would any employer want to employ a person with dubious reputation into his organisation
Depends on the organisation. Political parties aren’t infant schools. I suspect they mostly ‘close one eye’.

OnPol, so many interesting comments. Maybe you don’t recall my previous comments about KJ. You want me to choose a happy ending for him? I think with that cheeky self-satisfied smile and full head of hair of his, perhaps he should change his name to Karina, pay for some top-notch (if you’ll pardon the expression) surgery, hide in Pat Pong and learn the bottle-opening trick.

Funny, Nizar now leads a ‘government in exile’. Anybody remember a happy ending for a government in exile? I have to be honest and admit that besides voting for parties that never won anything but local council seats, I never paid the slightest attention to politics until I realised that my first class infrastructure didn’t even have a dialling tone one day a month. PR will be better off than the Tibetans anyway, at least Najib is still holding elections

Not bad OnPol, but I think at the 11th hour, Lee Wang Yen will return with some expensive and unusually good quality fireworks, and announce the “People’s Front of Malaya”, fronted by Michelle Yeoh, that guy on the front page of celcom’s website at the moment, and Daniel Li, the guy who won Malaysian Idol, and went on to run HK’s Anti Corruption Commission (remember? He said “We are independent, nobody should question”?). LWY will prove the non-existence of BN, and they will disappear up their own Chinese Year of the ParadOx.

The Government of Perak will return (a short journey) from exile, Nizar will get his call from Obama, and be invited to join the USA’s Axis of Change, and we will all live in peace and harmony ever after, like the Thais, only with cheaper heritage because we’ve only just built it.

No, no, I don’t think this is going anywhere…

I see a lot of calls for PR to admit fault in losing Perak. Are the people asking for this on crack? The sport PR lost at was the low-jump. It was (is, and always will be) a stupid idea (can we have Wan Azizah back yet?). If the rules had been followed subsequent to the defections and the State Assembly had ended up in the hands of BN by adherence to rules or electoral process, PR would have been skulking in the shadows with egg all over their faces, wearing cone-shaped hats with a big ‘D’ on the front. Or is it ‘B’ here?

The thing is, that didn’t happen. Najib ‘came too soon’ and now there’s a terrible mess – perhaps the ‘spilt milk’ swipenter refers to. If the low-jump had been won by PR in a BN state, do you really believe Anwar could have ordered the police to blockade that other state’s government building? Do you really believe Anwar could have gone to that other state’s sultan and said “here are the sorry turncoats I promised, give us the keys to power eh?”, and the sultan would have said “Go on Anwar! In there my son!”. You think AAB would have said “better let Anwar have that state, he did say that was what he was going to do”. You think the BN ex-MB of that state would hold a love-in with candles, sing some songs and then all his supporters would have gone home to cry into their teh tariks? In which state could those things have taken place, if the shoe had been on the other foot?

PR did make an error of judgement. It would have been terribly embarrassing if it had been patiently explained to all involved that BN was now going to inexorably wind the voters back in. They still had Shahrir’s Ace up their sleeve: withheld federal funds. Fortunately for PR, BN’s chief strategist couldn’t hold on at the exciting part and finished too quickly with a spasmodic lunge, catapulting PR out from a sticky mess underneath him, up onto the principled high ground.

Are those on crack reading the press? Exactly what is Najib going to tell UMNO happened in Perak? His friends in blue tear-gassed a mosque and he precipitated a constitutional crisis? And people want PR to admit they got it wrong? I don’t know, maybe I’m being naive. Maybe UMNO wanted Najib to get control of Perak back, even if he had to carpet-bomb it, but I’m not sure carpet-bombing would have had any less of a long-term negative effect. Are UMNO so thick they would award Najib “job well done” for his performance in Perak?

detainees currently living
I thought they were all let go recently, weren’t they?

Do you still think that the Malaysians are better off than the Tibetans?
Would you move to Tibet? Oh hang on, you’ll have to let me measure you for ‘Han’ness before you answer! Let’s not talk about Tibet, it’s like arguing about whose beer is better.

Prompted by ‘mother of three’ and the reality of being a computing wizard in a country whose first class infrastructure doesn’t work, I was talking to my wife about where we might live next. Up until recently, we were thinking of staying in Malaysia at least until our children were about 7 years old (maybe another 4 years), so that they could pick up some fluency in the local language, and some sense of Malaysian identity. Seven we thought was hedging their bets between building a little identity and learning how to classify their friends by race. I don’t want a child of mine to study ‘moral’ at school either, but that’s just my own taste.

We can live in Malaysia, thanks to my wife and children being Malaysian, or just about anywhere in Europe, thanks to me being British and reasonably well qualified. Of all the places we could live, I think Malaysia holds the most promise and the greatest risks. It’s a tricky choice to make. Thanks to my qualifications, we could live just about any other place that had a highly-skilled migrant program. But then we’d all be foreigners! There are some countries where we wouldn’t seem any more foreign than the ‘locals’, but we would be, and I’m still dithering about the ‘promise’ aspect.

We talked about moving to another South East Asian country. Disregarding politics, I think there’s a lot of promise in many South East Asian countries. My wife is hesitant, her ancestors’ diaspora in South East Asia didn’t go very well in a lot of our neighbouring countries. I’d live in Thailand, I’ve been offered jobs there, but we go there fairly often, and we’re an odd couple in Thailand: we’re the same age. As an only-just-past-my-prime white man, I don’t know whether to feel embarrassed or envious about my fellows there. No, there’s something not quite right about a grey-haired white man holding hands with a pregnant Thai teenager.

Not sure about Indonesia, it seems to be making some credible efforts to build itself into a decent nation. My wife won’t go there even for a day trip. We both love Cambodia when we go there. There’s apparent poverty everywhere, but people seem to be both welcoming to visitors and looking forward to a brighter future. The problem with any of the promising-but-risky moves is that we really have no idea what we’d be getting into, so I doubt we’ll make one. My wife suggested recently I apply for ‘best job in the world’ (the Australian island), but I think she’s just trying to cheer me up.

I do think Malaysians are much better off than Tibetans, given the little I know. I think the gap could have been much wider. The last 20 years seem to me to have been squandered in Malaysia, possibly even retrogressive. I love my neighbours here. As long as they don’t get a chance to whip their bigotry out, they’re welcoming and generous to a fault. When they do get their bigotry out, they may make appallingly racist comments, but they don’t really mean to slight every man, woman and child qualifying for the classification, they mean the egregiously incompetent leaders those classes have had in the recent past.

PR and Malaysia as a whole really doesn’t need leaders who can beat foreigners attribute-for-attribute in a game of global Top Trumps (did you have those here?). What it needs are genuine, charismatic (but not slimy), principled Malaysians to pull the people their predecessors have divided back together and onward to a common goal – a great Malaysia. Malaysia’s physically a great country. It has great people. The people just need to represent themselves rather than accept the same old cockroaches who have squeezed themselves into the crack of power and won’t come out when the light’s on.

Uh oh, I’ve written a book. Sorry. Ooh look: Tiananmen. I shared an office in a UK Uni with a guy slightly older than me from Guilin. He started teaching me Chinese calligraphy, and I helped him with his English vernacular. He explained that what he wrote was beautiful, and what I wrote ‘looks crap’. He explained opinion on Tiananmen was all about age. People above a certain age, who were close to student age at the time of the events in Tiananmen Square, remain largely horrified and embarrassed by it. I heard many Chinese people make similar remarks, and the younger Chinese really did seem to have a diametrically opposed view. I remember one postgrad student complaining that the authorities in the UK allowed people to do ‘all sorts of disgusting things’ – she was referring to a protest in London, can’t remember which, there are a lot. I joked that maybe the UK government should try driving over protesters in tanks. “The government of China were right to do that!” she exclaimed “They were terrorists!”. I never did try to joke about tanks again, but I heard similar opinions expressed many times by younger Chinese students in the UK.

Just one last comment! What country elects intelligent, highly qualified, forward-thinking politicians? None of them! Or at least, perhaps only one or two in an entire government. Most of them are elected for being popular, looking nice, being good on chat shows, stuff that really counts at the polls. In developed countries, political movements have massive numbers of advisers, so the ‘leaders’ can concentrate on looking good for the cameras, while still apparently knowing everything and having excellent plans.

Malaysian politicians strike me as either being spectacularly badly advised, or really, really convinced that they really are as god-like as their position might suggest, while really ‘blowing it’ in public. Nobody ever responds to my suggestions that PR is not over-endowed with manpower and resources. I don’t know whether to believe that’s because it’s true or I’m so badly wrong, it’s not worth rebutting the suggestion. I think it would be only strategic to concentrate efforts on the role of advisers in PR, and leave the stage to the charismatic representatives who can toe a party line. If you can find a sifu of politics who also looks good when it counts, then that’s perfect. But I really don’t think any country has more than a handful at any one time.

Sorry, too much from me today, just worried by the number of people who think that it’s possible to ‘select and forget’ in politics.

Just out of interest – in the parallel political universe that the BN state government of Perak now operates in – is Nizar still a member of the State Assembly? Is it just the MB post he has ‘resigned’ from? Who would normally call a vote of no-confidence in the BN administration in the parallel political universe? I suppose it’s no longer possible to call a vote of no-confidence in the PR administration in the parallel political universe, as they no longer officially exist, do they?

You couldn’t make this stuff up! If you did make this up Godfather, while you’re exercising your creative talent, how would you end it? “… and then I woke up.”?

Umno Youth
Stay well away. Let them make speeches to an empty Perak. The right-thinking people of Perak who voted for the exiled government have the moral high ground, but they do not have the police on their side. Najib needs a slip-up to crack down on. Don’t give it to him.

PR supporters can best show their strict adherence to principle by offering the UMNO Youth their inalienable right to protest. Not one head must be shaken, nor one voice raised in argument with these people. They need a token of treason so they can show how ‘right’ they are.

Jeffrey – I don’t see what need there is for ‘bad faith’. Can a supermarket cashier keep the extra 50sen she owes me if she short-changes me in good faith? Presumably nobody is trying to say that the sultan has done anything bad, only that he has made a very small error, not dissimilar to a mistake in counting change. If I leave Billion, and I am 50sen short to pay my parking fee, and the police tow my car away, and I am robbed and killed while looking for a bus to ride home, it is not the cashier’s fault is it?

Perhaps good/bad faith is important for recourse. We have to assume, without an improved CAT scan that can detect political bias, that the sultan acted in the very best of faith, and so any recourse is limited to setting right that which was initially wrong – MB2 goes back to being an ordinary assembly person and gets his chance to call a vote of no-confidence, Nizar gets to refill his drawers, after allowing the BN staff 10 days to vacate the premises again. Or am I slow on the uptake again?

Keep up, imranj78 – the game has moved on! Yes, the low-jump is ill-conceived. Yes, every jumper should have been met with demands for a by-election by the party they betrayed. Yes, the matter should have been taken to the courts at the first jump.

But soliciting turncoats is not against any law in Malaysia, is it? We can decry it, but is it in the rules or not? Anwar, in my view, has thrown 2 dice with only 10sen left in his pot, and come up with 5 sixes and a royal flush! By my reading, the rules may have been broken, and if broken, then the heavy-handed capitalisation of the break was a terrible misjudgement on Najib’s part. Anwar’s luck is incredible! I hope he is buying lottery tickets today, perhaps he can retire a rich man by the end of the month!

Yes, the people still supporting mandate betrayal (the jumpers must be voted for in the first place, or there is no issue) as a political tool are attempting to subvert democracy. Yes, PR, if they didn’t start it, were most vocal about it. And yes, they lost at traitor-tempting. But if they broke a rule, they should have been taken to court. Justice is where the high ground is. Our wives may betray us, but if we beat those who cuckold us, it is us who will be going to jail. Some acts, while distasteful, are not against the law. Others are.

Asking politicians not to be two faced? Too late! They are ‘laughing on the other sides of their faces’ now. It’s no longer about our views of right and wrong, a rule may have been broken. If the rule isn’t checked and amends made (if needed), justice will follow our politicians’ morals into the toilet.

Hello, wake up [limkamput]; please don’t take it upon yourself you must have a final say in everything.

LKS – I appeal for you to apply your wisdom! Please limit us all to no more comments than limkamput posts on any thread. I fear limkamput has the moral high ground on this issue, but I am too easily tempted by your invitation “Leave a reply“. I beg for draconian laws to save me from my own weakness! I desire the power of insight so greatly that I make random comments in great numbers in the hopes one will be right!

You see? Jeffrey saw a better meaning in my ‘cuckold’ analogy than the one I intended. Now I am so smart, I surprise even myself!

Aiyah, limkamput is right – I use this blog like a chatroom! I have no self restraint. If I beg you all for forgiveness, will you promise not to spit on my mother? Sorry, sorry, I’m going now.

zak_hammaad Says: As the saying goes: “so you reap, so…”
“so you reap, so de dum de dum de dum”?

I don’t know that one. Is that a bit like “You reap what you sow”?

Sorry, sorry, really struggling with this not-posting lark.