Vendetta

I don't read the Malaysian print press that much now after the election. I think they lost a lot of their credibility even before the election. I just perceive them to be biased.

However, when I do occasionally read them I find it amusing when I read between the lines.

Recently, the members of the press were barred from the main areas of parliament. The Barisan Backbencers Club removed the baricade after the press stopped reporting on their activities.

Read the article below from the star:

Saturday June 28, 2008 MYT 4:52:13 PM

Najib wants Nazri and Tiong to end spat

By AUDREY EDWARDS

KUALA LUMPUR: Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak wants the feud between Datuk Seri Nazri Abd Aziz and Barisan Nasional Backbenchers Club (BBC) chairman Datuk Seri Tiong King Sing to stop.

"I hope it will not continue. Arguments within any group of the Barisan Nasional is an unhealthy development," the deputy Prime Minister told reporters Saturday after opening the International Conference on "Meeting of Minds: Developing the Malaysia Master Brand."

"We must make the effort to resolve the situation so we can focus on our responsibility in Parliament, which is to debate on issues of interest to the people and how we can use our role as Members of Parliament and government to continually defend them."

The feud between Nazri, minister in charge of Parliament affairs and Tiong has gained momentum where Nazri on Friday said he expected the BBC to recommend to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to sack him as a minister.

"If they dare not do that on Monday, then shut up and don’t talk anymore,” he had said.

This was in response to Tiong's statement that BBC was upset with Nazri, a minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, who had called the club members childish and gangster-like after they removed the barricade at Parliament lobby on Tuesday.

The barrier was put up to ban reporters from moving freely in the lobby area.

Tiong had also said that the BBC would hold a meeting on Monday to discuss the issue and decide on the next course of action to be taken as they felt Nazri had gone overboard.

Najib, when asked whether he, as Barisan whip, would issue a directive for the matter to be resolved, he said: "It is okay. I will whisper."

I found it most amusing that a few days before that, the press has been reporting what Tiong has been saying about Nazri. I feel the press are still pissed about getting blocked out from parliament. They can't admonish Nazri directly but they can report on what others have to say about him... like Tiong here.

I wonder where this is going to go. Its been fun watching the press being biased on this story.

I also read the statutory Declaration from Raja Petra Kamarudin's statutory declaration. I found it most amusing that he's declaring that he knows something that he heard from 'reliable sources'. Don't you just love how conspiracy theories work? A 'reliable source' told someone and immediately it's the truth... what the heck is this, is this the X-Files?

Then anyone can make a statutory declaration that they read in the newspaper about RPK's declaration and they read from reliable sources (is The Star still a reliable source?) that they know something's fishy. Is that proof now?

I declare this is crap. I have spoken. Let it be the truth.

incompetent people don't recognize they're incompetent

Right now, Pak Lah and the BN component parties are doing post-election reviews on why they performed so badly. I came upon this article after Scott Adams highlighted it in his Dilbert blog. It's a New York Times article about a psychology study and the findings are most interesting.


Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find
They're blind to own failings, others' skills

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

``I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it,'' Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically correct standard English,'' and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an ``expert'' panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the ``false consensus effect.''

When high-scoring subjects were asked to ``grade'' the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

``Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,'' the researchers concluded.

In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``he who knows best knows how little he knows.''

And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that overconfidence is common; studies have found, for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as ``above average'' on a wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.

Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, said he suspects that most lay people have only a vague idea of the meaning of ``average'' in statistical terms.

``I'm not sure the average person thinks of `average' or `percentile' in quite that literal a sense,'' Funder said, ``so `above average' might mean to them `pretty good,' or `OK,' or `doing all right.' And if, in fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong, using the statistical criterion.''

But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated there are many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it.

In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out ``You stink!'' -- truthful though this assessment may be.



After reading this, it makes me wonder about the frustration people felt before the election. Those who voted for Barisan Rakyat were probably screaming at BN that they were incompetent but then the BN politicians were thinking, "no I'm not, I'm good at my job!". Well, I guess we know now why they were thinking like that.

Life goes on

I was waiting to go home while sitting at my desk at work today and some of my colleagues started talking about politics. One of them told us he wasn't surprised to see BN smaller victory. He said for those who were around in 1969, they were used to it as BN had suffered a huge dent then, although the loss now is even greater. We have to be on guard so that racial integrity is strong.

The people's hunger for news on politics is huge, even Malaysiakini's website is still trying to cope with the huge spike in traffic. Information is power now. People are looking for the latest news, even turning to blogs for unverified news.

Their is so many ramifications from the election results affecting all sectors of life, from economics to the man on the street. We can't see the effects now yet but in the construction sector, large companies are already worrying about current projects.

As for now, there is only very small affects on me. Some small changes in shooting schedules; listening to my colleagues, friends and family talk about politics; dodging political banners on the roads... other than that, life hasn't changed for much yet. Same old, same old.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Others have written about this before but I just wanted to bring this up as it's related to what I want to write about. A few weeks ago, Pak Lah officiated a boutique owned by his daughter, Nori and his son-in-law Khairy in the Pavilion. Guess what was the name of the shop?

"The Emperor's New Clothes". Oh, the irony. They even presented him a polo shirt at the shop. Now if you don't know the Hans Christian Andersen story, it goes like this. The emperor is swindled into wearing a 'magical' robe which only the one deserving his position could see. No one else wanted to tell the emperor that there he was naked as he paraded down the street in his new clothes until at last, a small boy laughed and shouted out, "he has nothing on!".

So the moral of the story, don't surround yourself with yes man. When the people are angry, the press should report it instead of sweeping it under the carpet. True, the press also has a responsibility to ensure national security is maintained but on the flip side, when things are not said, people get angry when they don't get to voice out their opinions. The only way people could pass the message to Pak Lah was at the ballot box.

It must have been a hard pill for Pak Lah to swallow. If you have read newspapers; watch the TV; seen the billboards and been listening the radio... you would have assumed that BN was on its way to an easy 2/3 majority win again. What wasn't reported however was the huge dissastifaction among the people. Even during the hectic campaigning period, it was in-your-face propaganda. The only piece written about the opposition was color stories or short paragraphs. I don't think Pak Lah even knew how strong the opposition's campaign was and the people's anger. Pak Lah couldn't see the magnitude of the people's anger. He probably knew already and had the press supress it... but that is just as dumb.

Once the election results come out, the press would look stupid just as well. It goes to show they are not in touch with reality. The election results is a huge dent in all the official Malaysian press credibility. All their editorials; the so called 'experts' they interviewed; the VOX POPULI interviews... now it goes to they were all... well, bullshit. BN leaders are now claiming suprise at their results. Wow, have they been eatening up the same stuff their propaganda engine has been shuffing down the troats of the masses?

I wonder how the BN council post-mortem would be like. I would love to be a fly on the wall and hear what all the BN component party leaders have to say. They're all putting on a show rallying around the PM now. That's exactly what Brutus and his comrades did just before Caesar murmured out 'Et tu Brutus?"

Here's my favourite part from Shakespeare's play... Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene II

Now, before you watch Marlon Brando deliver the lines below... imagine if Marlon Brando was speaking about Tun Dr. Mahathir or Pak Lah instead.



We're all honorable men aren't we?

Passing Mark



Everyone who voted for the opposition is asking for Pak Lah to step down as Prime Minister. Everyone is reacting as if Pak Lah actually lost the election. People 'seem' to forget that the BN did win a simple majority and can form the next federal government... although there's a stronger opposition in Parliament now. It would probably a lame duck government. I hope Parliament doesn't get bogged down in too many deadlocks.

I guess it just goes to show that this is the one exception to Malaysian standards. Normally, we are used to substandard goods and services but when it comes to election results, if the BN doesn't get a 2/3 majority, it's a failure. Getting a C is not a passing mark... must get at least a B to pass!

The opposition @ Alternative Front should also change its name now. While they're still the opposition in Parliament, they now hold 4 states (Perak, Selangor, Penang and Kelantan). In the 4 states, they are now the rulling state government, so it's not right to call them the 'opposition' anymore. A rebranding would change people's perception about them. Maybe a change to "The People's Voice" would sound better. The "Barisan Rakyat" name sounds much better. Telling people you're an alternative choice wouldn't last long if everyone swings to your side. The Reformasi slogan wouldn't last long too if you're already the government of the day.

They're not the underdog anymore. They're quite a huge doggie now.