Slander is one of the daily habits of some members of our political class in Malaysia, and for them, it is a standard issue thing to expect as part of the culture – for some people, in fact, it is viewed as a duty.

What does this suggest?

It suggests that these people have no principles, there is nothing worth admiring about their past, present, or their future, and that their culture is inferior.

It looks like we’ve leveled up a little bit, though, because we’ve gone and straight up slandered not just Malaysian politicians at this point, but in fact the United States of America, to the point that the US Embassy had to come out and make the following response.

Why? Because one of our national jokes is casually insinuating that America tried to bring about a regime change in Malaysia with no evidence, hoping that his stupid followers will blend together with the people out there watching Fahrenheit 911 both for conspiratorial and legitimate purposes and somehow bring about a wave of people who will allegedly push against America with enough plausible deniability that people will ignore the fact that the onus is on the accuser to prove their claims.

In a way, we could say that this is a rather sophisticated strategy and a somewhat unsurprising correlate of the fact that these people do this kind of thing all day and all night as they live and as they breathe, in their sermons, in every single articulation of their faith, as an expression of their existences, dedicated entirely to gaslighting.

No wonder their skills on this front are on the “international level”.

Unfortunately, the way it plays out in Malaysia, what people can infer is this:

The more religious these people are, the more likely they are to take part in garbage like this.

Honestly, one of the things that makes me want to give up on Malaysia is that this class of people are likely to succeed by recruiting their mindless supporters and talking to them about race and religion – and when I say “mindless”, I mean that over the course of time, I’ve gone from thinking that they could possibly be people with hopes and dreams to considering that they do not have any deep internal lives or meaningful culture or otherwise.

But there’s an even worse outcome from this.

I used to think that it was a bad thing to think this way, but in time, I’ve come to realize that the rest of the world will probably end up seeing them the same way as well, and that likely members of their own community see themselves this way as well and they are likely adjusting given the circumstances ala “we are already so terrible, and since the world already sees us as being so terrible, we still have to live and have jati diri right? So let’s slander as much as we can because that’s what it is!”

Well, similar to the men of Odysseus who ate the cattle of the Sun God, they’ve chosen their path.

Might write more on this a little later, but I have to go out.

Till then!

I guess you can see that I’ve been having a bit of a blast thinking about how my mind works, how reality works, and so many other things as well – and it is also pretty interesting to reflect how a lot of people who were exposed to it across time became extraordinarily capable people on a level that I could not kid about even if I wanted to – not as a shill of my ability to teach or as some indication of my role of an instructor or friend in some way shape or form – but just an interesting observation.

Well, I have no idea if these blog posts are really influencing anyone – but if they do somehow influence you in some way beyond immediate judgments or thoughts to achieve something a little better than you could before (and I’m primarily talking to myself, as the main consumer and producer of this blog), I would be happy for you.

Anyway, today’s thought:

Speed is king.

That’s one thing that I’ve learned in multiple contexts across time, often in the most unexpected of places.

This is so for many reasons, and I could name a few:

• In a competitive context, getting stuff done ahead of the other guy means you can submit faster, and thus you win.
• Getting stuff done ahead of time means you can do it more thoroughly.
• Practicing stuff faster means you can do more practice (lol) but also that you gain more skill – speed compounds speed!
• Getting stuff done quickly means that there are fewer impediments that could stop you from doing the thing that you want, increases the probability that you will get things done in one shot (and thus minimizes the probability that intervening circumstances will stop you from doing the thing), and improves the likelihood that you will execute.

I could name a couple more things (and I may later on), but I should say that speed does have its limitations.

For one thing, if you never actually start things, it doesn’t matter how fast you go. Secondly, it is a localized thing – it happens in the instantaneous moment, and it’s unclear that that instantaneous moment is what really shifts outcomes so much that it is definitive; that role probably belongs to the systems that we create to regulate our behavior or to give ourselves the impression that we are regulating our behavior.

It is still meaningful to think about speed though, the preconditions for it (which are many), and how it makes things possible where they were not before – but that extended reflection will have to wait for another day 😀