Thursday, November 2, 2006

Singapore swings

An 18-year-old blogger from Singapore's upper crust has created a surprisingly far-reaching series of ripples with a single post. Her online screed, now removed from her blog but reproduced here (did anyone doubt it would live on?), rips a hole or five in the fairly innocuous views of a young man named Derek Wee, who expressed concerns about the economic insecurity of many people in Singapore. Both Derek Wee and his younger critic, Ms. Wee Shu Min, are the children of prominent politicians in the country.

Ms. Wee leveled her sights at Mr. Wee (no relation) without even a nod at the norms of decorum, which seem to be particularly exacting in Singapore. Ms. Wee also touched some hot buttons by accusing Mr. Wee, apparently below her position in the class structure, of laziness and entitlement:

derek, derek, derek darling, how can you expect to have an iron ricebowl or a solid future if you cannot spell?

if you're not good enough, life will kick you in the balls. that's just how things go....

dear derek is one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country, and in this world. one of those who would prefer to be unemployed and wax lyrical about how his myriad talents are being abandoned for the foreigner's, instead of earning a decent, stable living as a sales assistant. it's not even about being a road sweeper. these !!^#bags don't want anything without "manager" and a name card.

This is just a particularly nasty and polarized forms of an old debate about political philosophy. But again, it's remarkable how much these off-the-cuff remarks have gone beyond Singapore's borders. Ms. Wee's name was for a time the third most popular search term at the blog search engine Technorati.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:21 PM

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