Meritocracy, 1984-style

“Earlier this month, I re-read 1984 while nursing a slight sunburn in idyllic Vieques. (It wasn’t even my copy, but whatever.) Call me a masochist or killjoy if you please, but it really isn’t that often that I get to read literature that isn’t chock-full of data and (in general) poorly written reported speech. 1984 is perhaps George Orwell’s most famous work, and definitely one of the most prominent literary dystopias around. (Fitting, perhaps, that its coinage as a word is attributed to Mill, after which my lab computer is named.)

One would think it pure, undistilled cynicism that when reading 1984, I feel like I’m reading not just about a purely fictional society, but also about my own country, in a greatly garbled form.” …more (Elia Diodati)

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Singing the Same Tune

“PM Lee said in his National Day Rally message that “you don’t want everybody to be singing the same note but at least…it should be, we’re each saying different things but it blends together”.

So how did our 140th ranked press respond? By singing the praises of almost every point that PM Lee made in his speech, with hardly any of the critical analyses that they probably last used in their journalism classes in university.” …more (Singapore Patriot)

Propaganda and its Discontents

“Molly is very angry with the mainstream media for violating the Bhavani commandment everything. How could they?? It’s not the job of journalists to campaign for or against the government. While they certainly have not campaigned against the government, the seem to have forgotten the first half of the commandment.

First, they tell us that mee siam mai hum is mee siam mai hiam. Then they keep reporting about the wonderful advantages of immigrants coming to Singapore. What makes many peasants angry is that the media and the clever ministers have misunderstood their feelings.” …more (Molly Meek)