shut up and sit down (whatever that means)

lots has happened over the past few days / weeks. as a result have sacrificed quality (i.e. scintillating intellect and rapier wit) for a broad coverage of the issues at hand. it's been quite overwhelming really, sometimes i begin to question ... everything.

the meaty (pun not completely intended) stuff first then:

swine flu: it's been starting to get a bit disruptive already. although there have been no reported cases of infection (yet), my company has already made plans to "split operations" next week. this means i'll get to work from home. woohoo! i guess. though wouldn't people get bored with constantly staying at home? better to do a rotation basis i guess, where some people will come in 1/3/5 and 2/4/6 etc etc. fairer that way. i'll miss the colleagues and human interactions at work though, i guess will volunteer to go back at some point.

the important thing is not to overreact or underreact - one might say the extreme quarantine measures (e.g. HK) are a bit overdone, but tensions are pretty high here after SARS in 2003. i guess its a measure of how "successful" the asians have been that the petty outbreaks in the past few years have been nipped in the bud, while the big epidemic comes from an animal (pig) in a place (MX) that no one really anticipated. pray this will blow over quickly though, plague is NOT fun. but then again you could say its one thing that doesn't really discriminate, an "Act of God".

AWARE: Storm in a teacup, in my opinion. For those not in the same country, some younger members (mostly Christians) stage a coup d'etat in the most prominent women's rights NGO here and took over the important positions. Main reason cited for dissatisfaction was the permissive attitude of the old committee towards LGBT issues, including, inter alia, (omg i used a lawyers' term!) slipping innuendos that such things are permissive into educational materials for secondary schoolers (middle schools).

I would agree with the mainstream population's (and church's) opinions on this one. I'll come out to say that I am against over-permissiveness on LGBT issues (to the extent that the lifestyle rather than only the person is condoned), but the methods which were used were wrong. We should not be washing our dirty linen in public a la coups d'etat (and even in a small NGO which, though high-profile, is not widely supported). Should they have established a separate organisation? Maybe. But i guess the problem still boiled down to the breakdown in relationships between the different parties. Did the course of events show that the "new guard" were too hasty? Possibly.

I would also be against overt Church (with both a big and small "C") involvement in this issue. After all, it is too small to use valuable political capital to weigh in on the issue (unlike things of large scale importance like, say, casinos or abolishing Penal Code 377A). Generally we should be known to be there and known to be actively working, but not getting dragged down into the politicking and compromising of the world. "Seen but not heard" isn't entirely accurate, but it encapsulates part of the meaning.

afternote: the "new guard" lost a no-confidence vote, and decided to step down. i guess it's a 50-50 situation after all... further confrontations have been avoided and the old people are back, although severely discredited. the winners in this case are citizen journalists... although i'm not sure if the pro-LGBT crowd can claim a clear cut victory on this one. "women's activism" definitely suffered a setback, although in SG the need for such an organisation, i believe, is past. perhaps this will shift more political attention to groups which may need it, like the arts or the environment.