As some of you may know, I have recently been making a range of videos about topics that I think are important for Malaysia to discuss, namely the 3 R’s. Recently, the user ​⁠@coldsunflares asked me on my YouTube channel and my video about the penunggang agama Rayyan Wong who recently accused PMX and our Agong of eating in a non-halal restaurant about what I would do differently from the Madani Government when it comes to regulating what some may call extremism or penunggang agama.  It was quite a thoughtful comment, and I reproduce it here.  “You mentioned the government’s inability to deal with these kinds of issues, which for the most part, is true. However, how would you propose they deal with it? Because any time the government decides to take these so-called “decisive action”, they are labelled as “draconian, stifling freedom of speech” among other things. On one hand, the government is hard pressed to take these measure because of their history of championing reforms, equality and civil liberty, but on the other are those “from the other side” who hides behind the guise of freedom of speech (without decorum) to spread malicious statements, as is evident from multiple recent incidents, i.e. China flag issue, mandatory Halal cert, etc. We are bursting at the seams with people who point out the problem, but not so much people who can come up with a feasible solution to these issues.” The comment I wrote was too long for the margins of the comment window, and after I had written it I realized – it was too long even for the YouTube post window, so here it is in full blog entry glory.  Response begins:  I think even now, the Madani government is having huge problems with actually portraying itself as a compassionate government – but I feel that this is because […]

As Reinhold Neibuhr once famously said… I reflect on this quote a lot more than I should, and every single year it means something slightly different. I rather like my interpretation this year and the thoughts that have come out from it, and so I share them here. When I was a child, I had a whole list of ideas of what people must be like as they grew older. Older people were richer because the universe made them so – they were married because their partners were brought into their lives; they were fatter because a divine ordinance made their bodies expand; things happened automatically because they were simply ‘meant to be’. I now see that a lot of this was wrong-headed, and came about because of intellectual laziness that I no longer consider valid. As time passed, I saw that things were not so simple. People became rich because they worked for it either hard or smart – they got married because they had relationships with people, romantic and then sexual, that they decided to make into family ties; they were fatter because they were often sedentary as part of a modern condition; things could happen because of chance, but in all likelihood people could steer the ship far more effectively than they could give themselves credit for but even then lose themselves in the comforting soma of a ‘fate’ narrative. Well, comfort is a beautiful thing. In some instances, it’s even necessary. After all, there are lots of things in this world where what you believe and what I believe are opposed, but circumstances are uncertain and neither of us might be right – in this situation, how should we think and navigate the world? It would be easy for one person to conclude that well, because fate is a thing, it doesn’t matter what we do – […]

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how time is finite. The moments that we have on earth, the memories that we have, the seconds that flow by… Everything is finite. You think that the moments will roll and everything will come and go infinitely – but it’s not true; all of it is part of a set of flowing sands flowing through glass crevices into a pile that lies down below, and whether we like it or not, these moments will one day all fade away as we hit inescapable limits, bound by biology, time, and energy. We have all the reason to make every minute worth it. Every ounce of energy earn something. Every part of our minds, our cognitions, our planning yield some sort of meaningful and measurable benefit to our happiness, our joy, our wallets, and everything in between. As the year comes to an end, it’s strange to see – my energy has multiplied, my peace has come closer, and I am moving forward faster than I ever have, with so little compunction or fear that it’s interesting to watch someone who seems to be of a different body and mind than the person who had been here before. There are many good things that I feel about who I am and who I will become, and I look forward to seeing where things will go 🙂