I Wish I Were Your Derivative So I Could Lie Tangent To Your Curves!
If you get what it means, join the club.
Author: Hafiz Noor Shams
For more about me, please read this.
What is Bangsa Malaysia exactly?
Is it an assimilation policy to create an united race?
Is it a multicultural policy that celebrates cultural diversity?
Is it simply about the citizenship of Malaysia?
Is it about equality?
Is it about Malay rights?
Is it something else altogether?
Is it about nothing at all?
Somebody. Help me. Please.
A lot of people are giving me contradictory answers and I’m officially confused. For instance, Dr. Rais Yatim said:
IDENTIFYING oneself as Bangsa Malaysia does not mean that one forgets one’s race, culture, heritage and other practices, said Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.
“Each of us is a Malay, Chinese, Indian or other race first, but at the same time, we belong to Bangsa Malaysia. This is because we share a common destiny, common interest socially, politically and economically,” said the minister for Culture, Arts and Heritage.
But Dr. Mahathir said:
In August, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad made a plea for “Bangsa Malaysia” – a united Malaysian Nation in which being a Malaysian is the thing, not being Malay, Chinese, Indian, Iban or Kadazan. It means “people being able to identify themselves with the country, speak Bahasa Malaysia and accept the Constitution,” said Mahathir.
Then, Najib Razak said:
JOHOR BARU: The Bangsa Malaysia concept is the state of an individual’s mind and does not infringe on Malay special rights and privileges, said Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.
The Deputy Prime Minister said Bangsa Malaysia was a concept and had nothing to do with the Constitution or national policies, but was related to an individual’s state of mind.
“Bangsa Malaysia means we do not evaluate someone by his skin colour, race or religion,” Najib said when closing the Johor Umno Convention at Persada Johor here yesterday.
“It does not question the special rights of the Malays, our quota or anything of that sort.”
Before we start banging on each other head, let’s define the term first, shall we?
I hate shooting bullets at somebody while not knowing why am I shooting the bullets in the first place.
Did you love the Op-Ed section of the New York Times? Did you say “shit” when NYT tried to make you pay for its addictive Op-Ed? Are you missing Krugman, Kristof, Brooks, Dowd, et alii?
Well, thank you to Philips, the Op-Ed section is now available for free for the whole week. You can even dig up NYT archives! Well, only partly. Still, how cool is that?
NYT calls it Free Access Week. I call it, w00t week! Read them all while you can!
Heh. NYT is probably trying to influence public opinion as far as the midterm election is concerned.
In reading libertarian literature, it’s relatively easy to find an idea that states that liberty is not a mean but rather, it’s the end. However inspiring the idea might be, is it true that liberty isn’t a mean but instead, the highest political end?
The reason I’m asking this question is that I’m uncertain if liberty is the highest political end. Rather, I think happiness is the highest political end.
In economics, students will learn the concept of saturation point of a person. This is the theoretical point where all wants and needs of the person are satisfied and another unit of “wants and needs” good won’t increase the well being of the individual. Let me demonstrate this concept.
If a monkey has one million bananas and it’s impossible for this monkey to finish it all while discounting temporal issue — to make it clearer, the monkey is so full that another banana down its throat would cause puking, and this would happen before the monkey get to its 1,000,000th banana, discounting interest rate — would the monkey be happy with the addition of one more banana to its wealth, if the monkey could count at all?
No.
From purely economic point of view, happiness is achieved through the fulfillment of wants and needs. This comes from the concept of utility which is the basis of welfare economics. Through this, I’d postulate that restriction to the satisfaction of wants and needs leads to unhappiness. Extrapolating the idea, the pursuit of happiness will include commodity trading (why must it includes trade? Remember why trade occurs in the first place!), whatever the commodity might be, physical or spiritual, if it’s tradable. In order to trade to pursue happiness, a person must be free to trade.
However, surely if one is free to do anything but yet, the person is unable to improve his welfare by moving closer to his saturation point, such true liberty is useless. Surely, liberty is useless when a person is unable to achieve happiness.
Through this, it seems to me that liberty is only a mean to achieve happiness with happiness being the end, not liberty.
This begs another question, is there any other mean to achieve happiness besides liberty? Is it possible to achieve happiness without liberty? Not just economic liberty but liberty in general.
I need to read more. Through experience however, I’m inclined to say without liberty, achieving happiness is harder than it should be.
Former President of Iraq is sentenced to death:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to death by hanging for war crimes in the 1982 killings of 148 people in the town of Dujail, as the former leader, trembling, shouted “God is great!”
As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to hang, Saddam yelled out, “Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!”
Though a dictator he was, merciless in his reign, I feel a hint of pity for him. From my point of view, life imprisonment would suffice. A little show of mercy would have been more powerful as an example than a simple act of revenge.