backman hits out at our lady minister

hey, two days ago i was just blogging about michael backman’s (picture left) article ‘while malaysia fiddles, opportunities are running dry‘, in which he label malaysia as ‘bodoh’ (stupid), and suddenly yesterday he came out with a second article.

as i mentioned in my previous post, our fat lady minister, the makcik, had exclaimed that she couldn’t care less what backman wrote since backman is a foreigner, thus this article of backman seems to hit out at her! why, the heading itself is telling of her, being the trade and industry minister – ‘malaysia bites back and industriously trades the insult‘.
go and read it here, at the age website (or my mentaljog extra site).

backman also mentioned something about education:

Learning is largely by rote. In an email to me last week, one Malaysian recalled her schooling as being in a system all about spoon-feeding, memory work and regurgitation.Students are not encouraged to think for themselves and they become adults who swallow everything they’re told.

so true. many of us had been complaining about this for a long long time.

But does the Malaysian Government want creative, critical thinkers? Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi said to the ruling party’s recent general assembly Malaysia needed to make students creative. But that means they must be questioning and thus critical; what hope is there of that when one of Abdullah’s own ministers tells Malaysians that they cannot say the things that I can and hundreds of them write to me to complain because they don’t feel that they can complain to their own Government?

so very true!! we can’t criticise or question the government. not only we, the public, but even some ministers… if non umno ministers of course. criticise or question little bit, we’ll be label with all sorts of names like trying to be clever, wanting to stir up shit, or we are racists and so on. why, look at what happened to opposition leader, lim kit siang recently… for questioning about the new RM400 million istana negara, a group of muslim had reported him to the police. this is sheer silliness at work!!

ok, remember to read backman’s article, ya, and drop him a line if you feel you agree strongly with him via his own website.