Tonight

We (A and I) had dinner at the Bunk, ie, the house of YK, IL and BS - the three guys with triangular overlapping traits of being electrical engineers (YK and BS), Christians (IL and BS) and enthusiasts of Singapore politics (YK and BS). It's the latter that motivated me to write here (gosh here's no turning back once you get pulled into the whirlpool of training for scientific reading and writing.).

In order to get YK to stop talking about convex linearity or non-convex non-linearity or stuff to those extents, I asked him why wouldn't the increase in the spending tax be a good measure to help the poor. My question was somewhat missionary since YF had just explained his grounds vs that of YK's, and I felt I owed YF his political presence at the little dinner gathering tonight. So there I was, the proud representative of YF's "optimistic, hard-working pacifism against anti-government sentiments" attitude, going all out to refute YK and IL in their cynicism against the incumbent ruling regime of Singapore.

In short, YK and IL conclude that the PAP is
1. Elistist/not believing in welfare, ie, ill-treats the poor and enriches the rich;
2. Entrenches their own power.
3. Hypocritical about what they actually are and do (ie, #1 and 2) and tell only about the glory.

It all started out fun, but my tendency to get generalized, quizzical and philosophical in my arguement soon made me bid farewell to YF's simple attitude model. I realised that there's no denying that I'm an anti-progression, anti-development, anti-economydrivenmotifofexistence pessimist. I believe in making love not war and natural evolution. Through whose hands is natural evolution effected, and where natural evolution takes us are in general problems that I don't have enough energy to deal with. So, my arguements, instead of being

1. Evidence shows PAP evaluates and makes decisions for the far future (and lo behold my fatal weakness of never being able to state the evidence in question apart from my strong belief in "what I feel".) and therefore is trustworthy in what they plan for us.
2. Poverty isn't easy to eliminate. Perhaps there's progress even now and we aren't aware of it. (gosh I have this love-hate relationship with the word "perhaps". It's perhaps my most frequently used word.)
3. Singapore's still young, so the parental democracy model could work just fine.

[Even with these arguments I couldn't have sounded so fine, not knowing facts such as Bukit Merah and Toa Payoh held pockets of the poorest people in the population (oh wow, nearly an alliteration)]

were in fact:

1. Poverty, anti-opposition, entrenchment of ruling power, elitism are present in every country. Just live with it.
2. You want to effect rapid change and twist the branches of natural evolution. But what follows progress and the golden age is inevitably decline. Singapore is by default in a state of crisis and high energy. Its energy state needs not get any higher to bring about disorder and downfall (considering how the Chinese civilization remained from the ancient times by maintaining a state of unimaginative low-energy. It slugs on. But it survives and outlives.)
3. There's no justice without wrongdoing, no elitism without commonplace-ness. The universe has a relative and balanced set of values.

Even if I had spoken like this all nice and typed it'd not be in the style and line of YK and IL's arguments, so with jumbled up speech you could imagine why in the end nobody bought my "natural evolution/consequence" theory. In fact nobody understood it. BS did just a little, but for the whole time I was out there alone. Oh well, it might just be the great divide between the TJs and an FP.

Don't be mistaken that I'm depressed though. I'm glad that for once I didn't come out of an argument all shaken and felt like I did something wrong, or that people "don't like me anymore". I mightn't be a driven person, but I'm getting hardened nevertheless. I still do think my philosophy of balanced pessimism is the most suitable.

But for the most part it remains as a philosophy. Almost unteachable and at most written down like this. Oh well, words are feeble but actions are strenuous. A contradiction? Nope. A balance.