"Brave inheritor".

Another short passage from Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry, this time on the inheritance of privilege, from one generation to another:

In some cases the sentiments of dissenting young women were practically love letters from a purportedly ungrateful generation. Responding to Linda Hirshman's piece about her mother issues, Courtney Martin wrote in the American Prospect, "I have gained an immeasurable amount from the wise, older women who have challenged my views on this election and other issues within a context of complexity. These women have made me a better thinker, a better writer, a better feminist, and a better human. And because of them, I will not cower, but I promise to be grateful. I will not forget, but I must also move on. I will not be a dutiful daughter, but I promise to be an impassioned, authentic, and brave inheritor.

...

It was true, [Gloria] Steniem acknowledged, that many of her contemporaries "were not appreciated enough for the hard work and the sacrifice and so on. But you cannot now exact the price from your daughters. Even Susan. B. Anthony said, 'Our job is not to make young women grateful. It's to make them ungrateful.'" (pp162-163)

The Farm Awards: Your Candidate and Their Track Records

===
ETA 28 Apr 2011: Singapore Democratic Party published their manifesto yesterday, and they have an exclusive section on women's issues AND disability rights. We won't rate them against the other parties/candidates as it's past our deadline, but we strongly encourage everyone to head over there to read it!
==


Candidate Rating Table
(JPEG on Picasa; downloadable)


67-page Assessment of Candidate/Party Quotes
(PDF on Google Doc; downloadable.)

Fur and feathers are flying. In preparation for the elections, we on the farm have done some homework, looking into the stances various parties and candidates have taken on some issues close to our animal hearts. Drawing on parliamentary records, party manifestos and websites and some personal blogs of candidates, we've put together remarks from a number of candidates on topics including: abortion rights, parental benefits & family building (single parents, paternity leave), sexual autonomy (sex education, enforcement, sexual orientation & employment rights), sexual violence (marital rape, inmate rape & child abuse) & workplace sexual harassment, foreign domestic workers’ rights (with a small mention of foreign worker spouse), and a bit of disability rights.

As you can see above, we've put it all together in two nice fat tables. One sets out direct quotations from candidates, and our remarks. The other is a chart which shows our assessments of candidates' track records on each topic, with a four-colour rating system to show whether we Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree or Strongly Agree. (Sometimes we've put Disagree or Strongly Disagree when we haven't necessarily found them saying outrageous things, but the party statements on a subject in their manifesto are extremely limited and cannot do the subject justice.)

We'll hopefully also be publishing individual blog posts on certain topics over the coming days.

We like honesty, so we're going to admit a number of limitations here. We've done some searches but we can't pretend to have covered everything under these headings. If you have any further information about the policy intention of candidates or parties that we've missed out, please send it in.

There's also a lot more we wanted to cover, but didn't. Trans rights. Sex workers' rights. More on employment discrimination, including unfair termination for pregnancy. More detailed research on disability rights, rather than the very little we've found. But as a motley bunch of frazzled farm stock, we haven't got very far. Again, if you have more information to share, please hit up the farm email.

We also recommend reading the material with a heavy dose of understanding of some background facts:

1) Whatever the appearance of internal dissent within the PAP, the actual policy results you get by voting for them is easily determined as a matter of record. For example, we have some quotations from a handful of PAP MPs advocating sensible positions well at odds with what the government actually does, but this may not be very significant, as long as these particular backbenchers don't have much direct input into ministerial policy formation. So tread with caution.

2) We're publishing what we've found online. It is difficult to find information on the Internet about what some of the parties think on many issues. This may reflect their lack of policy intention in these areas, or it may reflect their failure to put it on the Internet. Be aware that there are silences here.

3) Good rankings on particular points aren't necessarily an endorsement of the candidate as a whole or their parties (see, for example, point 1). There are lots of other topics that we on the farm think are important, like economic equality, education, and freedom of speech. We're just trying to help build a fuller picture of the positions that have been taken on particular issues that matter to us.

Read, share, and discuss our findings. And vote well.

Call for topics: GE candidates' views on women's issues.

By popular demand, this farm will attempt to research and publish findings of potential general election candidates' views on women's issues, including but not limited to abortion, family maintenance, sexual assault, etc.

Should readers have particular topics of interest, and/or have leads on what you deem will be beneficial for our compilation, do let us know either in your comments or email us at farmer*dot*plantalot*at*gmail*dot*com.

"A woman schlemiel".

In light of Singapore's imminent general elections this year, and the ugliness of sexist dissections people feel entitled to enact upon candidates (e.g. Tin Pei Ling), I thought it'd be timely to share some passages from the Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry (an interview with the author), which discusses the sexism and misogyny faced by vice- and presidential candidates - Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton, respectively - in the 2008 United States elections.

Breaking from writing conventions, I'm just going to paste the relevant passages without comment or leads. This all seems quite self-explanatory:

It's not that male politicians escaped related evaluation (based on looks) ... The scrutiny was much more intense for Clinton, because women value is intrinsically tied to desirability and attractiveness .... For those who supported her had to downplay her feminine attributes lest she be diminished by objectification. For those who hated her the goal was to humiliate her, and at the same time affirm that she held no alluring power over them. As Shirley Chisholm said decades before, "One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian..." (pp76-77)

These points of recognition (of sexism) were about identifying with a certain strain of ill treatment, something feminists are loath to do lest they be accused of capitalising on victimhood. But feminism was born precisely because women faced gendered injustices. To identify and overcome obstacles and resistance was to advance the project of female empowerment ... To see a woman get taunted for being simultaneously frigid and lachrymose and then get teased for her smarts was not to ascribe to her inherently feminine qualities of frigidity, sentimentality, or unsociability. Rather it was to witness femininity as it has historically been cast, especially when it threatened male power structures: as a laughable, silly, unpleasant, or devalued condition. Women had watched a popular version of Hillary Clinton, a front-running candidate with whom they may have had a complicated or cool relationship but whose strengths, weaknesses, achievements, and mistakes had never been traditional or one-dimensional, manipulated to fit into retro molds of lightweight (peevish, unpopular, calculating, shrill) feminine illegitimacy. In a cartoon drawn by Pat Oliphant in the days after New Hampshire a bubbling Clinton is shown at a desk, facing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Laden, Lim Jong Il and other menacing men murmuring "Aww, she's sensitive--I had no idea"; "Was it something we said?"; and "Buy her flowers." A thought bubble above Hillary's head reads, "You guys are mean!" and in the corner, a miniature Bill remarks, "This is when PMS goes nuclear." In the face of plenty of good reasons to criticise Hillary Clinton, women now realized that for some it still came down to this: the same twisted characterizations used for centuries to bolster the idea that women were unfit to lead. (pp104-106)

Letters to left-leaning publications and blogs bubbled with enmity toward Clinton. As Katha Pollitt wrote, "Vats of sexist nastiness splattered across the Comments section of hundreds of blogs and websites. It's as if every obscene phone caller and every exhibitionist in America decided to become an amateur political pundit." ... The trouble was that because everyone was liberal and officially down with female empowerment, that many women who couldn't cite actual uses of the words bitch or cunt found themselves troubled by their inability to specify the sexism they sensed. "I don't think anyone in my (progressive) peer group ... would be comfortable saying, 'I'm not ready for a woman president,'" said Alex Seggerman, a twenty-four-year-old art history Ph.D. student. Seggerman was an Obama voter but noticed people making remarks like "She's had plastic surgery" or "Her attitude is off-putting," which she heard as "expressions of some deeper issues with the fact that she is a woman." People can always come up with reasons they don't like the candidate they're not supporting," said Dana Lossia, the Obama-supporting labor lawyer. "But no one disliked Joe Biden or Chris Dodd as much as they dislike Hillary." She's never heard her friends say anything explicit: "[They never say] anything where I could say, 'That's a sexist comment.' It's just that I can't understand why they hate her so much."

It was a contemporary iteration of Betty Friedan's problem that had no name, a maddening cycle of vague hunches and self-righteous denials that left many of us feeling as though we were going insane. Even (Jessica) Valenti was disoriented by it; she was particularly hamstrung because, as she pointed out, she made her living identifying sexism. "You'd think I'd be able to find an example," she said, adding, "Because it's not [always] explicit sexism, it makes it impossible to argue with people, because if you say something, then you're the wackadoo feminist." (pp169-170)

The liberalish radio host Ed Schultz, who had said on air that (Sarah) Palin set off a "bimbo alert", who asked, in conversation with Larry King and Republican Susan Molinari, "What kind of mother is she? Is she prepared to be the vice president? Is she going to be totally focused on the issues?" The Washington Post's Sally Quinn asked if Palin was "prepared for the all-consuming nature of the job ... Her first priority has to be her children. When the phone rings at three in the morning and one of her children is really sick what choice will she make?"

... The feminist writer and lawyer Susan Estrich weighed in, remarking, "No one would be asking these questions if she were a man. No one asked whether Arnold Schwarzenegger should run for governor because he has four children ... This is how the double standard works ... I have no doubt that Barack Obama can count on his fingers the number of times he has been home in the last 19 months to put his two beautiful daughters to bed ... Does this make him a 'bad father'? Should it undercut his claim to the presidency? Of course not?" (pp233-234)

[Palin] was a bad vice-presidential candidate, like bad vice-presidential candidates before her, and her communications team had allowed a prank caller to get through. She was ill-prepared and inarticulate, and her chattiness about how much she liked Sarkozy's model wife, Carla Bruni, was cringey. But progress takes all sorts, and in the pantheon of political leadership there has been thousands of craven, ill-intentioned, pompous, and stupid men. There was no rule that said that in order to make history Palin had to be a decent, honest politician, nor that she was a rocket scientist. Were we to envision true equality in politics, it would involve as many Sarah Palins as it would Hillary Clintons. As Bella Abzug had said, "[The goal is not to see a] female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel." (p280)

And just to be clear, this farm also attributes sexism as the cause for the imbalance of attention spent between demolishing Tin's political aspiration and other candidates. Head over to Weekday Blues' post to find out why.

When you say or do something sexist and/or misogynistic towards one person, man or woman, you do it to everyone else because you remind us, the everyone else, that we are supposed to have a restrictive place in life too. Don't try to make this them versus us; exceptionalising the hated as someone deserving of discriminatory and violent scorn, then especialising everyone else as different from the pack, like as if we're supposed to feel good about your not being directly bigoted towards us. Oh, looky, Brownie cookies for us! We have your favour and approval. How lovely!

Though the real beauty of exceptionalising it is that it muddles it for us. Makes it difficult for us to call you out, because people don't like to be associated with the scorn, and then be scorned too. Especially not when a large group of people are the culprits of it. Especially not when we least expect our immediate network best friends, greatly admired people, closest of family members, or supposedly most progressive of internet blogs--all of whom supposed to protect and stand with us from all this grotesque discrimination--be the ones promulgating this bullshit.

Don't kid yourself, there's no us and there's no them in social injustices. It hurts every-fucking-one.

Reminder: say no to censorship

Recent events like the arrest of Alan Shadrake and the ban on Martyn See's film are reminder of how live the danger of state censorship of dissent remains. Don't forget to sign the Arts Engage paper to show your opposition to these oppressive tactics.

The public is interested

More sober heads than mine have already discussed the pointlessness of the ban on Martyn See's film of Dr Lim Hock Siew, who spoke of his detention without trial for almost 20 years. (Transcript here, film here.) Distributing a film of an elderly, mild-mannered man giving an account of his personal experiences has now become a criminal offence.

Ostensibly this has taken place because the film is "contrary to the public interest". According to the mighty MICA:

The Singapore Government will not allow individuals who have posed a security threat to Singapore's interests in the past to use media platforms such as films to make baseless accusations against the authorities, give a false portrayal of their previous activities in order to exculpate their guilt, and undermine public confidence in the Government in the process.

My main question is, what exactly is the public interest served here?, but in order to ask it, I need to back up a bit and look at some fundamentals. They had this man in custody for almost 20 years, and they did not convict him of any crime. MICA talks about "exculpating guilt", but guilt for what exactly? Even the people who detained him didn't manage to work that one out.

But let's assume (gingerly, trying not to wrinkle our noses at the implausibility of it) that Dr Lim Hock Siew was once a genuine "security threat", supposedly because he had links to supposedly violent Communists or somesuch. If so, what is the public interest in restricting the present day circulation of the film? If detention was justified, let the government justify it; if his account of what happened was false, let the government contradict it. They've got all the records, right? They haven't flushed important paperwork down the toilet somewhere?

If we posit that the government was completely right to detain him, there is no possible harm in sharing this information now. It's not as if there is sensitive, ongoing operational security work against these violent Communist groups, which would be jeopardised by public discussion. (If there ever was.) I mean, yo, newsflash, PAP: the Berlin wall fell 20 years ago. Grab someone off the street and talk to them about "the alienation of labour" or "the internal contradictions of capital" and they will reply leh kong simi? The government cannot seriously be claiming that public discussion of the long-decomposed carcass of a defunct historical "threat" is somehow "against the public interest".

Remember, we've been giving the government the benefit of the doubt here. Even if Dr Lim is spouting total B.S. (and I don't think he is lor), the "public interest" doesn't make any sense, since the government can just whip out their thousands of detailed documents and prove to us, incontrovertibly, that they were right. "Public confidence" would not be "undermined", but strengthened.

And if he's not talking B.S., if the government stuck unconvicted citizens into prison for years on end and it was all about "saving face" and people underwent months of solitary confinement and women were force fed with tubes until they vomited and their vomit was cleaned off the floor with their own pants, might there not be a rather large public interest in the public hearing about it?

The film raises questions which any government should be prepared to answer, like, "Hey, man, why did you lock that guy up? And did you torture him while you were at it? Just, like, wanting to check, you know." And that's the whole point of the ban. It's meant to be a ban on questions. Shut up because we know best, and we don't even have to prove it. By "public interest" they mean the public should not be interested.

Well, I damn well am. And we should all be. Find out as much as you can about the detentions and let's question them until their ears bleed.

Transcript of Dr Lim Hock Siew's speech on the ISA.

Ex-political prisoner speaks out in Singapore

Posted on Youtube, 15 November, 2009.
By Singapore Rebel (Martyn See).

Video description: Dr Lim Hock Siew is Singapore's second longest-held political prisoner.

From the video:

[A founding member of the ruling People's Action Party, Lim was accused of being a communist and was arrested without trial in 1963, and had his detention prolonged by the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew until his release in 1982.]

[On 14th of Nov 2009, Lim made his first post-detention speech in Singapore during a book launch.]

[The day coincided with the arrival of US President Barack Obama in Singapore for the APEC Summit.]

My contribution to this book is very modest. Because of my ill-health, I've not been able to write too much. It comprises mainly of a statement which I made when I was in prison in 1972, after 9 years of incarceration.

As you know, I was detained in Coldstore Operation in February the 2nd 1963, and I was the last one to come out from the batch of detainees almost 20 years later. Now this statement mainly stated my stand on my detention.

After 9 years of incarceration, they wanted me to issue a statement to firstly support the so-called democratic system of Singapore, and secondly to renounce politics. I told them that these two demands are self-contradictory, because if there is parliamentary democracy, then I don't have to give up politics. So they said, "You must say something to show repentance other wise Lee Kuan Yew will lose face."

For me this not a question of pride, it's a question of principle.

In the first place, if a person has to save his face by depriving somebody else of his fundamental rights, then that's not a face that's worth saving. So the, the main democratic right is a fundamental constitutional right of the people of Singapore. And no one should be deprived of their right, and held ransom to extort statements of repentance and contrition. So the whole thing bogged down to having to issue a statement of repentance, which I refused.

Subsequently, I was detained for another almost 10 years, after that statement was issued. So a total of 19 years and eight months, longer than a life sentence. Life sentences will be released after 13 years, after the initial one-third remission, but for no charge, no trial, I was detained for longer than life sentences.

A lot of hullabaloo have been said recently on the right of political detainees to appeal to an Advisory Board. I want to tell you about my experience in this Advisory Board.

After about one year of detention, I was asked to the prison main gate at about 4pm, and a statement of notice to say that I had to appear before the Advisory Board the next day, and I was given a two fool-scap paper of so-called charge sheets. I said I wanted to keep these sheets of paper so I could prepare for my next morning's appearance. They said, "No, you cannot keep it. Just read it and we'll take it back."

I said I want to inform my lawyer about this. They said, "No, you have the right to inform your lawyer, but you cannot telephone him now." I said, "In that case, how do I contact my lawyer?" He said, "That's the law."

So the next morning I was called to the High Court in handcuffs and all that to appear before an Advisory Board comprising three persons. A judge called Judge Winslow and two other persons. One is a certain Elias, I think he's a lawyer, and the other one a Chinese gentleman whose name I cannot remember.

So, on these so-called charge sheets, there were a lot of blank spaces. I asked Judge Winslow what do these blank spaces mean? He said, "Oh, these are charges which are so sensitive that they can be shown only to the Advisory Board but not to you."

I said, "How the hell can anybody defend himself against a charge that's not even revealed to him?" I asked him for advice, he just said [shrugs shoulder]. I said, "Is this a mockery of justice or what?" He said, "This is the law."

You see, the whole thing is a judicial farce. I mean, it's incredible that anyone has to face this kind of mockery, this kind of so-called justice, and the fact that a High court judge is being put as the chairman of this Advisory Board gives the public an illusion that there is judgement, there is justice. And I told him that if I were a High court judge, I would not lend credence to this mockery by my presence.

Then this Elias threatened me with contempt of court. I was very happy when he with contempt of court, because after all I was already in prison, so threatening me with contempt of court and al that makes no difference to me.

By the way, in my 20 years in prison, I was detained in practically all the prisons in Singapore, except of course the female prison.

In the end, the judge said, "No, no, let the doctor have his say, there's no question of contempt of court." So I gave a three-hour statement to debunk all the so-called charges. One of the charges was in fact a false charge: I was charged for being one of the right Fajar students who were charged for sedition. I said, "As a matter of fact, I didn't have the privilege to be one of the eight. In fact, I would be flattered to be one of the eight, and that I was not one of the eight. So why should I be imprisoned for allegedly being one of the eight, when these eight were acquitted without being called, and acquitted and defended by Lee Kuan Yew himself, who is now detaining me?"

He said, "This is the law."

Everything is the law.

So recently you have heard all this so-called rule of law. Now there is detention without trial by ISA [Internal Security Act], a law which makes a mockery of the concept of rule of law. It is a law that is outside the rule of law. Once you are detained under the ISA, you have no legal defence whatsoever.

I tried the habeas corpus twice. On one occasion I succeeded on the technical error on the side of the government--they did not sign my detention order. It was supposed to be signed by a minister, but it was delegated to a civil servant. So on that account the court has to release me on a technical point. So when I was released, there was the Special Branch waiting for me outside Queenstown Prison. I was re-arrested one minute later. It was a mock release. And for that habeas corpus, I was punished and sent to the most hideous of all detention centres, the Central Police Station head office.

That was a place that is not fit to keep animals let alone human beings. The place was so dark, so stinky and so ill-ventilated that you cannot stand inside for more than 24 hours, but I was locked in there for 24 hours a day. And the whole place was infested with bugs. I had a lot of bugs for company. No reading material and the light was so dim that I could hardly see the crease of my hand. So immediately the five of us went on hunger strike, and my ulcer bled and I had to be transferred to hospital. That was the so-called habeas corpus right there you have. Try it at your risk, or be severely punished.

The second time I went for habeas corpus case was when they tried to force me to do manual labour. That was in 1972. They said all detainees should do manual labour as a programme of rehabilitation. I was supposed to do carpentry. So this superintendent told me that it was good for you as a doctor, you try to become more dexterous with your hand. So I said, "You do not have the qualifications to enter a medical college, and here you are telling a doctor what is good for post-graduate education. Are you over-reaching yourself?" He said, "This is the law. You have to be paid 8 cents a day." So we all went on hunger strike, and some of us went on hunger strike for three months in order to frustrate their attempt to make us labourers like criminals. I went on hunger strike for three weeks before they came in and said, "Okay, we exempt you from that."

And the women detainees in Moon Crescent Centre went on hunger strike for 130 days, and they were forced-fed. Some of them vomited after being fed milk by the tube inserted forcefully into their oesophagus. One girl vomited and the superintendent forced for wardens to carry her and wiped the floor with her pants. This is the kind of treatment meted to detainees. All these of course suppressed by the press, but this is the thing we all had to go through.

Now all of us had to go through detention in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement according to Lee Kuan Yew himself is a very bad form of torture. I will read to you what Lee Kuan Yew said of solitary confinement: "The biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli. That is real torture." Lee Kuan Yew, January 2008.

Although he knows it is real torture, he had no compunction in meting out this real torture to all detainees without exception. Some of us had to undergo this real torture, not for one day, two days, but for six months. Now under the law, there is a protection for even criminal prisoners from this kind of torture. A criminal prisoner when found guilty of infringing prison rules will be sentenced to solitary confinement for not more than two weeks, because of the obvious mental health effects. But for political detainees, there is no protection.

And Lee Eu Seng, the general manager of Nanyang Zhao Pao, was put into solitary confinement not once but twice, and it is to his credit he withstood that kind of real torture. TT Rajah, a lawyer who was detained for two and half years, was put under solitary confinement for six months. Twice. Said Zahari was put into solitary confinement four times in his long 17 years of detention. It is to our credit that we did not back down despite our difficult ordeal. We stood our ground and held on to our integrity.

Today, they are asking us to be magnanimous. What does magnanimity mean? Only those who have suffered have the moral right, the moral standing to be magnanimous, not the culprit. The culprit can seek forgiveness, if they admit their mistakes and apologise for it. Not for the victims of this torture to seek forgiveness. We are the ones who have to be magnanimous, and we are prepared to be magnanimous provided the culprits admit their mistakes and seek our forgiveness.

In my statement which I released to the press in 1972, through my wife Beatrice Chen, and which was of course suppressed by the newspapers, but was distributed a lot to all student organisations--I said the proper way to settle our case is that you must release us without conditions. Unconditional release. Moreover, you must compensate us for our long detention and also apologise. I said I'm prepared to forgo these two last conditions of having to compensate us and also having to apologise to us because I don't believe an arrogant man like Lee Kuan Yew would concede easily. On that question of release unconditionally--that we stand firm, I stood firm and had to suffer for two decades. That is the price that we had to pay for our integrity.

In Singapore, we have a situation where the government leaders said they have integrity that has to be sustained by the highest pay in the world, but yet they demand from political opponents and detainees an integrity that has to be sustained by the longest imprisonment in the world. This kind of two types of integrity, to compare them is to compare heaven and earth. Why should anybody has to sacrifice so much just to sustain his integrity and his beliefs? And the government have to reward themselves with so much high pay. This is the immorality of the political situation in Singapore today.

Now, detention without trial is not a peaceful action. It is an act of violence. They come to see you not in the daylight with an invitation card. They come in the morning, 4am. That is the time when decent people sleep, and when political terrorists and tyrants strike. And when you are detained, you are subjected to all kinds of mental and even physical torture. This is not only unique for the 1963 batch, it was also practised in many other batches of detention: 1972, and as late as 1987. When Teo Soh Lung and her group of so-called marxist detainees were subjected to mental and physical torture. ... And women lawyers can be subjected to torture. But when these women lawyers came out and issued a statement to describe how they have been tortured, they were again detained and compelled to withdraw their accusation.

What type of rule of law is that when the accuser can be punished by the accused against the government, and compelled to withdraw their accusation? Is it not a rule of law justice turned upside down? Now this is a situation where even the Law Society dare not utter a word of protest. They are so impotent after what they had done to the Law Society in 1987.

Now, Poo Soo Kai has written a very good article on Operation Coldstore. In it, he has revealed a lot of declassified British archive documents, showing how the British and Lee Kuan Yew conspired and collaborated to crush the opposition before the 1963 General Elections. The whole aim of this merger was to crush the opposition before the 1963 elections.

And today, the PAP is standing on high moral ground, demanding human rights in other countries, even demanding the realise of political detainees in Myanmar. But precisely on what moral ground are they standing to have this demand? In examining their past records, they are standing on a pedestal that is leaking with worms and vermin, Let them repent first their own dismal record of human rights and then you may have the moral right to cast aspersions on other people's lack of human rights.

Poh Soo Kai has also written the last chapter of this book [The Fajar Generation], about the future of Socialism. Many of you may ponder what is the relevance of Socialism in this era. after 50 years when the club was formed, Socialist movements all over the world has suffered a lot of setbacks and even defeats, and some wonder whether we are still relevant. The recent economic crisis, the recent financial crisis, has once again exploded the corruption and immorality of the capitalist system, and feel that human beings should deserve something better than a system that is generated by green and by corruption.

Now some of you may have heard that when you are young you are idealistic, when you're old you are realistic. Now this is the kind of rubbish that is used by those who have either lost their ideals or have sold their ideals for self-interests. Each should not wither one's ideals or convictions. If anything, it should only consolidate and make it more resolute. If age has anything to do with it, it is only by way of expression and application of these ideals and convictions having the benefit of a youthful experience. And a life without convictions, without idealism, is a mere meaningless existence, and I'm sure most of you will agree that as human beings, we are worthy of a life much more meaningful than just that.

Thank you.

[Dr Lim Hock Siew is currently 78 years and is a retired physician.

[He remains a staunch socialist.]

[Lee Kuan Yew remains in political office, and now holds the title of Minister Mentor.]

ETA - 11:53pm: http://www.3outube.com/watch?v=dqhr4wxUFws to download the video; it'll be illegal to own it in Singapore in about six minutes time.

Filial piety: fine feelings and hard work

Parenting is hard work. If only the Singapore government were as good at recognising that when making policies that have material consequences for parents, as it is in making sappy videos full of fine feelings.

But that, of course, as Funny Little World explains, is the whole point. This video on filial piety is about displacing political responsibility from the government for collective problems that need (to some extent) collective solutions. It promotes a moralising discourse, about the fine feelings we should all supposedly have about our parents (failing to recognise that they might have been wholly abusive, indeed perhaps specifically notwithstanding any abuse), to avoid questions about society's and the government's welfare obligations, about the fair and appropriate distribution of the hard work of eldercare, as between individuals and the state.

We were all ruminating on this in the Barn, prompting the following wisdom from the Complaining Cow:

The ad plays on people's fears about growing old alone and unassisted, a huge source of insecurity in a country without a social welfare system. The idea that it's possible for elderly people to be abusive is generally unrecognised (even though many people have experienced this firsthand in their own family, from what I've been told -- in particular elderly people abusing each other). Such behaviour is seen as 'demanding' and 'unreasonable' at most, but something to be put up with because the way society functions is stacked up against older people, so family members have to be accommodating.

I was thinking about the ad, where the elderly mother says she wants to move out. Personally, I think I would want to have my own household when I'm old (whether or not I have children), and I wonder, in the context of the fictional ad family, why her moving out would be a bad thing for the family? The family in the ad seems to have no choice but have the grandmother live with them. I'm aware there are all sorts of possible reasons: eg if someone for some reason she can't afford their own home anymore, or needs assistance, or does want to live with their child's family but just suffers occasional fits of pique against them, etc.

But these in turn point to problems like homelessness, access to care for mental/physical disability, general accessibility of our built environment to anyone who's not 100% able-bodied; and MCYS's response to that seems to be: have children now so that they'll provide you with these social services FOC when you need them, 'cause we sure as hell ain't going to. Which fucks over everyone who can't or won't have children, or for whatever reason doesn't want to depend on them.

The Cow also raised questions about the other toxic messages packed away in the ad:

Also: what's up with all the other toxic narratives that are peripheral to the ad's intended message but tightly woven into its fabric?! Eg setting up the woman as the primary caregiver of the family in both generations (it wasn't the man's cooking the grandmother was criticising, was it?), framing relations between the woman and her mother-in-law as adversarial, etc.

My Magical eye alighted upon these items too. Not only does the filial piety conversation attempt to displace collective obligations onto individual households, it also (less overtly) displaces collective obligations onto women, in particular, who are assumed to be the ones who should provide free care work for the sake of family togetherness. The stamps of this assumption are all over the video, which is - funnily enough - entitled "Father and Son". There is no indication of what relationship the woman has with her own parents (presumably this is a nod to the notion that they ought to have bothered to have a useful child, i.e. a son and not a daughter, of their own); in fact, there are no daughter-parent relationships portrayed at all. Not only is the work of cooking done by the woman, but also, at the beginning, she goes off to sort out tasks on behalf of the family, while telling her husband and son to stay with her mother-in-law and with each other. The lesson the boy learns is evident in his question: he asks not about the work involved in caring for his grandmother, but about his father's feelings.

The message here is gendered. The fine feelings of filial piety are for men and boys: but the hard work of elder care, which makes the sustenance of those fine feelings possible, is for women and girls.

If we have to watch videos about fathers and son, I think I prefer this ad:

Drawing Mohammed

I hope it goes without saying that I think Draw Mohammed Day (scheduled initially for the 20th of May 2010 and then rescinded when the progenitor of the idea got freaked out by the responses to it) is an unmitigated bad idea.

"But Cat!" you say, "You blaspheme right along with the best of them! Isn't this just organized blasphemy?"

Christ on a cracker. Have we taught you nothing here at the Barn?

You do not piss on ideas that other people hold dear. Now, I will defend to the death your right to free speech and I do not think that the violence committed against cartoonists who have depicted Mohammed is justified in any way. But that being said, it wasn't a very nice thing to do now, was it?

To me, the situation at hand is not about blasphemy or free speech. It's about privilege, racism and xenophobia. This is the Western world uniting to do something deliberately incendiary towards a group of people often caricatured and marginalized within their societies.

Muslims are not an empowered group in the Western world. That should go without saying. The ghettos they are corralled in in Europe (a breeding ground for discontent, and a whole other post), the rhetoric flung at them in America post-9/11 (that has ended up affecting not just Muslims but any dark-skinned group that wears turbans), the carefully crafted news segments portraying violent and loudly unintelligible foreigners that splash across our consciousnesses - this is the position they occupy.

This is the position, underrepresented and over stereotyped, from which they are to respond to any actions taken to deliberately cause affront to symbols they hold dear.

OF COURSE SOME OF THEM WOULD FREAKING FLIP THE FUCK OUT. Not that I condone that response - but seriously, all sorts of populations lose their shit when confronted with things that contradict closely held values. We're just not constantly telling their stories as part of the "villan" bit in our societies' narrative.

This "Draw Mohammed Day"? The cartoonist, Molly Norris, has said that "this is not meant to disrespect any religion, but rather meant to protect people's right to express themselves." Fuck you Molly. Really.

Because this isn't about freedom of expression. Not by a long shot. This is about adding to the cultural drumbeat of "Muslims as bad, irrational and violent. Look! They're responding angrily to my wanting to draw something!" that's been building for a long time now. Shame on you. Shame.

Rony Tan and The State - 5 - "An openly pluralist, secularist, human-rights based challenge"

Really agree with this Oh My Goat - that someone really needed to push him hard to retract the statement, and it's unfortunate that it was the ISD rather than others in civic society, as would happen in a "free world". Ideally there would have been - in addition to blog posts, which there are - protests, pickets, strongly worded letters from a variety of faith and interfaith and secularist organisations published in the papers, disputing editorials in rival newspapers discussing the very nuances like those in your email etc., collectively leading to a social consensus so strong that people would hesitate to be obnoxious in the way he has, while continuing to make strong criticisms of hateful attitudes and practices whether they take a religious or non-religious form.

The reason why we have none of that is the ISA/PAP state control generally, and that ironically also creates the need for the ISD/PAP to step in, but their involvement inhibits the development of the environment that wouldn't need them... It's woeful really.

I agree with Poultrygeist that mandating prosecution wouldn't be great... I just think the healthy endpoint isn't one that's reached via the ISD.

What I think is going on here is a colonial strategy in a domestic context - divide and rule. The government is interested in a clear sectarian division between communities defined along racial/religious lines partly for ideological reasons (i.e. LKY's weird racialism)...

...but partly also because this means they can achieve this "surface harmony" you refer to, without the destabilising effect of difficult questions that arise from minorities-within-minorities (like someone criticising their own religious "community"), or groups like women, LGBTQ people, the poor etc. who have shared interests between "communities". Successful challenges to "communities" by these individuals and groups would also legitimate other challenges to interests that the government has in avoiding welfarist obligations. It is in their interests to palm welfare off onto religious "charity", and have participation in ritual ("spirituality" without social content) replace political engagement. Possibly this is also why welfare, where it exists, is often supported by the state along "community" lines (and in Singapore also by continually trying to enforce a vision of morality whereby the "family" has all the obligations to support those in need), to avoid the issues of state obligations to individuals qua individuals, which would pose a much more direct challenge to their economic and political control. Give each religious/racial "community" leader their fiefdom and they'll keep their own house in order, allowing the government elite to continue with their profits.

Of course their problem is that they're feeding (with financial support and legitimacy) the very same factions that will inevitably give rise to challenges to their own power, so they have to rap them on the knuckles with the ISD every now and then. But they won't be able to do this forever - and there is the danger the PAP itself will be assimilated into fundamentalism or increasingly pressured to give way to it on substantive matters, which amounts to the same thing - and if we want to avoid theocracy (creeping or sudden) an openly pluralist, secularist, human-rights based challenge needs to be cultivated pronto.

Rony Tan and the State - 4 - "A national narrative of harmony and stability"

I've been thinking about this in terms of the government preference for a national narrative of harmony and stability, rather than diversity and non-violence. I think it was Cat in the Cream who pointed out during our conversation that to the ISD, what they were doing was indeed clamping down and enforcing harmony/stability to arrest any possible slide down the slope to non-violence. And either Badly Drawn Pig or The Terrierist who noted that many old-guard politicians remember the days when dissent was followed by violence, and the new generation that'll take over has been schooled in and become comfortable in this framework of justifications for policing public discourse.

When the system is set up to enforce surface harmony rather than allow people and groups who disagree to express themselves up to the point of violence or incitement thereof, then people like Rony Tan's followers muttering about their preacher being a persecuted martyr, and people like Oh My Goat wondering whether she'll suffer any backlash from criticizing a religious practice, even one that might originate from a faith should she belong to. Or do people just buy into the prevention-is-better-than-cure approach?

Rony Tan and The State - 3 - "Valid criticism of religious or religion-adjacent practices"

This isn't the first time I've heard this anti-Buddhism, anti-Taoism spiel. I've heard it at least once before during a talk in school specifically aimed at how homosexuality is an abhorrence. It's probably a lot more common than we may realise for some churches to disparage other religions in their efforts to convince their flock that they have chosen the right path.

I think it was a good thing that he was asked to retract his statements. That was a massive amount of misinformation he was spreading to his flock. In a free world, there would be other ideas to counter this Rony Tan's hateful crap. But I'm not sure all members of his flock seek them out. In that context, it was probably right to make him say "I'm being irresponsible and I should have never said that. That was blatant misinformation on my part."

However, I feel uncomfortable about the "upsetting religious sensitivity" angle. Spreading falsehoods about a religion is one thing. I think valid criticism of religious or religion-adjacent practices must certainly be permitted, yes? I don't think religious beliefs should be considered sufficient in and of themselves to confer legitimacy on suspect practices.

Rony Tan and the State - 2 - "Things will get much, much messier"

We don't have any anti-discrimination laws expressly spelled out (even the wording of our constitution is aspirational on this issue, and does not set out examples of what discrimination etc is). Which is why they've used the Sedition Act.

I guess I don't have an issue against invoking the Sedition Act, because I find the notion that religions be allowed to preach against each other to be fundamentally flawed. But then, I also don't believe in an absolutist concept of truth - which is the basis for such hateful speech anyway: [insert religious text here] says [insert subject of hate speech here] is wrong and therefore it is wrong.

I think it's frightening that people in positions of power are allowed to preach whatever they want regarding the incontrovertible truth of religious ideology with a view to influencing a group of people. Personally, I believe this lays foundations for extremism.

To be honest, I was completely offended by the WAY in which he belittled Taoism (and the concept of karma and the chanting), as if fancying himself some kind of stand up comedian. It was irresponsible and pretty hateful. And given that he has no grasp/understanding of Taoism, on what basis is he making these comments?

I think the reason we don't have anti-discrimination laws is because they don't want to get rid of the discretion not to prosecute. The ISD basically forced him to capitulate and retract all his hateful crap and apologise thereby appeasing the groups he maligned, as well as keeping the Christians' persecution complex at bay. I'm pretty sure the ISD called up Derek Hong during the AWARE issue, because I don't think he apologised out of the goodness of his heart or anything. I don't think the ISD is attacking the freedom of association or religion in this regard - I think they're saying "Look here, you can preach but stay out of purporting to be an expert on other religions kthxbye". While it does seem paternalistic, I think it might actually be a better alternative to prosecuting this guy, as would be the case if we had anti-discrimination laws (even then, who's to say the ISD won't be involved? Usually they don't trumpet their involvement - this was an anomaly!)

Just my view on things lah, I think if you start prosecuting people for irresponsible proselytising things will get much, much messier.

Rony Tan and the State - 1 - "The enemy of my enemy"

This is slightly tricky one for me.

On the one hand, I have no issue with anti-discrimination laws that spell out protection against hate-speech, or mete out greater penalty for hate-related crimes. As we here at the Barn ARGUE. ALL. THE. TIME, spouting and hearing shit unchallenged is the very reason people feel justified to hate, which ultimately underpins all the violence and harassment we face at hand. As Sparky notes on the puzzlement that the mothership of Focus on the Family expressed when they found out that their teachings were being propped up as the intellectual apparatus that motivated Uganda's deathly anti-homosexuality bill:

And, as we've seen before with Rick Warren, the Family and others who are up to their evil eyes in this particular vileness, they are now all shocked, SHOCKED, that their hate filled words could have encouraged such an awful awful thing.

Even accepting their protests as sincere (and I really really don't, because it's beyond belief that someone can espouse such hatred and then be shocked at the result), even accepting that they never ever imagined this could happen - well, what did they expect? How can they be shocked that constantly attacking gays, accusing us of preying on children, of trying to destroy society, leads to persecution?

...

Hatred does not come from a vacuum. The violent do not appear out of thin air. There is no mystery behind those that attack and hurt and kill us.

It comes from us, our society, our leaders, our culture, our language and our very selves. We have value - but that will never be acknowledged - that will never be truly BELIEVED - while there are so many voices that devalue us.

Hate will never stop until we stop saying, in a hundred ways, every day that hate is ok.

And so long as we keep saying hate is ok, we are responsible when that hatred leads to ruined lives.

On that count, I'm angered by what Pastor Tan has said and continues to say.

On the other hand, I do think invoking the Sedition Act and invoking police action as most foul, and I don't like how this has played out for Pastor Tan too.

As a free-thinker who has had personal investments in various faith in the past, I don't actually think it's wrong of religions to preach against each other, since fundamentally each more or less already believes itself humanity's answer to attaining peace. But I also do not think that arguing the superiority or rightness of one's religions needs precludes also arguing against violence or intolerance of any sort at the same time. People should be entitled to believe shit, preaching and saying shit should be challenged. But is the Act really the right sort of "challenge" to be up against?

I'm of the belief that the Act is crafted and employed more to force EVERYONE into acquiesce under a rather troubling paternalistic rule. If anything, the Act poses more problems for liberals attaining freedom, often in service of preventing a punishing spectre of civil war, race/religion inspired riot, etc. Using this legislative pressure tactic to demand an already fearful culture to cede more freedoms, often beginning with the attainment of a voice to speak, I think, is plain awful for all. I am not entirely naïve to believe that I live in a problem-free country where people are so mild that emotional and physical abuse is not enacted on some LGBTQ person everyday, but I simply don't think moving the masses into a darker age by keeping shit under wrap is the way to go.

Not discounting that Rony Tan was indeed an asshat for holding and saying those things (I'm not even entirely convinced by his apologies), and in another time and space perhaps warrants penalty, but I think in this scenario, and strictly for this Singaporean context, his strongest detractors are just using tools of a greater enemy to inflict wounds on another enemy. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, and I'd much rather not have to succumb to employing a strategy meant to hurt me as well on another person.

The equal-opportunist, fight-fire-with-fire, schadenfreude-lite approach to this worries me. In the same way it frightens me that some people's solution to the denigrative objectification of women is in the objectification of men, or the parallel of attempts to outlaw militant Islamic extremism by banning the Muslim veil. Ultimately piling on shit on more people doesn't make the already hurt hurt less, what it does instead is present a net increase in the amount of shit on a net increase in the number of victims.

So count me in on calling out Pastor Tan on his disinformation, but please count me out of rallying for State embargo. The last thing I need is for him to be or feel remotely martyred.

Preamble: The misadventures of Rony Tan.

The animals at the Barn took time away from farm duties to attend an on-going roundtable discussion on the subject of Rony Tan, the governmental actions that have either already been taken, or are currently lobbied against him, and whether we think he should be allowed the right to think and speak how ever controversially he wishes on how ever sensitive, highly politicised a topic. Proceedings are being put together as posts and will be published over the weekend. This is a preamble.

How does one begin?

RONY. FUCKTART. TAN.

That's the founding senior pastor of Lighthouse Evangelism Church who's been making headlines over the last two weeks. He quickly established himself as a bonafide asshole who aggrieved the Taoist and Buddhist communities in Singapore when videos of his rather unpalatable sermons surfaced on the internet. The sucker punch, however, came in the form of an extremely public invitation from our lovely Internal Security Department (ISD) for Pastor Tan to join them for tea and scones. All this ended in removal of said videos, apologies, woeful sermon of regret, and other double-taking that all ran rather openly. Now his words on gay people are haunting him, as two film-makers have lodged a police report against him, ostensibly in hope of invoking aspects of the Sedition Act even if the Act is written to only protect racial and religious harmony. He has since come out to stand by and defend his position on homosexuality, "I’ve said nothing wrong, you know. Like I said, my stand is with the average person and the Government."

Here are some choice quotes that I've managed to dig up so that you can have a rough idea of what was uttered:

On religion; responding to a parishioner, Rita's experience with Buddhism:

[4:51 onwards]

Ok, now, here I pause again to, you know, let you all know that, when we talk about religions; false religions, we are not just talking about a set of teachings. We are talking about the spiritual world. we are talking about satan and his demons,coming into people's mind and dropping ideas like that, to get us away from ...

When rita was seriously, you know, in this religion, the demonic power would supernaturally put some ideas in her mind, and the same demonic power, you cannot see, put the same kind of thoughts into the Tibetan monk. So when they check up the facts, it's the same. It dazzles us. but if you were to look behind the scene, it is a cheap david copperfield trick, nothing more, nothing more, you understand? So conclusion, there's no truth in reincarnation.

...

When Buddha was dying, do you know what he said to his disciples? "I'm still searching for the way..."

[Grunts to suggest last breath, then steps forward.]

And Jesus comes, "I am the way." (Source)

On homosexuality:

What Pastor Rony Tan of Lighthouse Evangelism thinks about gays and lesbians from Kenneth Tan on Vimeo.

Don’t believe all those loud-mouthed gay people who tell you they are born this way... If we don’t warn people against this, then there will be more and more homosexuals... Many of these people will be harrassing and seducing young boys, and they in turn will become homosexuals... Half the world will be homosexual! Proper sex means life — it propagates life. Lesbianism and homosexuality simply mean death and barrenness... If you allow [homosexuality], next time people will want to get married to monkeys. And they will want rights. They’ll want to apply for HDB. With a donkey or a monkey or a dog and so on. It’s very pathetic. (Source)

You can see why animals and people alike have gotten prettttty upset with him. Yet, should we play Volitaire and defend his right to speak even if we gravely disagree with him?

Lest you too are the curious sort, you can view copies of the videos pertaining to religious insult here. Pastor Tan has beseeched that copies of the video be taken down as well, but I personally find this forced erasure/ amnesia of mistakes frankly stupid. I'm glad copies are floating around so that we can be constantly reminded of how horrible he was, even if those who took offense have since forgiven him.

This does not help

In fact, it's downright oppressive:

A French parliamentary committee has recommended a partial ban on women wearing Islamic face veils.

The committee's near 200-page report has proposed a ban in hospitals, schools, government offices and on public transport.

It also recommends that anyone showing visible signs of "radical religious practice" should be refused residence cards and citizenship.

This is allegedly in the service of gender equality, but in reality it's simple xenophobia on the part of the French non-Muslim majority.

Don't get me wrong. The social dictate that women must cover their entire bodies and faces, lest a glimpse of their earlobes inflame uncontrollable male lust, is absurd, oppressive, and insulting to women and men both. But the same is true of the social dictate that women must wear make-up or high heels to be presentable, and nobody for a moment entertains the idea that banning their use in public would further gender equality.

If women are being coerced by family members to wear the veil, this ban is simply further limiting the ability of these women to enjoy any independent public existence. Worse, it could be an excuse for those same family members to place even more severe restrictions on their freedom of movement.

If women are choosing to wear the veil because they personally subscribe to the belief that their bodies must not be exposed, such a ban is tantamount to punishing women for observing her own conscientiously chosen form of religious dress. Absent clear danger to others (for example, if the clothing in question required knives to be carried), an individual's choice to observe their religious beliefs through their clothing is not a matter for state interference.

All kinds of people express all kinds of contempt for women. Some of them even get to write in national newspapers or be celebrated statesmen. If the veil is also often used to express contempt for women, the solution isn't to punish the very women on whom the main burden of that contempt falls.

This proposed ban doesn't promote gender equality. It really isn't about women's well-being at all. It's about using Muslim women as pawns to express hostility to Islam.

Avatarred

[WARNING: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]

Yeah, okay, the CGI was amazing, and on the whole it was entertaining enough.

But now that we've got that out of the way...

Much of the film was distractingly silly, in a way that relates directly to its political failings. A great deal has been said, very masterfully (especially by Annalee Newitz), about the problematic colonial 'saviour' fantasy playing out in Avatar, so I went into the cinema with probing Magical beak at the ready.

(To dispose of this objection quickly: the film features human beings from a corporation backed by armed might who seek, out of a profit motive, to relocate a racially distinct indigenous population with cultural features strongly recalling stereotypical representations of native Americans, namely war paint, 'feathered' clothing, and bows and arrows. If anyone still wishes to argue the film-makers don't specifically invoke colonialism - an intertwined complex of racism, militarism and capitalism - please do so elsewhere.)

The weakest aspect of the story is that Jake Sully, who initially comes as part of the invading force, is apparently divinely ordained as The One who will lead the indigenous people, the Na'vi, to success in their struggle against humanity. Two issues with his portrayal really leap off the screen.

One is the astounding, untenable ignorance with which he approaches the Na'vi and their planet, Pandora. This just defies belief: he goes wandering into a completely alien forest, in a completely alien body, without the faintest clue about the completely alien perils he might face. He wanders off mid-mission to poke completely alien plants that - for all he knows - might eat or poison him; and when faced with gargantuan and dangerous animals he hasn't the foggiest how he ought to respond to them, so he shoots randomly. Despite the enormous expense they have incurred to transport him to Pandora and kit him out in this new blue body, none of his employers sees fit to ground him in even the most basic facts about the hostile environment in which they want him to operate, nor does he - apparently entirely lacking in curiosity - ask.

This is the guy your amazing life-force-embodying-tree-goddess, allegedly calling upon the cumulative wisdom of thousands of sentient beings of times past, chooses to lead the people? ...and specifically, this guy is chosen over the careful, respectful, interested scientist Grace Augustine, for inclusion in the Na'vi community?

Second, the inevitable counterpart to Jake Sully's ignorance is the collapse of the Na'vi into a cartoonish bunch of mystics. There's a lot to be said for the attractiveness of their culture, like the respect for life and biodiversity, but it all becomes undermined by the film-maker's Super Duper Top Priority, i.e. that Jake Sully must be the one to lead them to victory. Quite aside from the fact that at the time of his selection by the floating seeds he appears to be totally, wilfully clueless, there's also the manner in which his eventual leadership is established. Are the film-makers genuinely telling us that in a society where mastering the flying Toruk brings pre-eminence, no one for generations other than this n00b has successfully completed the relatively simple task of flying above it and dropping onto its back? Moreover, the story implies that the Na'vi are so utterly simple-minded that they'll immediately accept not just the help but the leadership of a traitor whose deception and betrayal have just destroyed their sacred home, just so long as he turns up on the back of this red dragon.

This ridiculousness, again, has its source in the imperative that this member of the colonising force must be the one who leads the oppressed people to victory. The film-makers are simply more interested in the colonisers than the colonised, and this ideological perspective warps an otherwise promising story. It's also for this reason that the audience never gets to meet Na'vi who aren't members of the royal family, or to witness any complex dynamics within Na'vi society (by contrast to tensions within the human camp). Heroism is not available to the oppressed group.

All of this makes the movie less believeable, less interesting and less meaningful than it could have been. In other words, it's not critics of Avatar's approach to colonialism and racism who are spoiling the story with their politics. The film-makers have been more than adequate at doing that themselves.

++++

I am indebted to conversation with Badly Drawn Pig, who astutely points out that this problem may inhere in the very concept of "The One" to begin with, especially when "The One has traditionally always been a dude ... here to save all us sissies".

Put a ring on it

Here is Lee Kuan Yew talking to Mark Jacobson of National Geographic, in an interview which showcases a wide array of Lee Kuan Yew's characteristically bizarre opinions. (Special mention must go to the persistent spectre of the "disloyal" Muslim Singaporean, and to the idea that citizens are workhorses who need "spurs" to be put to their "hides".) But what particularly caught my Magical eye is how Lee Kuan Yew channels Beyonce.

All the single ladies, all the single ladies...
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it.

He really can't stand the fact that there are single women running around out there, doing their thing and living their lives without official state assignation to a man. It gets his goat something awful. The idea that a woman might have plans for her life that are more important to her is besides the point: indeed, it's a nuisance. She can't be trusted to know what's good for her.

I’m undergoing physiotherapy because I had a fall on the bicycle, so I’m stuck there for one hour talking to the physiotherapist [...] she was 32-years-old. I said are you married. She said no. I said you shouldn’t leave it too late. She said well, I haven’t found the right person. I said how is that? you are meeting fellow nurses, you better join, you have got a social development unit where you meet men above board, they are looking for spouses, you are looking for spouses and you meet in groups, unless you decide we are friends, and you want to cultivate a closer relation, and she said no, no, no, I'm a Christian, that limits my choice to 20 per cent of the population and we meet in Church.

If someone hasn't found the right person to marry, then they shouldn't be married. It's not a crime, it's not a failing, it's not a problem. It's just what happens. It's also none of your business.

Once the women are educated, they have equal job opportunities, some of them earning as much if not more than men, there is a certain independence of choice. I mean they say what’s the hurry? Singlehood is no burden, my daughter is 55, unmarried, mother has been nagging her when she was in her 30s, she's quite happy. [...] I've got two boys who have got grandchildren but I feel sad for her. Because when my wife is gone and I'm gone, this hotel which keeps her going. She will have to manage it.

She's independent. She's a hugely successful doctor! She's - in his own words - happy! But he has to "feel sad for her" because it's not her - the person - and what she wants out of life that matter: it's whether she fulfils Lee Kuan Yew's master plan for the destiny of female reproductive units.

We can't undo women's education, equal job opportunities. But the whole problem springs as I was talking to this physiotherapist, I said suppose you were not educated to a point where you are independent, your mother and father would have got you matched off. [...] Father and mother will look for another father and mother with an appropriate background, no inherited diseases and similar social affluence and then they marry them off, they get them together and meet and no objections and then you are married. Then you love the man, or you love the woman you marry. But she's educated and she's thinking of a degree in physiotherapy and upgrading herself and so...

As a matter of fact, women don't yet have equal opportunities for social and economic participation (see here and here for starters). But even to the extent we do: these opportunities are part of the basic requirements for humane society. They aren't optional and you shouldn't lament being unable to "undo" them.

You'll note, for example, that he doesn't for a moment speculate about denying all men education and career opportunities so that they might be required to stay at home and bring up the kids of their financially successful wives - even though that might also bring birth rates up. The suggestion that we should solve any problem by deliberately sequestering men at home is ludicrous and unacceptable on its face - and it should be equally so when it applies to women.

When you characterise women's education as some kind of unfortunate historical residue...

When you daydream wistfully about starting over again without it...

When you talk of putting women on conveyor belts heading into arranged marriage and complete financial dependence, and expect the woman you address (who has already stated her desire to choose her own partner and further her career) to respond to this with anything other than complete rejection...

When you do these things, your fantasies are grounded in seeing women as subhuman.

This fetishisation of marriage is degrading enough even before you consider that the state he exalts is one of permanent rapeability for women (to say nothing of society's failure to take seriously other forms of domestic abuse).

Single ladies don't like it. Put a sock in it.

People we love: Molly Meek

An inspiration to this farmland fowl, Molly Meek is the original furry dissident. In The Importance of Being Bitchy she calls for less mealy-mouthed, status-quo-reinforcing pseudo-balance in favour of more full-blooded animal spirit.

What do we have then? We have vocal activists and opposition politicians (though not that many of them). We also have those who, interpellated by the State’s seductive call, fancy themselves balanced, rational, constructive critics who, more often than not (and I think they might lash their constructive whips on me here) spout wishy-washy pseudo-criticisms and are on stand-by 24/7 to cane those whom they deem unreasonable, i.e truly political. “You must be fair to the PAP. Not everything they do is wrong.” These are the people who believe that when you have a kilogram of criticism, you must balance it with a kilogram of praise and acknowledgement of good work. (Admittedly, this is an exaggeration, but do I not have the right to use hyperbolic language to make a point, however imbalanced and unfair it is?)

What we need are Political Uber-bitches. And what they need is some real space in which to exist, not an abyss in which they are constantly hurled prescriptions of sedatives to cure them of their perceived excesses.

In bold is a perfect description of the people who make me want to punch walls. (Disclaimer: no walls were harmed in the making of this post.) Their obstructionism is only ever placed in the way of those who are trying to make things better. Never is it directed at those silent and invisible but nevertheless tangible and forceful - even violent - forces that keep the burdens of prejudice, abuse and deprivation where they are.

"It is a good aim in theory, but your methods are bad," they utter from a reclining position on a sedan chair, never raising so much as a little finger in service of any allegedly superior methods to promote the aims they supposedly support.

Kudos to Molly for turning those sharp feline eyes onto this.

What it Says About You

Today I witnessed a discussion about whether differing viewpoints on LGBTQ rights should be a dealbreaker in a heterosexual relationship. Points such as "it only affects us by extrapolation/if our kids turn out to be gay" and "it's an intellectual disagreement" came up.

So, I write to offer my unsolicited advice.

If I have to explain to someone why people whose sexualities fall outside of the one man-one woman norm should also be granted the same legal rights to marriage and adoption, then that someone to me isn't someone worth spending time with. LGBTQ (and everything in between) rights is not a subject for intellectual discourse because anyone arguing against the provision of such rights are arguing against the humanity of the people involved. It is also a stunning display of privilege that is frankly acutely unattractive (since when were your rights brought up over drinks as a point of intellectual debate?).

Monogamous hetereosexual people may feel that they are not affected by whether those who fall into other categories are seen as full people under the law. But that's not true. Their humanity is affected by the opinion they hold on whether a person's humanity can be decided by referendum. I'll make it simple for you - it can't. My humanity is not up for discussion, neither is anyone else's and if you feel differently then I question how much you have considered the world around you and how much you have decided that you, by virtue of an accidental alliance, should be entitled to so much more than anyone else.

A few weeks ago Senator Diane Savino spoke eloquently of how us heterosexual folk have squandered our right to marry by constantly making a mockery of the institution of marriage itself. She followed it up with a breathtaking description of the very human people who are denied this by an arbitrary and cruel standard enforced by prejudice and by nothing else. If you can, please take the time to watch it now (full transcript here):

A quote from the video:

You know I’ve also been lobbied, quite interestingly, on this bill by people on both sides. I’ll tell you one funny story. I was on 6th avenue in Manhattan, I was in my car, I was driving, make a left turn onto 52nd street, I was stopped at a light, I had my window open. And a young man on a pedicab stopped and stuck his head in the window of my car, which I thought was kind of strange. But he recognized the senate license plate on my car and this was right during the week that the assembly was taking up the vote earlier this year.

And he said to me, "Excuse me, is there going to be a gay marriage vote in Albany this week?"

And I said, "Yes, the assembly’s going to take it up, but the senate probably won’t take it up any time soon, I’m not sure when."

And he said, "Are you going to vote for it?" and I said, "Yes I am", and he said, "Why?"

And I said, "Because I believe that people should be able to share their life with whomever they want and the role of government is to administer that contract that they agree to enter into."

And he stopped and said, "But they’re changing the definition of marriage."

And I said, "Don’t get so excited about this marriage stuff." I said, "Think about this, we just met, you and I right here at the stoplight. You stuck your head in the window of my car. Do you know tomorrow we could go to City Hall, we could apply for a marriage license, and we could get married, and nobody there will ask us about the quality of our relationship or whether we’ve been committed to each other or any of those things. They will issue that marriage license and we can get married."

And he said, "Yes, that’s true."

I said, "Do you think we’re ready for that kind of commitment?"

And he stopped and he said, "I see your point."

Human rights shouuld not be up to a vote, neither should they be subject to discussion. I would not piss to put out a fire on someone who disagrees - they have demonstrated to me how they feel about the humanity of others, leaving me free to disregard theirs.