What would you do if you were the PM?

October 27th, 2006 gier

Honestly, what would you do if you were the Prime Minister of Malaysia and your predecessor keeps bitching at and about you? I was thinking about this. If you were the PM of the UK, say and your predecessor snipes at you, I don’t think you’d have much of a problem. This is because your name would be Tony Blair and your predecessor would be a grey chap by the name of John Major. You wouldn’t be bothered because there ain’t much to be bothered about with John Major. Besides, John Major would rather watch cricket.

However, if your predecessor is Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, it’s a little trickier. He’s a great man, as I keep saying. Doesn’t keep him from being wrong, mind you, nor does that mean that he’s not a sarcastic, caustic and opinionated man. I’ve actually met Tun a few times when he was the PM. It was OK. He didn’t think much of me, I could tell, but that’s because he was the PM and I was just a snotty fat guy making sure that the computers were working for my bosses who were making a presentation or three. I’m not sure why I mentioned that, but there you go.

Anyhow, given that your predecessor had lead the country for 22 years, is member no. 1 of UMNO (Baru), and generally respected and revered by a huge cross-section of the society, you can easily find yourself in a Catch-22 (pun intended) situation. You can’t exactly ream the man, because … well, because he’s THE Tun. It’s not like there aren’t any other Tuns in the country (e.g. Tun Daim, Tun Ling, Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah) but let’s face it, whenever we say Tun, not many of us would be referring to Tun Khalil, would we? That’s a main signifier of how revered the Tun is. It’ll almost be political suicide to ream the man, not to mention (more importantly) rather rude. On the other hand, you can’t exactly bow down to his every demand, since you are the PM, darn it, and you’ll lead the country your way.

So, honestly, what would you do?

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Don’t leave your brains at home

October 27th, 2006 gier

It’s a funny thing. I started this blog with the (ridiculous) idea that I could join the morass of punditry that pretends to be serious prognostication on the “blogosphere”. And I thought one of the requirements is to spew out pompous and bombastic sentences like the previous one. That is not true, obviously. It’s becoming clear to me that in order to blog regularly, you’d need to have at least one of these prerequisites (and preferably all):

1. A strong sense of personal worth (a.k.a. a predilection for navel gazing),
2. A strong sense that (perceived) justice needs to be done,
3. A cause that you strongly believe in (transparency, equality, p2p, open source, etc.),
4. A hobby (eating in restaurants, photography, ornithology, porn, etc.),
5. A hope (or confidence) that people will read your stuff,
6. An occasional tendency to have selective memory, and therefore
7. A predilection for what I call revisionist history.

When you don’t really feel any of the above strongly enough, and/or often enough, you end up like me. You blog very occasionally. Anyhow, the point of this entry isn’t so much about me (haha! See 1. above), but about 2, 3, 6 and 7, where if 5 happens, it’ll be a bonus. This entry is about our former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and the spat with our current Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. My first blog entry was about the spat, actually[1], and it was effectively the first time I got annoyed enough to actually write anything here.

You know, there is actually a reason why I registered mentera.org and why I call this blog “Mentera — Say Anything Often Enough”. Mentera is the Malay word for mantra and just go to that link to see what it means (if you can’t guess already), with the implication that if you say anything often enough, you and possibly a whole bunch of people would actually believe what you say is true and that you’re right. Do it long enough, with just enough things happening to actually be true and right, and enough people will think that you’re always right. For example, if you’ve led a country for 22 years, and were actually rather good at leading the country for those years, there’ll probably be enough people who will always think you’re right. Even after you’ve stopped leading the country, and someone else is sitting on the hot seat.

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eBay has a university?

October 10th, 2006 gier

Yesterday I received an email. It was from eBay.com. I consider it spam, though technically maybe not, since I have an eBay account. Anyhow, the title of the email was: eBay Explained! 2006.

Natch.

The email explained (hah!) that for the first time, the Dean of eBay Education & eBay University Instructor will be in KL on the 12th of November ” to share his knowledge on how you can make your eBay selling, searching and shopping more effective and become successful online buyers and sellers.”

WTF? eBay has a university?

So, I googled for eBay University and the first link is to here. It’s an officially set up thingmy by eBay. So, this begs the questions:

1. Why did eBay set up a university?
2. What do they teach?
3. Can you get degrees from the university?
4. Are those degrees ratified locally?
5. What sort of job can you get with those degrees?

Okay, once you get to the eBay Uni page, you’ll get your answers to the above questions.  Basically it’s all about selling stuff on eBay. Didn’t realise that we needed “university” courses for that. Didn’t realise that you could call that shite university, either.

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