And yes, I just realised you have moved house. Just paid a visit to the new home. Looking great!

I think Singaporeans just want the government to at least pretend to care. I mean, it’s not like we really know whether the politicians care. And it doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s just like a cha-cha dance where the electorate and the politicians go back and forth and back and forth. Such is politics.

BTW, my dear friend, I’ve shifted my blog. Tsktsk. When was the last time you dropped by?

the potential is there unless hindered.

Finally the falcon hears the falconer! Yes how true you are my little muse for pointing out the obvious. “Bovine” and “dim” au contraire, “immature” hardly, “lack of impetus” – yes, that is the right word to use, but I am not ascribing any blame to the average Singaporean for his lack of political coherency as you may have suggested.

“Lack of impetus” – most definitely, but remember when personalities such as Krauss emerged, it was directly after the end of the carnage of WW1 when Europe had been turned inside out, shaken and stirred.

It is difficult in today’s terms to comprehend the magnitude of human loss unless one actually lived through the period. Just to give you a rough scale of human cost, it would be like 70% of every household in Singapore losing at least a single male!

The Great war had a profound impact on shaping the eventual complexion of politics, economics, society and even technology as we know it today. It is no accident directly after the war concepts such as welfare, monetarism, labor rights, socialism, collectivism, fascism, minimum wage, ethics sprung directly out of a collective psyche something was seriously wrong about the world and the political order, if so many young men could have perished so wantonly, so you are perhaps correct in highlighting the issue of impetus and it’s relevance in the context of seeding a credible opposition.

Perhaps next time, I shall simply have to call it a spade. Thanks and very well spotted.

Nice to see you again. Hey I think one of your problems when you explain is you take it for granted people already know first hand what the assumptions are, so you typically race to the point and as a result miss out the ground work.

What you are saying to me at least because I have read it about 10 times! Is most Singaporeans may not even know what to expect from a so called credible opposition. What you are saying perhaps is we are still politically immature or lack the impetus to go beyond our current level of sophistication.

Correct?

So at the end of the day you are actually saying even if there is a Singaporean version of a Mr Krauss, we wouldn’t even bother to listen to him. In short you are saying we are politically bovine and dim.

Aren’t you my dear. Please don’t get cross with me, I don’t mean to come across as confrontational, only I believe you should just call a spade a spade.

How true, but I differ from you in one specific observation. What emerges as the belief that unifies most intellectuals (and I am too dumb to be one) is NOT that a credible opposition can change anything but that it can preserve something.

The things being preserved is of course the rule of law and the spirit of the constitution i.e your rights and mine hopefully.

This I believe is the root cause why the current opposition in Singapore lacks credibility, their battle cry is premised on effecting change instead of preserving your rights and mine and this is something which naturally leads most people to ask, do they really have the skill sets.

Most people I believe do not trust the current opposition because they seem to be machine gunning everything and anything simply to gain political mileage. This in my view is just soap box politics and no one in their right mind will ever take them seriously.

Yes you are also correct in pointing out it is not easy to go about the business of seeding a credible opposition. I never said it was easy. Neither was it easy for developed countries in the West. The modern idea of the oppositional writer is quite a recent phenomenon even by western standards, it only began sometime after WW1 when the Austrian satirist Karl Krauss described himself as a “hopeless contrarian.”

But an oppositional counter force whether it is in the form of a satirist or credible oppositional also requires an equally credible pool oppositional readers and observers – this was the whole idea of the Guttenberg Elegies, the printing press will simply run out of ink when no one reads, it takes two hands to clap.

For example, you can write a story but if people do not even care to vote with their mouse clickers to read what you write because you come across as dead beat boring, then the sum total of your effort amounts to zero. But if they find your work appealing and interesting, then you get a core readership who will follow you wherever you go. This is basic economics.

So the question, DOTL is simply this: does Singapore have a mature oppositional readership or electorate that really understands the philosophy of creating a credible opposition and the role there are supposed to play in statecraft?

I can tell you being an credible opposition isn’t about shouting and ranting any idiot can stand on a soap box and complain about the price of transport, housing, food etc going up, but it takes a first class counter force to say, “have you considered this as an alternative Mr Gahmen?” – only when they begin to do this, will the serious men of this world will put down everything and begin to prick up their ears.

I think you made an excellent point, but perhaps reality isn’t exactly quite so simple in deciding where in the continuum we want to operate at. It turns out that different policies have different constraints and the layman probably knows squat about some issues. More specifically, perhaps in the areas of foreign policy and defence, a top-down approach is right, while in areas of education, social policies, it should be more ground-driven. Just my random thoughts.

It doesn’t matter if there are some good ministers and MP in the parliament, for to them, an extra fat pay is an incentive and privilege. It doesn’t really matter if you are good ppl, if you mixed with “bad” egg, u still consider “bad”.

A food for a thought. Simple, without opp party, the gov will raise anything since they are disconnected with ppl. With opp party to counter them, at least, they can delay and question the gov which in turn will be questioned by the ppl. Do u think gov really sincerely care ?? I don’t think so especially they want to increase minister’s high pay when 2% increase. This is definitely an insult to laymen Singaporean. When they say 2% increase is to help the poor suddenly become to help the ministers !!!
Scam ??? Well, you can decide??