Valusim

In a fit of boredom:

i have been (truly) inefficient

And as our dear Wenjie would ask, waydn? Have you been efficient? You haven’t? LIES.

The past few days have been spent going outside, rather serious slacking, facebooking, and watching PMQs.

That’s what I’d like to talk about. Britain’s Prime Minister’s Questions is a hallmark of the nation’s political maturity and societal awareness. It dated to somewhere in the 1950s I believe, where the need for debate arose after the confirmed fall from power of the Soverign and the nobility. Eventually the UK Parliament split into two Houses, the Upper (House of Lords) and Lower (House of Commons). The latter is the one holding de facto power (meaning actual power, and I did not kope this from everyone’s favourite encyclopaedia.)

Anyway, and I think we all know this, Labour (party) won the 05 elections once again, hence they got the chance to form the Cabinet and get their Prime Minister (then Tony, now Gordon) up into the governing bodies of state. Accountability and transparency is, to some extent at least, valued in the British political superstructure, hence the other parties also need a chance to project their influence in a manner that is fair and free.

Enter PMQ. It is a 30-minute, weekly session held every Wednesday, where the MPs (member of parliments) from various districts of Britain converge collectively as a House of Commons and “taro” the Prime Minister. In strictly layman terms, they get to “voice their opinions”. But it is a little more complicated than that.

The Prime Minister can speak for as long as he likes (generally), while the Leader of the largest opposition party (the Conservatives) has 6 supplementary questions. The LibDems, the second largest minority, has 2 questions. The Prime Minister and his side of the House (Labour), who won the most votes in the General Election, can be subject to inquiry and criticism. The other MPs get their turns, but those are considered minor.

I was intruiged when I first saw the most recent PMQ about the Baby P incident. I spent half a day watching all those available on the BBC website. The excitement, passion and intellect that these sessions manage to generate make for a very… inspiring form of governance. Of course there’s party bashing and all that, but that’s the best possible method of ensuring the Government stays relevant and not quell in ignorance and/or incompetence, a scene many single-party nations have successfully played out. (the Singapore govt is a rare exception.)

The way the Leaders of the opposition parties conduct themselves are also subject to nationwide observation – these have known to make or break careers. The reason why David Cameron (Conservative head) is increasingly popular is because of the amount of confidence he appears to have. His partisan rhetoric is distasteful but nevertheless effective in eroding the confidence in the current government.

As Gordon Brown rightly put it, “The opposition should listen and maybe they will learn something”.

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The writer does not blatantly exploit Wikipedia.

And here’s the only coherent PMQ by Margaret Thatcher available on the net. Her conviction and clout was her stamp on British politics, and… I am humbled. Here, she argues her case against a barrage of MPs and opposition leaders about the sovereignty of the UK and the power of the Sterling Pound.

freedom and the humanities

It seemed like the mood of our class was rather pensive, rather than liberated, after the HMT O-levels. No doubt our class had the greatest percentage of locals attending Chinese tuition, the celebratory mood for festivities and freedom just wasn’t… present. I believe that a great deal of the level didn’t really study much Chinese for the examinations, bringing into the exam hall the mentality that “language can’t be learned”.

Well, it can.

Last-minute cramming of good phrases (“好词好句”）will, in fact, get you further in Chinese. People in 4C don’t just memorise 250 idioms, they also memorise entire essays and 报章报道s if they have too – after all, 4 hours worth of exams might not seem reason enough for forking out so much money for the Os.

As Ren Yan commented (on the train while we were going to the class chalet), there is a great deal of meaning in the Chinese language. But the “value” of the language is not always determined by the cultural or lexiconic complexities that Chinese seems to grasp perfectly – instead, it is the viability, usage and application that determines the value.

I seem to be quite free after the ‘O’s. It’s a funny feeling. Many of my  leisurely pursuits seem to be ditched unconciously, and there’s this unwelcome but inexorable urge to wile your time away. I’ll draw up a schedule for the holidays, really I must.

The Humanities

I’ve chosen to take the Humanities in RJC.

It’s a big decision – possibly one of the most future-changing, life-altering important ones I’ve ever made.  I matriculated online and submitted my application for the HSP (humans scholarship programme) yesterday. And I’m going to justify my choice aloud.

The decision initially was PGME – a cocktail of my RA subjects which I had scored respectably in, and the usual M-E combination which a significant proportion of RJC takes. But as I later learnt, this was a rojak two-sciences-two-humans combination, putting me in an arts class. Reputation doesn’t seem to favour this group of people from hearsay, but this is more of a generalisation than anything else.

Then I consulted my parents and some friends and asked for their opinion. It was PCME all the way. To them, the strategy was to join the many with 4As – for some, sacrificing their interests and for others, trodding down the academic-oriented pathway.

There is some truth to why the majority of people choose this combination. The most glaring reason is the common humans-phobia. It is often viewed as a combination with subjective assessment instead of the familiar objectivity of the sciences. “You can score well in one test and fail in the other” doesn’t hold much appeal as compared to “Confirmed, guaranteed 100% As”.

The second consideration is the relevance to future pathways of this batch of gifted students. The science pathway is known to produce not just researchers or doctors, but humanists and lawyers. Putting it more simply, the Sciences allow one to diversify into a plethora of future roadways, whereas the Humanities can’t. Joining the Humanities might prevent one from being an engineer – of which which many Singaporeans parents argue is the sole occupation from which many people branch out their later careers from.

And then the third case is interest. It isn’t hard to guess, especially in my environment, that a great deal of RI boys (and most probably RGS girls) take Science as a scoring subject. Two years in a Science class tells me that. The reason why so many classes are trip-science classes is some testament to the inability of the lower-secondary humanities programme to capture the hearts of the majority of this batch, and the general, intangible appeal of the sciences. There is something so… Singaporean about the Sciences.

But I am different. I seem to have a high inclination towards writing and thinking – not a line of information placed here to accentuate my ego, but rather, an observable phenomenon. My better 4.0s resided in the Humanities. Writing is not about telling the examiner that the RNAi-induced Silencing Complex molecule  wraps around the single-strand RNA or that the liberation of hydrogen gives you a “pop” sound if you insert a glowing splint into the test-tube. Writing is about construction and deconstruction. It gives and takes meaning. It nurtures and weakens souls. That is writing.

(Perhaps a science student reading this might consider this a somewhat extreme justification. Then again, perhaps some of the science students have written or read so little to even know that this is true. Not to say, of course, that all Science students fit this image. After all, a previous Science student is writing this, and many Science students even bothering to read this post don’t fit this image at all.)

Thinking isn’t just comparing charts and deriving the lens-maker’s equation to find the focal length of a lens. It’s not being uncertain about Heisenberg or spew out how sustainability can be reached in an exam (ok forgive the Heisenberg example). These do absolutely nothing to help oneself. I find it amusing, then, how people with high grades in Science can be considered to be logically superior or even in placed in an elevated status because they mug well.

Mind you, it’s not that I score too badly for Science either. I can grasp these concepts quite readily and score appreciably well, but I lack the interest. I’ve taken a mounting disinterest in the Sciences since secondary 3, because I find it so perfectly irrelevant to my future. If I am to orientate myself towards the financial or law sector in the future, I don’t see why I should study these subjects now. It barely engages me on a level that the Humanities are able to.

But while we have the short-term assurances of highly respected teachers and capable peers in our company, we also have the short-term period of doubt and uncertainty. It does take some courage to pursue this entirely different route. For me, the leap from Trip-Science to Trip-Humans is large.

Certainly, the Humanities students will be offered some advantages for their audacious – even valorous – decision. But these weigh minimally on the scale of importance and relevance that these Humans students seem to be able to appreciate. These students know where and what they want in life – a far better bunch of poeple in my regard. Engineering might not be our forte, but while it might be against “the convention” to pursue Humanities in the JC, we know it is our future we are focused on.

We don’t just want a stepping stone for good grades. We’ll get that. We want a bit of thinking and writing.

That makes us human.

More human at least, than those reciting that darned reactivity series.

ObamaGirl

The second most popular US election video of 2008, with about 10.6 million hits. (The first was an illogical and fallacious American veteran’s message about McCain.)

Sexy and (hence) objectionable content inside. Please watch this in a more…. informal location.

Yong Sheng dislaims all responsibility related to you watching this video.

He also thanks Obama for winning. He also thinks that facebook is the next biggest distraction to the US elections.