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Saturday, Oct 15, 2011 - 23:54 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Nothing Doing

Had to pull a few scheduled updates due to an unanticipated invitation to go bowling today. Hadn't gone to the alley in ages, and it showed, with a five-game average of barely 110, and a high of near 150. Got to remind myself to begin with a 14-pound ball next time. It is a pity that bowling isn't free to play, and I therefore never found the heart to sacrifice some practice in search of technique. Basketball follows tomorrow.

Signed up for the New Paper Big Walk for the first time at Vivocity after that, and copped an XL T-shirt out of it. Personally, I would have loved an option to register online and collect the goodie bag on walkday itself, especially since they're handing out a second one after the event.


The Number Of What The

Mr. Ham is no help for the time being, still being involved in his shady overseas dealings. In that vein, I was slightly disappointed by the latest edition of The Epoch Times, a Falungong-affiliated broadsheet that occasionally gets disbursed to the free papers racks around campus.

It's good to have a handle on alternative views, and their dislike of the CCP is understandable, though their claim of over 100 million disavowing the party is perhaps a bit farfetched; I have to draw the line however at their factual presentation of a contributor recounting a 500 year-old sage curing him as a baby, and thereby silencing his "non-superstitious" father, that too with the front page of that section headlined by "Fortune-teller Saved My Life", and an inside page conflating the Biblical Beast (of triple-six vintage) with the Communist Party.

My sympathy for them went down a notch or two, but hey, they probably know their target audience.


A Second Occupation?

Some bright spark apparently attempted to instigate an Occupy Raffles Place protest in parallel with the (still going-strong) Occupy Wall Street protests going on in the USA. The lack of originality combined with some tut-tutting by the police resulted in a predictable lack of attendance.

As much as I feel certain aspects of local governance could be improved, I believe this does indeed largely show that residents are by and large satisfied. Cue our Prime Minister's past proclamation that "People support CPF cuts because there are no protests outside parliament.", which while probably not exactly correct, does hide a deeper truth - people are indeed not sufficiently riled up to protest, for since when has the threat of arrest and imprisonment, even under far more brutal regimes, been able to deter a sufficiently unhappy citizenry from rioting?

From a purely academic perspective, in the local context, what would the number of sufficiently aggrieved and determined people, who are willing to gather and stand with placards in a peaceable manner, sufficient to have an impact? Assume also that they are willing to put up token but non-violent resistance to arrest.

As the SDP has often found out to its detriment, ten or less is not quite enough, especially as the issues they raise in this manner are often not those that the populace at large cares very much about.

Proceeding through the orders of magnitude, a hundred people of conviction (whether misplaced or not) would certainly be newsworthy, and may well cause a slight headache on how to handle the protestors, especially if the issue taken up can elict sufficient resonance. Jailing so many at a go might well have repercussions, while letting them off could well embolden the protesters (a dilemma faced by the CCP, and resolved in a bloody manner at Tiananmen)

While a hundred might or might not be a headache, a thousand certainly would be, but more because a cause that manages to gather such a number likely has a significant minority sympathizing with it. This would probably require the army to come in, but it is not altogether clear what they could do and still retain the moral high ground.

Ten thousand is nigh-on unmanageable, if only because there wouldn't be enough room to keep them - that's roughly Singapore's entire prison population. Of course, these numbers refer to serious protestors, not rioters and looters of opportunity. Hopefully, we never get to know.

One strange thing about the Wall Street protests is that the participants often refer to themselves as "The 99%", with the implication that it is the richest 1% who are cheating everybody else out of their fair share.

Leaving aside the 98th percentile, let's examine a 90th-percentiler. His household net worth would be about US$1 million, which given an average household size of 2.6 (arguably probably smaller for richer households) would come out to a personal net worth of close to half a million.

So here we have a true-blue 99%-er, likely with a couple hundred grand in the bank and other investments, his own house mostly paid up (the net worth already excludes mortgages), iPhone in hand, driving up to the location of the demonstration and whipping out a "Poor Little Me" sign.


"99%!" (Source: arlingtoncardinal.com)


Hmm. Forgive me if I'm unconvinced. Now, if it were called "We are the 9% (or even 49%)..."

[N.B. One suspects that some of the complaints are satirical - for example, the one by a guy who says he may have no choice but to drop out of college for good because he has US$50k in student loan debt... but, but, but he has spent ten years in college. And he is only a junior (i.e. in his third year of classes). And then asks why society doesn't value teachers and social workers. See more here and here.]


Change To Be Believed In

I'm a lover of new discoveries, inventions and theories, such as (probably debatable) evidence for evolution in action (reminds me - saw nary a baby at NUH), pizza cones (yum), and the proposed Mexican earth-scraper that goes 300m below ground, something that Singapore might eventually want to look into; if it does come to fruition, I would seriously consider making a trip down just to visit it (if computers hadn't been invented, I might well have studied to be an architect after all).


Mr. Robo (standing in for Mr. Ham) (0/600 seeds): Tottenham to beat Newcastle (at 2.30)

FAKEBERT (684/600 seeds): Chelsea to beat Everton (at 1.30)



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Next: Many Faces


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4 comments

anonymous said...
fuck you one of your links don't work
u make blog how long liao still make schoolboy error never check your own fucking links u chao chee bye


October 17, 2011 - 13:06 SGT     
gilbert said...
Eh that's Mr. Ham's job. So irresponsible of him. I will dock his pay dun worry


October 17, 2011 - 16:06 SGT     
anonymous said...
everytime blame mr ham mr ham, dun ham ji leh u
stop hiding leh u chee bye bastard


October 22, 2011 - 08:21 SGT     
gilbert said...


October 22, 2011 - 11:11 SGT     

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