Sg's desperation to get couples to marry and procreate.
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Singapore's desperation to get couples to marry and procreate.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The state owned and controlled Singapore newspaper; just as in North Korea where all media is state owned and controlled like in Singapore; Channel News Asia has an article on Feb 17, 2008 which reads "Singapore holds first speed dating event on the MRT".
It tells about the government’s efforts to get more people to marry and have children. One of Singapore's major problems is its low birth rate, so low that births cannot even replace those dying, and were it not for the government permitting hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Communist China, India and other places, the population by now would have seriously declined.
This article refers to the latest of a series of attempts to encourage more births, which have all failed so far; this time advertising for both men and women to line up facing each other in train stations hoping that they will instantly fall in love and procreate soon thereafter! A sign of desperation on the part of the Singapore government, don't you think?
The article speaks of a low miserable figure of 52 men and women having turned up at the train station for a chance at matrimony on a train; in response to the government's advertisements throughout the island! A miserably low number of 52 men and women!
Jeraldine Toh, a Bank Relationship Manager; is reported to have said that she was very excited because it was the first time that matrimony was attempted on a speedy train. I can sympathize with her, and tell her that it is not her fault for not being able to marry. It is the fault of this tyrannical government and their unpopular policies which has created a sense of fear and insecurity among Singaporeans preventing them from wanting children.
Michael Wee a technician like Jerldine Toh also thought it was a good idea because he feels people have insufficient time in Singapore to meet the opposite sex.
Lee Kuan Yew's minister who is paid as a salary 5 times what the president of the United States George Bush is paid, being $3.7 million a year, Mr. S Iswaran, was the matrimonial “how to woo and romance” instructor for the day. He was on duty at the Boon Lay MRT Train station and was reported to have given "a little encouragement and dating tips" but what actually this meant or to what detail the instruction was; was not explained in the news article. Also, as to what qualifications he had for this romantic instructor position was also not explained. Was he a successful womanizer in the past or another Rodolfo Valentino? Such questions remained unanswered!
The report states that only singles between 20 and 40 years of age were permitted to engage in this activity of a labor of love, so sympathies and commiserations to those above 40, both men and women who may be capable in more ways than one, in such activity. Surly age discrimination here, don't you think?
The romantic aspirants were give very little time, only about 6 minutes, or the equivalent of 2 stations of travel time, when they forced to go on the next person, so as the largest number can meet and make a judgment on their life long partners! Very little time indeed to decide on such an important issue!
Ms Toh, another woman marriage aspirant who took part, complained that despite many people there (54 hardly appears many) and despite her meeting all of them, she still could not find a friend.
I must say, reading this news shows a country in utter desperation. Willing to do almost anything to remedy a situation which has become hopeless. The government, instead of trying these desperate attempts at increasing the population of Singapore should first ask itself why it finds itself in this position anyway.
The reason for people not wanting to marry and have children is the appalling political situation in Singapore.Where people are afraid of the government. Where there is no job security. Where jobs are given to foreigners and Singaporeans retrenched. Where there is no social security or social welfare. Where if you lose your job, you are given $200.00 a bag of rice and asked to fend for yourself.
Where you can succeed only if you tow the government line and join Lee Kuan Yew's political party and parrot whatever he says. Where there is no rule of law and no human rights. Where there is no free press and free debate on ideas. Where children are deprived of their childhood being overworked with no chance to play.
In other words, Singapore is a dictatorship where Lee and his family rule with some very silly policies and where criticism is not tolerated at all. So they do not want to have children in Singapore. Many want to immigrate to Australia and leave Singapore for good. In Australia I believe they will have children. Many children.
Gopalan Nairhttp://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/2008/02/singapores-desperation-to-get-couples.html
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i need love too
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Originally posted by 我爱周�伦:
i need love too
First, you must understand the difference between love and lust as well as peer pressure. Even if your friends are not actively pressuring you, you must only want to enter into a relationship on your own accord. -
Speed dating was an idea that sprung up in the US mainly by bars and clubs so that they could still make some money during down times, eg those weekdays when few people went out drinking. Think Zouk tea dances on Saturday at 4:00pm.
It was a marketing idea to attact customers who did not have luck picking up sexual partners during a normal night out.
The rational was that if you chatted someone up and got turned down, your chances to pick up the next person falls if there were witnesses to your being turned down. Generally because everyone doesn't know each other and so assumed that you were turned down for a reason and there was no need to go through the whole chatting up with you. You had been pre-disapproved. Conversely people who get picked up usually have a higher chance of getting picked up again.
That led to bar hopping, where if you were turned down at one bar, you'd save time and go to another bar where your chances were supposedly better as you hadn't been turned down there yet. More people started bar hopping to see their friends who might be in any number of bars and probably didn't get lucky and go home with a stranger. So it became a fad.
After a while, bar hopping begin to be seen as being desperate. You either could not get laid or you were a stalker and needed to get your own life. Only those not in the know thought it was trendy and this was falsely maintained by celebrites bar hopping so the paparazzi had a greater chance of taking their picture with the current love interest.
It became noted that the old formula of put alchol in a room and watch the customers come in was old school and new marketing ideas begin to proliferate.
Someone then came up with the bright idea of "speed dating" that allowed you to chat with someone. Your preferences were recorded down and then you'd be put in touch with that someone if you both happened to pick each other out from the crowd. You didn't have to spend a lot on drinks, you got to speak to a large number of potential real date material, it was an efficient use of time and most of all, it was private.
It became a real fad but after a while it became the fashion to believe that people who went on speed date sessions after speed date sessions had been more efficiently rejected by even more people and were therefore even less worthy of consideration and so it fell out of fashion with the bar crowd as it had the taint of being the resort of misfits.
The less knowlegeble crowd still thought it was a good way to date but they are becoming fewer and fewer.
So basically there is a time and limit to the use of speed dating and I think Singapore has already passed that "use by" date.
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when i migrate to aussie then i'll start a family la. haha
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i think 我爱周�伦 need to be anal-ed by Mr Lee and his family then he will get all the love he wants
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life here so ex how to happy happy say get married n hv children... its only for those who got $$$... poor ppl can wait long long...
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I suggest gahmen pass a law where polygamy is allowed to produce more children
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Confucius said respect your elders and condone polygamy.
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... simply amazing...
... for a "government" that claims to be comprised of Top Talents & Scholarly Minds they sure are DUMB (or are acting DUMB) to not see what's causing the lack of babies...
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Wah, fantastic planning and fantastic execution.
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One can forget about any rise in chinese birthrates here unless the women dump female magazine and 5c mindset which I thhink they won't
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mind set cant be reverse!!
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One can forget about any rise in chinese birthrates here unless the women dump female magazine and 5c mindset which I thhink they won't
We can compare the Singapore middle class outlook with the USA middle class outlook and note the similarities, here is an analysis of the USA middle class family and their outlook:
... In marriage, as in so many other things, Western Civilization has been subjected to quite antithetical theories; these we might call the Western and the Romantic theories of love and marriage. The Romantic theory of these things was that each man or woman had a unique personality consisting of inborn traits, accumulated by inheritance from a unique combination of ancestors. This is, of course, the same theory that was used to justify permissive education. In Romantic love, however, the theory went on to assume, simply as a matter of faith, that for each man or woman there existed in a world a person of the opposite sex whose personality traits would just fit into those of his or her destined mate. The only problem was to find that mate. It was assumed that this would he done, at first sight, when an almost instantaneous flash of recognition would reveal to both that they had found the one possible life's partner.
The idea of love at first sight as a flash of recognition was closely related to the Manichaean and Puritan religious idea that God's truth came to men in a similar flash of illumination (an idea that goes back, like so many of these ideas, to Plato's theory of knowledge as reminiscence). In its most extreme form, this Romantic theory of love assumed that each of the destined lovers was only part of a person, the two parts fitting together instantly on meeting into a single personality. Associated witl1 this were a number of other ideas, including the idea that marriages were “made in heaven," that such a Romantic marriage was totally satisfying to the partners, and that such a marriage should be "eternal."
These ideas of Romantic love and marriage were much more acceptable to women than to men (for reasons we have not time to analyze) and were embraced by the middle class, but not, to any great extent, by other classes. The theory, like so much of the middle-class outlook, originated among the medieval heresies, such as Manichaeism (as the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont has shown), and was thus from the same tradition that saw the rise of the bourgeois outlook in the Middle Ages and its reinforcement by the closely associated Puritan movement of modern times. The Romantic theory of love was spread through the middle class by incidental factors, such as that the bourgeoisie were the only social class that read much, and Romantic love was basically a literary convention in its propagation whatever it may have been in its origins. It made no real impression on the other social classes in European society, such as the peasants, the nobility, or the urban working craftsmen.
Strangely enough, Romantic love, accepted as a theory and ideal by the bourgeoisie, had little influence on middle-class marriages in practice, since these were usually based on middle-class values of economic security and material status rather than on love. More accurately, middle-class marriages were based on these material considerations in fact, while everyone concerned pretended that they were based on Romantic love. Any subsequent recognition of this clash between fact and theory often gave a severe jolt and has sometimes been a subject for literary examination, as in the first volume of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga.
Opposed to this Romantic theory of love and marriage, and almost equally opposed to the bourgeois practice of "sensible" marriage, was what we may call the Western idea of love and marriage. This assumes that personalities are dynamic and flexible things formed largely by experiences in the past. Love and marriage between such personalities are, like everything in the Western outlook, diverse, imperfect, adjustable, creative, cooperative, and changeable. The Western idea assumes that a couple come together for many reasons (sex, loneliness, common interests, similar background, economic and social cooperation, reciprocal admiration of character traits, and other reasons). It further assumes that their whole relationship will be a slow process of getting to know each other and of mutual adjustment—a process that may never end. The need for constant adjustment shows the Western recognition that nothing, even love, is final or perfect. This is also shown by recognition that love and marriage are never total and all-absorbing, that each partner remains an independent personality with the right to an independent life. (This is found throughout the Western tradition and goes back to the Christian belief that each person is a separate soul with its own, ultimately separate, fate. )
Thus there appeared in Western society at least three kinds of marriage, which we may call Romantic, bourgeois, and Western. The last, without being much discussed (except in modern books on love and marriage), is probably the most numerous of the three, and the other two, if they prove successful, do so by gradually developing into this third kind. Romantic marriage, based on the "shock of recognition," has in fact come to be based very largely on sexual attraction, since this is the chief form that love at first sight can take. Such marriages often fail, since even sex requires practice and mutual adjustment and is too momentary a human relationship to sustain a permanent union unless many other common interests accumulate around it. Even when this occurs and the marriage becomes a success, in the sense that it persists, it is never total, and the Romantic delusion that marriage should be totally absorbing of the time, attention, and energies of its partners, still expected by many women brought up on the Romantic idea, merely means that the marriage becomes an enslaving relationship to the husbands and a source of disappointment and frustration to the wives.
Middle-class marriage, in fact, was not romantic, for, in the middle class, marriage, like everything else, was subject to the middle-class system of values. Within that value system, middle-class persons chose a marriage partner who would assist in achieving middle-class goals of status and achievement. A woman, with her parents' approval, chose a husband who showed promise of being a good provider and a steady, reliable, social achiever, who would be able to give her a material status at least as high as that provided by her own parents. A man chose as a wife one who showed promise of being a help in his upward struggle, one able to act as hostess to his aspirant activities and to provide the domestic decorum and social graces expected of a successful business or professional man.
Such a marriage was based, from both sides, on status factors rather than on personal factors. The fact that a man was a Yale graduate, was trained for a profession, had a position with a good firm, drove an expensive car, could order dinner with assurance in an expensive restaurant, and had already applied for membership in a golf or country club were not reasons for loving him as a person, since they were simply the accessories of his status. Yet middle-class persons married for reasons such as these and, at the same time, convinced themselves and their friends that they were marrying for Romantic love (based on the fact that they were, in addition to their mutual social acceptability, sexually attracted).
For a time the new marriage could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations ago, but today the question is posed by every women's magazine, "Is your marriage a success?" But unconsciously, long before this, realization had been growing that the marriage relationship was not based on love, which must be a recognition and appreciation of personal qualities, not of status accessories. Without personal feeling based on such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners, with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class minds, still insisted that it was based on love. The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and "fulfillment," will be examined in a moment.
Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally. Brought up in a male-dominated family, she was prepared to accept a similar situation in her own life. This means that her outside contacts and her general picture of the world came to her through the screen of her husband's vision of these things.
The decrease in the number of children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930'5. Enterprising editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's magazines (like the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women's clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed children. By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women's magazines. Her increasing leisure gave her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to greater effort in pursuit of money. To him this became nagging; to her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under which she had entered upon the marriage relationship.
While this was going on, the outside world was also changing. Women became "emancipated" as a consequence of World War I, with considerable urging onward from the women's magazines. Shorter skirts and shorter hair became symbols of this process, but even more significant was the appearance in the outside world of a great increase in the number of jobs that could be done best, or only, by women. As part of this process, there took place considerable changes in bourgeois morality, the ending of chaperonage, greater freedom between the sexes, and the acceptance of divorce as morally possible in bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the stage and cinema).
As part of this whole process, there occurred a dramatic event of great social significance. This was the reversal in longevity expectations of men and women in adult life. A century ago (to be sure, in a largely rural context), a twenty-year-old man could expect to live longer than a twenty-year-old wife. In fact, such a man might well bury two or three wives, usually from the mortality associated with childbirth or other female problems. Today, a twenty-year-old man has little expectation of living as long as a twenty-year-old woman. To make matters worse, a twenty-year-old woman a century ago married a man considerably older than herself, at least in the middle classes, simply because future preference required that a man be established economically before he began to raise a family.
Today, from a series of causes, such as the extension of the female expectation of life faster than the male expectation, the increased practice of birth control, coeducation (which brings the sexes into contact at the same age), weakening of future preference and of the middle-class outlook generally, which leads to marriages by couples of about the same age, husbands now generally die before their wives. Recognition of this, the increased independence of women, adaptation to taxes and other legal nuisances, has given rise to joint financial accounts, to property being put in the wife's name, and to greatly increased insurance benefits for wives. Gradually the wealth of the country became female-owned, even if still largely male-controlled.
But this had subtle results; it made women more independent and more outspoken. Bourgeois men gradually came to live under a regime of persistent nagging to become "better providers." To many men, work became a refuge and a relief from domestic revelations of the inadequacy of their performance as economic achievers. This growth of overwork, of constant tension, of frustration of emotional life and of leisure began to make more and more men increasingly willing to accept death as the only method of achieving rest. Bourgeois men literally began to kill themselves, by unconscious psychic suicide, from overwork, neurotic overindulgence in alcohol, smoking, work, and violent leisure, and the middle class slowly increased its proportion of materially endowed widows.
One notable change in this whole process was a shift, over the past century, from the male-dominated family to a female-dominated family. The locality in which the young couple set up their home had an increasing tendency to be matrilocal rather than patrilocal. In increasing numbers of cases, where the young couple married before the groom's educational process was finished, they even lived with her family (but very rarely with his family). Increasingly part of the burden of housework was shifted to the husband: washing dishes, buying groceries, even tending the children. In 1840 a child could cry at night and would invariably be tended by its mother, while the father slept peacefully on, totally unaware of what was going on. By 1960, if a child cried at night, the chances were as likely as not that the mother would hear nothing while the father took over the necessary activities. If this were questioned by anyone, the mother's retort was pointed: "I take care of baby all day; I don't see why he can't take care of it at night!".
Closely related to this confusion, or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was decreasing sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As recently as the 1920's girl babies were reared...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#75
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LOL. Even if I found the guy of my dreams, i wouldn't live in Singapore, tyvm.
*rolls eyes*
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O my this situation isnt good... Low birth rates plus so many leaving = less working people = lesser GDP = lesser growth = no more reason to justify expotential pay increments..... not good..... for the government that is...
As if the government is concerned about promoting family values or increasing the quality of life of the people or the 'extinction' of the singapore population or promoting romantic love for that matter
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You want to have children.... then do so.
You think too $$$$.... then don't.
Either way, non of us 'owe' the Govt anything so important that we must have children for them.
But do remember that this is a Chicken or Egg issue......
Too low a birth rate in S'pore.... import more FT & FW..... S'porean don't like so many FT & FW..... then have more children lor..... don't want children...... import more FT & FW.... and the whole issue goes full circle.
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Use money to solve the problem lor.
3 kids or more, get $X cash bonus.
Set $X high enough such that more people will bite.
How high should $X be? $100K enough?
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Originally posted by onlooker123:
Use money to solve the problem lor.
3 kids or more, get $X cash bonus.
Set $X high enough such that more people will bite.
How high should $X be? $100K enough?
Intresting...... But what would happen if ppl just wants the Kids for the $100K than don't take care
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Originally posted by hloc:
Intresting...... But what would happen if ppl just wants the Kids for the $100K than don't take care
You ever heard of Maintenance of Parents Act?Simple right. Just pass a Maintenance of Children's Act.
Don't take care? Take back the $100K.
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I do not seriously think sg is desperate enough for procreation as if that is true, the following would have happened:
1. Work Culture would have improved : hours worked, stresss level, pay, UNIONS.
2. Quality of Life . Quite low , really. who can deny?
they say, when under stress the sperm cells takboleh tahan. :)
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change to 41/2 day week, couples have more time to make love. Increase more public holidays, give pay maternity leave 6 months (pay by government), free delivery in government hospitals. just to suggest a few. But I think this selfish government would not take steps to change the rules, they only want you to have more babies without helping us, if their is help also minimun only, not generous, "kaka lai," stupid PXP gahmen.