Laying 377A to Rest - Why It Does Not Matter

Has the PAP retreated from the fray?
Have the silent (straight and gay) minority been shortchanged?
Have the fundamentalists prevailed?

It really does not matter. And I will tell you why:

LHL did the clever thing.
The rhetoric might upset the vocal intellectual elite in their hallowed realms of academic theory, but stark reality has and MUST prevail: it was the smart move to lay 377A to rest.

Believe me, I do not and will never buy the flawed reasoning of criminalizing homosexual activity for society's Greater Good, nor the rabid rantings of certain middle-aged pre-menopausal Fundamentalist law lecturers who think they are on some messianic mission to save our society from certain ruin.

There was no way out of this one: at the eye of the storm lies the heart of the matter, I think in my humble opinion - that Singaporeans have become a truly plural, polarised and politicised populace. (pardon the alliteration & bad punctuation, couldn't resist!)

No civilised, progressive country that seeks to represent its people by democratic and secular law would accept homsexual criminalization on grounds that God Said So. But this is the essential argument posed by our right-wing friends, the rhetorical social deterioration of the family, the obliteration of moral "values", of General Human Goodness (what IS that anyway?) is just a bunch of badly plagiarised cut-and-paste logic from "Our Shared Values", which you can find on the back of just about every generic brown exercise book cover used in our primary schools.

That said, the Government is not about to address or discuss the philosophy of democratic principles in our penal code, or the logical soundness of the anti-repeal-camp's arguments. The entire saga that has played out only served ONE purpose, and that is to reveal starkly and embarassingly their abject FAILURE to portray the nation as one happy family unified in a common ideology of what is the Proper Life. The way I see it, the iron rule of racial and religious "tolerance" has masked an unmistakeable truth, that the ignorant who tolerate are potentially fundamentalists who discriminate.

It shouldn't come as a surprise, and more divisions will reveal themselves in time to come. The cleavage in the populace is now based on what is acceptable sexual orientation, and the battle was played out unfortunately on something that should never have been -- our system of justice. To do nothing was the only thing to do, damage control was necessary.

Now LHL has a bigger problem on his plate: the battle lines are drawn, and each warring faction has shown their strength. While the vast majority of the population is still bored by the whole shenanigan that just played out in Parliament and distracted by the property market boom, what can he do before the next civil war of ideologies bursts forth?

So don't get your panties in a knot!
It's no big deal....LHL said so himself, chill people!
They're not gonna use entrapment in gay clubs, or do anything really nasty that we aren't already used to.
Let the fundamentalists howl and have their day. No turf was actually lost or won, and the real battle has yet to come.

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE GAY MAN?

This morning, I flipped the Straitjacket Times to page 24 to find this taunt in boldface: “Decriminalizing homosexuality would be an error”. My eyes widened and I wondered which retard passing herself off as an academic was once again yodeling their morality on higher ground, and my blood-thirsty instincts were further fuelled when I realized Yvonne C.L. Lee was an assistant professor of law at the local university. Law professors, particularly the kind with fundamentalist Christian leanings make the most asinine arguments while cloaking them under the intellectual superiority of the law and their profession. It’s time to go for blood.

Lee essentially sounded no different fromthe rest of the moral panickers who fear the day that sex between two consenting adult males would be legal. She had only two new approaches to opposing this scenario, and that was

1) Human rights equality is not an absolute value, and the “public good” takes precedence over individuals’ equality and still must be protected by the law against “the rights of the individual or groups”.

She goes on to repeat a stale and seriously tiresome argument that decriminalizing homosexuality will result in “harmful social consequences”. To render her argument more credible, she went to great effort to imagine a hypothetical nightmare of possibilities that might come in the wake of this action, every single one of which I will destroy.

2) Homosexuality is “repugnant” and “offensive to the majority of citizens”. That’s it! I was speechless. One of her brilliant arguments was that the gay rights movement have been impeding the “free speech” of religious bigots – oops, I meant Christian and Muslim pastors who preach to thousands of people from their pulpits that there are people amongst us Singaporeans who are sinners, and morally repugnant, simply because they are only attracted to others of the same sex.

Basically, her own personal opinion – no doubt informed by a very flawed and shitty book that is deemed to be the literal word of God – is a good enough premise to generalize to most of the population, that ‘homosexuality is “offensive” because I and a lot of other religious zealots think so’. So there. She goes on to assert that one of the nightmare repercussions for our “public good” is the breeding of social divisiveness!

Somebody, please do something about university graduates who inflict this kind of stupidity on those who read the newspaper on a day they have 3 chapters of a Masters thesis to edit. I could not sit by and do nothing. This lunatic is only one of THOUSANDS of other lunatics out there who really BELIEVE they are right. Not by any kind of logic based on humanistic goals or a universal compassion and preference for broad, inclusive social justice. No, they invoke a most dangerous kind of rationality: reason based on (1) the word of some people masquerading as messengers from a higher being and
(2) an overactive imagination.

Let me demolish Lee’s “rational” arguments one by one:

(i) A harmful social consequence is the threat to “public health” because Lee argues that it has been “proven” that sodomy “an inherently unhealthy act that carries higher risks of a number of sexually transmitted infections”. The law thereby “should not facilitate acts which threaten public health”.

Firstly, sexually transmitted infections are not MORE commonly caused by anal sex than vaginal-penile penetration. In fact if Lee would check her facts, public health statistics would show that the highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases and infections occurred in heterosexuals. If the law against sodomy should remain because the act itself carries risk to health, then by all means, put a ban on ANY SEXUAL INTERCOURSE, because it isn’t abstinence from sexual acts that pose health risks, a medically trained professional will tell you it is a person’s prudent and safe sexual HABITS that protect him against infection.

(ii) Lee believes that letting this one go to the gay camp would support the extension of their agenda to “transform social morality”. She gives a whole list of POSSIBLE realities that the law must accommodate:

a) mandating the age of legal consent. Lee says that in Western nations, this ranges from 13 to 18, she then cleverly (or stupidly, depending on how you like your logic served up) gives us the imagery that this covers “Singapore males from Sec 1 to junior college”.

What’s the point? Is Lee saying that there is something morally reprehensible in allowing 13 year old boys and junior college boys to fuck one another? Or is she implying that there is something UNNATURAL and WRONG about them having anal sex? Either way, this is a no-brainer, because 10 year olds are having sex now. Yes, the law hasn’t caught up with heterosexual sexual patterns of our young, so why is she getting hot and bothered with the age at which young boys should be allowed to have anal sex?

b) Lee thinks that the gay rights camp would move to get their alternative lifestyle “mainstreamed” in the media, arts, education. Basically, she is panicking over the possibility that homosexuality would gain the right to be publicly accepted on our TVs. She thinks that it is “problematic” to NOT discriminate a person’s sexual orientation.

One: what a fucking fascist.
Two: she says that “sexual orientation” is vague and includes “bestiality and paedophilia”. Excuse me, paedophilia poses a THREAT to society because it harms the most defenceless of its members – children. Bestiality probably infringes the rights of the animal, but I don’t suppose Lee or the right wing religionists really care. Sexual orientation MUST NOT be a basis for discriminating individuals, and let us please note the difference between ORIENTATION and DEPRAVITY. Sodomy harms nobody when it is consensual, but it certainly harms the woman being RAPED.

Can someone please fire this clown? I am getting tired, and I am not even into her 3rd argument, which is a winner:

c) “An active homosexual agenda has engendered clashes with fundamental liberties like free speech and religious liberty”. She goes on to describe luridly how religious pastors have been sanctioned by the law for inciting “hate” in their preaching that homosexuality is a sin and repugnant and immoral. This opinion includes non-religious people, she adds.

I love this one. Ms Lee is saying that making PUBLIC speeches on hatred and denouncement of homosexuals is okay, because this is “free speech”. In fact, having laws against this kind of behaviour and speech is “intolerance” and will “breed social divisiveness”.
HELLO?
Somebody please, please do something about the stupidity of our law lecturers. I fear for my children’s future in multiracial, SECULAR Singapore.

Ms Lee, you think that publicly denouncing homosexuals and homosexuality as “repugnant”, “morally wrong and unnatural” as well as a “sin” is merely a matter of free speech while homosexuals are NOT FREE TO ASK for societal acceptance that they are simply “different” and not criminal? That it is not within their rights to talk about their differences on stage, in song and performance? Do they incite their own community to denounce and despise heterosexuals? Muslims? Christians? My dear Ms Lee, what you are saying is already intolerant to a great number of people, offensive even, and is as we speak, breeding divisiveness amongst Singaporeans.

d) Lee says there is a threat in homosexuals seeking “societal approval”. She says that the comparison between decriminalizing adultery and that of homosexuality is “fallacious”. That argument in support of decriminalization asserts that adultery has not gained social acceptance despite being decriminalized, and hence, widespread social mores against homosexuality would not be affected by a similar action.

I don’t follow.
Ms Lee criticizes the “fallacy” of the analogy by saying that adulterers do not ask for social approval, unlike gays. Therefore gays should still be criminal. Excuse me? Adultery is a direct threat to the institution of marriage, adulterers ARE MARRIED. Why would married adulterers threaten their own marriage? In fact many gay men choose to get married, simply because they are too afraid to be openly gay, because of this same lack of social acceptance of their choice. If you do your research, many married men trough the Internet for sex with other married men. Hello? Societal acceptance of homosexuality is going to SAVE MORE MARRIAGES and reduce the rate of HIV infection of innocent, unsuspecting women than acceptance adultery ever will.

I’m getting really tired. This person is more stupid than I thought.
The “homosexual rights agenda” and the hypothetical moral mayhem it potentially spells for us is what Ms Lee is opposing, not the ethics behind decriminalizing homosexuality and the logic of human rights and equality. By equality, I mean respect rather than discrimination, not a flat-out universalist contention. Lee has simply repeated all the stupid arguments stemming from blind and intolerant beliefs that curtail the rights of homosexuals to exist and behave in a responsible manner. How? By a pathetic demonizing of people and extending pricelessly flawed reasoning to the larger concept of the “public good”.

Is this the future envisioned by fascist bigots? If so, please, save the Supreme Court from all religious fundamentalists who think they have rationality on their side. In their fear of toppling off their moral high horses, I am afraid they have lost the script.

The Inverse Relationship Between Depression and Goal Orientation

Depressive thoughts, borne of a mind that is mired in its own contemplative misery, culminating in a spiralling trip into inertia. Sinking into unbelievable depths of introspection, but never reaching anything more conclusive than a death sentence. The verdict being nothing more than a projection of a depressive state of mind, one never reaches anywhere further than the cerebral walls that close in each time one revisits the past, the recent past or the redundancy of the future. Inner fears and unresolved torment recreate the figment of one's imagined unhappiness.

Restlessness, borne of a fundamental lack within one's consciousness of reality and bolstered by the inexorable need to become, to do, to escape. Becoming is a truism of the Self, steeped in the ever present and presence of mind. Goal-orientation, the driver of change, of doing and hence becoming, either motivates or stymies the restless one. Lacking an orientation toward a goal makes one restless, yet immobilizes one in one's entirety. Because one is immanently conscious of one's lack of goal-orientation, frustration evolves into restless ennui, and sometimes to resentful cynicism. Then one begins to search for reasons to justify the feelings, perhaps identifying the lack of goals or the disabled goal-orientation. If force drives action, which drives change, one might conclude that goal-oriented behaviour rests upon a force such as motivation (which is illogical if having a goal motivates one to act). And motivation being both externally and internally produced, it is only a matter of reasoning that the restless one might conclude that his lack of goal-orientation stems from a lack of motivation.

Motivation, a noun that is over-used and under-evaluated. Mostly understood and utilized as a concept to signify a feeling, an emotion or a force - internally or externally produced - which causes the human to engage in goal-oriented behaviour, in actions of sometimes mind-boggling proportions and other times of unspeakably inane pursuits such as getting straight As, going to Raffles Junior College and converting as many Muslims and Buddhists to Christianity as can be possibly envisioned in a given amount of time and stupidity. If goal-oriented behaviour is based on motivation - an internal force that could be stimulated by an external factor such as God, money and the person one desires to fuck, one should consider the basis of these factors that drive one's drive to act. Cognitively, one thinks, but emotionally, one feels. It is possible to think emotionally and feel rationally, but this is highly unlikely given the number of dimwits who do things for the reasons they say if you bother to ask. So motivation, the emotional driver of goal-oriented behaviour (which is cognitively rational but not necessarily logical) depends on how much one thinks the goal is worth orientating towards and acting for.

The only goal there is in being depressed is in the depressed person's complete and utter lack of goal-orientation, which is motivated by the inner-directed drive to be depressed.

"NO" IS A BAD WORD

It's amazing how much of your life you can live, and NOT have any hand in it. Most of us lament about not having any choice about things, we blame other people for "doing" things TO us mostly, or our parents or the Government. Perhaps children differ in the amount of freedom they get, freedom being the ability to choose or be given choices. Most children don't get the right kind of freedom -- they get a choice of which ice-cream flavour they'd like at Haagen Daz, but not of whether they would like to go to the Gifted Education program if they had the choice to turn it down. Or if they'd like to go to school at all for that matter.

Rejection. That is a choice that few are wont to make on their own free will. We seem to have been programmed since inception to reject rejection. Or at least view it with distaste and aversion. Rejecting anything is like a cuss word you are ashamed to be heard saying, unless it's rejecting something universally nasty, like an ugly suitor or a colonoscopy. People are never taught to say no to things that are offered to them, particularly when there's an implicit assumption that nobody would refuse it. Saying no is couched in extremely moral terms, so that rejecting is akin to repudiating something morally bad, no matter how dubious the morality. "Say no to drugs, smoking, premarital sex and multi-level marketeers".

You don't hear people mulling over whether to say no to a free lunch. Mostly due to the logic of gaining something for nothing. So what happened to the adage: You don't get nothing for nothing? Take lucky draw coupons for one, you get offered a chance to win something, nevermind the fact you don't know what you stand to win much less if you care about winning it or not, yet you would hardly stop to wonder if you should say no. For it is ASSUMED that people want to win something, winning implies getting something free and without having to pay any price for it. But the fact remains that people ARE paying a price for this dubious chance.

First, lucky draws are hardly ever transparent, going by the known fact that companies have awarded prizes to their own employees. Second, there is zero protection for you when you volunteer vital information that is required on filling out a coupon. This translates to zero liability to those who acquire your information should they give it away, and currently there really is nothing legislating how businesses and other corporate entities should treat individuals' information. So why do people continue to give away their information when the risks of it being wrongfully exploited for ill-gain is undeniably apparant and actually taking place as I speak?

Because people don't know how to say No. And saying no goes to the heart of knowing your rights and knowing how to choose: two of the least understood and downplayed ideas in Singapore. It goes to the very heart of the issue of freedom. In my opinion, having any right at all presupposes the freedom of exercising those rights. So too is the question of choice, or choosing. The freedom of choice differs from the freedom to choose. The former denotes the existence of two or more options, the latter supposes that one has the ability to say yes or no to those options and the will to exercise that right. You might be given a choice of two options, say chocolate or vanilla, but you hardly are expected to choose NO when a free lunch is offered. It is already assumed that a free lunch is preferred to no free lunch. The right to refuse is almost denied, and most of us deny our very right to refuse.

Then comes the issue of knowing how to choose: knowing that I have a right to refuse the free lunch, should I thereby refuse or accept? Incidentally, vote-spoiling and non-voting are prime examples of exercising intelligence when it comes to choosing, although in Singapore non-voting automatically disqualifies you from the next election, so additional effort need be applied here.

So we come to the problem of deliberation and motivation. Countless geniuses have applied themselves to theorising the how and why of making choices. The theory of rational choice argues that people choose according to a rational calculation of what they stand to gain against what might be lost, a cost-benefit analysis if you will. If people are rational, they will choose rationally to benefit more than to lose. So how would one define such rationality? Is it more rational to take the free lunch because it costs nothing as opposed to having to pay for it? Or is it more rational to pay for a lunch you might enjoy more as opposed to eating a free lunch that leaves you dissatisfied at best and at worst, lurching to the toilet from severe dyspeptia the rest of the afternoon?

So different people are motivated by different things, you argue. Back to the lucky draw: some people are motivated by greed (winning anything is preferred to winning nothing), some are motivated by pragmatism (I might need it later, even if I wouldn't buy it now), some by unconscious ignorance (why not?) and others by conscious ignorance (I don't really care if I win or not, and I'm not going to think about whether I want it at all).

You see, people are well-aware of their right to choose, but they are impervious to their right to refuse any or all options. I believe the problem lies in the logic we use in considering each choice we are presented with. "Having" comes with all kinds of rewards, most of them delightful. But "not having" connotes loss of rewards, even though "not having" doesn't even mean any net loss in whatever you currently possess. It is simply the continuation of present haves, instead of the loss of future (hypothetical) haves.

The hypothetical is the main culprit of this rant. Everyday we are presented with hypotheticals in the guise of religion, career projections and people who got your phone number over the weekend. And we live as if we are surely moving into the future, getting older is one thing but being as healthy or lucid as we are now is really another kind of hypothetical. The sale of hope is the most pernicious conjob ever, followed by the predilection for assuming things.

Which is why I urge all my friends to exercise their freedom to choose with utmost caution when it comes to being horny. Because having bad sex is not a choice you make until you get hit with it.

And then you spend the rest of your week wondering why you didn't think about this.

Le Grand Content

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LOVE IS A BRAIN SUPPRESSION

So here's the biggest ever Dumbspeak some people have been duped with: That Lovey Dovey feeling.

Con's friend J is marrying Ange's friend HB on the rebound. 6 months

Ange's friend T is marrying God-knows-Who on a Limited Shelf Life. Less than one year.

And last month Eve told me my ex-galpal JB married someone right after a 4 year relationship folded. In 6 months.

All have one thing in common: they believe they are happy.
And they really are! Let me tell you why: it's not love. It's a little known culprit behind your frontal cortex.
This is scientific people, I ain't making this up: the thing you believe is "love" is really your brain suppressing its CRITICAL REASONING FUNCTION.

Tony verified it, cos well, he's Tony and he reads more than me anyway. And since I am a right-wing empiricist, science speaks louder than words. And because this hypothesis was tested years ago and came out in quite a few prominent medical journals. You do the Googling, I have a thesis to write.

Basically, if you have been seeing/fucking/romanticising the same person for less than 12-18 months, please get an MRI scan. The neurologist will point out the target of our discussion today. If that part of your brain responsible for critical reasoning is suppressed (scan should be taken while you are looking at/thinking about your honey), please don't do anything rash.

In a few months, depending on how short your attention span (or how delusional you are), the next MRI should show that part of the brain working again. And by then, you won't feel so lovey-dovey, you'll be thinking a LOT more about his/her nasty habits, finding fault, you'll be having one or two more arguments and suddenly the honey doesn't taste so sweet any more. Ah and yes, you'll be having much less sex.

Our brain dupes us into feeling this way, probably for species survival, DUH. Hence the procreation that comes so naturally on Friday and Saturday one-night-stands. We're not biologically programmed to look for problems or faults in the first 2 years (average) of a relationship. That's enough time to sign your life away to the marriage institution.

Remember: before getting "madly" committed, get your MRI first.
Don't say you weren't warned.

Seoul in Winter

Panmunjom, at the DMZ

The only signs of life, Freedom Bridge

A railway runs through it

Happy Campers

It snowed all night

And when we woke, it was white and silent

with just the footsteps

And the wet, puddly, cold