Saint Santorum needed Michigan,
But he couldn’t get enough Republicans,
“Damn it Mitt,” said the senator,
“I’m going with the Democrat electors.”
Category: Politics & government
The anti-Lynas camp organized a public forum at the Malaysian Parliament some time ago last year. There was a panel of several men and women highlighting the cost of allowing Lynas to operate its rare earth metals refinery plant in Pahang.
An expert took his turn to speak. He patiently explained the inverse-square law in the context of public health. The danger of harmful radioactive substance to a person correlates inversely to the distance between the two.
The shorter the distance, the more detrimental it is to the person’s health. It is not a linear relationship where a unit of distance closer means a unit increase of harm. Rather, the danger increases exponentially with each unit of distance shaved.
He went on to explain that the Lynas plant would be processing fine radioactive substance. If handled carelessly or by some unfortunate accident, the substance would be exposed to the air and permeated to the surrounding areas.
If inhaled, the distance between the radioactive material and human body would effectively be zero. Under the inverse-square law, the danger would be infinite. Radiation poisoning would be inevitable.
The person may be an expert in his field, but he spoke without the eloquence of a seasoned orator. There were short pauses as he thought through his next point slowly. As much as his thoughtfulness demanded respect, those pauses were distracting and even annoying. He lost the audience, if the mostly boring jargon-laced scientific presentation had not yet.
The next two speakers had sharper presentation styles and spoke in plain Malaysian English. The presentation slides were more colorful than the expert’s. One had a video running. They immediately took hold of the crowd, demanding attention with their exuberant confidence.
Yet, their field of expertise was unclear. The only obvious thing was that their speeches were a series of emotional appeals, and a series of exaggerations. One of them asserted that radioactive material from Lynas plant could pollute all palm oil produced in Malaysia, hence making it dangerous for consumption.
He talked as if the whole palm oil industry would be in danger of collapse. Others outside of the hall in the public sphere have equated the risks of running the plant to the meltdowns of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
They exaggerated either willfully or out of ignorance to garner support for their cause. Maybe out of desperation too because they care about the issue and they need support. They are the advocates. They may have succeeded judging by the reaction of the audience but not all were moved by the exaggeration. But most of the audience already had their minds made up before the presentations. The two were preaching to the choir.
For the unmoved minority with their minds yet to be made, the exaggeration discredited the speakers.
To be fair, the debates surrounding Lynas are full of exaggerations. Both the opposition and the proponents have exaggerated the benefits and the cost of the project.
The Lynas debate is obviously not the only one that suffers from exaggeration. The debate on the goods and services tax is another. As the exaggeration goes, inflation would go up through the roof and everybody’s tax bill would balloon.
The fact that the GST would only cause transient inflation was uninteresting to the anti-GST side. The fact that the GST can mimic the existing tax system without increasing a person’s total tax burden was discounted by the anti-GST camp.
On the proponent side, they exaggerated that Malaysia would go the Greek way if the GST was not implemented. The truth is that while it helps, the introduction of the GST is neither the only way nor the crucial piece to balance public finance up.
We know the Greek argument is exaggerated when the sides that use it are undisturbed by handouts given by the government that directly contribute to the current state of government finance. Even they are unworried.
When a side runs out of bullets, exaggeration is the water pistol masquerading as a real gun. An exaggerator armed with a water pistol may fool some people sometimes. But when it is time to pull the trigger, the exaggerator better prepare for a backlash or two.
Amid opposing positions, political centrists have the tendency to stake the middle ground. It is a compromise that appears sensible on the surface. Sometimes, it can be sensible deep down in a substantial way. It can even be the best path forward.
Not always though. Not all compromises are sensible and it can be even outright nonsense. A chronic centrist would do so anyway, and then has the gall to call those who see a square peg in a round hole as extremists.
There is no guarantee that centrism equates sensibility. Sensibility depends on an entirely different consideration altogether. It might very well be the seemingly extreme position that is the most sensible and right.
A chronic centrist does not believe that. He is a person who works like a mindless average machine. Take any two diametrical positions, average it out and there you go: a solution. Move on to the next issue, take any two positions, average it out and then there you go again: another solution. It goes on and on forever.
They rarely make introspection of the averaged positions. There is no thinking behind it, except some kind of blind elementary arithmetic applied onto issues in the public sphere. The only real argument they have to offer is that the middle path is a compromise. A win-win some would say. And a compromise is always a virtue, so say the centrists, who are also probably self-proclaimed political moderates.
Of course there are compromises that need to be made on a case-by-case basis. We live in a society where give and take has to happen and where we end up treading along the middle path. It indeed happens every day.
A musician practicing his trade living next to a neighbor who likes a quiet evening would have to talk to each other so that both can live comfortably without too much bad blood, for instance. On a bigger more concrete scale, the relevant landowners in Kuala Lumpur, the developer of the Mass Rapid Transit system and the government have to compromise to get the project going.
Or maybe in election seat negotiations among parties which have a common interest to defeat yet another party by combining resources instead of fighting each other, it is in their best interest to reach an amicable solution and refrain from engaging in wasteful squabbling.
By contrast, there are principles and ideas that cannot be violated. If a thief steals an apple from a person, one does not cut the apple to give half of the fruit to the thief and the other half to the owner. That is injustice. If a racist proposes a policy and a liberal advocates the opposite view, one does not just write a compromised policy that is half racist, half liberal. That is confusion. There is nothing sensible about such an unjust confused judgment.
It is a half-measure that the mindless and the gutless would take. The mechanical, automatic centrist is mindless because he does not make sense. He is gutless because he takes no real position. The centrist is an automaton. Feed in the input. Average it out. There you go: a moderated position.
We do not need automatons to solve our problems. We especially do not need mindless, gutless, automatic centrists to do the thinking for us. They tell us nothing of value. We need thinking beings, ones who reason from some position of principle, inducing and deducing through tough propositions to reach well thought-out conclusions. This is stuff that is likely beyond the mental capability of these automatic, mechanical centrists.
Transformation is a big word. It is not some word that should be used lightly. Use it too often for the smallest of things, it will turn into a cliché and it will lose its meaning soon afterwards. In Malaysia, that is already happening with all the stress on transforming Malaysia under the 1Malaysia banner.
And so, in conferring an award to Prime Minister Najib Razak, World Chinese Economic Forum’s Michael Yeoh said, “[y]ou have contributed significantly to the transformation of the Malaysian nation.”[1]
Transformation of the Malaysian nation?
With the ETP appearing stalling or at more kindly put, going slowly, economic liberalization halted halfway through, along with half-baked realization of the September 15 announcement of the so-called political transformation program, and moreover, not even 3 years in office, I would think there is hardly anything that could be transformed. Tweak yes, but transform? Far from it.
Remember, transformation is a big word. It connotes an action that changed something completely into something else. Maybe the ETP has it right when it uses (and overuses) the word transform. At least, the objective of being (yet another overused phrase) high-income nation suggests a completely different Malaysian economic reality that prevails today.
A moth into a butterfly, that is transformation. Ass to a donkey? Maybe not so.
In the past three years, what transformation have we seen? Is Malaysia today any different that in 2009? Some potholes in the city have been there even before the PM assumed office with Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s mandate. It will not take a transformation to cover the potholes. Yet, here we are living in transformation, so claimed Michael Yeoh.
You cheapen the word Mr. Yeoh. But I guess, since everybody uses it so cheaply, it does not hurt much. How more cheaply can the cliché get, eh?
A mere less-than-three-years, and Mr. Yeoh and the WCEF granted the PM a lifetime award.
If anything, the supposedly transformation has hardly begun in earnest. The jury is still out there but Mr. Yeoh and the WCEF have jumped the gun. Overwrought, them.
Najib was also conferred the “Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award” by the WCEF for his work and commitment towards transforming Malaysia.
“You (Najib) have contributed significantly to the transformation of the Malaysian nation.
“The Chinese community has benefitted tremendously from you for your fair and just leadership,” WCEF chairman Datuk Michael Yeoh said in his speech at the conferment ceremony here today. [Chinese economic group calls Najib ”˜Father of Transformation and Moderation’. Clara Chooi. The Malaysian Insider. January 25 2011]
Words for Malaysian religious conservatives, maybe especially for Hasan Ali and his sympathizers.
In November, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an independent Salafist cleric and presidential candidate, was asked by an interviewer how, as president, he would react to a woman wearing a bikini on the beach? ”She would be arrested,” he said.
The Al Nour Party quickly said he was not speaking for it. Agence France-Presse quoted another spokesman for Al Nour, Muhammad Nour, as also dismissing fears raised in the news media that the Salafists might ban alcohol, a staple of Egypt’s tourist hotels. ”Maybe 20,000 out of 80 million Egyptians drink alcohol,” he said. ”Forty million don’t have sanitary water. Do you think that, in Parliament, I’ll busy myself with people who don’t have water, or people who get drunk?” [Thomas Friedman. Political Islam Without Oil. New York Times. January 10 2012]