The (watch)men in white

Among those of us who were more active in gay rights in Singapore in the earlier days, we used to joke about how we could always ask the internal security dept (ISD) for our emails if they ever got lost or deleted. It was somehow a known assumption then that the government has been monitoring our activities and correspondences. Moles and attempted infiltration to keep the government aware of what is going on is probably a common theme. We, of course, know that whenever that is a large gathering, clueless plainclothes polices were sent to spy on us, often being singled out very quickly or having to endure long talks about gay sex (perhaps) or relationship or worst still gay poetry and art!

One of the joke in the gay email list SiGNeL was that we should all sign off our postings with “LKY”. The purpose was so that every posting gets captured by the ISD and the poor intelligence people have to read through all of our postings to find out that it has nothing to do with “LKY” other than the signature. This will certain keep them very busy!

The Dalai Lama, the Pope & monkly mistakes

One of the problem with the Westernised media, particularly coming from the Americas is that there is a strong tendency to apply their own world view of how things should be to the rest of the world. This is called ethnocentrisms. Thus it does not get any better when the American/Western media continuously portray the Dalai Lama like he is the sole authority of the Buddhist world, the equivalent of the pope in Catholicism. Of course, the popularity of the Dalai Lama have, in part, a lot to do with the fact that Tibet was taken over by China, and there are good political agenda and interests to use that fact against China, by some government agencies to negotiable deals and force China to obey Western rules. So sometimes it hard to tell when the Dalai Lama is a Western government’s tool of against China or when its really for the concern of the people in Tibet.