Sorry…Actually, your entry made me laugh ;)

Who goes to vacation and worry about the political situation? Pretty strange to see you worrying about Singapore where it has the most stable political system in Asia. You should worry about whether your family or children would be safe when you vacationing..over here you can even walk alone by yourself, even as a single lady :)

There are so many 3rd world countries in the world where they have so much social chaos and political problems in their countries, so why you are so concern over a developed country’s political system like Singapore? It just like if we were to travel to a developed country like U.S., isn’t it a joke if I were to worry what George bush’s doing for his country?

If millions of tourists here are not concerned on the politics, and esp the locals, so why are you? Strange..

Then few hours later, you came up with another entry of Singapore again that you want to come here once you finish your study…What’s up with that? ..And why no info of the other countries that you listed but only Singapore? Hmmm..

I have spent at least 7 years of my life trying to define “democracy” and sigh, without much success alas. So I have since become very careful how I throw the term around.

I would therefore interpret your neat little quote from a long-ago drug-trafficking Yippie as trying to say this : “That decent governments treat their dissidents decently; that we should not applaud governments that only treat decently those who support them.”

I like the way it sounded. It certainly would be preferable if we decide to go against the Establishment (for whatever reason) to know that we could get away with it. Even if other people who disagree with us should be inconvenienced while we’re at it. Yeah boy, some days you win, some days I do :-). And may the loudest (always)win.

And you are certainly right that we cannot compare the USA and Singapore. One is very big and the other very small. The former is 200 years older and has as many times more issues at hand. It’s also a weird country (to small-minded me) where criminals could write a book about themselves and earn lots of money and fans. Certainly a land whose streets are paved with gold.

Besides, you can have a million dissidents in the USA and ferret half of them secretly out of the country to be dealt with somewhere else and nobody is any the wiser. In Singapore, you have one dissident and everyone knows him :-).

But I still do not see the reason for this dig. What did Singapore do to our (political) dissidents (what a dissident is is another discussion I will not enter into now)? Did we poison them, imprison them, kill them, put them under house arrest? Not as far as I know. Whereas Hoffman, by the way, was jailed and was a fugitive before that.

A dissident in Singapore will probably be sued to bankruptcy for defamation and whether the judiciary is questionable will be presumptious for outsiders to imply. And what is money when you are still alive to fight your battle another day? Besides people usually have a soft spot for underdogs, Singaporeans are no different :-).

But he’ll more likely just hang around to bide his time, for the country is young, always evolving, perpetually undergoing change.

Most of them usually attempt to push through their agenda through the legitimate political process, for if you are alone in your battle, you would do better to stand on a chair in a corner of Hyde Park and bother only those who happen to be there.

And there is a political process in Singapore, contrary to what our detractors insist on denying. Sometimes I get the impression that people do not want Singapore to progress politically, that what they really want is for the people to all go against the Government (who for all its faults has been doing a good job) and experience chaos like almost everywhere else.

And why the hell should outsiders keep telling us what we should do and how we should live? Especially when we are doing pretty well ourselves, no thank you.

And what amazed me too is the fact that some should see the stones in other people but miss out the rock in their own eyes. In the 1st presidential elections, Bush manipulated the voting lists keeping Black and other coloured people from voting. These people are not even dissidents. They were just potential Democrat voters.

And what is a conformist? Someone who looks at a clean handkerchief and does not insist that it is bloodstained? Even dissidents in Singapore enjoy the same high standards of living as the “conformists”. At the very least Singapore treats her “conformists” well, for in many other countries people who “conform” need not necessarily have enough to eat, clean and safe streets or an equal chance to education, healthcare, employment and lodgings.

But it is good to have ideals and ideas and expose them, and I do applaud you for that. As long as I get the right to disagree :-).

PS : In Chinese culture, we have a little story of how a rock didn’t have a big hole in it because someone used a big hard thing to hit on it. It got its hole through days, weeks and months of little droplets of water falling onto it. The rock as such didn’t have big ugly cracks, but a smooth, unbroken surface with a nice hole in it :-).