Just spent a couple of hours sitting in on Singapore’s Parliament, which is a thing you can do if you’re a citizen. Quite an interesting experience and I’m glad I finally got around to doing it
The 1st funny thought I had was “wow this meeting could’ve been an email” 😂 which is a bit of a childish thought, I know. But it does seem broadly inefficient somehow, so many people sitting in a room for hours talking turns to talk. Need to read+think more to have a better POV
The 2nd funny thing is the decorum and ritual. Everybody - from members of the public to the Prime Minister - is expected to bow to the Speaker when entering and exiting Parliament. I appreciate the effect it has, but it’s also funny to me. Ministers gotta bow before they can pee
Jokes and laughs aside, I actually felt something being in that chamber. Just, it’s cool that I can literally walk into the room (well, a viewing gallery upstairs) where my Prime Minister and elected representatives are talking about issues of governance and public concern
I showed up today in particular to witness MP Louis Ng talk about his recommendations for public housing policy re: single unwed parents and their children. It’s an issue that we could be dealing with better as a nation. I appreciated his speech and I appreciated the response
There’ll probably be a news article about it soon. But what the news doesn’t tell you is that you can see that the people in the chamber do care. In her response, Sun Xueling put in real effort to empathise + agree with Louis Ng and the points he raised. I see that + respect it
After Parliament adjourned (~7 hours after it convened?), I saw Louis Ng talking with members of the public who were in attendance, listening to them and answering their questions. 😍 It’s cool that this is my country. I’m glad to be a part of it and I want to help it be better
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Obama is still the only POTUS who was born after 1946. He was the only one born after the partition of India. Gandhi's assassination. the Berlin Blockade. the coinage of the term "Big Bang". Mao's proclamation founding the PRC. the signing of NATO. the Korean War.
only POTUS born after the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952, after Everest was summited for the first time in '53, after the Fellowship of the Ring was published in '54, after the first Disneyland opened in '55, after Elvis dropped Heartbreak Hotel in 56, Sputnik launched '57
Barbie debuted 1959
Pantyhose also debuted 1959, big year for a particular kind of pervert
Muhammad Ali wins the gold at boxing in the 1960 olympics when Biden is ~18 years old
then JFK and Nixon have the first televised presidential debate also in 1960
at almost every threshold there are a bunch of people who set up a basecamp where they discuss how to cross the threshold. some of those people do go on to cross the threshold, but those people tend to then become incomprehensible to most of those who are still in basecamp
one might say “not all thresholds”, but in the model I’m presenting here I’d argue that thresholds that are easily crossed are not real thresholds. it is useful to demarcate the thresholds at precisely the boundaries people fail to cross
often the reason for this is that the people before the threshold are operating with a set of beliefs/assumptions that are incompatible with life beyond the threshold. My instinct is to say “this maybe doesnt apply to physical things like sprinting” but then, Daniel Chambliss:
over the years I’ve found there’s a discernable “signature” to the way people are confidently wrong vs the way people are confidently right. it’s hard to pin down to any one element though. it’s discerned more ecologically. confidently wrong has a clunky bluntness to it
the wrong tend to overuse words like “only” and “never” and often get kinda needlessly aggressive. it’s like they’re trying to bully you into accepting their position. the person who knows they’re right can be more chill and is often kinda laughing about it
A complication tho,
is when the person who’s right is also anxious, for whatever reason. This *does* happen often, and idk what the % of each quadrant is altogether. Probably domain-dependent too
I have a lot of thoughts about this, as someone who both tweets a lot and likes reading books
I think for starters a lot of people do themselves a disservice by comparing their current/adult selves with their tutorial zone kid selves who read when there was little else to do
second, I think as people accumulate socialization there’s a lot of “books I should want to read, books I’m supposed to read, books I ought to read” etc which muddy up the list of books you’ll actually read, which is the books you simply want to read
third, and this is related to the first point, I think people have this mental model of reading as something you set aside hours of uninterrupted time for. lots of ppl fantasize about reading books in 1-4 sittings. But they never quite have time for that. But funnily enough,
collection of 4chan posts that are extended criticisms or analyses of something, hit me up with whatever comes to mind
1. john oliver
2. harry potter
3. guy discovers that viktor from arcane looks just like him, then discovers the amount of porn of him, thirsty fangirls of him, and realizes that it's not his looks holding him back but his personality
connected a few dots i’ve been simmering on for years now
oversimplified: one of the reasons there arent ~“simple solutions to everybody’s human problems” is that what sets off a cascade of insight for someone at one tier of wretchedness can worsen things for someone below
the recent prevalence of the phrase “skill issue” is a useful example to gesture at. it’s a scissor that can cleave a peviously nebulous group into camps of people who feel energized and people who feel demoralized by it
for private individuals, this is basically a good thing. ish. mostly. sorta. you want to be at least mildly polarizing enough that the social reality around you rearranges itself to suit you.
or rather, we cant escape or avoid this. it’s always happening! similar pattern as: