Tun Barack Obama

The bewildered world is scrambling to make sense of the hiroshima-esque bobmshell that is Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. Explanations range from “there was noone better” to “they’ve introduced affirmative action for this too”.

My favorite explanation: Norway is envious that Obama visited Denmark (to pitch for the Olympics) and not them. By giving him the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama will have to visit! This is roughly the same reason that Melaka gave Shahrukh Khan a Dato’ship. Obviously this begs the question: can we give Barack Obama an award so that he will visit us too?

Some snooty pundits have said this award mocks the achievements and sacrifices of previous award winners. I disagree. I think this was an inevitable act of self-preservation. The Nobel committee did for the peace prize what Kanye West did for MTV’s Video Music Awards: they made people give a damn. Or maybe I’m just in a cynical frame of mind right now :-)

The silver lining is this: my faith in the collective wisdom of the world has been somewhat restored, since widespread consensus is that he hasn’t yet earned the award. Good on you world.

The other “upside” (well, it’s an upside for us but a downside for him) is that he sure as hell better deliver now. We’ve gone way beyond “hope” now: we’ve already given him the award for things we think he would do, and I don’t think he can give it back, so ironically, as far as his legacy is concerned, this award doesn’t actually help: it will simply make his failure, if it comes to that, so much worse. He is now a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. He has to score a hole in one just to make par.

Kartika sayang…

For the uninitiated, Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno is the lass who got caught having a beer and was sentened to caning… but then not caning… and now it’s back on again. FYI this made international headlines, including in Italy (a colleague of mine read about it in Italian newspapers). The flip-floppery fits perfectly with the modus operandi of religious conservatives in Malaysia, but that shall be the topic of another blog post.

Kartika is asking to be caned. I think I can understand that. This is something I’ve actually given considerable thoght to, as a hypothetical mind experiment: if I were to be punished for something that I did not believe should be punishable, given a choice, would I opt for caning over jail time? Of course making these “decisions” in hypothetical situations is never quite like the real thing, but I came to the conclusion that YES I would much prefer to be caned than to be jailed. As I get older I am gaining a deeper appreciation for how precious time is. I would rather suffer a thrashing than give away my precious time to those whom I feel didn’t deserve it. (For the record, I am a very good boy, I don’t expect to be indicted of anything, I just thought about this for fun la…)

In addition, I imagine Kartika is being quite stigmatized through this entire ordeal given the conservative nature of Malay Muslim society, and she would rather just get it over with instead of seeing the issue drag on in the public domain. Dirty linen and all that.

Given her predicament, Kartika is clearly a very sympathetic character. Having said that, given enough time, future generations may not regard her with quite so much sympathy but may instead have wished that she had faught harder, because what happens here could very well have a substantial impact on what happens in the future. I am referring, of course, to the issue of precedent. Personally, I like to consider legal precedent as well as political precedent, especially in a country where there is little separation between jurisprudence and politics. Is Kartika screwing future generations of Malaysians?

Kartika is being torn apart by Islamic conservatives on one hand, and liberals like Sisters-in-Islam on the other. At the moment she herself is “siding with” the Islamists. We can only speculate as to why, but it’s possible that she simply subscribes to the conventional wisdom that in Malaysia, in any fight between conservatives and liberals, conservatives win. Along those lines, this incident has given Islamist-conservative bloggers a perfect excuse to fire caustic venom at Sisters-in-Islam, who are hardly a threat to anybody, but a group whose mere existence seems offensive to conservative Malay Muslim sensibilities!

So what is there to do. If I were Kartika, I would probably do exactly what she is doing now. I would want to get it over with, because I also don’t think SiS and friends are going to win this, especially since their traditional allies such as the DAP have been, sadly, relatively quiet on this. So perhaps the seemingly inevitable is the course of action we should all accept, and do what we can to ensure that her punishement is, as Tulang Besi claims, not meant to be physically hurtful. An unfortunate precedent would be set, and we would have to work even harder to halt the decay of Malaysian secularism.

There’s this little story I remember from Balvikas. Two ladies are fighting over a child, both claiming the child to be their son. The cliche’d wise man of the village proposes a test to see who is the boy’s real mum; the child would be held over a small fire, with both ladies holding arms on either side, pulling until one lady lets go. And so they do this, and the child of course cries in pain, until eventually one woman manages to pull the child over to her side. The wise old man promptly declares the other woman to be the boy’s real mum: she let go first, not being willing to bear the child’s screams of pain, thus clearly demonstrating motherly love for the child.

Kartika might be considered a martyr of sorts when this is all over and done with, but the weird thing is, I’m not sure if she would be a martyr for being punished by the Islamists for something she did not believe was a crime, or for having her punishment dragged out by the secularists.

Malaysia Day gift for DAP supporters

While Merdeka day was decisively ruined by a rowdy rabble of cow haters, there’s some better news to brighten up Malaysia Day. The DAP has established a majority-Malay, Malay-led branch.

The news headline by Sinar Harian announces “Penubuhan ahli DAP Melayu pertama”, but this is of course very misleading. DAP has had Malay members for some time – you needn’t study DAP’s history to know this, afterall Tunku Aziz is Malay, and in fact I remember several other Malays who were not just DAP members but in positions of leadership over the last 10 or so years. But what might be unprecedented is that an entire branch is essentially Malay-based.

A lack of Malay participation has been the glass ceiling preventing DAP from being an effective single-party opposition to BN, and given long-standing demographic trends, a lack of Malay participation spells doom for DAP over the long-term. In the last General Election, DAP squeezed the last drop out of it’s existing support base. In Peninsula Malaysia, DAP achieved a win rate of almost 100% – i.e. they won almost every seat they contested. While this can’t really be considered a bad result, it was worrying in the sense that it seemed the party had very little new ground to expand into. If nothing changes, DAP’s power would have peaked in 2008.

That is why it is vital that DAP begin to carve out a significant Malay support base. If you asked me last week, I would have said that it’s already too late for DAP – the time to cultivate a Malay base was after the 2004 General Election, when PKR was almost wiped out, but alas for whatever reason, this just did not happen.

However, since August of 2008, much was being said about Teresa Kok’s efficacy in reaching out to the working-class Malay base in the areas surrounding her Selangor state constituency. Similar things had been said about Tony Pua, albeit to a lesser extent. To be honest, I was skeptical that either of them were making any significant impact, but this development seems to be cause for some optimism.

I hope this is the first of many more similar announcements, and I hope DAP continues to pursue this strategy of ground-up development of a Malay base rather than parachuting in strong Malay personalities into positions of leadership. This organic growth will provide a strong foundation for DAP to eventually emerge as a truly multiracial party.

There will be many potential pitfalls along the way, such as the handling of issues relating to Syariah law, the Sultanate, Malay “special position”, etc… any of these issues can derail and totally undermine the party’s outreach to a Malay base, in particular a working-class Malay base. I can’t quite decide myself if now is a good time for the DAP to reassert it’s ideological position, perhaps in a move reminiscent of the Setapak Declaration. On one hand, this will clarify the party’s aims and pursuits and curtail the possibility of any embarrassing defections and/or miscommunications/misunderstandings. On the other hand, maybe some “room for interpretation” is convenient right now.

But at some point, cards will have to be shown.

What is that they are dragging through the street?

Right after I decide to take up blogging again, on the eve of Merdeka, something happens that grabs our attention by the neck. I planned a post explaining why I decided to start blogging again, but that will have to wait.

The Malaysian Insider headline sums it up in one depressing line: “Protestors threaten bloodshed over Hindu temple“.

Photos of the protest have spread like wildfire through all the usual media outlets as well as on Facebook. The novelty of this protest is in the use of a stage prop: the head of a cow, chucked unceremoniously on the street, and stepped on as well.

The Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism & Taoism has called for calm, correctly stating that “nothing can be gained by provocative action on the part of any side.”

That’s true enough, and we should be careful that we do not allow tensions to escalate to the point where any kind of enforcement clampdown becomes justified.

But a price has to be paid for this. That’s not just a cow’s head being desecrated, that’s the Malaysian promise and identity being dragged through the street.

At the time that this post was made, I have yet to see any condemnation of this from PKR or PAS leadership. MIC (Samy Vellu) has responded. DAP (Ramasamy) has responded. Even UMNO (Najib) has responded.

Are PAS and PKR still computing the political calculus to figure out what’s the most politically advantageous course of action? Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for a measured response to avoid escalation of tensions, but swift condemnation of the act is not just possible, it is a responsibility and an obligation for all significant parties, especially for parties which have a powerbase where the transgression occurred – and PAS and PKR certainly fit this bill.

Happy national day.

on second thoughts…

maybe it’s back on :-)

cukuplah

Orait, this time srsly closing shop… I’m gonna focus on other activities for a while. If I decide to start blogging again, I think it will most likely be at another venue, and it will be a more general (i.e. less politics-centric) blog. Ciao!

Strategic Transparency

Transparency is good. We hold that truth to be self-evident. Amen.

Now that we have accepted that commandment, let us attempt to rationalize it a posteriori ;-)

Crazy Idea #859: to Chinese educate, or not to Chinese educate… what is the question?

Ktemoc has a couple of posts touching on the issue of vernacular education, where among other things he theorizes on the true motivations for Chinese parents sending their children to Chinese schools. They are good posts, and the comments are also high quality.

[By the way, I think Ktemoc's blog is fantastic and it's usually the first one I check every day, not because I agree with everything he says, but because the quality of discourse in the comments is really top notch. Excellent signal-to-noise ratio. That's actually quite amazing, seeing as comments are not moderated.]

Back to the question of why Chinese parents seem to have favourable tendencies towards Chinese schools in Malaysia, there seem to be two schools of thought emerging in the two inter-related threads of discussion on Ktemoc’s blog.

Piss poor pathetic petty politics

This is shameful.

Apparently, some political parties are taking advantage of the Bukit Antarabangsa landslide in a political dick measuring contest, to see who is better endowed to help the people.

Never mind the sheer lack of class, or that this kind of “camping” is border-line uncivilized, but surely there are very real practical complications raised, as pointed out by the residents association president:

Mohamad Rafick berkata, hal itu seterusnya telah menimbulkan sentimen politik apabila ada mangsa yang tidak mahu pergi ke pusat bantuan yang bukan diuruskan oleh parti yang disokongnya.

I’m not sure if the standard of politics in Malaysia has gotten better or worse since 308.

Shame on the shameless party workers who thought up this clever idea.

The Unforgettable Fire

When I first heard about JERIT’s cycling campaign, my reaction was “ho hum”. I thought it’d be a nice gesture, but a non-event which would be mainly ignored.

Boy. Was. I. Wrong.

Not only has it been in the news for what seems like everyday, the latest installment is a whopper.

ARSONISTS TORCH JERIT BICYCLES

So says the Malaysiakini headline.

Y’know, I thought this was going to be such a simple affair that I thought to myself if I were in KL at this time I might have liked to join them. It actually sounded kinda FUN to me (well, it’s a hard ride, but a nice expedition nonetheless, and for a good cause to boot). The danger and difficulty these guys have faced so far has left me shocked.

This is so sad. For the Jerit riders to face this level of hardship and danger reveals a very insecure and unstable society. The culprits need to be exposed and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

I hope these guys make it through. So far they’re only 1/3rd of the way through, and the ammount of bullshit they’ve had to deal with is ridiculous. I, for one, would not think any less of them if they decided to call it off. There’s no way they could have anticipated arson, for goodness sake.