Reposting a snippet from my latest blog post, you can read the full article here: http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/2020/07/raeesah-khan-ge-2020-and-being-labeled.html?m=1
I’m posting more about Raeesah Khan today.
First, a disclaimer. I do not dislike the Worker’s Party.
Of all the opposition parties, I think they are the best. I live in Aljunied grc, and they have done a great job so far. I agree with many of the policy suggestions in their manifesto.
For example, redundancy insurance, abolishing the retirement age, or lowering the age of eligibility for BTO flats, which will help singles and our LGBTQ community to get housing just like married couples are.
Previously I mentioned on my ig stories that Raeesah Khan is not suitable to be an MP.
Today I am going to ask some very important questions which I hope both WP and Raeesah will answer.
I refer to this tweet by Raeesah in the photos.
It appears that she is saying her political views can be summed up by
- Angela Davis’ political views
- Intersectional feminism
Many of you may not know about Angela Davis, but she is a far-left activist, who spent her life sympathising with some of the most oppressive communism regimes around.
She literally calls herself a communist, and was a member of the Communism Party in USA. I think there is no need to explain how horrible communism is.
And of course in order to make any non-communist country a communist state, it would involve total revolution, many lives, and replacing it with a totalitarian regime in charge of redistributing wealth back to its citizens.
She is also a prison abolitionist, campaigning for prisons to completely be eradicated. Where to put the murderers, I can’t seem to find a good answer, because it seems she also is against the death penalty.
Angela Davis was a member of the Black Panthers, a brutal communist, anti-semite organization. In 1970, Angela Davis bought the weapons that were used for a shootout during a trial of 3 black inmates accused of killing a white prison guard. All the black men and judge who was held hostage perished in the gunfight, and Davis fled the state. She was eventually caught.
Even though she conspired to commit murder, the jury found her not guilty.
In short, this woman is the antithesis to the Singapore that Mr Lee Kuan Yew wanted.
This tweet of Raeesah Khan’s talking about Angela Davis was posted only a few weeks ago, but surprisingly enough, nobody is talking about it.
Anyone who knows who Angela Davis is should be horror-filled that a candidate running for parliament is a fan of hers, and claims that the reading of her books represents her political views.
Previously I mentioned Raeesah appears to be one of those radical leftists who seem hell bent on bringing the toxic, cancerous identity politics that America is so notorious for into Singapore.
There are racial issues that minorities face in Singapore, of course there is. It is tough to be a minority in any country.
But instead of discussing calmly and logically what new politics can be introduced to solve these problems or what laws need to change, proponents of Identity politics instead try to make a single race the enemy.
When there are enemies, people unite. Political parties using this method will see themselves get votes if they manage to market themselves as the empathetic ones, even if the politics they impose do more evil than good in the long run.
Society is then split into a them vs us, while tribalistic infighting ensue. If you disagree with this method of classifying victims by their skin colour (when in fact so many things determine a person’s privilege, such as looks, height, family wealth, health, both parents around etc etc), you are automatically seen as racist and the bad guy.
Because nobody wants to seem morally corrupt or unsympathetic, they prop up this system.
Instill this sentiment into citizens long enough and resentment builds. The ones constantly told they are being oppressed will start seeing oppression everywhere. They won’t even try to succeed in life, because they are told they are so oppressed they can never make it. They believe their oppressors owe them.
Meanwhile, the majority race starts feeling angry at constantly being called oppressors. Or maybe they are poor and unhappy themselves, but see that resources for help are only made available for minorities but not them. If they were indeed racist before, this makes them even more racist.
What eventually happens is civil war. We cannot have this poison in Singapore.
Raeesah’s has apologised for her posts, but nobody needed to hear whether she is sorry she was being insensitive.
What people need to know is:
Does she still believe our courts are corrupt as she so insinuated? Does she still believe law enforcement unfairly target minorities? If not, what made her change her mind? Her statement does not address any of this.
Worker’s Party claim they did not see those posts of Raeesah’s. Fair enough. But I do not believe they have done such terrible vetting that they have not seen her tweet about Angela Davis which was so recent.
I wish to ask Raeesah Khan, DO YOU DISAVOW ANGELA DAVIS’ POLITICAL VIEWS?
- Do you believe that Singapore, through a brutal revolution and death, can become a communist utopia?
- Do you think that everyone in Singapore should not own private property and should have equal wealth, the very values communism epouses? If so, do you seek to redistribute your multi-millionaire dad's wealth to the poverty-stricken citizens of Singapore?
- Do you agree that it is only with violence and death do we achieve true freedom?
- Do you seek to abolish prisons in Singapore?
- Do you believe in the ideologies of Karl Marx, or Valdamir Lenin?
As for Worker’s Party, why did you field a candidate who holds extreme left-wing views?
Do you agree with her ideologies and think it aligns with yours? DO YOU ENDORSE THESE FAR LEFT VIEWS??
Please answer these questions. I write all these not because I am a PAP lackey, even though obviously people will say I am. Despite what you think, I believe it is healthy to have opposition seats in parliament.
However, I absolutely do not want to see candidates such as Raeesah Khan in our parliament - she brings with her dangerous political views that can topple the peaceful society we built over the years and is completely against everything that Singapore stands for. As it is, the mindless youth of Singapore are already echoing her dangerous ideologies.
I would rather any opposition joker win than her.
article about youth today 在 黃之鋒 Joshua Wong Facebook 的最讚貼文
泰晤士報人物專訪【Joshua Wong interview: Xi won’t win this battle, says Hong Kong activist】
Beijing believes punitive prison sentences will put an end to pro-democracy protests. It couldn’t be more wrong, the 23-year-old says.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/joshua-wong-interview-xi-wont-win-this-battle-says-hong-kong-activist-p52wlmd0t
For Joshua Wong, activism began early and in his Hong Kong school canteen. The 13-year-old was so appalled by the bland, oily meals served for lunch at the United Christian College that he organised a petition to lobby for better fare. His precocious behaviour earned him and his parents a summons to the headmaster’s office. His mother played peacemaker, but the episode delivered a valuable message to the teenage rebel.
“It was an important lesson in political activism,” Wong concluded. “You can try as hard as you want, but until you force them to pay attention, those in power won’t listen to you.”
It was also the first stage in a remarkable journey that has transformed the bespectacled, geeky child into the globally recognised face of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy. Wong is the most prominent international advocate for the protests that have convulsed the former British colony since last summer.
At 23, few people would have the material for a memoir. But that is certainly not a problem for Wong, whose book, #UnfreeSpeech, will be published in Britain this week.
We meet in a cafe in the Admiralty district, amid the skyscrapers of Hong Kong’s waterfront, close to the site of the most famous scenes in his decade of protest. Wong explains that he remains optimistic about his home city’s prospects in its showdown with the might of communist China under President Xi Jinping.
“It’s not enough just to be dissidents or youth activists. We really need to enter politics and make some change inside the institution,” says Wong, hinting at his own ambitions to pursue elected office.
He has been jailed twice for his activism. He could face a third stint as a result of a case now going through the courts, a possibility he treats with equanimity. “Others have been given much longer sentences,” he says. Indeed, 7,000 people have been arrested since the protests broke out some seven months ago; 1,000 of them have been charged, with many facing a sentence of as much as 10 years.
There is a widespread belief that Beijing hopes such sentences will dampen support for future protests. Wong brushes off that argument. “It’s gone too far. Who would imagine that Generation Z and the millennials would be confronting rubber bullets and teargas, and be fully engaged in politics, instead of Instagram or Snapchat? The Hong Kong government may claim the worst is over, but Hong Kong will never be peaceful as long as police violence persists.”
In Unfree Speech, Wong argues that China is not only Hong Kong’s problem (the book’s subtitle is: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now). “It is an urgent message that people need to defend their rights, against China and other authoritarians, wherever they live,” he says.
At the heart of the book are Wong’s prison writings from a summer spent behind bars in 2017. Each evening in his cell, “I sat on my hard bed and put pen to paper under dim light” to tell his story.
Wong was born in October 1996, nine months before Britain ceded control of Hong Kong to Beijing. That makes him a fire rat, the same sign of the Chinese zodiac that was celebrated on the first day of the lunar new year yesterday. Fire rats are held to be adventurous, rebellious and garrulous. Wong is a Christian and does not believe in astrology, but those personality traits seem close to the mark.
His parents are Christians — his father quit his job in IT to become a pastor, while his mother works at a community centre that provides counselling — and named their son after the prophet who led the Israelites to the promised land.
Like many young people in Hong Kong, whose housing market has been ranked as the world’s most unaffordable, he still lives at home, in South Horizons, a commuter community on the south side of the main island.
Wong was a dyslexic but talkative child, telling jokes in church groups and bombarding his elders with questions about their faith. “By speaking confidently, I was able to make up for my weaknesses,” he writes. “The microphone loved me and I loved it even more.”
In 2011, he and a group of friends, some of whom are his fellow activists today, launched Scholarism, a student activist group, to oppose the introduction of “moral and national education” to their school curriculum — code for communist brainwashing, critics believed. “I lived the life of Peter Parker,” he says. “Like Spider-Man’s alter-ego, I went to class during the day and rushed out to fight evil after school.”
The next year, the authorities issued a teaching manual that hailed the Chinese Communist Party as an “advanced and selfless regime”. For Wong, “it confirmed all our suspicions and fears about communist propaganda”.
In August 2012, members of Scholarism launched an occupation protest outside the Hong Kong government’s headquarters. Wong told a crowd of 120,000 students and parents: “Tonight we have one message and one message only: withdraw the brainwashing curriculum. We’ve had enough of this government. Hong Kongers will prevail.”
Remarkably, the kids won. Leung Chun-ying, the territory’s chief executive at the time, backed down. Buoyed by their success, the youngsters of Scholarism joined forces with other civil rights groups to protest about the lack of progress towards electing the next chief executive by universal suffrage — laid out as a goal in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution. Their protests culminated in the “umbrella movement” occupation of central Hong Kong for 79 days in 2014.
Two years later, Wong and other leaders set up a political group, Demosisto. He has always been at pains to emphasise he is not calling for independence — a complete red line for Beijing. Demosisto has even dropped the words “self-determination” from its stated goals — perhaps to ease prospects for its candidates in elections to Legco, the territory’s legislative council, in September.
Wong won’t say whether he will stand himself, but he is emphatically political, making a plea for change from within — not simply for anger on the streets — and for stepping up international pressure: “I am one of the facilitators to let the voices of Hong Kong people be heard in the international community, especially since 2016.”
There are tensions between moderates and radicals. Some of the hardliners on the streets last year considered Wong already to be part of the Establishment, a backer of the failed protests of the past.
So why bother? What’s the point of a city of seven million taking on one of the world’s nastiest authoritarian states, with a population of about 1.4 billion? And in any case, won’t it all be over in 2047, the end of the “one country, two systems” deal agreed between China and Britain, which was supposed to guarantee a high degree of autonomy for another 50 years? Does he fear tanks and a repetition of the Tiananmen Square killings?
Wong acknowledges there are gloomy scenarios but remains a robust optimist. “Freedom and democracy can prevail in the same way that they did in eastern Europe, even though before the Berlin Wall fell, few people believed it would happen.”
He is tired of the predictions of think-tank pundits, journalists and the like. Three decades ago, with the implosion of communism in the Soviet bloc, many were confidently saying that the demise of the people’s republic was only a matter of time. Jump forward 20 years, amid the enthusiasm after the Beijing Olympics, and they were predicting market reforms and a growing middle class would presage liberalisation.
Neither scenario has unfolded, Wong notes. “They are pretending to hold the crystal ball to predict the future, but look at their record and it is clear no one knows what will happen by 2047. Will the Communist Party even still exist?”
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1119445/unfree-speech
article about youth today 在 Ying C. 一匙甜點舀巴黎 Facebook 的最佳解答
[Tasting / #法式甜點鑑賞] 巴黎 Pâtisserie Gilles Marchal 檸檬塔 / Lemon tart of Pâtisserie Gilles Marchal, Paris (for English, please click "see more")
你今天吃甜點了嗎?
讀完 #為什麼法式甜點需要鑑賞,就有正當理由吃甜點訓練品味了😉 今天就讓我們用實際案例一起來看看究竟該怎麼鑑賞一個法式甜點!
📌 鑑賞重點:
🚩 1. #知道自己在吃什麼:這句話聽起來像句廢話,但是其實很多人並不知道自己現在正在品嚐的東西到底是什麼。舉例來說,巧克力塔和巧克力慕斯蛋糕是完全不同的東西、費南雪與瑪德蓮也不一樣,如果將兩者混為一談,不清楚該有的外型、元素、組成,自然也就不會有正確的期待與評判標準,也不知道除了「好不好吃」、「甜不甜」之外還能怎麼欣賞。
🚩 2. #好吃又好看「c'est bon et c'est beau!」:
#外型:先觀察作品的外觀,欣賞其美感、細節和特殊之處。很多甜點(尤其是元素越簡單的甜點)光看外表,從其基礎元素完成的細緻程度,就可以預測它到底好不好吃。而甜點美麗與否,是否讓人想更進一步一親芳澤、讚嘆甜點人的巧思,又是另外一個層次。
#味道與口感:首先掌握甜點本身的組成元素,吃一口看看味道是否均衡細緻、口感是否兼顧軟硬、柔滑、酥脆的對比、是否有風味組合搭配上的驚喜,都是鑑賞的重點。接著可以分開品味不同元素的表現。請注意,「#甜或不甜」#並不是品評的必要標準。既然是吃甜點,請不要再說「這個看起來好甜」、「給我最不甜的」、「我喜歡,因為它不是很甜」!
🚩 3. #其他:諸如該甜點的歷史掌故、創意來源、主題、甜點主廚的背景、風格、創作哲學、如何對經典重新詮釋、使用元素等,都是值得品味之處。
🍋 前言結束,讓我們從最經典、元素最單純的 #檸檬塔(tart au citron)開始,一起欣賞有趣的作品!
檸檬塔的基礎元素是 #塔皮(pâte sucrée)、#檸檬奶餡(crème au citron)、#蛋白霜(meringue),有的檸檬塔更單純,只有前面兩個元素。巴黎甜點店 Pâtisserie Gilles Marchal 的檸檬塔三個元素都具備、又在經典上有所變化,正好適合拿來當作範例解說。點開照片看詳細說明!
🔖 延伸閱讀:
為什麼法式甜點需要鑑賞?https://tinyurl.com/y54dacbu
「重新詮釋」——法式甜點經典重生、歷久彌新的秘訣:https://tinyurl.com/y5xenfqz
從類型與組成元素徹底解析法式甜點:https://tinyurl.com/y5c9nbeb
了解關鍵概念、解析基礎元素:看懂、吃懂法式甜點的入門課:https://tinyurl.com/y4w9sxxs
*****
Have you all read the article “Why tasting is important when we enjoy French pastries”? Shall we take an example today to practice how exactly tasting should be like?
📌 Key points:
🚩 1. Knowing exactly what we are tasting before making any comments. This sounds like nonsense, but it’s pretty much true because many people do give comments even when they don’t have a clear on what they’re eating. For example, a chocolate tart is different from a chocolate mousse cake, a financier is not the same as a madeleine. If you mix them up and don’t know the basic components and classic look of the pastries, you wouldn’t have correct expectations and criteria to judge whether this cake is good or not besides having comments like “oh this tastes good/bad”, “this is (not) too sweet”, etc.
🚩 2. It’s delicious AND pretty. (In French, we say, “c’est bon et c’est beau!”)
#Look: Have a thorough look on the presentation of the pastry and appreciate its beauty, details, and characteristics. In fact, the presentation tells a lot about the taste if you know how it's made. The more delicate the details are, the more likely it would taste good. Besides, visual appeal also makes customers feel like tasting and admiring the ideas of the creators.
#Taste and #textures: First, you have to know what are the components of the cake, then have a bite and see if different flavours match each other well and are balanced, if there’s enough contrast between different textures such as soft vs. hard, smooth vs. crunchy, etc., and if there’s any surprise with regard to the taste combinations. After that, you could have a further taste on each of the components to get to know them further. Attention: since we are tasting a pastry/cake which is sweet, don’t judge it according to its sweetness only.
🚩 3. Others: If you know more about the history, the origin, the inspirations, background, styles and philosophy of the chef, how he/she reinterprets the classics and what ingredients he/she uses, tasting would become even more interesting.
🍋 Now let’s take the classic lemon tart (tarte au citron) as an example. The basic components are sweet shortcrust pastry (pâte sucrée), lemon curd (crème au citron), and meringue. Some lemon tarts are even more simple, leaving the latter out. We’re having a closer look on the lemon tart of the Pâtisserie Gilles Marchal in Paris today. It has the all three components and is made with a little twist of the classic, which serves as a perfect example. Click on the photos and discover more!
🔖 To read more on the topic:
Why “tasting” is important when having French pastries: https://tinyurl.com/y54dacbu
Revisiting classics, the fountain of youth secret of French pastries: https://tinyurl.com/y5xenfqz
Decomposing French pastries by categories and basic components: https://tinyurl.com/y5c9nbeb
Your first class in French pastries, getting to know basic ingredients and key concepts: https://tinyurl.com/y4w9sxxs
#yingspastryguide #frenchpastrytasting #dégustation #tarteaucitron #lemontart #gillesmarchal