3/28/2011
A small flood!
A small flood in Orchard Road and Singaporeans kpkb non stop. What kind of attitude is that? Can't Singaporeans take a small unusual occurrence and live with it, and move on? A small flood is actually good as it shows the fragility of the system. It also wakes people up to scurry for better solutions. Things will improve after the flood.
How about a little flood in Parliament? I mean figuratively of course. The small flood can come in the form of a few more opposition candidates getting elected into Parliament. Now would Singaporeans start to kpkb? Or would there by hysteria?
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9 comments:
Quite unlikely to have a heavy damaging flood, however, it shall depend on the weather, oops i mean the voters.
How big a flood shall depend on the people. If a small flood is good in a little awakening.
A big one will rock up everybody.
patriot
If there is a small flood, that is a small step for Singaporeans, but a big awakening for the leaders.
I am all for it.
Nay, it show the fragility of the individual thinking.
Because of certain changing physical conditions in the planets climatology, extreme weather has been (statistically) predicted over the next 18 months or so.
Bitching about it is just plain neurotic.
Matilah, my first para is only a leading scenario. The gist is in the second para.
Restating my often mentioned plans for parliament – if I was the one to decide.
1. Dissolve parliament, sack everyone
2. Turn over parliament house to private developer proven to create value – like Ong Beng Seng or Far East, or Denis Foo (St James Power Station)
3. Convert parliament house into a rocking entertainment/ shopping venue with luxuary accommodation facilities.
Move parliament into a commercial warehouse or lease 1-3 floors of a commercial building. That is the max size of “government” a small city-state like Singapore needs. Nothing more.
If our leaders are courageous enough to take the blame and the "buck stops with them", perhaps, we would not kpkb and might even forgive them. But to draw million dollars salary annually and saying that "it only happens once every 50 years" is unacceptable. Afterall, it did happen many times in that few weeks when heavy rain fell on Singapore.
Ministers not taking responsibilities for Mas Selamat's escape, for the billions of taxpayers money that were lost due to poor investments, for high housing prices, for high inflation etc, would never ever happen in a fully democratic society like the UK, Australian, Japan and the US. Our leaders got to learn that their million dollars salaries come with responsibilities and also the option of resignation from the cabinet. Period.
Our leaders are getting too complacent in their highly placed thrones and need to be brought back to earth. The only way to do so is to have a sizeable number of opposition in the parliament.
anon728:
I think you suffer form the common affliction: the illusion of 'purity'.
In our day to day lives all of us "impure" beings manage to get on with relative ease and with only a few negative engagements with each other -- even without the police or the law or even the rest of society who will mostly remain strangers to us all of our lives (because of their sheer numbers) -- to scrutinise every aspect of our behaviour -- mostly "imperfect" even at the best of times.
Nonetheless, we are all 'accountable' for our actions to many "standards": to our friends, our families, our bosses, our co-workers, fellow members of groups, organisations and institutions we voluntarily join or associate ourselves with.
Should we do anything 'untoward' -- there are costs -- social costs we must bear. E.g say we steal from a friend or cheat at our job or slander a fellow member. We are summarily sanctioned and held accountable for our actions by our peers. There is no escape: to attain 'forgiveness' is to first admit the transgression, offer some recompense and then and ONLY then might we be forgiven and have our 'status' re-established in the group.
In such a social arrangement, no one is 'above' another in terms of what behaviour is morally 'good' or 'evil'. In day-to-day relationships, no one requires a PhD in philosophy to figure out whether someone has behaved badly or not.
And throughout this: No one in the group is (not limited to the errant person) -- or can claim to be -- morally pure -- at least all of the time. Everyone accepts that they are somehow 'flawed' and subject to the basic human desires -- which is why we need to not just look after each other, but from time to time police each other, within a framework of tolerance.
Now consider a high-raking government official -- a minister. The mechanism and claims made here are totally the opposite:
1. Ministers are fully accountable
2. Ministers are fully responsible
3. Ministers are morally superior with characters beyond reproach
4. Minister don't require 'forgiveness' because they have no social capital to lose (from the people)
5. Ministers are granted -- within their vast sphere of influence -- absolute power.
Thus to expect these folks to act morally is expecting too much. If they do act morally, good for all. If they don't -- can you really blame them?
Contracts
All our relationshiops are based on implicit and explicit contracts aka 'understandings'.
There are consequences if one breaches contracts -- even (and especially) the implicit ones. e.g. Friendship: impliit contract -- loyalty. If a party breaches that (implicit) contract there are consequences. "Consequences" are based on the idea of proportionality i.e. you betrayed my trust, therefore, my response is I don't speak to you/ refuse to associate further with you.
Question: Even if you argue correctly that there is an underlying contract govt officials must abide by...who then ENFORCES the contract and awards the consequences if the contract is breached?
The people? The courts? The supreme being of the universe?
No one, except their boss -- who also might be complicit and have a lot to lose himself. Thus the general case is that no one enforces the contracts nor the consequences -- they get away with it!
To hold them to a standard neither you nor I could possibly attain ourselves is being unreasonably judgmental and not cognizant of our own sort comings -- whic will definitely (count on it) come to the fore if we ourselves were given Absolute Power.
Thus it is the system more than it is the person which is the failure.
I think there is a general consensus in the air, excluding the govt camp, that demanding a few millions as salary and a lifetime pension after serving two terms in Parliament is bad behaviour.
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