Regional currencies take a beating.

For all the talk about Syria for the moment, let's zoom onto something local. For those who don't quite follow financial news of this particular region, South-East Asian currencies have taken a beating of late, bringing up shades of the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis. Very interesting indeed. Zerohedge has reported that the Thai baht, Indonesian rupiah and Malaysian ringgit have all taken huge losses; I know for a fact that the ringgit - traditionally at about 2 to the Singapore dollar - is now about 2.5 now.

The Singaporean dollar has remained quite stable, even during the 1997 crisis, so it means stuff just got quite a bit cheaper both to the north and south of the country, whether it be across the Causeway or on a ferry ride to Batam. It's certainly interesting, considering how most things I follow seem comfortably away on the other half of the planet...until ripples start trickling down here.

Wonder when the ripples will turn into genuine aftershocks.

Commencement.

Just got back from the commencement ceremony.

It was vile.

Disgusting.

Abhorrent.

The opening video was one of our Dear Leader LKY receiving a honourary doctorate of law at the Istana (our equivalent of your White House) earlier this year. Why this was shown, I have no idea.

The guest speaker was a regional manager for a petroleum company. She pontificated at length about her "work-life balance", which involved outsourcing the raising of her three children to her mother and mother-in-law, as well as their nanny, of which she openly bragged that her children regarded their nanny as another mother. This was followed by exhortations for men to do more in the home (we know you ladies don't really find us sexy when we do dishes) and "support their wives' careers", while urging the women to "find the bravery" to "reach top positions in the corporate world".

The dean's speech was little better, blathering on about how climate change was threatening the world, the roles of engineers in building social justice, blah blah blah blah diversity blah blah discrimination blah blah blah -

At least the valedictorian's speech was just a teeny bit less politically charged, although he gushed and bubbled over at how university was a great experience for him and how we should follow our hearts and everything which Cappy Cap points out is a big bull of crock you should not be paying thousands of dollars a semester for.

A big portion of what's wrong with modern society, squeezed into the small space of two hours. It's enough to make a man feel ill.

I can't wait for higher education and this society to crumble to dust.

Joblessness.

It's about noon. The phone rings.

It's my sister, calling from the other half of the world. She asks for my mother, but there's time to chat for a minute or so. We discuss what's happened in Egypt, and after that, she asks the following:

"Has anyone called you up for an interview yet?"

"No."

Awkward silence.

"It's all about networking, you know."

I resist the urge to tell her how much I hate "networking", and essentially how pointless and fake it is, with no relation whatsoever to how well a job is done. I resist the urge to channel Cappy Cap at her.

I pass the phone to my mother, and go and get dressed. Time to spend the afternoon with my old navy friends.

Most of my navy friends, when I go out with them on our bimonthly trips, won't talk about whether they have jobs, either. At least, those who went to college, instead of those who entered the workforce immediately after leaving the armed forces.

"Have you got a job yet?" the guys ask one another.

"No, I haven't," is the uniform reply.

"Those damned mainland Chinese," someone says not quite under their breath.

End of conversation. No one wants to continue. They sip at their beer; I sip at my tea. A few commiserations are offered by those who didn't go to college, and are waved off with forced smiles. The conversation soon turns to girls and old navy days, two topics that're always safe. We finish our time together, and I down the customary half-mug of beer.

"See you in the morning," they say with a laugh.

I catch a train home, the beer settling uneasily in my gut. Walk the rest of the way to the door, and push it open to find my mother seated in front of the televitz.

"Have you found a job yet?"

"No," I say. "I'm still looking."

"You should find one anyway."

"I know," I reply. "If I don't find something in my field by August, I'll go get a small job. Something to start the money flowing before I can find something that I'm more suited to."

My mother nods and turns back to the talking heads on TV.

The End.

I will admit, I have gained a faith-based belief, if only to help assuage the damp pallor of moroseness which seems to hang about me like a cloud these days.

I call it "the end".

Now, while there are plenty of signs pointing to the distinct possibility that we are heading towards "the end", no one can tell with surety what "the end" will look like exactly, nor when it will come. That's all right, I acknowledge that my version of "the end" is merely a pleasant fantasy to keep me going and improving myself in preparation for when the real end comes. I hold no illusions that said preparations will actually carry me through whatever befalls the world in the future, but I will be as prepared as it is possible for "the end", materially, physically, and mentally.

My fantasies of "the end" are varied in nature, but generally can be summed up as such: "It's like watching a packed clown car get crushed by a train in slow motion while a blood-stained rubber shoe flies in the air and there are sad honking noises all over."

"The end" will not be pretty, but it will be hilarious in a twisted sort of way.

For those with a linear view of time, "the end" is horrifying to even consider, for what comes after that? Nay, the Machine must progress, the Machine must progress, the Machine must progress.

For those with a cyclical view of time, "the end" is merely "the beginning".

Cough cough.

The haze from Indonesian forest fires continues to plague the rest of South-East Asia. The problem, unfortunately, has been compounded by the lack of rain over the last few days, causing what looks like fog to hang over the sky at all times, with a slight scent of ash to the air.

I've mentioned before that one of the nice things about living in Singapore is the generally clean environment, especially with regards to air quality. For all the laws and regulations we put up in our own backyard, there's as much chance of stopping the haze coming from burning forest as there is of, say, stopping Fukushima radiation from reaching the West Coast.

And the Indonesian government's response?

 

Well. Perhaps we should forgive criminals, because they had so many other chances to commit crimes and didn't do so? Shall we have someone tally up the positives of all good and evil deeds both real and in absentia, and then weigh one against the other?

Then again, reading about Indonesian politics, it has never been quite on the straight and narrow. One of my seniors described to me the difficulties inherent in doing business there; the number of palms to grease and people to play golf with just to safely secure one shipment of coal is astounding.

Mrrrph. I'm taking the time spent indoors to catch up on my reading and coding, but my feet get itchy. Man is not made to sit under a roof all day.

On social shame and punishment.

Been reflecting on this in the past day or two:

"Lead through policies, discipline through punishments, and the people may be restrained but without a sense of shame. Lead through virtue, discipline with the rites, and there shall be a sense of shame and conscientious improvements."

- Analects, Chapter 2, verse 3.

Thinking back to when I was sixteen or thereabouts, longtime readers of this blog (do I have any?) will remember that the complete narcissist of a principal who headed my school at the time mandated that every student join a uniformed youth organisation for the ostensible purpose of "promoting leadership". By some freakish coincidence, my class was the first to have this inane rule apply to them, so during the four years I was in secondary school (your rough approximation would be junior high), I was able to track quite keenly the...ah, decline of the uniformed youth organsiations during my time there.

We have so much to learn.

Today, having nothing better to do after searching through the regular job listings (and finding no more positions to my liking), I had a bit of time and decided to go learn how to do a little jar canning. While I may not have the tools to put what I learned in practice, thanks to pressure canners being a bit rare in this country, it was nevertheless interesting to learn it as a how-to, as well as how to do a canning/pickling mix that can be done for vegetables without advanced equipment and no more additives than some vinegar.

And all I had to do was to input a few keystrokes into my computer to get the information at hand, complete with video demonstrations.

Next, since I'm looking to grow a beard, I went ahead and looked up some resources for trimming and general care for facial hair, as well as some styles that would look prim and proper on my lip and chin. Again, this information was summoned up in mere moments from the comfort of my home. Not exactly world-changing information on a grand scale, but it's world-changing information on a small scale.

Isn't it fascinating? The ancients revered the Great Library of Alexandra, and even we today recognise its burning as one of the greatest blows to civilisation of the day. Today, we have information amounting to what, hundreds? Thousands? of times, and people are too...distracted, to put it kindly, to peruse it.

Is it a greater tragedy if a library is burned by a malicious hand, or if it's allowed to crumble to dust through disuse?

Singaporean delusions of democracy.

In the midst of the hoo-hah over the recent vaguely-worded "licensing framework" for "news sites" by the Singapore government, on which I have not really reported because frankly, people around these parts have been half-expecting some attempt at internet censorship by now.

What I found interesting in particular, is this:

And then ask yourself: why should you, as a citizen of this country, be subject to such state-imposed fear? Why should those who should be your servants in turn lord over your very right to speak up – a right which is guaranteed in our Constitution?

Ask yourself: why should a bunch of unelected bureaucrats in a statutory board have such immense power over you?

[...]

Article 14 (1) (a) of the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore guarantees that “every citizen of Singapore has the right to freedom of speech and expression”.

We must not let this right be so easily usurped by unelected bureaucrats, without any engagement, discussion, debate or dialogue. For if we do, then what is the value of our Constitution and what it guarantees us as citizens, especially if you cannot even post comments on websites?

Surely, it is not the intent of our Constitution to forbid this.

 Let me draw attention to a couple of phrases: "unelected bureaucrats in a statutory board" and "usurped by unelected bureaucrats without any engagement, discussion, debate or dialogue". Hell, let's narrow it down even more to one word:

"Unelected".

Has that sunk in yet?

"Unelected". Say that three times, then turn around and clap your hands.

"Un-elected".

Now, fellow Singaporeans, let's imagine that there was an election tomorrow, and you threw all the MPs out of parliament through the ballot box. Let's imagine that happened without any shenanigans pulled like what happened during the recent Malaysian elections. Let's imagine that, say, the Worker's Party or whichever joke of an opposition party formed the new government, hurray hurray, stick a flag in it, it's done.

Who is going to oversee your CPF?

Who is going to overlook your Medisave and Medishield?

Who makes the laws that govern your lives? It's definitely not the MPs in any substantive amount.

Who controls the media?

Who makes sure the buses and trains run on time?

Etc, etc, etc...

Can you vote them out? Oh no, you can't.

Can the government you voted in root them all out and throw them out of their positions, even if it wanted to? As likely as Elvis suddenly reappearing in the middle of the desert like some B-horror/SF movie.

Democracy and the power of the ballot box is the biggest delusion of our modern age, and it's not hard to see why: it allows people to operate under the belief that they have some control over their fate. You voted? Then you endorsed the system and have to accept the result. You didn't vote? Then you have no right to complain, aye?

What a pretty lie. If not for the fact that refusing to vote is an offence in Singapore, I wouldn't even bother.

"Hey man, I still think we can turn this around." That's what your vote says. Voting implies consent. It implies that you still believe in the system and are satisfied with your options. I'm not advocating apathy. I don't want you to stop caring. I want you to stop believing. I want you to withdraw your consent. The best thing you can do for your country - for the men around you, for the future - is to let the system tear itself apart.

- Jack Donovan.

The birds.

The elderly come down every morning with their songbirds. They walk down from their apartments somewhere around 6-7 am bearing huge cages meticulously woven from rattan; these hold as many as three of the little creatures within, chirping away. No mass-produced cold metal birdcages for these folks.

Being in that nebulous period where my coursework is done and I'm still seeking gainful employment, I've found time in the mornings to go down with a tin mug, buy a mugful of tea from the coffee shop, and then sit down on the benches by the playground to watch the old folks hang up their songbirds and sip at the stuff. No milk, no sugar.

It used to be the case, I hear, that there were whole parks around the country built for the sole purpose of songbird-keeping, with hundreds of metal poles for the elderly of the day to go about and hang their birdcages on, complete with pulleys so the birds could get some extra height. Of course, those parks are a thing of the past now - I have a few faint memories of seeing such parks when I was really young, but that's about it. Today, the old folks who still keep songbirds about my place have to use trees and stepladders for the same purpose.

I've tried talking to some of them, but while pleasant enough, they don't seem to be as gregarious or loquacious as my grandmother was. Offering to help carry their birdcages usually results in a gentle refusal, and so I've learned not to ask, but simply sit and watch. While interaction is little more than a nod and smile, and I could tell that my first few appearances did make the old folks uneasy, a couple weeks of being a semi-regular fixture has ameliorated that somewhat. It would be nice if they would talk to me, but talking to strangers, especially strange young men with wisps of a goatee, is probably right out in atomised Singapore.

And so it's just sitting down and listening to the songbirds. Birds are the one of the few things that are left uncorrupted in this world, I believe; it's a pity that Singapore is not exactly conducive to falconry, although it's practiced in Malaysia with the local birds of prey.

Singapore and the reaction.

I've heard it passed around some reactionary circles that Singapore is apparently some sort of reactionary paradise. It usually expresses itself as such:

Step 1: (varies)
Step 2: (varies)
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Singapore.

I know most of these people are generally much smarter than I am, but to hold up Singapore as some sort of reactionary ideal is well, misinformed. Take it from me, I've lived here for more than two decades.

To recap, the following arms of neoreaction are summed up by Nick B. Steves in the following diagram (click to expand):

While techno-commercialists are depicted here as not concerning themselves with tribe, an alternative offered by some of them is that shared pursuit of economic growth constitutes tribe and identity, and Singapore is held up as some kind of ultimate proof of concept for that.

Which I would like to contend, having lived on the ground: a) does the pursuit of economic growth really promote tribe - is it the only reason Singapore's situation came about? b) if so, then is it sustainable?

Singaporean Kindness Mascot gives up on "angry and disagreeable" Singaporeans, quits.

A little something something from this part of the world to build on my previous thoughts on the subject. It's always nice to be vindicated.

Seems like this fellow has got the idea. Well, at least some, if not all of it.

SINGAPORE: The Singapore Kindness Movement’s mascot, Singa the lion, has resigned.

In open letter, the lion mascot that was previously the Courtesy Lion, said it was "just too tired to continue facing an increasingly angry and disagreeable society.”

Having done the job for over 30 years, Singa noted that kindness should not be a campaign, but a part of values education, adding that “people in authority - at work, in school, at home and in government - should lead by example”.

"I suppose it's time for real people to step up, and for the mascot to step aside."

You can read the full letter off the linked article. I'll admit it actually manages to convey the weary tone of the mascot as if he'd been a real person, whether intentional or not, and the confusion as to why his long labours are fruitless in the end.

I sort of pity him, really.

A nation of me-toos.

Vox has just made a post about how entrepreneurs are vanishing in the western world, and I'm not surprised. With so many regulations and taxes choking small and medium enterprises, it's only natural that things end this way, with obvious repercussions for the economy.

Oddly enough, we appear to have similar problems, despite the Singaporean government being more friendly to startups than most. After all, if I had a great idea as a student and was willing to draft up a business plan for it, I could have conceivably have went and applied for a government grant of about ten thousand dollars to help me get started. Not that much, admittedly, but when you're a small startup every dollar is going to count. We don't have that many regulations choking us (yet), and the environment is still quite pro-business.

Maybe I should have phrased myself better: our problem isn't so much that there aren't so many start-ups. It's that almost all of them fizzle into nothingness. Singapore has only one truly big name to its fame: Creative. Oh, and that star has long since- well, it hasn't merely set, more like faded into obscurity with a whimper. Just compare the sale of iPods verses Zens, and that should speak for itself.

Rainfall collecting - experimentation.

Today I woke up just in time to see dark clouds gathering on the horizon for an incipient thunderstorm. Rain was imminent in about fifteen to twenty minutes, considering it was already drizzling, and although this usually means it's the kind of day where I can stay in bed while I can help it, today I had a small experiment to perform.

For science. And survival. And science, of course.

For this experiment, I required a small frame which I'd put together over the last couple of days. Nothing fancy, just three comparatively short lengths of bamboo lashed together in a U-shape and a sheet of plastic about a couple of square meters in area. Next came two plastic stools as support.

Added to this were three identical five-liter buckets I temporarily purloined from my mother's laundry supplies, and armed with these, I headed downstairs where there was a reasonably open area.

Going off the narcotic drip.

I don't rightly remember when I stopped watching television. It was a gradual process, I gather; even though I'd never really been enthralled with the glowing picture box, I followed the occasional serial drama and cartoon series as a kid. (God, was Animaniacs cool.) But as the years wore by, the already low appeal of the televitz declined even further. Those moving pictures failed to inspire activity in my mind, and I got bored as a natural consequence. Watching television was a little - no, far too passive for my tastes. Just sitting, watching, and being numbed wasn't quite that appealing, and there was far too much trash to make waiting for the few things that interested me a worthwhile activity.

When I was thirteen, the internets exploded onto the scene with the acquisition of a 56k dial-up modem by my family. Now that was more interesting, for the simple reason that it was interactive, rather than the steady brain-rotting stream of passivity that was the televitz. Then again, even books like the fantasy novels I read (and still read, despite pollution by "my hot sexy paranormal boyfriend #342348") require some sort of user involvement in turning the words on a page into action in one's mind. When you read non-fiction, you're generally compelled to think and reflect on what you've just comprehended. With the internet, I didn't have to wait for the program to get to the few bits I found interesting; I could just bring up what I was interested in when I wanted it.

And for someone who has as small a brain-attic as I do and who needs to resort to the way of the engineer, the lumber-room of the internet is a godsend. Need a common counterargument for a point? Got it saved. Need a reference? Got that saved too. Need...I think you get my drift.

It's fun. It's engaging. And once you start running, you generally don't want to stop. When you find better, you develop a natural resistance to going back.

Same thing with video games. Sure, they were fun, but I don't really feel I'm deriving a lot of joy these days from running on a treadmill in a Skinner box. Besides, the quality of games these days from the big companies has dropped perceptibly, especially the AAA titles. For the last six months at least, most video games aren't cutting it for me any more; my spare hours are spent bouncing from blog to blog, article to article, book to book. Video games...sure, every now and then, but to the extent I used to play them when I was flapping about aimlessly in the wind?

Once you yank yourself off the drip, once you experience life, who would want to go back?

Once you have something better, why go back to something worse?

Especially when you can laugh at the world and throw rocks at it from the safety of your box while everything burns?

Well, seems like credentialism is alive and well despite the world economy slowly sinking.

Have a gander at this, folks.

Desire vs. Morality.

I've written before on how I've had the desire to lead others, yet fallen short when it comes to exericising that desire due to my pig-headed unwillingness to use coercive force to compel others to my will.

Sometimes, I get bored and read the blogs of other young manosphere denizens like me, folks in their early 20s, and when I read about some of their goals and what they're building themselves towards, such as establishing a harem, I catch myself thinking "more power to them, but I could never quite do this."

Not that I don't have the desire to - I'm sure every straight, hot-blooded male has fantasised about being waited on hand and foot by a gaggle of HB 10s.

An outlet for pain.

Koanic stresses that Koans need a way of letting go of pain and negative feelings. Telling yourself things like "view every setback as a positive experience" may work in the short run, he points out in one of his videos, but without an outlet for the pain experienced by one's setbacks, dissonance eventually sets in between your hardware and software. As strong as you are, all this bottled-up crap will in all likelihood cause you to stop using a bad Koan altogether. Lying to yourself generally isn't a smart thing to do.

I'd like to suggest that this can be extended to life in general.

Singaporean animosity towards "foreign talent" increases.

Seems to me that the whole immigrant issue in Singapore has been heating up, uniting the local Chinese, Indians and Malays in their resentment. Nothing to bring a diverse people together like an external enemy, eh?

 

One fairly new example would be the resentment against Indian immigrants for supposedly giving preference to their fellow Indian nationals for jobs, passing over even the local Singaporean Indians.

"He said that his Indian company in Singapore did not have any Singaporean employees because their boss wants to save more for money for himself, and thus, he said, with approval of the MOM, the boss went to India to hire them."

Hmm, hiring even skilled professionals from foreign countries because they'll work for peanuts. Where have we seen this before? Note that Singapore does not have a minimum wage (not that I'm advocating for one, it's just an observation), so there's a lot less stigma over cheap foreign labour staying here.

Employment exclusion has been a thorn in the Singaporean anti-immigration side for a little while now, with more and more cases popping up recently - like Phillippines' Jollibee fast food chain setting up in Singapore, which supposedly also discriminates against Singaporean employees in favour of Filipinos, a lot of Singaporeans are discovering a whole lot of ways in which they're being held down by foreigners, although to be honest, foreigners in Singapore have been doing the exact same thing they've been doing for the past couple of decades. Domestic maids didn't just pop into existence within our homes overnight, and now that there's not enough pie to go around for everyone to gorge themselves silly, the locals are saying they were at the table first.

Guess the rules are quick to change when there isn't enough to go around, eh? "They took our jerbs!" has been a rallying cry of the masses since time immemorial.

Now there's another anti-immigration protest planned on May 1 -  or labour day, to be exact.

Of course, there's the other side of the equation, with those against immigration being lambasted as xenophobic and racist.

In the end, though, the whole argument is moot; the government will do what it wants anyways and everyone else be damned. This whole thing is just hilarious to watch.

Consideration.

I have this group of five or six guys (the last one keeps on drifting in and out of the circle) from my navy days. We get together twice a month at a coffeeshop of our choosing, get ourselves settled, and talk the night away - with six or seven folks, it's usually easy to keep the conversation going, and if not there's always the good old fallback of navy days.

For reference, here's an example of a Singaporean coffeeshop, complete with locals watching a game on the televitz:

As far as I know, we are the whole of the alt-right red-pill thinkers in Singapore, six or seven men in a country of 5.3 million people. Sounds pretty miniscule when the rest of the country seems to be united in demanding more cheese and free stuff from the government, but we move forward somehow.

Now, four of us are smokers. Although we tend to sit in the open-air areas, where smoking is technically allowed by law, my fellows know what smoke of any sort does to my airways and are more than willing to step away from the table to light up. I realise that, and appreciate the thought.

They also know what alcohol does to my system, so for the entirety of the night I nurse dark black coffee at sixty cents a cup while they pass around bottles of beer. Funny thing is, when it's almost time to depart, they always leave about half a mug of the stuff in the last bottle and pass it along to me expectantly.

And knowing full well what it does to me (albeit with no lasting effects I've been able to discern over the years), I down it to the last drop.

Next morning, I usually get at least a couple of text messages asking if I've thrown up yet.

It's all in good fun. We all accommodate each other of our own free will, with no idiots pushing for laws to ban smoking on private property just because they don't like it; our government does that well enough. People are actually - wait for it - considerate in this tiny group of ours. And hey, what's a couple of hours of feeling quite miserable if a bunch of people you care about get a genuine laugh and smile out of it?

Heh.

The magic of Singaporean multiculturalism.

Recently, I was directed to a post on society and human biodiversity theory, and it mentions Singapore as an example. Naturally, I find it somewhat interesting how people from the outside view this wonderful little benevolent dictatorship, since it's hard to see the outside of a box when you're sitting in it, and devoured it quite well.

In the post, the author discusses the issue of Hierarchial Integration of different races, and the potential problems within. While he does get some of the facts wrong (from my on-the-ground perspective, anyways), I have to agree with him in general on most of the points that were raised about the problems with Hierarchial Integration, and why Singapore is an interesting case. After all, it's the few places in the world where you can have a church and a mosque lying peacefully a few streets away from each other and the residents don't have their heads explode from the sheer impossbility of it all.

There are a few things he does get wrong, though, and I'd like to expand on them: