Dr Catherine Lim on “cooling-off†day: PAP must be feeling v
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Dr Catherine Lim on “cooling-off” day: PAP must be feeling very insecure
January 14, 2010
Singapore’s prominent writer Dr Catherine Lim has written a letter to The Straits Times Forum yesterday expressing her “surprise” at the “cooling-off” day introduced recently by the ruling PAP.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced last month that an additional “cooling-off” day will be introduced in the next general election on the eve of polling day itself to enable voters to make a “calm” and “rational” decision and to prevent “public disorders” from happening.
All mass rallies, door-to-door visits and public displays of party logos are banned on the “cooling-off” day. The ban will also be applied to the internet where websites of political parties and socio-political blogs are expected to adhere to the new rule.
However, the traditional broadcasts of various parties as well as reports on the election in the mainstream media will continue on “cooling-off” day.
Dr Lim described her immediate response as: “Why, the People’s Action Party (PAP) must be feeling very insecure.”
She opined that the decision must be driven by self-interest to “give it an advantage at the polls, that is, more Singaporeans would vote for the PAP than if there were no ruling.”
“Since ‘cooling off’ can only refer to emotions, there must be a PAP fear that the wildly enthusiastic display of emotions by the large crowds at opposition rallies in past general elections is likely to be exploited by the opposition in this coming one. It will build up to a climax towards the end, affecting the voting pattern, and hence, must be prevented……..the electorate will include a large number of new, young voters who belong to the noisy, rumbustious world of the Internet, where emotions rather than cool reason prevail. The opposition is sure to make opportunistic use of this new force,” she added.
The “cooling-off” day has been criticized by many Singaporeans for giving an unfair advantage to the PAP since the mainstream media is controlled by them and it is still permitted to report on news pertaining to the elections on “cooling-off” day.
Though other countries like Australia do have a similar form of “cooling-off” period, the rules apply equally to all political parties and the mainstream media is not owned by the ruling party, unlike in Singapore.
The PAP has a rather unsavory reputation of making use of it incumbency to tweak the electoral system to its benefit. For example, it uses the Electoral Boundary Committee under the Prime Minister’s Office to redraw electoral boundaries at its whims and fancies to dilute concentration of opposition support and the changes are often announced just before the polls to throw the opposition off guard.
Dr Lim wrote that she was suprised that “a shrewd leadership like the PAP could come up with a ruling that first, is of doubtful value and could even backfire; second, exposes an anxiety that could provide political fodder for the opposition, and third, exposes an insecurity that must make even its supporters wonder about how strong, after more than four decades of leadership, the bond between the Government and the people really is.”
Her letter prompted a swift rebuttal from Dr Yik Keng Yong who wrote to The Straits Times Forum today to show his support for the “cooling-off” day:
“Calm, collected and rational voting is what all sensible citizens should seek. Yet who among us is not ruled partly by emotions, letting the heart overrule the head in the heat of the moment? It is easier to be swayed momentarily by demagoguery and emotional argument than by rational reasoning. Nothing remedies this better than a good night’s rest and some rational reflection, after which convictions can be firmed and action taken without room for remorse. Dr Lim may ascribe PAP insecurity and anxiety to this new policy, but in the final analysis, the PAP’s idea is more conducive to the election.”
Dr Lim first crossed swords with the PAP in 1994 when she wrote a landmark article published in The Straits Times – “PAP and the People: A Great Affective Divide”, which peeved then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong so much that his press secretary challenged her to enter politics and take responsibility for her views.
Goh said at a PAP event that Lim had “gone beyond the pale” to imply that he was not really in charge in the article.
“When my authority is being commented on or undermined by wrong observations, I have to correct them, or the view will prevail that I am indeed not in charge of Singapore…..If left unchecked, snide comments would, over time, erode the people’s respect for the office,” he said.
Lee Kuan Yew dismissed Catherine Lim’s views as “the popular theory that the Western press writes about.”
In his memoirs, Lee is quoted as saying:
“Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister….She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac….There is no other way you can govern in a Chinese society.”
Catherine Lim did not join politics. Her column was subsequently stopped by the Straits Times and she remained on the fringes of Singapore socio-political life with few young Singaporeans even remotely aware of her existence.
Read more of Dr Catherine Lim’s writings on her blog here
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The PAP rule must end by this year.
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Dr Catherine Lim - thank you
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This was posted in Election STrategy earlier.
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Angel 7030, i saw your nick appear before 4 pm today
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GReat 1 tracking angel7030 down. She he came for just viewing comments about PAP then go report la
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sori, got an urgent from Lau Lee
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Recently
1 - temasek review
2 - the online citizen
had been gonna ... by some invisible ...
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lky now become lau lee
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Originally posted by Great1:
lky now become lau lee
later lau sai.
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Originally posted by Great1:
Recently
1 - temasek review
2 - the online citizen
had been gonna ... by some invisible ...
Your message not complete. had been gonna what? -
Originally posted by Great1:
lky now become lau lee
Uncles near my house coffeeshop all call him Lau Lee mah.Anyway, Lau lee said, give you all cooling day to rest, you all also make noise, dun give also make noise...haiz!!! cooling day is mend more for younger peoples like us, not for Uncles and Aunties to line up at singapore pools ya.
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The well-coordinated simultaneous attacks on TR and TOC: Who, Why and What
January 12, 2010
On 9th January 2010, The Online Citizen, one of the two major socio-political blogs in Singapore was incapacitated by what is known as a DDOS (Denial of Service) attack which is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users to prevent an internal site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.
The site is only accessible intermittently for the last two days and has been down for the past few hours. According to the last posting on TOC’s Facebook, the attack is still going on.
A day later, the Temasek Review came under a similar DDOS attack too, but fortunately with our new anti-DDOS firewall blocking the attacks, our site is able to stay up though the loading may be slow. A week ago, TR will be completely inaccessible like TOC now.
(Some readers are unable to access TR not because of the attack, but due to DNS propagation issues which we have already resolved.)
The Temasek Review has come under such attacks on several occasions in the last few months beginning in September last year. The first attack on our site completely overwhelmed us and it was down for more than 24 hours, sparking a controversy in cyberspace.
This is probably the first time that any socio-political blog in Singapore has come under such an attack and it is therefore understandable that some netizens were skeptical about our claims.
One prominent gamer in Singapore’s blogosphere and a former guest columnist of Temasek Review, “Darkness” went around disputing our claims and accused us of “faking” an attack to publicize our site.
(Is there any blogger out there who can grow his/her blog’s readership by having it accessible only half the time?)
We challenged “Darkness” to substantiate his allegations which he was unable to do so and he was subsequently evicted from the “Brotherhood”, a guild of gamers whose “Council of the wise” apologized for his indiscretion on our site. (read the comment here)
Since the first attack, we have been attacked on an increasing frequency, initially on a monthly basis followed by bi-weekly, weekly and now once in a few days.
Due to the complexities involved, it is not possible for us to explain clearly each time our site becomes inaccessible because it may not be caused directly by the attack.
Sometimes, it is not a DDOS attack, but a sync attack, a smurf attack or a massive “content grabbing” like what SPH did to us which has the potential to slow our site down if we do not have a firewall to block off its requests.
In the past, everytime we come under an attack, we will have to move our server or change a IP address to strengthen our security system which explains why some readers may see our page as “upgrading in process” at times which our detractors used to “prove” that we did not suffer a DDOS attack. These were evasive measures necessary to safeguard our original site’s data and hardware from further damages.
Since then, with the help of our present host, we have migrated our site onto a clustered cloud server environment with load balancing and network level firewall which promises better availability, stability and defensibility against most attacks.
Who is responsible?
Both TR and TOC have a combined readership which is high enough to challenge the mainstream media and it doesn’t take a “forecaster” to warrant a guess who the culprits are.
Initially we thought the attacker(s) may be some bored youths or a netizen who had an axe to grind with us. However, the attacks are so well-coordinated and relentless that it is likely to be started by a group of hackers with the implicit support of an organization which has the resources to fund them.
The attacks follow a classic pattern:
1. They come suddenly without any warning with IPs flooding in from all over the world at the same time which overloads the server and brings it crashing down in no time.
2. It usually lasts more than 48 hours. The longest duration of attack we suffered was 4 days. The site was not down for so long because we had a dedicated IT team to trouble-shoot and find ways to keep the site accessible to some readers.
3. They were not isolated attacks and will come again, again and again.
Why is this happening?
The short-term aim of these attacks is to prevent readers from accessing our site to decrease our growing readership and to prevent damaging articles from reaching out to a larger audience.
The long-term goal would be to discourage us from continuing to work on TR and give up completely which we did consider as unlike TOC, we do not have somebody to manage TR full-time. All of us have full-time jobs outside and we cannot afford to spend too much time bogged down by these perplexing problems with the site.
A secondary goal will be to deplete our resources so that we are unable to devote our time, energy and finances to expand the site which they (the attackers) have succeeded in a way.
We have spent nearly SGD$10,000 upgrading our server, bandwidth and firewall which leaves us with little money for other more pressing tasks ahead.
We had initially wanted to register a company early this year and employ permanent staff to man TR, but now we have to postpone our plans indefinitely till we make our IT system more secure, especially with the next general election around the corner.
There is no point spending money to improve the quality of the editorial content when the site is crippled frequently by these irritating and disabling attacks.
What can we do?
No site in the world is completely safe and impenetrable. Even mighty sites like Yahoo and Ebay were attacked and brought down and most recently, China’s gigantic IT portal Baidu.
We can only keep beefing up our security system to make it as secure as possible. Right now, our site is hosted on a cluster of three dedicated servers in different parts of the world all protected by an anti-DDOS firewall on a high-level security network.
The attacker(s) will have to overwhelm our firewall and take down three servers together at one go before our site crashes and even then we have prepared a few backups in store. Only a professional hacker will be able to breach our security wall.
Right now, there is an attack going on, but you are still able to read this article because only one server is being flooded, the other two are holding up.
Due to our unfortunate “experience” in dealing with these attacks which have made us literally “vomitted blood” many times, we are more than willing to provide some technical advice and assistance to TOC.
They have three options currently:
1. Move to a dedicated server and increase their bandwidth and RAM to accommodate more communication requests.
2. Strengthen their firewall or install one if they don’t have it.
3. Purchase a dummy server and mirror their main site to divert the attacks so that at least half their readers will be able to access the site.
Whoever these attackers are, they are unlikely to stop at only one attack. With Temasek Review becoming more and more difficult to attack nowadays, they may change their target to TOC which will have to bear the brunt of it.
Despite some petty differences between us, we, more than anybody else, will want to keep TOC up simply because we share the same goal of providing an alternative voice to Singaporeans.
Furthermore, with TOC down, the authorities will have one less target to monitor and will now place all their attention on TR which will put us in a precarious situation.
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Originally posted by angel7030:
Uncles near my house coffeeshop all call him Lau Lee mah.Anyway, Lau lee said, give you all cooling day to rest, you all also make noise, dun give also make noise...haiz!!! cooling day is mend more for younger peoples like us, not for Uncles and Aunties to line up at singapore pools ya.
Usual bullshit from you. But moderator never touch you, so you are lucky.
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Originally posted by angel7030:
Uncles near my house coffeeshop all call him Lau Lee mah.Anyway, Lau lee said, give you all cooling day to rest, you all also make noise, dun give also make noise...haiz!!! cooling day is mend more for younger peoples like us, not for Uncles and Aunties to line up at singapore pools ya.
can ask him give us some money or notcny coming
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Originally posted by ztreyier:
Usual bullshit from you. But moderator never touch you, so you are lucky.
What bullshit, the problem with older peoples is that they alway think the youngs bullshit and they are the only one not bullshitting...hello, wake up ya. The Y generation needs time to think it over before voting, unlike your time, vote anyhow one, no wonder PAP alway win. -
Originally posted by Great1:
can ask him give us some money or notcny coming
lau lee said he can only give you the bowl, you go beg yourself with your skill -
Originally posted by Great1:
can ask him give us some money or notcny coming
can why not..LAter i going to RC meeting
i be meeting the chairman
how much u want
I propose to him ok
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Originally posted by angel7030:
lau lee said he can only give you the bowl, you go beg yourself with your skill
beggars also got "ft" one -
Originally posted by Great1:
beggars also got "ft" oneJust saw one thai beggar yesterday. He came a long way to beg money. Exchange rate here higher.
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Originally posted by ztreyier:
Just saw one thai beggar yesterday. He came a long way to beg money. Exchange rate here higher.
dun be suprise u might see this beggarshopping at Ion LV
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Originally posted by noahnoah:
can why not..LAter i going to RC meeting
i be meeting the chairman
how much u want
I propose to him ok
now cannot, the monk gone already
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Originally posted by ztreyier:
Just saw one thai beggar yesterday. He came a long way to beg money. Exchange rate here higher.
prc syndicate -
Originally posted by noahnoah:
dun be suprise u might see this beggarshopping at Ion LV
Don't know what the hell PAP is doing. Letting all sorts of aliens into Singapore. Destroying our society and country.
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fake monk from another country also beg for money