Sincere call for KJ to withdraw and endorse LLL

[Dreamer1]

Brother,I borrow this Y tube msg from brother God-Zeus

message to the voting cattle
http://youtu.be/t5FNDRgPOLs

 

[metalmickey]

One more song for Kenneth Jeyaretnam

[video=youtube;CmXWkMlKFkI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmXWkMlKFkI[/video]

Context: "We are no Motley Crew"

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reform-party-on-the-offensive---we-are-no-motley-crew-135638962.html

 

[aurvandil]

I was forecasting KJ to get about 600 votes. He got about 300. With the benefit of hindsight, I am sure he will wish that he had taken my advice.

 

[ray_of_hope]

I was forecasting KJ to get about 600 votes. He got about 300. With the benefit of hindsight, I am sure he will wish that he had taken my advice.

He does not seem to care. It is a complete humiliation, and a well-deserved one.

 

[aurvandil]

Saw a posting which said he kept pushing for recounts. He was having a lot of difficulty accepting he didn't even go past 500. He made a statement which appeared to be a concession. Then he refuted his own statement. He refused the final interview and they had to air his earlier final concession statement.

He does not seem to care. It is a complete humiliation, and a well-deserved one.

 

[metalmickey]

Saw a posting which said he kept pushing for recounts. He was having a lot of difficulty accepting he didn't even go past 500. He made a statement which appeared to be a concession. Then he refuted his own statement. He refused the final interview and they had to air his earlier final concession statement.

Kenneth Jeyaretnam is a former hedge fund manager, and if that is any indication of his slant, it should tell you a few things about the man.

HE's a guy who sees things through a certain prism, and reasons things out through abstract principles. Rather than what he can see with his own eyes and through interacting with people. He could be the sort of person who sees things as he wishes them to be rather than what they are. Otherwise he wouldn't have made this disastrous campaign. In a way he's a more tragic figure than Desmond Lim, because while you could imagine Desmond Lim being a mole, it is hard to see KJ as one.

It is difficult to criticise JBJ because he's such a folk hero, but JBJ is also a little one dimensional. I remember reading about one conversation that Devan Nair had with LKY, and Devan Nair in his wisdom said "JBJ doesn't have a sound grasp of economics. His ideas are stupid. Just let everybody see what a mediocre governor he is, and you'll be fine". We now know what LKY did with this advice. But JBJ was born to be a martyr, because he is a Don Quixote, a champion for lost causes.

Kenneth Jeyaretnam's tragedy is that he doesn't live in an era of martyrs like his father did. JBJ's time passed somewhere around the 90s. The first wave of opposition attackers (JBJ, Chee Soon Juan) are the suicide squad whose main job is to be crucified and become saints. The second wave of opposition attackers are turtles like Chiam See Tong and Low Thia Khiang who believe in doing a little, but mainly keeping their head down and making sure that the door is ajar, and playing a patient game. You could say that Chiam See Tong eventually turned into a martyr after his stroke, but he also showed another face of the opposition, the reasonable guy asking reasonable questions of the establishment. It is now time for the third wave - all the nice people we've been introduced to in 2011 and to a lesser extent 2006.

The people of the third wave will not be asked to make sacrifices like the first generation of saints or the detainees of the 70s and 80s. They will not be asked to spend their time twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing. But their task is no less difficult. It will involve building up the party mechanism, meeting people, shaking a lot of hands, a ridiculous amount of outreach, saying "no" to a lot of their enthusiastic subordinates and inevitably pissing off a lot of them in the process. It will also involve envisioning a new Singapore, digging out information, scooping out dirt. Sometimes it will involve putting a friendly arm around the PAP and asking, "are you sure you want to do it this way". Sometimes it will involve slapping their faces and kicking their asses. When the romance and the "oh my god I can't believe we've broken through" thrill is gone, they will find out that politics is messy and requires a strong stomach, sometimes saying things you don't mean, sometimes doing things that other people consider morally dubious.

KJ could have been a member of the third wave but instead he ended up being a sacrificed martyr. That's sad but life has to go on.

 

[wwabbit]

Is a martyr considered a martyr if hardly anyone cares about his sacrifice?

 

[metalmickey]

Is a martyr considered a martyr if hardly anyone cares about his sacrifice?

There are two separate issues - did they care back then, and do they care right now. Case in point - Jesus Christ. Answers are, respectively, no and yes.

Other issue is - who really cares. For JBJ, probably the population at large doesn't care, but the people that he inspired, even though they are relatively few, turned out to be people in the opposition who are making some impact today, and could still make a huge impact tomorrow. JBJ may have been dead for a few years already, but it is still too soon to assess the impact of his life.

Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai, "what do you think of the French Revolution?" and Zhou Enlai's answer, almost 200 years after the fact, was "it's too soon to tell".

If you're talking about KJ, though, it's probably safe to say that people don't give a shit.