Free Tibet!!!!
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Singapore is too small a state to exercise any influence over these things.
I can understand it and I accept it.
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Originally posted by Poh Ah Pak:
Singapore is too small a state to exercise any influence over these things.
I can understand it and I accept it.
Regionally though, Singapore provides both a political and economic model for China to emulate. You know the talk about 'learning from Singapore' in China.
I know you are critical of your government, but it is not without selling points as far as Chinese leadership is concerned.
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I agree with you. Protection of cultural values and identity is important.
So how do you think our education system in Singapore can be reformed to reflect this?
Ever thought what is the nature of Singapore? A brokerage land/ a trading post/ Emporium. A Singular culture identity for Singapore or a multi ethnic culture for Singapore?
singapore education system has always reflect how singapore survived thru times. It adapted and changed over time depended upon state of influence. Yesterday English, Today Mandarin. Tomorrow - Hindi. Day after tomorrow .......
Preservation of culture fall into social and home custom, as such personally I am not sure what you are trying to preserve given the influence of China in the region. Assertion of Chinese culture will be in SG. But excessive will result in displeasure of other races in SG.
I have always believe that You have to be born a Human Being first before you can be associated with any Race, Culture, or Religion. I thought your Taoist would favor a more balance.
the only way education system in Singapore can do is to reflect A balance of culture uderstanding with a global perspective of tolerance. You are not going to see Singaporean sit in Singapore and not going to be living or working abroad.
In the hope that the generation that is born and bred out from SG. We can be neutral on issue of ethnic ties, and culture.
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In the hope that the generation that is born and bred out from SG. We can be neutral on issue of ethnic ties, and culture.
Which means a dead and lifeless society.
It adapted and changed over time depended upon state of influence. Yesterday English, Today Mandarin. Tomorrow - Hindi. Day after tomorrow .......
You cannot anyhow suka suka change here change there, the society will suffer a crisis and decay.
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...each civilization is born in some inexplicable fashion and, after a slow start, enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power, both internally and at the expense of its neighbors, until gradually a crisis of organization appears.
When this crisis has passed and the civilization has been reorganized, it seems somewhat different. Its vigor and morale have weakened. It becomes stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, internal crises again arise.
At this point there appears, for the first time, a moral and physical weakness which raises, also for the first time, questions about the civilization's ability to defend itself against external enemies.
Racked by internal struggles of a social and constitutional character, weakened by loss of faith in its older ideologies and by the challenge of newer ideas incompatible with its past nature, the civilization grows steadily weaker until it is submerged by outside enemies, and eventually disappears.
...The Age of Expansion is generally marked by four kinds of expansion:
(1) of population,
(2) of geographic area,
(3) of production, and
(4) of knowledge.
The expansion of production and the expansion of knowledge give rise to the expansion of population, and the three of these together give rise to the expansion of geographic extent...
...Eventually, in most civilizations the rate of expansion begins to decline everywhere.
it is this decline in the rate of expansion of a civilization which marks its passage from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict. This latter is the most complex, most interesting, and most critical of all the periods of the life cycle of a civilization. It is marked by four chief characteristics:
(a) it is a period of declining rate of expansion;
(b) it is a period of growing tensions and class conflicts;
(c) it is a period of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent imperialist wars; and
(d) it is a period of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions, and otherworldliness.
All these phenomena appear in the core area of a civilization before they appear in more peripheral portions of the society...
...The decreasing rate of expansion of the Age of Conflict gives rise to the other characteristics of the age, in part at least.
After the long years of the Age of Expansion, people's minds and their social organizations are adjusted to expansion, and it is a very difficult thing to readjust these to a decreasing rate of expansion.
Social classes and political units within the civilization try to compensate for the slowing of expansion through normal growth by the use of violence against other social classes or against other political units...
...The diffusion of material elements from one society to another has a complex effect on the importing society. In the short run it is usually benefitted by the importation, but in the long run it is frequently disorganized and weakened. When white men first came to North America, material elements from Western Civilization spread rapidly among the different Indian tribes. The Plains Indians, for example, were weak and impoverished before 1543, but in that year the horse began to diffuse northward from the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century the Plains Indians were raised to a much higher standard of living (because of ability to hunt buffalo from horseback) and were immensely strengthened in their ability to resist Americans coming westward across the continent. In the meantime, the trans-Appalachian Indians who had been very powerful in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to receive firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually whiskey from the French and later the English by way of the St. Lawrence. These greatly weakened the woods Indians of the trans-Appalachian area and ultimately weakened the Plains Indians of the trans-Mississippi area, because measles and whiskey were devastating and demoralizing and because the use of traps and guns by certain tribes made them dependent on whites for supplies at the same time that they allowed them to put great physical pressure on the more remote tribes which had not yet received guns or traps. Any united front of reds against whites was impossible, and the Indians were disrupted, demoralized, and destroyed.
In general, importation of an element of material culture from one society to another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it is
(a) productive,
(b) can be made within the society itself, and
(c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing society without demoralizing it.
The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy them in a material sense with firearms.
When one society is destroyed by the impact of another society, the people are left in a debris of cultural elements derived from their own shattered culture as well as from the invading culture. These elements generally provide the instruments for fulfilling the material needs of these people, but they cannot be organized into a functioning society because of the lack of an ideology and spiritual cohesive...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/01.html#1
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then what constitutes a nation ?
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I just want Lee Kuan Yew to die now.
I think the trend of Singaporeans leaving Singapore is a sign of the society weakening due to the reforms taken by the PAP regime in the 60s and 70s.
In the short run, Singapore appeared to be progressing well on the economic level.
But in the long run, on other non-material levels, Singapore society has been badly disrupted by the importation of an alien culture on the society.
This is Lee Kuan Yew's doing.
He is a fool.
I want him to die.
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I am not sure why there is this need to blame.
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i find it ironic that the most of the western countries condemn china so readily when they were the ones that held china at cannon points and force it to import heroin, and surrendered land (HK, Taiwan, Macau) to the western empires. which incidently, also enslave millions of africans into their slave trade.
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The destruction of traditional Chinese culture under the impact of Western Civilization was considerably later than the similar destruction of Indian culture by Europeans.
This delay arose from the fact that European pressure on India was applied fairly steadily from the early sixteenth century, while in the Far East, in Japan even more completely than in China, this pressure was relaxed from the early seventeenth century for almost two hundred years, to 1794 in the case of China and to 1854 in the case of Japan.
As a result, we can see the process by which European culture was able to destroy the traditional native cultures of Asia more clearly in China than almost anywhere else.
The traditional culture of China, as elsewhere in Asia, consisted of a military and bureaucratic hierarchy superimposed on a great mass of hardworking peasantry...
...Until 1841 Canton was the only port allowed for foreign imports, and opium was illegal.
As a consequence of Chinese destruction of illegal Indian opium and the commercial exactions of Cantonese authorities, Britain imposed on China the treaties of Nanking (1842) and of Tientsin (1858).
These forced China to cede Hong Kong to Britain and to open sixteen ports to foreign trade, to impose a uniform import tariff of no more than 5 percent, to pay an indemnity of about $100 million, to permit foreign legations in Peking, to allow a British official to act as head of the Chinese customs service, and to legalize the import of opium.
Other agreements were imposed by which China lost various fringe areas such as Burma (to Britain), Indochina (to France), Formosa and the Pescadores (to Japan), and Macao (to Portugal), while other areas were taken on leases of various durations, from twenty-five to ninety-nine years.
In this way Germany took Kiaochow, Russia took southern Liaotung (including Port Arthur), France took Kwangcho-wan, and Britain took Kowloon and Weihaiwei.
In this same period various Powers imposed on China a system of extraterritorial courts under which foreigners, in judicial cases, could not be tried in Chinese courts or under Chinese law...
...In Asia generally, the revolution in weapons (meaning muskets and later rifles) came before the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.
Indeed, most firearms were not locally made, but were imported and, being imported, came into the possession of the upper class of rulers, bureaucrats, and landlords and not into the hands of peasants or city masses.
As a result, these ruling groups were generally able to maintain their position against their own masses even when they could not defend themselves against European Powers.
As a consequence of this, any hope of partial reform or of a successful revolution early enough to be a moderate revolution became quite unlikely...
...In China the people could not get weapons because of their low standards of living and the high cost of imported arms.
As a result, power remained in the hands of the army, except for small groups who were financed by emigrant Chinese with relatively high incomes overseas.
By 1911 the prestige of the imperial regime had fallen so low that it obtained support from almost no one, and the army refused to sustain it.
As a result, the revolutionaries, supported by overseas money, were able to overthrow the imperial regime in an almost bloodless revolution, but were not able to control the army after they had technically come to power...
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I have deliberately refrained from commenting on this until more facts are known. After sorting through news and videos from various sources, my conclusion is that western media is indeed biased in their reporting, to the point of misrepresentation of facts
So much for free press. There is too much commie-phobia and china-phobia in the western psyche. Maybe they can feel their superiority threatened? -
There is too much commie-phobia and china-phobia in the western psyche. Maybe they can feel their superiority threatened?
...Most stable and primitive societies, such as the American Indians before 1492 or medieval Europe, have no great population problem because the birthrate is balanced by the death rate.
In such societies both of these are high, the population is stable, and the major portion of that population is young (below eighteen years of age).
This kind of society (frequently called Population Type A) is what existed in Europe in the medieval period (say about 1400) or even in part of the early modern period (say about 1700).
As a result of the increased supply of food in Europe after 1725, and of men's increased ability to save lives because of advances in sanitation and medicine after 1775, the death rate began to fall, the birthrate remained high, the population began to increase, and the number of older persons in the society increased.
This gave rise to what we have called the demographic explosion (or Population Type B).
As a result of it, the population of Europe (beginning in western Europe) increased in the nineteenth century, and the major portion of that population was in the prime of life (ages eighteen to forty-five), the arms-bearing years for men and the childbearing years for women.
At this point the demographic cycle of an expanding population goes into a third stage (Population Type C) in which the birthrate also begins to fall.
The reasons for this fall in the birthrate have never been explained in a satisfactory way, but, as a consequence of it, there appears a new demographic condition marked by a falling birthrate, a low death rate, and a stabilizing and aging population whose major part is in the mature years from thirty to sixty.
As the population gets older because of the decrease in births and the increase in expectation of life, a larger and larger part of the population has passed the years of hearing children or bearing arms.
This causes the birthrate to decline even more rapidly, and eventually gives a population so old that the death rate begins to rise again because of the great increase in deaths from old age or from the casualties of inevitable senility.
Accordingly, the society passes into a fourth stage of the demographic cycle (Population Type D). This stage is marked by a declining birthrate, a rising death rate, a decreasing population, and a population in which the major part is over fifty years of age...
... This diffusion of pressure outward from the western European core of Western Civilization can contribute a great deal toward a richer understanding of the period 1850-2000.
It helps to explain the Anglo-French rivalry about 1850, the Anglo-French alliance based on fear of Germany after 1900, the free-world alliance based on fear of Soviet Russia after 1950, and the danger to both Western Civilization and Soviet Civilization from Asiatic pressure by 2000.
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Originally posted by Arapahoe:
Last para line 7 should read "nobody want to preserve national identity and preserve cultural heritage."
That would be your own position. The number does sound silly but the point he was making was to create a balance of changed. Preservation of the cultured.
In any case how do you put SG with Tibet. in different part of History. Singapore took the decision to pick up English and that leads to development as it is today. Future change and SG will have to make changes, if today MY n Indo are the economics power we would be writting Bahasa.
Singapore didn't take the decision to pick up English, the master of the land then was the Brit so English was there to stay. Many Chinese didn't agree so there were Chinese schools. But you are right, we now study Chinese because of China, we would have studied Indonesian if Sukarno had his way, if India development picked up then I am not sure if we would study Tamil or Hindi....
The point is even the Tibetans, given a choice, they would want to study a language that would enable them to make better living, honestly I don't know if they have a problem studying both Tibetan and Chinese language. As it is, the dilution of Tibetan culture by the Chinese is much less than the influence of western culture in Chinese culture. Wait till hollywood and bollywood both enter Lakhsa, via the railroad built by China...
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there is an interesting view that actually under the chinese, tibet has enjoyed greater freedom and economic progress as the wealth/resources china has can easily to pass over to tibet. arguably, on its own, tibet may even struggle or be stiffled economically.
tibet is also locally run by tibetens, no doubt placed by the chinese and has full allegience to the communist party.
that independence hold such dear ideals to the tibetens may actually be misplaced or backfired if it spiral into a `one step forward, three steps back' situation.
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On the eve of taiwan's election..
Stones never before seen around Tibet was conveniantly found put in piles the following night to be used to pelt the Han people.
I support the tanks!
Dun fuk with these guys in blue tracksuit. Sacred Flame Protection Squad 'whats it in chinese again? '. lol.. only China will come up with names like that.
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Singapore didn't take the decision to pick up English, the master of the land then was the Brit so English was there to stay.
Yoo! Which year were you born?
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Originally posted by redDUST:
there is an interesting view that actually under the chinese, tibet has enjoyed greater freedom and economic progress as the wealth/resources china has can easily to pass over to tibet. arguably, on its own, tibet may even struggle or be stiffled economically.
tibet is also locally run by tibetens, no doubt placed by the chinese and has full allegience to the communist party.
that independence hold such dear ideals to the tibetens may actually be misplaced or backfired if it spiral into a `one step forward, three steps back' situation.
Check out this article written by a western researcher before all this started. Tibetan buddhism is very different from the buddhism that you or I are familiar with. Some rituals are pretty barbaric, like 'tian zhan', meaning cutting up and feeding dead bodies to eagles (or is it vultures?). I also remember seeing a documentary where they had some kind of percussion musical instrument made from a child's scalp. I was only 8 years old then and it made me really sick...
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
Ooops... i think Poh Ah Pak already posted this site earlier...
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How would you like for some group to consider you uncivilized because you are not like them, and then proceed to have you adopt their ways whether you like it or not?
Tibet is a mountainous region of hard rocks, burial land is scarce, as is arable land for farming. Wood for cremation is also scare. Therefore the dead are disposed by feeding to vultures. Buddhist culture consider this virtuous as it benefits another creature. Also in high altitude bodies tends to freeze and become mummified. Where to pile those bodies?
So you think Tibetians are barbaric and should be made to be current by working for the city municipal, sweeping and removing garbage for you.
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I'm glad that this incident has made me realise the total hypocrisy of the Dalai Lama and Tibetian Buddhism in general. I will never donate a single cent to their cause in future. Western movies like "The Golden Child" got all their facts wrong. I don't think they were even interested in facts, just to further their propaganda war against communist China
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Originally posted by mancha:
How would you like for some group to consider you uncivilized because you are not like them, and then proceed to have you adopt their ways whether you like it or not?
Tibet is a mountainous region of hard rocks, burial land is scarce, as is arable land for farming. Wood for cremation is also scare. Therefore the dead are disposed by feeding to vultures. Buddhist culture consider this virtuous as it benefits another creature. Also in high altitude bodies tends to freeze and become mummified. Where to pile those bodies?
So you think Tibetians are barbaric and should be made to be current by working for the city municipal, sweeping and removing garbage for you.
Actually, if you bother to read the article, it's the previously privileged landlords/lamas/slavers who are receiving their just comeuppance. Sweeping and removing garbage is too good for them.
Well, maybe "tian zhan" is not so bad, considering that they are dead bodies anyway... It is grisly though...
Just wondering... are you also supportive of hindus burning their widows... because it is "their way"?
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perharps this is another propaganda. it works both direction.
"The Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations." Aren't they? Actually, the Olympics seem an ideal place for demonstrations. Not only are the world's media there with cameras running, but the modern Olympics were set up with a political purpose: to promote international peace by encouraging healthy competition among nations. Hence the emphasis on national teams instead of individual competitors; hence the opening ceremony — since copied by other sporting events — as well as the national flags and national anthems.
These elements make the Olympics special, different from other international competitions, but they also sometimes give the Games a nasty edge. The old U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. basketball rivalry; the parade of East German women with husky voices; the lists of who has won how many medals — all of that is evidence of the decades-old politicization of the Olympics. There were black-power demonstrations at the 1968 Mexico City Games. A Palestinian group attacked and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games. Australian aborigines protested at the 2000 Sydney Games. And everything associated with the 2008 Olympics, from the massive Beijing building program, to the Olympic torch that is due to be carried across Tibet, to the Chinese Olympic committee's Web site (which describes China's commitment to "promoting mass sporting activities on an extensive scale, improving the people's physique, and spurring the socialist modernization of China") is blatantly designed to promote the domestic and international image of the Chinese state, too.
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Yah, whether you like it or not, anything that has so much media coverage IS political. Hillary Clinton telling Bush to boycott olympics is also political
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Originally posted by Panache1976:
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Just wondering... are you also supportive of hindus burning their widows... because it is "their way"?
No, but I would not preach to them. The British, and a few zealots, demonised the custom, which was voluntary and optional. It was "their way" and I won't argue with them over it. It is their business.
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Originally posted by mancha:
No, but I would not preach to them. The British, and a few zealots, demonised the custom, which was voluntary and optional. It was "their way" and I won't argue with them over it. It is their business.
Sorry I can't agree with you there... I think it is the duty of enlightened people to spread civilisation everywhere.Anyway, the widow-burning custom cannot be described as wholly voluntary. There might be a few widows who loved their husbands so much that their wanted to die and join him (errrmm... I wish I will have a wife who loved me that much... but I wouldn't wish her to die with me...), but the vast majority were forced by social pressure to do so. If they do not, they will become a social pariah and be mistreated by their community for the rest of their lives.
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The destruction of traditional Chinese culture under the impact of Western Civilization was considerably later than the similar destruction of Indian culture by Europeans.
Which is worst i don't know. but I tend to think that self destruction have a tendency to destroy more. Cause we do not know what we are destroying.
a topic on culture revolution.
The Chinese Communist party (CCP) is responsible for the total destruction of all traditional Chinese culture in the last 60 years. Doing such evil involved huge manpower and resources to spread the CCP's ideology of class struggles and hatred… It was a large-scale brainwashing. It poisoned a lot of young people to pave the way for the Cultural Revolution," Jin said.
"During the appalling and unprecedented Cultural Revolution, countless families were destroyed and a large number of people died of unnatural causes. People were brutally persecuted, from intellectuals to common citizens. Many teenagers served in the Red Guards at that time. They became the communist regime's vicious thugs. This is one typical example of how the communist party culture poisoned the Chinese people, and these kinds of examples are countless. Today, the so-called artistic performances produced by the communist regime's party culture are permeated by its ideology of hatred, violence, immorality, and vulgar fun," Jin said.