Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue, Malaysia: New Deal on August 12, 2009 | Comments Off
In his essay and speech, Time for a New Beginning, Razaleigh Hamzah makes an intriguing – and interesting – juxtaposition. This is followed by an philosophical observation, rare among Malaysians or Malays, rarer still among politicians.
The juxtaposition reads:
“In my own parliamentary constituency, jungle covered, far inland and one of the most remote in the peninsula [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue, Malaysia: New Deal on May 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
There is not a power on earth that has not relied on some form of terror. Man lived not merely in fear of invaders who would ride furiously in from the distance, he lived in fear of gods or of God and his representatives on earth. He lived in fear of the authority of officers [...]
Posted in Lina Joy Writings, Malaysia: Dialogue on March 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
From Raja Petra Kamarudin on ethnicity:
Many of my very close friends and relatives are half this or half that.
But which half? And Petra says:
Mahathir Mohamad is half-Indian. Anwar Ibrahim is half-Indian. Wan Azizah, according to Umno, is half-Chinese. I am half-Malay.
What about the other half? Mahathir is half Malay, Anwar is half Malay, Wan Azizah [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue, Malaysia: New Deal on July 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Public Service Life of a Political Administrator is banal. Get use to it.
AT the risk of being presumptuous, this, below, is for the benefit of the DAP politicians and their constituency members who are looking forward to substantive change in how their streets and their lives are managed. Work the table anyway they wish; [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue, Malaysia: New Deal on July 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Commentary
A RISE in the number of a certain type of commentaries at Malaysiakini is revealing into, not the state of the National Front government, but the state of the opposition – the alliance of socialist DAP, Justice PKR and Islamic PAS – that have been given a chance to rule. They have five states, three heavily [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue, Malaysia: New Deal on November 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Anwar: The Philosopher-Politician
Excerpts from Anwar Ibrahim in interview with Imram Imtiaz (published Nov 9, 2007: http://www.malaysia-today.net/nuc2006/report07.php?itemid=162)
Anwar on Anwar:
After re-examining my worldview, its premises and postulates, and modulate it with the experiential wisdom culled from time spent in struggle, I believe I emerged with something of the sense of serenity, which Albert Camus observed as the [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on October 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
The Lingam video is banal for what it ostensibly protrays: two persons conversing on the judiciary line-up, that is, who’s who and who’s to be who on the bench. One hears the same kind of conversation almost daily, inside corporate boardrooms, offices, after work, and between colleagues.
What is astonishing is that it reflects on the state of [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on October 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
“Let me tell you something about power. There is such a thing as the power of the powerless.” — Mahadev Shanker, former judge, Malaysia.
Mahadev Shanker is mistaken on two counts when he talks of, “there is such a thing as the power of the powerless.”
“Fukuda” is not the author of The End of History and [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue, Malaysia: New Deal on September 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
This essay argues why, for the judiciary to have any independence or integrity, it needs power. It is not apolitical. But how and from where is its power to be derived?
The man in the VK Lingam video was an individual who, perhaps without realising it, became a public officer. And, better than that, a public officer [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on September 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
From Lu Xun (魯迅 or Lu Hsun, 1881-1936) in Na Han (呐 喊 Call to Arms, Preface)
Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on September 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Malaysia is in trouble. The political class is inept and it is probably plundering the national wealth. The police is an instrument of the class and is served by it. Everywhere both are hated and feared simultaneously. Other national institutions are in the same state of decay, only the stages of the decay are different.
Consequently, [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on August 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Dialogue Series #5
Seven Malaysians, all resident abroad and calling themselves the Diaspora, have a letter to Malaysia Today, maybe. The letter is revealing into the thinking among some Malaysians about the state of Malaysia but which is rarely, if at all, and openly admitted even by liberal Malaysians, Muslims, or Malays, or by those who shout for [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on August 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Malaysia is a great importer of theologies and ideologies. Here is what to unlearn on its 50th anniversary.
Two countries, India and Pakistan, went separate ways this month sixty years ago: one secular, the other Islamic. This is what Mohammad Ali Jinnah said at the time:
“You will find that in the course of time Hindus would [...]
Posted in Malaysia: Dialogue on August 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Into Malaysia, the desert winds blow in from Arabia, the hurricane from America …
The Americans had no business to be in Vietnam. They made a mistake in Iraq. And President George Bush now invokes the first as support for the second. The two, Vietnam and Iraq, together becomes, as Bush says, the equivalence of “our moral [...]
