It takes years of philosophy lessons to realise a fundamental truth: Anything that starts with the letter E is bound to be nasty. Essays. Elephants. Eggplants. Evolution is cool, because it annoys Creationists. Eskimos, as well. Having to wrestle polar bears for lunch makes you cool. Some of them are in fact positively frozen.
Sorry.
Not that anyone actually gives a trout, but I've decided to change the blog title again. While 'Eccentric Chauvinist' kind of gets the gist, where's the subtlety? No sense of style at all. Tsk tsk. Three O'clock Truncheon combines a solid phallic symbol of oppression with a good dose of 'what-the-fuck?'. Its awesomeness could only be topped by a half-naked Marmite-covered man wielding a broken beer bottle battling barracudas beside big brown bears but behold, backbitten buzzards bid beastly blasphemy. Bah.
Right. I guess it would be rather callous of me if I didn't put in something in regards to the earth-wobbling shock result of the recent Malaysian election. The bit about the film with me in it just needs to wait.
Anyway the result was expected, Barisan lost a bit and the opposition gets some in. What wasn't expected was the size of that bit; the bit being five whole states and something just shy of half the votes.
Now, those that know me tend to lump me into the government camp, which makes me pro-establishment, hence evil and all-around uncool, all of which sounds just about right. Still, at the risk of sounding like a turncoat glory-hunter with nerves of weed, I have to kinda say that I'm not. I follow a funny Hobbesian logic to government and politics, mixed with a bit of Kantian duty in there as well. That means that I am loyal to the gov, it's just that I don't really care which party or tyrant is at the top. Benevolent democratic president? Brilliant. Inept socialist dictator? That's alright. Evil whip-wielding nymphomaniac princess? Yes, please.
All in all, on the surface it looks a good result. Now that the oppoes have cut their teeth a bit, them and the govoes won't continue putting up rubbish candidates whose sole task is to obey the guy at the top. Fact is, both the govoes and the oppoes are equally toss. Bunch of men without initiatives who bob around if there's no strong leader to shepherd them.
For that, I blame what Weber and Peter Evans recognized as a lack of institutional autonomy. Malaysia's governmental weakness lies in ineffectiveness and corruption, and those are the exact same result as having a state's capacity, signified by its bureaucratic strength, diminished by taking up more projects, more functions than it could handle. Expand the bureaucratic capacity with more and better qualified bureaucrats enticed by good over-the-private-sector-pay salaries.
The results would be indubitably for the better, though the short-term effects will sting many in the form of lay-offs and inflation. Yet, this bitter cure will heal a more malign and terminal illness, and the sooner it is done, the less critical and painful the cost.
The other is what Mygdal saw as what Third World countries are often wont to do: accommodate, and thus become weak. To have a strong state, a country must be autonomous from all the social actors in the nation, and politics of accommodation weakens it. By simply pandering to the Chinese community, the Indian community or even the Malay community itself is to perpetuate the weak state.
Hard-line apathy is good. Even instinctively, men gravitate towards decisive leaders because they know what they're doing. Those that advocate otherwise are usually those who stand to benefit from leaders who listens to them. That is what is called regulatory capture, the influence of social actors, any of the groups within society, ranging from the capitalists to the socialists to the union of teachers to the army, on the sovereign decisions of the state. Thereon lies the source of corruption and rentier protectionism.
It is often thought that this Malaysian policy of accommodation between the races is a good thing, it is not. It merely avoids the issue of assimilation. We are one nation, Malaysians all. Until we become Malaysians first and our respective creed or ethnicities last, then we are all damned. The political parties, all of them, are too mired with greed and power and lust for votes to put forth this remedy, though for sure that many amongst their ranks would have come across this piece of knowledge: We are Malaysians, and we must all be so; to have anyone claim otherwise is to weaken the state. By indulging them in their racist fantasies, we let ourselves to wallow in our ignorance, smothering ourselves with our own cultural filth.
For fear of the temporal pain of a surgical reform, Malaysian politicians, both regnant and opposition, condemn this body to the slow menial death of this morbid racial cancer.
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