The Daily Backtrack

I was reading the Sunday Times last week and one of their food writers was waxing hysterical about lemon curd. I've always loved lemon curd, how it captures sunny lemoniness in a bright yellow, wobbly custard. Whenever I have leftover lemons, I typically make lemon curd, and store it in jars in the fridge- it's easily achieved and the fact that you feel very Amish in the process is a plus point. You can make curd with mostly any citrus fruit, lemons, limes, oranges and passionfruit produce nice curds, and I have a jar of passionfruit curd sitting in my fridge because of a sudden excess of the wonderful, tart and delicious fruit.

I love passionfruit and I love local supermarkets for suddenly stocking them in mountains. The best ones are wrinkly and rotten-looking and look thoroughly inedible until you slice them open and the aroma hits you.

They are wonderful eaten on their own, shucked like oysters- this way, the tart juice tingles your tongue like fizzy pop. Very nice. I am prepared to wager that if you stir some of the fresh fruit into soda water, it will be absolutely delicious.

Passionfruit is very easily made into a jam, you don't even need commercial pectin because the inner rind is so high in it- all you do is boil the skins until the rind peels off easily, then chuck the fruit, juice and rind into a pot with sugar, boil and then seal. The jam is amazing on buttered toast- it is like a chunky marmalade, full of crunchy seeds and bits of chewy rind. It is sweet but not terribly so because the tartness of passionfruit tempers that in a most wonderful way. I think this jam would make wonderful bread and butter pudding, and I think I might try that soon.

Passionfruit curd is just as easy to make as lemon curd, and no less wonderful. It is soft, wobbly and has the bright sunny taste of lemon curd with a milder, more tempered tartness. It also has a glorious golden hue rather than the bright yellow of lemon curd and, incidentally, makes the most wonderful buttercream. I prefer not to leave the seeds in my passionfruit curd because I want the texture to be velvety smooth which works very well since, just as that ST foodwriter wrote, stirring curd into yoghurt makes the most delicious dessert, and all the better if it's smooth and creamy. I love yoghurt and I love Greek-style yoghurt in particular- stirring a few heaped tablespoons of curd into a cup of yoghurt, then sprinkling generously with raw wheat germ and a few strawberries (preferably frozen!), you get a nutritious and incredibly tasty concoction. The curd is actually quite high in cholesterol, but I ignore that because the wheat germ makes the whole thing feel healthier.

Speaking of desserts, and I have to announce this, Nigella got it right when she heaped passionfruit over sugary pavlova and cream. It is an intriguing flavour combination- sweet and sharp and creamy and smooth and chewy and crispy, what a terrific dessert! To make it even more terrific, use lightly sweetened, whipped creme fraiche instead of double cream and top with bananas and passionfruit. The two are a match made in heaven and, blanketed with wonderful creme fraiche, form some sort of holy trinity.

So yes, I love passionfruit!  

I was just reading some of my backdated posts and shudder to think that I could have written any of that nonsense. Some of it was just really so mean-spirited, I hope no one got hurt in the process. It's amazing what retrospect does to writing, a lot of it seems written by a different person. Not completely different, perhaps, but maybe a lot less mature.

Anyway, I was reading one of those memes I did and came across a very interesting line.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1) Press the fast-forward button on my life's remote control. You know, like in the movies, where the screen fades off and suddenly it's 2 years later? Yeah, that. Then I can skip A levels AND NS, and live with the consequences: Joblessness and insanity.

This was written in October 2005, before the A levels and before NS. Rickson tagged me and I was distracted from staring mindlessly at my notes to do it.

When I wrote that, NS looked like this insurmountable blob of horrible-ness, something I had been dreading for years and years, and the A levels were this depressing short-term nightmare, worsened by my complete lack of study- it was as if I would never survive and I wanted nothing more than to do a Rip Van Winkle.

But, omg, where has the time gone? It's so amazing! In retrospect, it really is as if someone pressed the magic fast-forward button and two years zoomed past, cue cinematic fade-in-fade-out. And look at how things turned out, I am neither jobless nor insane haha.

It's really fantastic how quickly things happen and turn out not to be as bad as they seem. A levels came and went, terrifying and depressing, but I ended up doing alright. And then NS came and went- My one real military experience was in BMT and that was actually oddly enjoyable in a sick and stupid kind of way. SAF Bands was NOT a military experience, no matter how much we tried to convince ourselves, it was like extended band camp with feather boas. The point of it is that everything turned out fine, and I'm fine, and the future looks bright and exciting.

It's also interesting to see how I have changed in the process- I think I'm a little more mature, naturally (NS does that to you), less awkward around strangers, more excited about life and thrilled at the prospect of learning new things.

I should make it a point to look back at life every once in a while and notice how wonderful the process of growing up is.

http://theonlinecitizen.com/2008/05/03/homophobia-part-2-under-attack-from-the-police/

Sigh.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

I really don't get this country sometimes. How can a place be so wonderful, funny, inspiring, beautiful and exciting but neurotic, paranoid, stifling, infuriating, hate-mongering, terrifying and STUPID at the same time?

There are many things the police should be doing or could be doing- finding Mas Selamat, crashing those illegal gambling dens and prozzies at Geylang, investigating cases of battery.... why do they have to poke at politically charged things like gay saunas? Don't they realise the fallout this will have? Don't they see what this will look like to the discerning public? Can't they control their vapid, homophobic stupidity?

I read the above account with so much consternation I could barely breathe for the irritation that was gripping my heart. I know it sounds dramatic but it's stupid little things like this that signal how futile, how desperately and urgently futile, all that anger was during the 377A debate. It is as if the entire parliamentary sitting, the aural nightmare of having to listen to Thio Li-Ann wax hysterical, was stirred up like hot, sticky jam and for naught, because nothing was learned in the process.

If the government should have learnt anything at all from the 377A debate, it is that the gay community is very vocal, very angry, very easily angered, very sad and very dis-enfranchised. They should also have learnt that the gay community has friends in society who aren't gay, but who are smart- and they are quite a hefty lot. It should therefore have learnt to control it's masturbatory right arm from thacking at gay sensibilities in a moaning contradiction of "377A will not be actively enforced". Granted, the raid mightn't have been motivated by that particular law, but it needs to be realised that 377A is not just a law, it is also a sentiment.

The sentiment of 377A expresses itself everytime the government or agent of the government takes actions that are needlessly discriminatory against homosexuals, like the police raid above, or the MDA's fining of Mediacorp for displaying a gay family on TV. I'm so tired I can't even explain why I find the latter just as frustrating as the former- but just imagine, for a moment, what it means: based on just one misguided, conservative opinion expressed in the ST forum, subsquently raised in parliament by another irrationally conservative thwack, there is now a saddening precedent to delete any gay people who behave normally from TV. This is, in effect, a deletion of real gay people from tv. How educational can this be? 

The sentiment of 377A is to shroud gay sensibilities from human detection (as if that were remotely possible), to protect oh-so-fragile public morality and pander to religiosity and its obssession with sex and 'deviance'. The sentiment of 377A is to always keep the gay community at bay as an "other" in society, exempt from being part of an "open and inclusive" Singapore. It disgusts me, over and over and over and over again, to absolutely no end. I hate that sentiment and everything it stands for.

This hateful sentiment stands today, in our otherwise progressive society, because there are people who want to translate their sexual hypochondria into public policy, and who are particularly good at making sure we get it. Everytime there is a debate on the issue, we can rest assured that there will be a cry of moral outrage from the same people who count bloodletting, child abuse and genocide as part of 'enlightened living'. This sentiment cannot be exorcised from our society, it can never be exorcised from our society until the government realises what is truly going on. The government has to learn that the sentiment of 377A is not politically expedient anymore, that it is one part of the caustic erosion of the wall between the State and those who wish to exert their dogma on it.

It is urgent, it is happening, it must be stopped.

In light of my previous post on the merits of nyeh, I had a most interesting encounter today.

The department invited two ST journalists over to give a small talk on 'Journalistic Integrity", in line with our discussions on the mass media. I approached this with as little cynicism as possible, let me assure you, convinced as I was that ST journalists are only evil on paper.

Our guests were two young journalists, with the ST for no more than about 3-4 years, both with very impressive American college degrees under their belt, the guy with a whole host of (local) journalistic awards and the girl up and coming in her own right.

Some of the points they raised were pretty standard- journalistic integrity encompasses a commitment to telling the truth, informing the public, providing a free flow of information yadayadayada. I wasn't cringing at this point, those were very acceptable standards of journalistic integrity; we weren't questioning whether or not the ST actually observed them.

Along the way they cracked a few jokes, expressed incredulity that no one raised their hands when asked "do any of you have blogs?", were generally preppy though not without what I perceived to be a little bit of condescension (I could be over-sensitive).

It wasn't until the Q&A that things got interesting, of course, and here I was sorely distressed by what I heard. 

"As journalists, do you self-censor?"

The guy took this question, (paraphrased) "I think everybody self-censors at some point or another. Like, you could take a certain tone of voice with your parents but certainly not with your teachers, and that is self-censorship. So yes, I think journalists do self-censor every now and then. But if you're asking me if we censor what we write for fear of upsetting the government, then it's not so clear cut. We usually write what we want and let our editors cut out what they want. Most of the time, it gets through."

This, of course, wasn't grasping the crux of the question, or at least straddles it half-heartedly. I think what the questioner was getting at was whether or not journalists make a conscious attempt not to cross OB markers, or weigh whether or not what they write might contradict the political sensitivities of the paper at large. He addresses the issue, but his response is practically a non-answer: Yes we self-censor, but we don't, our editors do it, but what we write usually gets through. If this is true, then the largely sterile writing that the ST churns out is evidence that, yes, journalists do self-censor. Nothing to be ashamed about, everyone self-censors at some point or another. And in any case, it doesn't matter who does the censoring, as long as it happens, not just in opinion pieces, but in standard reporting, and I refer you to 'It was a lapse, what to do?" amidst other things that don't come so readily to my mind.

Someone else asked, "do you get easily influenced by what you read online?"

The guy, once again, rose to the occasion and answered.

"No, I don't get easily influenced by what I read online. Or, rather, I'm just not easily influenced. I think that part of reading very widely is an ability to discern very well." (Don't be so quick to write him off as arrogant, he soon displays the most tremendous power of discretion) "I do, for instance, read quite a bit of stuff online. (wait for it) I visit Sammyboy quite often, but I find that most of the people there are just making a lot of noise, engaging in rumour-mongering and being quite irrational. Like, they like to gossip about things like 'ohh Wong Kang Seng's wife is Lee Hsien Loong's what la what la', and it's all very nonsensical. I don't get influenced by any of this stuff, but there are people who go there and accept is as 'oh it must be true'."

The girl answered too, but it was something inconsequential, so I've forgotten what she said. The one impression that I got about what the both of them had to say about going online for information was, however, that of a heavy emphasis on forums.

Now, I think there is something wrong with answering a question about what you read online with a reference to sammyboy. Apart from the fact that sammyboy has a certain pornographic touch to it (and I was quite shocked that he mentioned the site to the audience, young and impressionable and underaged as it was), it just doesn't sit well with me that he used one rather dirty brush to taint what he claims is available online. Forums are a very specific kind of online content, they can be messy, they can be noisy and they can be very nonsensical. Not all of them are, but sammyboy certainly tends towards it. Even I, naive and un-educated as I am, wouldn't be influenced by sammyboy.I didn't want to be snobbish by referring this journo to The Online Citizen and other very noteworthy sites on the Internet, most of which provide content that is a lot more incisive than what is available on sammyboy and, certainly, the Straits Times, because I think it would have led to a diatribe about the horrors of un-edited, un-regulated content, which would probably have caused me to bleed vitriol.

I don't know whether the bulk of this journo's online reading comprises of sammyboy, or if he was deliberately avoiding the socio-political blogosphere, which would certainly have been a lot more relevant to the topic of journalistic integrity. Either way, it does say something about this very clever, bright and obviously highly-educated young man- he is an ST journo through and through.

The ST's impression of the online community is that of a seething cesspool of stupidity and unmitigated anger. This is only one aspect of the online community, just as being incisive, cogent and accurate is a quality unique to the Life! aspect of the ST (bravo, food writers, though I must report that the Beer Bread recipe in the last Sunday Times is quite flawed!). There is very intelligent debate and analysis going on within the blog community, most of which delights in pointing out the gaping flaws of the ST. I think that is cause enough for the ST's own unmitigated anger, their disdain (even in person!) of all things online. Though they were happy to quote the 1.3 million people who read ST daily, I think it's fair to wonder how many do it to play 'spot the flub!'.. Hm.

The final question of the day was very nicely put.

"If if is articulated that the ST is a pro-government paper, then how does that sit with journalistic integrity?"

The implication, of course, is that the political agenda of the paper might obscure the journalistic principles of accuracy and objectivity.

The answer was most bizzarre.

"There are a few ways to go about it. On one hand, you can go with the flow of ST's philosophy, which is to be a pro-Singapore paper, and do what the government tells you, because if you align yourself with the ST's philosophy, then you'll agree with the government. This makes life easy. On the other hand, you can choose to reject all this and say, 'no, I won't write this, no I won't use this', and this will make your life more difficult."

This is just part 1, mind. If I get the gist of what the guy said correctly, it is essentially that journalistic integrity in the face of the ST's philosophy makes life difficult. I think that explains quite a bit.

"On the other hand, a lot of people like to say that certain writers always behave in a certain way, like 'oh this writer is very pro-government, oh this one is very critical'. But the lines are not so clear-cut, it really depends on what you feel about the issue, or your journalistic integrity. For instance, a lot of people asked me if I got into trouble for writing a 2-page feature on the WP's history. Mind you, it wasn't an article that was slamming the WP. I felt that, no, I wouldn't dumb down the story simply because it was about an opposition party, that's not how I work"

I wanted to throw a congratulatory laurel at him, but he was doing such a good job of it himself. The first bit is irrelevant, we all know it's not true- the ST's political desk is well known for being either noxiously pro-government or critical of alternative interpretations of current affairs. I find this very sad, that the ST presumes its editorials are the ultimate form of erudition, it must have something to do with all the scholars and smarmy graduates that run the paper.

Anyway, I think the journo was missing the forest for a tree. Writing about an opposition party is not a crime, especially since there are only 3 opposition MPs in parliament- there really isn't anything remotely dangerous about it. The question was pointing at the paper as a whole, how it reconciles journalistic integrity with the demands of the government to be put in a good light (for nation-building purposes, to preserve its moral authority, who knows?). In this sense, I think many bloggers, more astute than I, have pointed out that the ST fails in many regards.

The two journos sought to clarify the 'myth' surrounding the ST as a sycophantic mouthpiece of the government. Through their largely sterile, uninformative and sometimes condescending waffling, I think they merely reinforced it, and also explained the paper's institutional arrogance- it is staffed by many highly-educated, bright young minds, the type of minds, as we know, most likely to be impatient and adverse to the swarm of middle-class sensibility.

I don't think anyone in the audience learned anything today, except that ST journalists can be just as they are in person as they appear in the papers.

It is said, and I shall translate loosely here, that "if the top is crooked, so will the bottom". If you will, for a moment, look beyond the innuendo, it really means that leaders provide models for their underlings to follow.

This came to mind when I read what SM Goh and one of the Hamlet Chuas of the ST had to say about the Mas Selamat escape (and, by extension, the scratchy issue of government responsibility): MOVE ON.

I scratched my head.

Isn't moving on precisely what our government doesn't do when it comes to taking people to task?

What about James Gomez?

He is an "INVETERATE LIAR! LIAR LIAR LIAR. NYEH NYEH NYEH NYEH. CORRUPTION! DECEIT! POLITICS OF DISTRACTION! LIAR! NYEH NYEH NYEH. LIAR! NYEH NYEH NYEH!"

"I am sorry, could we please move o-" "NYEH NYEH NYEH NYEH NYEH"

"I am so-" 'NYEEEH NYEH NYEH NYEH"

"It should not have happened, and I'm sorry that it has" "NYeh- Let's move on".

At least James Gomez's apology was grammatically unambiguous. 

I don't think the ST should have gotten so worked up about bloggers being angry, emotional and irrational- to the point of feeding off each others' vitriol- they are simply taking the cue from our political masters.

When something happens, just nyeh nyeh nyeh.

The ST, too, has a habit of nyehing when needed. The purpose, I feel, of their engaging in quite a number of anti-blog pieces in the wake of the Mas Selamat Parliamentary session, was to spam the ST-reading masses with good and happy Pony Princess thoughts about the government. "Don't listen to those bloggers, those inveterate, whining buffoons! They're not credible, they're stupid, they're noisy, they're vindictive, they're unneccessarily sarcastic, they're evil, they're rebels without a cause, they're they're they're nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh" I can't say it wasn't effective. My mother came up to me one night and, with a monumental sigh only mothers are capable of, went, "haiya these stupid bloggers." I stood, shell-shocked, for a moment, before I smelled the print of ST ink on her fingers, and I understood.

The craven litch-kings of the ST's political desk have an amazing ability to be completely unaware of themselves in their blood-boiling diatribes- how can their writing, vitriolic by journalistic standards, be any better than the rabble rousing they accuse us bloggers of? Is it not equally vehement, equally opinionated, equally sarcastic and judgmental? The Hamlet Chuas are so vitriolic you can feel the vitriol spitting out of the lines between their tight-lipped (vitriolic) cyber-smacking. Pss psss. I mean, that Chua LH woman's blood BOILS when she reads blogs, how un-emotional are we supposed to assume she is? Yet, how is it that the ST's vitriol is more forgivable than ours? It isn't, but people have been conditioned to believe that it is, and that is the goal of the ST. It is vitriolic, patriotic NYEH. Nyeh nyeh nyeh.

But that's out of point, I was just so caught up in the vitriol of the moment that I had to drain it out into my piss pot of holy vitriol.

So yes, I wouldn't heed the government's call to move on. We should ask ourselves at all times: isn't nyehing what we've been taught to do? 

It is time to be selectively pro-establishment!

I've been so busy lately, fussing about with the newly revamped kitchen and my students and all sorts of other things, that I wasn't able to issue a knee-jerk response to the whole 'absolve the government of blame" affair re Mas Selamat. But I have had time to think about it and to read what so many very clever writers have had to say, and I think that the government is not doing itself a favour in its obssession with maintaining its moral authority. 

Amidst all the noise, my take on the matter is that the government has displayed its characteristic lack of PR skills. Simple. There is nothing more to it- callous, arrogant, detached, full of in-group neuroticism and emotional wrangling to push through the illusion surrounding moral authority. The only difference between this and other issues like, say the 377A circus or the GST or the IR debate, is that Mas Selamat has captured the imagination of every Singaporean from every possible sphere of society.

Where some of the issues I mentioned above mainly caught the ire of more policy-minded Singaporeans, or particular communities (the gay community, religious community and other figures in civil society), and where the GST flub is compounded in the average Singaporean's mind as another symptom of some sort of a looming US-led recession, the case of Mas Selamat is intriguing, frustrating and absolutely fascinating to generally all Singaporeans. From the intellectual, who moved their focus away from the actual escape to the validity of the ISA and the typicality of the government's response to the matter, to the not so wiki-minded, who simply saw an opportunity for ridicule and "cynical humour", the name Mas Selamat has become coffee-shop talk, coffee-parlour talk and coffee-house talk.

In this light, I think the government has cooked itself a rather unpleasant soup. While many Singaporeans may find that calling for WKS' resignation is extreme and unnecessary, I think it is not so hard to imagine that the government has not come out of this particularly well.

On one hand, those who aren't so pre-occupied with how WKS is struggling with apologia are choosing to focus more on the stupidity of how Mas Selamat managed to escape at all. This is problematic because it causes a huge gap in understanding how something so incredible could have happened in a supposedly high-security government facility- it will naturally point back to the government, no matter how much it insists on the man-on-the-ground theory of events. One of my friends, for instance, came up to me and said, "eh Mas Selamat climbed out of the toilet. Apparently the window was ungrilled. Why is WKS still the DPM?" You could call that a jump to conclusions, but, isolated as my example seems, I don't think it's a hard link for many Singaporeans to make- Mas Selamat's escape is an inevitable fault of the government, unreasonable as that may be.

And then there are those who see this as a public relations crisis for the government and, in the general anti-establishmentarian attitude of people who care about these things, are lambasting the government for effectively shrugging blame off WKS. Wong is not unforgivable simply because of the Mas Selamat escape, they argue (which is reasonable), but also because of the follow up to the escape- from the drip-drip of (some quite inaccurate) information to the suspect nature of Wong's "independent" Committee of Inquiry- essentially, for keeping people in the dark and being quite smug about it. Despite what the PM insisted in parliament, Wong never did, according to many bloggers, issue a direct apology. It is true. I could never read, in all the plurality of its meaning, "it should never have happened and I'm sorry that it has" as an apology.

The point I am trying to make is that the government is wriggling itself into a very unpleasant scenario. It took the cake when, in Parliament, PM Lee effectively announced to the nation that a minister should never be taken to task for lapses that occur as a result of on-the-ground negligence AND if, under conditions ascertained (presumably in private) by the PM, the minister is seen not to be at fault. This is faulty reasoning.

The first bit is silly because, by virtue of the fact that the Minister manages things at a macro level, he can never be truly responsible for what happens on the ground, but this cannot absolve him from blame since it comes under his purview. It is like saying a principal in whose school a teacher molests a student should not in any way apologise to the parents of the kid, simply because the principal can't be expected to monitor every single teacher's activities. As Minister, Wong should represent the collective remorse of his ministry. Why? Because he is the Minister, if not him then who?

The second bit is silly and dangerous. It effectively says that we should invest so much trust in the discernment and moral authority of the PM that, simply because he feels the minister has conducted himself reasonably despite a lapse, he can be absolved of all responsibility. The PM says he doesn't want to set a precedent for cabinet upheavals in the future, that we should draw some phantom line between anger and punishment. It follows, rather strangely, that he should set a precedent for huge cover-ups in the future, because it is his ball game, where he decides the rules and he decides who gets a red card and who doesn't. I needn't say more- logical as it seems on the outset, the fact that his reasoning is getting so much flak suggests how truly spurious it is.

The government should really learn to get off its moral high-horse every once in a while. Defending moral authority does not mean working neurotically to uphold an image of pristine, blame-free ministers. I think it says more if, regardless of whether or not the minister is personally at fault (and unless this involves embezzlement, sex scandals or the Minister walking up to a prisoner's cell and opening it, it ain't gonna happen), he graciously takes on the collective responsibility of his ministry and offers a clear, direct and simply-worded apology or, as some have suggested, depending on the seriousness of the issue, tenders a resignation. The resignation is a sticky issue; I don't think any of us really want to see WKS resign in the heat of things, because it really is an absurd idea- but, as in all things top-down, the act is a symbolic one. Symbolic of the minister's humility, his remorse and ability as a leader to accept criticism. 

It might really help to shut people up and turn the situation around if the government doesn't keep insisting on sweeping the matter under the carpet of blamelesness. The way it is going, the online community and, arguably, even non-bloggers, have signalled their disapproval of the government's wishy-washy attitude. The ST may be doing a sterling job in blackening bloggers as irrational, neurotic and bloodthirsty, but why are bloggers suddenly considered to be not-Singaporeans? In a debate such as this, it is impossible for any one side to be completely wrong or right. Many bloggers have made good points on the issue but, simply because, on the surface, people seem to hear "SACK WKS" more than anything else, the whole online community has been damned as one of "kopitiam rabble rousers".

The sooner the government and, by extension, the ST, realises that kopitiam rabble rousers are Singaporeans too, the sooner this whole PR faux pas will blow over.

I know a lot has been said about the China and Tibet thing, but I find, now, that the focus has moved away from the actual crisis to how the Chinese are reacting. It is really annoying.

Anyone who suggests that the Chinese response- protesting against Western Media Bias, Tibet, the politicisation of the Olympics and Tibetan sympathisers- is not a nationalistic orgy must surely be looking at this through heavily euphemistic lenses. This kind of surge in public opinion- flooded online forums, angry message boards, people taking to the streets- is definitely not a matter of outraged principles. To suggest this is not nationalistic is like saying the Iraq war was waged to find weapons of mass destruction- it is ultimately spurious. The Chinese people have been so galvanised because they rightly see all the negative attention they've been given as a deliberate attempt to humiliate the nation- and fair enough, Europe certainly has over-stepped the line.

But the Chinese response is no more intellectual- a Chinese banner reads: "CNN= Chinese Negative News- STOP CHINESE NEGATIVE NEWS!" It is so internally stupid and telling of their line of thought- 'stop being critical of China... because.' I didn't know that authoritarian precepts extended out of the country. To be fair, this was in response of the "Thugs and Goons" comment made by Jack Cafferty of China, a CNN commentator, although the Chinese misconstrued this to refer to the population rather than, as CNN claims, the Chinese government, its actual target. The way I see it, only on an irrational nationalistic warpath can such an extreme comment be taken wildly out of context. The Chinese are now calling Cafferty a liar, when I think this is a deliberate refusal to accept clarification on their part.

The Cafferty incident is just one in a series of idiotic standoffs the Chinese people have put up against the West. We should, by now, all have seen pictures of eager young Chinese youths protesting outside Carre Four, with plans of similar standoffs at KFC. Initially unaware that the China branch of Carre Four sells China made products, the organisers of the boycott then took to protesting "outside their doors" to make a point. What point, exactly?

That the politicisation of the Olympics is against the spirit of the games, for one. Chinese protestors hold up placards with pictures of a paralympic torchbearer being assaulted and question "Is this the Olympic Spirit?!" and shout "reject the politicisation of the Olympics!". Sympathetic as I am for the poor athlete, I find that irrelevant for the moment, because the 2008 games are not apolitical and never have been. If China thinks, for a moment, that the Olympics are, by nature, politically neutral, then they are being presumptuous. The Olympics have, in recent history, been platforms for political powerplay, and wikipedia provides a neat summary here. It is not unprecedented nor unexpected. In fact, China's call for the Olympics to be de-politicised is also hypocritical, and this on two fronts. One: that the Olympics are part of a grander Chinese plan for greater international standing (ie. political power) and Two: that the Chinese were given the Olympics on the working agreement that they would improve on their human rights record. Therefore, the reaction against China is natural of the West, not necessarily prudent, but natural considering China has chalked up a lot of human rights no-nos in the years since it was named host city. Also, looking at what the Chinese are doing now- boycotting Western goods, calling for a Western commentator to resign, condeming Western media bias- they are not de-politicising the Olympics, but agitating its already political nature.

The Chinese are also protesting against Tibetan independence, and this is a tricky issue. The West may see the crackdown on China as a human rights violation, but to be perfectly fair, it was a move by China against "splittism". It takes fairly little imagination to figure that if Tibet received its independence, it would give certain signals to other Chinese satellites, namely Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is only in this respect that I feel the Chinese have a case against the West- because they, Europe in particular, don't seem to see the situation as a potential crisis of sovereignty for China- and fail to realise that now is certainly not the right time to make decisions about Tibet that could de-stabilise the nation. The situation is certainly more complex than a human rights violation, which is something I have only just begun to see. To many Chinese, the Tibetans are asking for something that would damage China (giving Taiwan leverage in the independence matter is a time bomb of issues), and it was the Tibetans who turned violent in the first place, Dalai Lama or not.

What I feel, however, is wrong in the Chinese approach to Tibetan independence is the fact that for the nation to cling on so violently to it, the Chinese know fairly little about the Tibetans (and vice versa). Tibet was annexed via invasion and was only stabilised after a harsh removal of autonomy over the years. Politically and historically, there is cause for resentment on the Tibetan front, as would be the case if, say, another country were to annex Singapore. Another point to note here is that there is naturally very little interaction between the Tibetans and the Chinese- they speak different languages, live in different parts of a massive nation and observe different value-sytems. I find it quite obnoxious, therefore, for these average Chinese who know virtually nothing about their provincial neighbours, to cry so loudly against Tibet and its sympathisers. Their anger, I feel, is founded on ignorance and blind hatred. Ignorance because they roundly condemn the Dalai Lama, who is a spiritual more than a political figure amongst Tibetans, who traditionally believe that he is the reincarnation of the god of compassion, and blind hatred because of what the tiny state has accomplished by engaging the sensitivities of the West.

In my understanding, if you trample on the sovereignty of a country, slowly clamp down on its people's freedoms over the years, force them to learn your language, deaden their own culture and tradition, exile their earthbound deity, and then when they ask for freedom, you shoot them in the face, then something is wrong in your approach. Amidst all this, the Chinese could not even extend a symbolic gesture of peace with the Dalai Lama, which I think shows how grossly out-of-touch they are with Tibet. It is a building up of resentment and, I shall quote PM Lee out of context here, will have consequences way beyond the Olympic Games.

I am writing this because there are people who feel the Chinese response is not nationalistic in nature, and is not a result of the Chinese being force-fed nationalistic progaganda. I just cannot see how anyone can come to that conclusion. This whole incident smacks of so much nationalism that it has rallied the entire Chinese 'diaspora'.

"If our demands are not taken seriously, we shall unite more public support to fight against such racial prejudice," this in response to the above CNN affair, signed "All the Chinese of the Southwestern U.S".

Here, an account by Grace Wang on how, even at Duke University in the States, the nationalism is driving the PRC students to near-insanity. Simply for being objective in the matter, Ms Wang, a Duke undergrad who tried to bridge the gaps in understanding between rival protest factions, was villified and abused ("shameless dog", "burn you in oil" are my favourites) and, when news of her "defection" got home via the Internet, her family back in China was given death threats (her parents are in hiding now) and her family home dunked with faeces. Charming and civilised, what more could we expect?

If I were the EU, I would roundly condemn these displays of stupidity and remind China how utterly counter-productive their outrage is. At the end of the day, the stakes at hand are still China's, they stand to lose far more, and this temper tantrum is not helping. There is nothing rational about the Chinese response- it is a product of nationalism-patriotic and foul. From this, we might say that the Chinese people are neurotic, hyper-sensitive and easily herded into protest. All you have to do is step on their nationalistic hot-buttons, and you have yourself a story. Luis Bunuel said, after all, that "God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed". Country is China's God so, with China, you have a double whammy of nationalistic hoo-ha.