own personal agenda, even if it includes the illegal surveillance of an ex-wife. Looks like the backlash against Big Tech is gaining even further momentum now.
- I wonder why some folks would rather risk their lives than submit to vaccinations – a mode of treatment that has been proven to subdue the most virulent diseases known to mankind. It is as if some of us are insistent on erasing themselves from the human gene pool. Very odd.
- The rise of petroleum in our energy mix has led to more than a century of geopolitics being driven by the politics of the Middle East. Now that we are confronting a future where renewable energy technology will become an increasingly significant part of the future of global energy, the security of supply of battery manufacturing – amongst many other potential flashpoints – will begin to feature prominently in the evolution of global politics. Will US-China trade tensions escalate into a Cold War-style balkanization of global supply chains? Will countries like Korea and Japan (and of course, China) be tempted toward military escalation in order to guarantee the uninterrupted supply of raw materials? For mineral-rich, small countries like Malaysia, how do we navigate this new, more treacherous future?
Three Things I am Thinking about Today #8
- Who knew one could make quite a bit of money selling milk from home? As Farm Fresh prepares for its upcoming IPO, it is good to see businesses that are still anchored on the idea that business can actually help people to improve their lives. There has been a lot of skepticism, of late, in the enthusiasm of capitalism to embrace a more stakeholder-oriented stance, but I suppose it all depends on your intention: to truly embrace togetherness and shared prosperity, or to merely employ such rhetoric to mask baser motives of greed and exploitation.
- It is a common cycle throughout the history of innovation and technological growth: a new technology platform arrives on the scene – it could be petroleum as a source of energy, or electricity as a means to power machinery, or the Internet as a means of sharing information – and those most well-placed to gain from the rapid advancement and growing profitability of such technologies begin to gain outsize advantage and eventual domination: the Rockefeller oil trust, General Electric, or Google and Facebook. Eventually, burgeoning profitability and market share leads to outsize influence and power, and dominant players find themselves increasingly tempted to wield monopolistic power in their favour. And then, the backlash begins. In recent days, a whistle-blower has made her voice heard, and there is growing consensus that dominant tech giants like Facebook and Google will need to be reined in. Competition eventually becomes normalised, until the next cresting of a new technology…
- I believe that when historians look back at the politics of the late 2010s, there will be a huge collective sigh of relief that while Trump was certainly an influential and talented demagogue, his own incompetence and lack of discipline made sure that the damage he could actually inflict on America and the world was relatively limited. Could a more capable wannabe-tyrant have done differently? In my mind, highly likely. We are not yet at the endgame of the current epoch of this collective and corrective backlash against the excesses of capitalism and inequality: for that, we need a 21st century FDR to emerge, so that the inchoate demands for better justice and fairness can cohere into a set of much-needed policy reforms that will shape the world anew.
Three Things I am Thinking about Today #7
- There has been a lot of discussion about broadening the tax base in Malaysia, especially since the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax, which was eventually abolished by the Pakatan Harapan government. In an age when income inequality is foremost on the minds of policymakers and commentators, it is interesting to see the Malaysian Socialist Party (“PSM”) and the Democratic Action Party (“DAP”) at loggerheads over the idea of a Capital Gains Tax. My take is that policy choices in Malaysia would become much, much clearer on that day when we finally introduce clear rules around transparency of political financing. Then we will see, who exactly is fighting for the people, vs. those who merely talk a good game.
- Being married to Kat Rahmat inevitably means that there will be a lot of conversations around the meaning of Life and Death. In particular, the two of us often have conversations around the fear – nay, terror – of impending death, and how we engage in various convolutions and distractions, to take our eye off the stark reality of permanent departure from this world. This piece is consoling: that even physicists, who we would imagine to be the most rational of the best of us, cannot escape postulations that help us to find peace with the idea of our eventual expiration.
- The Great Resignation is real, and it is coming. As many workers have spent months away from the office, they have had time to evaluate their lives and careers, and many have begun to explore different options for how to live their post-pandemic lives. This article reminds us that it is okay for people to leave, and it is equally as important to pay attention on those who choose to stay. As for me, I look back at my career over the past decade and realise that even though I have technically moved jobs 5 times since 2010, those job moves have actually involved me shuttling back-and-forth between just Pemandu and Ekuinas. I would like to think it is a good sign that I have been able to return back to old stomping grounds, not just once but twice. Loyalty and trust can be hard to build, but they are very powerful currencies in our journey through life.
Three Things I am Thinking about Today #5
- The Government is tabling a bill to raise Malaysia’s statutory debt ceiling from 60% to 65%, in order to fund stimulus measures to help Malaysians get through the pandemic. I think this is timely, and much needed. What is not clear, however, is whether this is a temporary or permanent raising of the debt ceiling (the title of the Bill suggests that this is temporary, but this is not made fully clear), and whether there is a clear plan for Malaysia to bring its debt levels back down to below 60% once the pandemic is truly over. We must not allow emergency measures to become a slippery slope that drives our nation’s finances into further indebtedness, especially after all the losses that we are incurring over the 1MDB looting.
- While the debate in Malaysia’s parliament over raising the debt limit looks to be perfunctory, the United States seems to be spiraling into yet another bout of partisan bickering over its own debt ceiling. Madness? Yes. But this is the blowback that the US political class has purchased for itself when it walked blindly into the morass of the War on Terror, and the disastrous consummation of its flirtation with nativist no-nothingism with the Tea Party that had eventually led to Trump’s presidency. There is always a price to pay when you play with extremism in the pursuit of narrow parochial interests.
- Here’s an interesting and totally expected thing that usually happens when you conflate a succession race with a plan to recover from a pandemic: the politics will almost always get in the way. What is Singapore thinking? Like mentioned in the article, this is not something that would have happened during Lee Kwan Yew’s time. Another chink in the armour, then, for the PAP government under Lee Hsien Loong?
Three Things I am Thinking about Today #4
- Turkey threatens to buy new missile system from Russia: is this the beginning of the end for Turkey’s membership of NATO? And will this lead to even sharper realignment of global geopolitics?
- The third MRT line’s alignment has been finalised and awaiting approval. I hope we do get this 3rd line done: Kuala Lumpur needs to step back from the brink of urban car congestion, and embrace more active modes of mobility. The alternative is unsustainable.
- Like many of my generation, I have pegged a lot of my self-esteem and self-worth to my work. This is a good reminder that there is so much more to living than just what I do for a living.