The Desire to Avoid Evil

Surely you must have heard of the poor girl who got her face and body posted on our nation's newspapers because she bared it all on her blog? The blog in question, Sarong Party Girl belongs to a rather cosmopolitan female of the white-man-trapping (by her own admission, not mine) kind who is to my surprise rather intelligent - I have always harboured the prejudice that the standard SPG came equipped with only enough brains to power a bikini.

And she wants to show The Powers that Be here on our sunny island that we aren't really that conservative after all.

Hmmph.

In any case, after reading her blog you realise that she, like many of our other rebellious artistes, have left the nation and planted their creative roots elsewhere (though still smacking much of a rebel-against-the-evil-government sentiment). I'm not sure if that a good or bad thing - after all as our prime ministers always remind us, we're just not ready for that kind of liberalisation in our country yet. And so the people who snip off their pubic hair in public, dislike local despotic institutions or simply have artistic tastes that don't collide with the rest of us move away, leaving us in our sanitized peace and quiet.

I keep having the impression that the government would rather we be stupid than have ideas unsanctified by themselves.

Argument from Philippe - we're losing out because soon cheap talent from India and China is going to flush us all out. Only those of us who sell chicken rice will be holding any kind of technical jobs here and foreign employment will be nigh impossible given our staid reputation and higher pay-expectations.

I haven't exactly got a counter to that yet. Except maybe if you look at it in that light the casino will help out somewhat. If we can't do any technical work, we can at least be croupiers and card-dealers. Not so much skill involved, and we can always hope the stifling morals of our neighbouring SEA countries will prevent them from taking up those jobs.

Oh wait - I'm confused - who're the ones with the stifling morals?