General Elections 2025

 

One of the most interesting things that's happened in the elections is WP not contesting in Marine Parade. There have been various reasons given for Marine Parade not being contested. One of them is that Tin Pei Ling's constituency has been absorbed into the GRC, and quite possibly she's become the flagbearer of that GRC. That would complete a very remarkable turnaround story / redemption arc that first started with her getting voted into the GRC on the coat tails of more illustrious figures, and people moaning about how unfair it was that somebody like her was parachuted into the position.

In GE 2011, the opposition parties managed to contest almost all the seats, other than LKY's. They gave all of Singapore the opportunity to vote, and this was the first time. There was talk of co-ordination between the parties. All the parties made inroads: SDP had rising stars like Vincent Wijeysingha and Tan Jee Say. NSP had unearthed a gem in Nicole Seah, although she was originally with Kenneth Jeyaretnam's party but had defected at the last minute. NSP also had a few former government scholars. Chiam See Tong's party seemed to get a few young and illustrious people.

Today, things have changed. Nicole Seah has switched to the Worker's Party, and later on, because of the affair with Leon Perera, left the party. Although Pritam Singh has made it clear that if they had a choice, they would have kept her on. Worker's Party seems to be going from strength to strength, attracting the right sort of people. (And, in Raeesah's case, the wrong sort of people too.)

The other opposition parties seem to have one each person with name recognition. Red Dot United has Ravi Philemon. SDP has Chee Soon Juan and Paul Tambyah. Paul Tambyah is an obviously qualified candidate, but seems to be a doctor first and a politician second. SDA revolves around Desmond Lim. PPP revolves around Goh Meng Seng, Singapore Democratic Alliance has had so many parties joining and leaving that I've failed to keep track. There are other short lived parties in Singapore: Singapore's voice, Singapore Justice Party, Reform Party, People's Power Party, Singaporeans First Party. None of them give a true impression that any real institution building has taken place. None of them give the impression that if they were suddenly put in charge of a town council in Singapore, they could fight the onslaught of lawsuits that would come their way.

Chee Soon Juan, to his credit, has kept the SDP going all these years. But it remains to be seen if he can take the next step. If his brand revolves around building Singapore into something that resermbles more a western democracy, that branding might be turning toxic in the near term.

Tan Cheng Bock is the leader of the Progress Singapore Party. He and Lee Hsien Yang will lend some name recognition to the party, and they have successfully contested in West Coast GRC, getting NCMP seats in parliament. I don't know if Leong Mun Wai's antics will bring progress for the party, going forward. And I'm not sure that the party will outlast Tan Cheng Bock heading the party.

There will be parties which put out a lot of candidates in the short term to contest seats in elections, but this is looking more like just an exercise in contesting the seats and giving everybody a chance to vote. In the 14 years since 2011, a consensus has emerged that WP will be the main opposition party in Singapore, and they are going to contest more seats if they could. There is a big difference with WP: they are no longer contesting seats to make up the numbers. They are not packing up the numbers. They have one of the most impressive slate of candidates, but because they no longer have Leon Perera and Nicole Seah, that may have disrupted their plans to contest in even more GRCs.

That's the first sign of not contesting in Marine Parade: they are not going to stand for elections there just to make up the numbers. They are going to make sure that every GRC they contest are genuinely competitive affairs. Pritam Singh is on the record as saying that they didn't want to lose Nicole and Leon but their hand was forced. And they may even make progress in spite of not having those two.

The second thing is that they have contested Tampines. To me, this is a sign that they're no longer comrades with fellow opposition parties per se. It doesn't matter of PPP wants to contest, it doesn't matter if NSP were there since 2011. The opposition parties are no longer fellow travellers or allies. WP will respect you if it thinks that you have a chance to win. I don't expect the WP to be picking fights with the SDP or the PSP (for the PSP, not while Tan Cheng Bok is still around). But if it thinks that you're just unnecessarily taking up the oxygen in the room, it will not hesitate to elbow you out of the way. If the NSP and the PPP were to lose their deposits in this election, then I think this will be a very significant election cycle for the opposition parties in terms of clearing out dead wood.

This reminds me of GE 2011 when there were a few surprises: Low Thia Khiang left Hougang to contest in Aljunied, and he was taking the biggest political gamble of his life. Win, and you would have ushered in a new era in politics where the opposition takes a GRC. You would have punished the PAP by taking out 3-4 of their biggest people. Lose, and you better hope that you can hold on to Hougang.

If you want to understand what a gamble it is, consider that Chiam See Tong took the same gamble, going out of Potong Pasir to run in Toa Payoh. He lost that gamble big, and meant that his party no longer had any seats. (But it was a gamble worth taking because even if he lost, he could look forward to a well-deserved retirement.) The shame of it all is that he should have put his most capable lieutenant to contest in Potong Pasir, instead of his wife, who was a newcomer, although that meant that he would lose control of his party to that lieutenant. Potong Pasir was winnable.

Tampines is a gamble for the WP. Not as big a gamble as Aljunied was: they would have faced quite a bit of criticism. But they were about the test the waters and find out what it's like to tread on somebody else's turf. This would be a precursor for them to cast a wider net around Singapore.

There have also been independent candidates in Mountbatten and Radin Mas GRCs. The rise of independent candidates is also something that gives the lie to the notion that many of the opposition parties are anything more than shell organisations that revolve around veteran opposition party members. Many non-WP opposition parties are no more than mere independent candidates. That's the thing about political parties in the democratic countries in Asia: they tend to revolve more around names than institutions. Only the more mature parties have made the evolution towards being real institutions. For example, if you wanted to stand for elections in WP, you'd have to work your way up from the bottom: you have to put in the hours volunteering and doing the grassroots work, before you were allowed to stand for elections.

And that also brings me to the thinking of Worker's Party people. You have to attract the best people, and you will do that by signalling to prospective opposition party candidates out there that you are the party that people want to join in order to maximise your chances of being elected into parliament. And you must do your part by showing that your party has the organisation, the structure and the ambition to keep on growing. Among the opposition parties, only WP has shown growth since 2011, although it is a remarkable level of growth. They will have to survive the trials and tribulations that the PAP will want to put them through, even though this is a kinder, gentler version of what LKY's PAP was all about.

So the policy of WP has to be geared towards being ambitious. Yes, it is one thing to assure the voters that they're going to only contest 1/3 of all the seats available in order to prevent a freak election result where they suddenly deny the supermajority to the PAP. Then they will be in uncharted waters, because you don't know and they don't know how they're going to handle the additional responsibilities. Pritam Singh has already grown the party to the point where he has a leader of the opposition office. After that, milestone after milestone will fall. The WP will grow to the point where they may win more than half of the seats that they contest in. Which means that the head to head record of the WP will favour WP. Then they may even get more than 1/3 of the seats. The milestones will fall quickly. And then what happens to Singapore? With every milestone that falls, Singapore will be in uncharted territory.

The PAP will also have to deal with the recent events. There was a time when I was able to rattle off the names of the PAP cabinet ministers with little difficulty. Today I am not so sure, and I see that a lot of the people whose names I was familiar with are leaving the scene: Heng Swee Keat, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Ng Eng Hen, Teo Chee Hean. S Iswaran and Tan Chuan Jin have left under less than honourable discharges. Some of the more prominent backbenchers are gone: Inderjit Singh and Tan Cheng Bok. Vivian Balakrishnan and Shanmugam have been absolved of some of their transgressions because there aren't enough replacements for them.

A PAP politician is no longer a job for life, and there is lesser stability in the personnel. They can be voted out. Consequently, this tends to work both ways. There is a sense that being a cabinet minister is a soldier for life, or answering a higher calling, but rather just another appointment in a series of plum jobs for capable or ambitious people.

It is notable that quite a few of the departures are people whose presence in the cabinet might steal the limelight away from Lawrence Wong. He has this vulnerability where everybody knows that his rivals for the hot seat are Chan Chun Sing, Ong Ye Kung, Heng Swee Keat and Tharman Shanmugaratnam. CCS and OYK still have to hang around and help run things, but there is the awkwardness of having more senior people around him – Teo Chee Hean and Ng Eng Hen and Tharman. Lee Hsien Loong was probably most cognizant that while it's good to have a former prime minister still in the cabinet, it would not serve Singapore well for the cabinet to be a gerontocracy, where all the former DPMs were kept around for the sake of keeping them around. I suspect that LKY's last official appointment - ”Minister Mentor” carried undertones of “why are you still here?”.

This plays into other big question going into this electoral cycle: who are the leaders of Singapore? Who are the PAP team and why are they obviously better than the leaders of the WP? In many respects, they still are, because I still can't imagine Pritam Singh and company leading Singapore. But the gap is narrowing and I'm not sure to what extent Singapore is running on autopilot or there are brave and bold leaders who are pushing Singapore in all directions. Or if there are brave and bold leaders everywhere in the ranks a few rungs below the cabinet, and the cabinet is just there to rubber stamp the brave and bold stuff coming up from underneath.

What comes of the contests in Punggol, Tampines and East Coast will be an augury of what's in store. In Punggol, the most formidable of WP's new faces will come up against a team of relative heavy weights in Gan Kim Yong, Sun Xueling and Janil Puthucheary. In East Coast, it will be a familiar name in Yee Jenn Jong, but he will be up against Edwin Tong and company. Tampines is where they have stacked the decks in Ong Lue Ping and Michael Thng, who have padded resumes.

Punggol and East Coast will answer the question of whether they can expand their empire. East Coast is a place which is traditionally favourable to the WP, because they almost won a seat there in the past. Punggol is a place which is similar to Sengkang – adjacent to Sengkang, and with a younger demographic which is usually more predisposed towards the opposition parties.

It's interesting that they didn't put one of their heavyweights to try and wrestle Jalan Kayu away from Ng Chee Meng. It was pretty obvious that he would be slated for that seat. There is an increasing number of SMCs, this time around, not least because of the political pressure to lower the average size of GRCs, because having GRCs with more than 5 people in them is just going to backfire on the PAP. It's interesting that Chee Soon Juan and Paul Tambyah are targetting the SMCs, but the WP doesn't seem to pay a lot of close attention to the SMCs. (But we'll never know, maybe they'll win another SMC other than Hougang this year?)

Tampines will answer the question of whether they can wrest a seat away from another opposition party. WP have won a four cornered fight before, in Punggol East. For them to win Tampines would be a great show of strength.

Tampines is a sign that WP is at last starting to make an incursion into a place that has traditionally been contested by another opposition party. There used to be a pact between opposition parties that they would not step on each other's toes. But this is the beginning of this pact falling apart. The WP, if it succeeds in wresting this party away from other opposition parties, might see this as a sign that they can repeat this in the future.

If they can do a Tampines, or if they just lose narrowly to the PAP, then they can identify other HDB towns which are like Sengkang. In the next election cycle, anything and everything would be up for grabs. Tan Cheng Bock will no longer be around. Chee Soon Juan would be growing old. The other opposition party veterans will be washed up old men. They can put their guys wherever they want: Choa Chu Kang, Jurong, Tengah, Bukit Batok, Woodlands. If the WP is in expansionist mode and they can attract enough good candidates for the next cycle, they could target one of the constituencies in the West and take advantage of the opposition parties which have failed to level up over the years like they have.

That is why I feel that the way that Marine Parade is being talked about is wrong headed. People were talking about WP “walking away” from Marine Parade, as though the WP owe the citizens an opportunity to vote in an elections. This is some wish for the PAP and the establishment to think of the opposition as cannon fodder, to serve as some kind of referendum on the PAP's performance, as had been the case for a few election cycles. No, we're in a new world, where the WP are in it to win it, and to expand their empire. Sure, the WP might have to indefinitely field less than 1/3^rd the candidates in order to reassure the public that they will not cause a freak elections result. But what message is that going to send to their own people and supporters? They have to exhibit some kind of ambition and desire, because this plays into the kind of supporters and candidates they will be able to attract. The WP is still able to attract good people, and this has to be seen as the core source of their strength moving forward. This is why the talk of “giving all Singaporeans the chance to vote” is a little misguided. The WP is now in the business of trying to win elections, not merely field candidates for the sake of turning up.

The PAP seems to have problems guaranteeing that their preferred candidates will get into parliament. It used to be a system where a senior member of parliament would anchor a GRC, and the newer folks would take over, and hopefully one of them eventually become an anchor himself. Now, there will be an expedited cycle where a new MP gets elected, and within 5-10 years, has to grow into the role of a minister of state, if not an outright cabinet minister, without a long bedding in period of learning on the job. And there were a lot of examples of what happens if the opposition were to win a new GRC. The casualties of Aljunied were George Yeo, Zainal Abidin, Lim Hwee Hwa and Ong Ye Kung. Only Ong Ye Kung has attempted a return. Now, Koh Poh Koon, Lam Pin Min and Ng Chee Meng has discovered that their pathway to the cabinet would not be as smooth sailing as it was for their forebears. Rightly or wrongly, this can have a negative impact on not only their career progression, but on the caliber of leaders who end up in the cabinet. In quite a few of these cases, they would have lost people they spent years cultivating for top jobs.

There are the people who are like Lawrence Wong, who can climb their way to the top, even beating hand picked rivals like Heng Swee Keat and Ong Ye Kung. But anybody else would find it harder and harder – they would have to be good both at administration and being a politician. Maybe WP is being nice to PAP by not spoiling their personnel plans by fielding a strong person against Ng Chee Meng, although they have targetted him for his silence on the income-allianz takeover issue. (Which, in fairness, they have to, otherwise they wouldn't be a real opposition.)

The WP seems to be the only party who doesn't have increasing recruitment problems. PAP, for the reasons I described earlier has its own problems. Harpreet Singh was tea-sessioned by the PAP and many years later decided to join the WP. Being a PAP MP seems to be no longer a sure thing. Instead, it now looks like hazardous work that needs to be handsomely compensated for. Apparently, 5 PAP MPs have stepped down after just one term. And this is a record number. Louis Ng was a vocal member of parliament, and he has also stepped down. It's no longer an attractive occupation.

In addition, the ability of WP to attract well qualified candidates tells me that the attractiveness of PAP and WP to highly qualified candidates is narrowing. You can go with PAP, who will still give you the best prospects of being elected. Or you can go with the WP, where you would be in a slightly more hazardous environment, but you have more freedom to speak your mind and push for the policies that you really want to see happen. And there does not seem to be any advantage of joining a non-WP opposition party, other than you can have a Red Dot party and call yourself “master of my domain”.

One thing that I have noticed a bit more of is: there are more pictures of Lawrence Wong in the PAP posters this time. This is a new team, and he is their best foot forward. He has the best PR amongst the cabinet, and this is why he was chosen to be their human face. This is almost going to be a referendum on him.

Why don't they have a picture of all the members of the cabinet? The big difference between the PAP is that they are the cabinet, they are the ones who are in the seats, have all the senior appointments and portfolios. Why are they not on the posters? This is, in part due to the succession difficulties I outlined earlier: Lawrence Wong is the guy who won the race with his rivals in the cabinet to be the prime minister. And I'm not even sure that people actually wanted to be the PM, or rather it was passed around to the guy who drew the shortest straw.

One of the problems of the 4G leaders is that they don't really have the charisma that the older generation had. Maybe they were no longer the alpha males who walked like kings. Maybe when they were told to listen to the people, they lost a bit of their aura, and had to sand off the rough edges in their personalities until there was nothing left. Either that, or the turnover in the cabinet was so rapid that the average tenure of people in the cabinet was shorter. (It would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of the average length of tenure in the cabinet, how that's changed over the years.) Then one has to answer the question of how long the ideal tenure is. If you like it to be long, then you can't also complain that the same few guys are always in the same old seats, because then you'd be contradicting yourself. But if you like it to be short, then you have to allow for the fact that the cabinet members have no name recognition.

It used to be LKY and a few of his henchmen. They all had charisma. LKY had the badass / strongman charisma. His deputies had the kinder / gentler charisma. Then the generation after him didn't have so much charisma: they were guys like Ong Teng Cheong, Goh Chok Tong, Richard Hu, Dhanabalan and Tony Tan. But they inspired trust, because they were the solid-as-a-rock company men who always got things done.

What do the new guys do? Some of them come across as being a little unlikeable. Some of them have an inquisitiveness that is appealing for a technocrat, except that in our day and age, technocrats are seen as the human face of the evil skynet. Chan Chun Sing is not unlikeable but he's also seen as gaff prone. Vivian Balakrishnan is seen as a bumbler who still somehow manages to keep his seat. Lee Hsien Loong has exhibited remarkable discipline in never saying anything of substance ever in public. To be fair, times have change and you cannot blame the younger generation of leaders for behaving more defensively in public. But this is the natural consequence of the changing times. At least we still have a Lawrence Wong who by all accounts seems to be the guy in our cabinet who has mastered social media. But does that mean that from now on, that's our criterion for choosing the leader of the party?

Moving forward, these are my experiences with elections in the past. Chen Show Mao made a famous comment during the 2011 elections: “how many 5 year cycles are you going to live through?” It's a little ironic that Chen Show Mao would later turn into one of the guys that the WP regretted getting into parliament, but that was a bygone era when James Gomez and Goh Meng Seng could be slated as WP candidates.

The first unforgettable elections were the 1991 elections, when 4 opposition candidates were voted into parliament. However, they were persecuted with much zeal. The 1997 elections were also a disappointment, where it was just Low Thia Khiang and Chiam See Tong versus all the other PAP MPs. The 2001 elections were held just after the 9/11 attacks and the fear factor drove a lot of people to vote for the PAP. The 2006 election were green shoots for the opposition party, when the Aljunied GRC came close to being toppled, and the early version of the internet forever changed the way that elections were contested.

The 2011 elections were unforgettable. They were the first time in my adult life that I got to vote, and by then I was on the wrong side of 30. Instead of the opposition party members being the whipping boys, we were greeted with the strange sight of a few of the opposition party members being even better campaigners than the PAP gang. Instead of the opposition members being bozos and clowns (for all his years of service, I would include Chee Soon Juan as one of the clowns) we had people we actually did want to give a chance to in parliament. If not for the GRC system, I don't know how many opposition members we would have elected into parliament. Nicole Seah would have beaten a weaker PAP candidate. So would Vincent Wijeysingha, if people didn't mind him being gay. Tan Jee Say seemed like a breath of fresh air too, but that was before all the red flags started appearing.

I went to some of the rallies and I felt for the first time, a different kind of patriotism – a voluntary and spontaneous pouring of joy. Many of us had been too scared to declare ourselves as opponents of the PAP, but I did bond with a few other people who declared themselves opposition supporters.

I was away from Singapore in 2015 and I didn't see what was happening on the ground. The WP had won the by-elections in Punggol East and Hougang, so it seemed that their star was ever on the rise. But Low Thia Khiang was a canny reader of the ground, and he realised that the ground was not sweet for the opposition, they were on the defensive, and the groundswell of grief over the recently deceased LKY meant they were playing defensive.

And then, there was 2016. The votes for Brexit and for Trump made me lose my faith in democracy. It was reasonable for me to want some opposition representation in parliament, but some of the talk was a bit to nativist and too close to Trumpism. What was disappointing is that Tan Jee Say set up a party called “Singaporeans First” party. He got a few of his friends to run a nativist agenda. I don't know enough about him, but he seems to be doing this out of resentment for being passed over for bigger and better things.

I started realising that as much as I had looked forward to the opposition making gains in parliament, this had to be done gradually, and at every step, you had to observe the nuts and bolts of what was going on in the government. I started realising that when I first followed politics, it was from the perspective of me being a young rebel, and I wanted democracy and division of powers not because I thought that it would make for a better Singapore (I was not entirely convinced about that) but because of what I felt to be the unfairness of how the opposition was treated, and because it didn't seem right that somebody else would make all the decisions and we would just have to follow them no matter what. I started doubting my earlier conclusions because it occurred to me that I wasn't even asking the right questions to begin with.

Yes, you could point out all the mistakes that the PAP was making. But anybody would have made mistakes at that point in time. You could not be comparing the PAP to a fabled unicorn who never made any mistakes. And you had to think hard about whether vigorous debate in parliament would have had the benefit of tempering unchecked power, or was just an opportunity for grandstanding and obstructing the correct decisions in parliament. I started questioning whether I was a lover of political drama, or whether I had real opinions about how I thought the government should be run. I came to the conclusion that if you weren't interested in the boring stuff, you simply had no business being in politics or trying to influence politics. But every few years when elections came, the idea of winning elections suddenly became salient again, and that's when I start to have opinions about elections strategies.

One of the nice things about the 2011 elections was that it was good natured. There were congratulations all around that the Singapore government was doing a good job. There was less of the pettiness and nastiness that was going all around the western world, with the rise of the tea party that would eventually end up as Trumpism. There was a fond farewell and sendoff for Chiam See Tong. People packed into arenas for the Worker's Party in sights that would stir dead people. I think there were fewer of the traditional post-elections “fixing” that went on in previous editions. We could at least be thankful that our democracy is nicer than it used to be, and nicer than in a lot of other western countries.

The thing about the opposition party winning more seats is that it could be a better thing, in terms of more enquiry and more deliberation when we wanted to go into new avenues. Or it could turn into a more politically fraught environment, where everybody would avoid doing the necessary but brave things, and go into the politically expedient stuff. We could end up flip flopping between different policies if we transited between different people in charge of the government.

For us to collectively make a decision that WP would have more than 1/3 of the seats would be to effectively vote for a constitutional change. The government would be run differently, for better or worse. I don't know if the changes would be reversible. I hope they are but how would we find out for sure?

The thing that the PAP has to prove is that they have one thing that the opposition does not: they have the actual business of running the country. Not merely being the co-driver who slaps the other guy in the face when he's going the wrong way, but the guy making all the decisions, rather than the guy who's just there to make suggestions about whether he's going the wrong way, but with no direct power to take over the wheel.

I think sometimes of the hidden forces in Singapore politics, and that is foreign policy. We are a small country, who's forever at the larger forces that take place in the international arena, who we are. People are always complaining about CECA and we may have had too many concessions to India lately but we needed to have better trade deals with them? Well there had to be more intelligent discussions about whether we got a raw deal after knowing the facts.

We have stalwarts of the foreign policy. I get how we had people who were quite active in foreign policy during the earlier days. There were people like Kishore Mahbubani, Bilahari Kausikan, George Yeo and Tommy Koh, who you may or may not agree with, but are nevertheless quite perceptive about the foreign situation in their own way. That's on top of Rajaretnam and Lee Kuan Yew himself, who made very fateful decisions early in our nation's development. But who are their modern equivalents? Is it Vivian Balakrishnan, who recently “liked” something on Facebook he shouldn't have? Of course, our relative importance has declined, because Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Malaysia have made great strides in recent times. And of course we no longer get to speak for them. But what we do on the foreign policy arena is even more important now, that we're in a unique position of being able to explain Asia and the West to each other.

We made some consequential and monumental decisions in the past. We decided whose side we were going to be on during the Cold War. We extended a hand to China when we realised they were coming up. We eased tensions between the various Asian countries. Yet the international arena has become so much more complicated today: we don't obviously know that we have to be on America's side anymore. We can't always deal with Trump's craziness, or even Xi's. We don't know what we're going to do if China were to invade Taiwan. Do we pivot away from Malaysia or towards them? Those are decisions of such great importance, we are living in such a dangerous world, and while we have a nice and fine university now with a lot of smart people to run it, the danger of making a big mistake is so much larger than before, and the world is so much more dangerous.

So that's the thing I want the PAP to answer – who are our new giants, and why are they fit to wear the shoes of their predecessors?

I think that there was something quite vindictive about how the PAP went after Tang Liang Hong, and it's a little strange how Lee Hsien Loong was bringing this topic up again after so many years. It's a sore wound that... should have been put to rest a long time ago. I don't think there was anything wrong in him pointing out that some part of the parliament's makeup wasn't really representative of Singapore society at large. The PAP felt so strongly about balancing the racial makeup that they introduced the GRC, both for better and for worse. So why was this topic off limits for people to talk about?

Anyway it's late and I think this post has devolved into aimless ranting. So let's just call it a day and look forward to more interesting stuff unearthing itself during the elections season.

America's relationship with Asia

America is, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, big. 

After starting to see Singapore from the perspective of outsiders, I came to see Singapore from the outside. Singapore is basically a Chinatown with an army. And it is in many ways parallel to the overseas Chinese communities. The Chinese communities in California are traditionally invisible - at least low key. But they developed in parallel with Singapore, so when I see Chinese Americans - or Asian Americans, for that matter, it's like seeing long lost relatives.

Asian Americans haven't made their mark in entertainment by and large. But the first railroads to California were built by Chinese people. There were the Chinse exclusion laws. The Civil Rights act was seminal to Black Americans. The Immigration act of the 60s was equally important to the Asian Americans, although it took a while to make its influence felt. The story of the Asian Americans need to be told a little more. The first reason is that Asians have contributed more than their fair share to the US being a scientific and technological powerhouse. We pulled our weight in building Silicon Valley, nobody doubts that this is one of the most important events of the early 21st century. 

The other reason is that Asian Americans, as well as non-China East Asians live in this space between America and China. America doesn't just reckon with a rising China, but also a rising Asia. Many of us feel the tug of both America and China. America, who at various points was at war with the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea and Japan, and at other points is allied with these 4 countries in counterbalancing the influence of China. 

Asians (including Asian Americans) have a relationship with the US which may be more distant culturally and emotionally. But this is a world which was modernised and shaped by the US, and in turn, is now shaping the US, because the rise of Asia will transform the relationship between US and the world. Don't forget that it was Pearl Harbour which blew the door open between US and the rest of the world and paved the way for internationalism, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions. The paradox between Japan the enemy, Japan the ally, and Japan, the killer of the Detroit car industry. The paradox between Asia symbolising the past of ancient Asian civilisations, and Asia being the future because it is a rising power. Asian culture is not dead but it was forever transformed by American influence. 

Obama - who, lest we forget, grew up in Java - pivoted to Asia. The US is not post-racial. But just as the first Black president symbolises that race relations in the US is more complex than just black and white, the presence of Asians and Latinos reminds us that the US is a much more complex place than before. It's becoming something that more and more resembles the Asia of many races living side by side. Therefore it had to be Obama who pushed for the "pivot to Asia", meaning that USA's relationship with the world was not just trans Atlantic but also trans Pacific. 

The questions over the changes to the US' role in the world are not raised by Europe. They are raised by Asia. Something has changed recently - it is not America's relationship with Europe and Russia, although that is undoubtedly important. But the dramatic change is Asia. And those changes - the rise of Asia, the rise of Silicon Valley - are amongst what's at the top of peoples' minds when they are motivated to vote for Trump. 

Because Asia is an agent of change for the US (at least its relationship with the rest of the world) many of us are also pondering - just what is the US turning into? The US, which liberated us from the Japanese, who fought Korea and Vietnam, who helped build the trading system that became a buttress for Asian prosperity, and who is now nervously looking over its shoulder at China. The US, who was so preachy about freedom and democracy and is now struggling to make its democracy work. The US who, when they were the hegemons, believed in a free and open world, are now thinking in terms of empire, and preparing for a struggle against China and asking us to choose sides. There are cultural clashes all around. Asians and Americans do not have the same depth of conversations about culture, because there is not the same depth of understanding. The sheer diversity of Asians is already bewildering to Asians already, let alone Americans. Some Asians believe in democracy. Others believe in dictatorship. Both of these can nevertheless make their societies work. Some Asians see Americans as role models. Others see Americans as cautionary tales. Some of them remember the bravery they displayed in vanquishing the Japanese. Others resent the support Americans gave dictatorships in Philippines and Indonesians during the Cold War, or the role they played in the Great Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s. Some Asians are amazed at the generosity of the Americans in sharing their technologies with the world, and others are appalled at the selfishness of big American corporations and their oligarchs. 

Some strange relationship is shaping up, and that strange relationship is driving plenty of changes all around the world. 

Retrospective on the 2024 US Presidential Election campaign.

There's finally a chance to see the election in some perspective. Each of Donald Trump's elections have been nail-biting.

For me, the trouble started with Joe Biden's nomination in 2020. He wasn't originally going to be nominated, but he was up against Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The moderates put their heads together, and decided to drop out and let him run. They wanted to avoid a repeat of 2016 where Hillary and Bernie Sanders fought each other so hard that it weakened Hillary just enough to lose her the election. So that's the first mistake, that there was a conspiracy against Sanders (again).

The second mistake wasn't his fault. Biden didn't have to be on the campaign trail because he could run against Trump from indoors, due to the COVID pandemic. Again, it seemed that circumstances were unnaturally aiding Biden, an impression that would come to haunt him.

The third mistake was that he agreed beforehand to name a woman as VP. This was an extremely significant choice, because it was likely that whoever he named would eventually be a presidential nominee in the future. (This turned out to be the case). This gave the impression that Kamala was parachuted into this position, instead of earning it on her own merit. And this impression was probably bolstered by the fact that Kamala had to fold her 2020 campaign before the primaries voting even started, and this seriously damaged her reputation to the extent that she never even recovered.

Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I can look at the election and compare it to the 2016 election. Upon reflection, Hillary Clinton was a superior candidate to Kamala Harris in almost every aspect. She was one of the most qualified people to ever stand for presidential elections. The only thing about Hillary was that she was unlikeable. Otherwise, she had a good record as a Senator and a Secretary of State, and was a good enough politician that Bill Clinton wanted to marry her. She governed well and had a mastery of detail. Kamala Harris would struggle to explain to people why she ought to be president at all.

So when you compare Hillary to Kamala, you actually wouldn't expect Kamala to outperform Hillary. But Kamala actually underperformed Hillary by not very much. Hillary won the popular vote by a few percentage points. Kamala lost by 1 percent. Although Trump in 2024, remember, is also a weaker candidate than in 2016. Now, many more people know that he's a criminal, and know that he tried – rather desperately, one might add – to steal the 2020 election.

I think that's the reason why the criticism of Kamala was a bit more muted – people probably thought that she was so crap that they are surprised that she lost that narrowly to Trump.

There are a few things that will go against Kamala this time around. There are the things that were the holdovers from 2020 – that she made her hash of her first presidential run, that Biden had the nomination handed to him on a platter, that he then handed the VP nomination to her on a platter, and that they were never tested in a real presidential campaign because COVID made it impossible to have a conventional campaign.

On top of this, Biden also cheated by covering up his health issues from the public, not just as a candidate, but also as a president. It's bad enough to pretend that you're healthy and well to be a candidate, but it's probably even worse to pretend that you're well enough to be a president. Then who the hell was running the show?

And to top it all off, Kamala Harris was given an endorsement by Joe Biden right away, after Joe Biden said that he wasn't going to run. One of the more shocking revelations of this book is that it was Kamala who said to Joe Biden, “you have to endorse me immediately”, and he immediately complied. It's almost as though Joe Biden never prepared for the contingency that he was one day not going to run, until it was forced upon him, and didn't think through who was going to be the Democratic nominee. The only reason why I think he endorsed her was to keep the nomination “in the family”, and Biden considered Kamala Harris part of the family.

While Joe Biden is a solid president, there's no evidence that Kamala Harris would have been a good president, in hindsight. She mainly got her votes because there are more people this time around who know that Trump is incompetent, as opposed to in 2016, when it was easier to pretend that he was just acting crazy for show. Kamala Harris had a lot of endorsements early in the campaign, and there was a great initial wave of enthusiasm for her, as the person who didn't get as much hate as Trump got. But then later people got to know Kamala better and they started probing for who she really was, and they started to realise that she had done very little to deserve her nomination. That's when she started to lose those crucial votes that would have catapulted a Democrat into the White House.

It's also notable that Obama and Nancy Pelosi's preference was to have an open convention and redo the primary. But there were reasons why Kamala would have wanted to run. She might have thought that it was a fait accompli for her to be nominated and given that she was going to be nominated anyway, she had to have the endorsement from Biden right away. As opposed to that she was forcing him to make her the presidential nominee and actively shaping the course of events.

Another thing that counted against Kamala was that both Obama and Hillary recounted that they had to fight tough primary campaigns. Hillary had to fight two tough primary campaigns, whereas Biden and Kamala Harris had their nominations handed to them on a platter, that not ony was Biden's nomination essentially a coronation – he got the gay candidate (Buttegieg) and female candidates (Warren and Klobuchar) to step aside to led him run – the bye that he received extended to Kamala Harris too. They allowed him to run because the perception that Biden, as a white male was more electable than the rest. Then suddenly that opened the door for the black female to be shooed in. That looked a lot like Kamala Harris was the DEI hire. Fewer people considered Obama the DEI hire because he managed to prove himself by beating Hillary in 2008.

Presidential candidates are not annointed. They are given the opportunity to showcase their worth to on the world stage to millions of people watching in a primary. It's the primary which is the making of the candidate. It's through the primary process that great candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are unearthed. The Democrats appeared to have an embarrassment of riches in 2008 when it seemed as though they had not one but two viable presidential candidates. But this bounty was squandered. It turns out that 2000 didn't unearth any great candidates – Al Gore was basically almost given the candidacy because he was picked as VP and didn't have to sell himself to the world, and this was disastrous for the Democrats to retain the White House. 2004 only unearthed John Kerry and John Edwards. John Edwards carried forth into 2008, and revelations about his infidelity basically disqualified him from running again. In 2012, there were no candidates unearthed because there was no primary – Obama was the presumptive nominee. In 2016, there were 2 presumptive nominees waiting, Hillary and Biden, and while Bernie Sanders was a very strong candidate, there are doubts about his suitability to be the president, due to his radicalism and his politics. In 2020, there was Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But curiously enough, no great figure on the scale of an Obama.

2024 was supposed to be the year when there could have been candidates to put themselves forward. People talked about the amount of talent that was available, in people like Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom. But none of them got the chance to showcase themselves on the world stage. And that was what was so damaging about what Biden had done. 2024 would have been a great time for younger people – the post Baby Boomers to put themselves forward for the president's job, to at least keep themselves in the public spotlight for 2028. And nobody picked up the mantle. Alexander Ocasio Cortez might be getting enough mileage to put herself forward in 2028, but we don't really know.

The silence around the Democratic Party has been deafening. There are people who openly doubt whether it's a good idea to be protesting Donald Trump since day 1. And Donald Trump has actually made it very hard for the protesters to be out in full force. The Democrats might take a chance that Donald Trump's own actions made Republicans even more toxic than before. But then they'll be accused of doing nothing during the nation's darkest hour.

It's very notable that this book has really been about more of Democrats than the Republicans. Most of the narrative in the clip has been about Democrats, and not very much actually has been about Republicans. Trump has nominated a firebrand as a VP, and I can't imagine JD Vance doing the same thing that Mike Pence did if another January 6 broke out. I don't know if the Harris campaign was actually thinking “we're not actually going to lose this, are we?” throughout the campaign.

Man U fandom

 I met a friend who was wondering what happened to Man U... he got upset that people always made fun of Man U. I never truly understood the fandom business.

For me the Man U thing started to go south around the time that Alex Ferguson sold Ronaldo for a lot of money back then. He had won the UEFA Champions League with Man U – why would he think that Real Madrid were a bigger club? But they were. And at that time Real Madrid were on the wane. They had sold Wesley Sneijder and Arjen Robben to clubs that would win the UCL with those players in the side. But eventually Ronaldo would triumph and win 4 UCL titles.

From then, the 2008 vintage was taken apart piece by piece, without adequate replacements. At least Van Der Sar had a good enough replacement in David De Gea. But then one by one, the old guard left. Rooney, Evra, Ferdinand, Vidic, Nani, Van Persie, Michael Carrick, Jonny Evans. The players who came in were not at the same level. Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes were recalled in their mid-30s for duty.

The David Moyes era was a very damaging one for the club, first because Moyes and Woodard came in at the same time. Not only was there discontinuity with the manager, but also discontinuity with the CEO running football operations. And also there would be a discontinuity with the players.

One of the most galling seasons ever was the 13-14 season. I knew that it would be a long time before Man U won the league again, but for them to be almost a mid table team was such a dramatic fall from grace. United went from being a club who could always get who they wanted to a club who failed to land all their targets. They paid over the odds for bad acquisitions – Angel di Maria, Falcao, Anthony Martial. They turned great players into mediocre ones, like Paul Pogba, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Luke Shaw and Alexis Sanchez

They had bad scouting, bad recruitment, and an overall lack of strategy on the pitch. We could go into the Van Gaal, Mourinho and Solskjaar eras, but overall the picture was one where there wasn't a grand strategy on the football side of things. It's almost as though Alex Ferguson did several things so well that there wasn't anybody who could replace him when he was gone. Another manager who was extremely damaging was Erik Ten Hag, who came in with a great reputation for taking Ajax to the last 4 of the Champions League, but paid outrageous sums of money for underperforming players and left United with a very bad squad.

United had a a few blips in form before, such as during 2001 to 2006 when they won “only” one premier league title and were threatening to become a mediocre side. For me that was epitomised by two things. One was their inability to replace Schmeichel. They tried various people Taibbi, Bosnich, Barthez, Carroll and Tim Howard. None were particularly convincing, until they landed Van Der Sar. The other thing was the summer where they got in Veron and Van Nistlerooy. They were good players. Van Nistlerooy did very well as an individual, but whether he made Man U better was quite questionable. Veron was simply a misfit for the English league, because he went to Argentina and just made them better.

But somehow they managed to get Carrick, Hargreaves, Vidic, Evra and Van Der Sar in to build the spine of their last great side. I don't know who gets the credit for that. The downside is that they got saddled with the Glazers, who were clearly in the asset stripping business.

So that was the situation that that late great Man U side were in – things were good. The new recruits gelled well with the class of 99 veterans and the ones who came in during the lean years – Ronaldo, Ferdinand, Rooney and Saha. They had some help from Hendrik Larsson, who was on a roll – he helped Barcelona win the UCL, then helped Man U win the EPL the next season.

But that Indian summer started to crumble. Even when they sealed their title in 2011, I knew that Man U were weakening. A lot of their new recruits weren't terrible, but they weren't as great as the last great team. There was Fabio and Rafael, Anderson, Ashley Young, Phil Jones, Chicharito, Danny Welbeck, Robin Van Persie was great for 1 season before it was time for him to wane. But back then we couldn't have known that Man U were going to mess up so badly.

And another angle was that a lot of the former players who were from their teams who got media work. Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, Rio Ferdinand, Owen Hargreaves. Every player who was in the same room as Alex Ferguson seemed to be touched with greatness, but most of them turned out to be mediocre managers: the ones who had careers were Gordon Strachan, Steve Bruce and Mark Hughes. And the ones who tried were Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Dwight Yorke, Paul Ince, Wayne Rooney, Phil Neville, It turns out that Pep Guardiola is better at nurturing football coaching talent than Alex Ferguson is, because Pep Guardiola nurtures hard skills whereas Alex Ferguson excels at the soft skills, which are harder to transfer.

The problem with having a lot of the old guard in the media is that after a while, a lot of the things that made them great will fade away. Gary Neville used to provide a lot of great analysis, but soon learnt that other people on youtube did it better. Then invariably the things they would talk about be about griping about how their once-great club has fallen on hard times. It would toxicify the conversation.

I saw it happen to Arsenal, during the period from 2016 to 2021 when they were the butt of jokes. The most toxic part about Arsenal was that they were a club in gradual decline, and there would be a long period when they had to be satisfied with finishing in the champions league places and then getting knocked out of the last 16 in the UCL. I think that this “managed decline” was much better than what happened to Man United, but still not very satisfying, until Arteta brought them back from missing out on the champions league to “finishing second all the time”.

Liverpool were always a good side, but there were 2 period when it was hard to watch. The Souness years and the Hodgson years. It was a lucky thing they had Jurgen Klopp coming in the save the day.

The thing I didn't understand about that friend who was a united fan was – he was one of those who switched to United around the time when United started winning big trophies, and people thought of them as glory hunters. It's a good thing that he stuck around. But you knew that the rot was setting in – why didn't you abandon hope and stop supporting that club? Because it's not your hometown club, you don't really owe them any loyalty. You supported a club because of the friends and the contacts.

Supporting a club is a very passive activity. It's one of the most passive activities of all, which is why I question why anybody at all would do it.

Liverpool are a club in danger because – even though you know that Arne Slot has done well with the team that Klopp left behind, you don't know where their future success is going to come from. And there are new challengers like Aston Villa, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth who are biting at the heels and challenging for champions league places.

Well, I don't know what would have happened to my Arsenal fandom if Arteta hadn't come in to revive my club. All I know is that a lot of my milestones in life have come at a time when they won the league, and I'm always hoping that they'll do it again, and we'll see what kind of milestone I'll hit in life next.

Newcastle vs Liverpool

Last weekend I took the long trip (isn't that long these days but back then it was really long) trip to the old army camp where I lived in for 1-2 months in 1996. They were probably the longest part of my national service. That place was one of the most bleak and barren places in Singapore (although it was not as bleak and barren as Snowy Hill). 

At that time, there was this great football match: Newcastle vs Liverpool. It finished 4-3. It was, back then, billed as the greatest match that we’ve seen since the EPL started. Back then, the EPL wasn’t a great product. It was still coming out of its doldrums, and it would not be taken seriously: the various failures in Europe made it seem that the EPL was left far behind. 

After the ban on the English football ended, it experienced a rebirth. Alex Ferguson’s Man U had won a European trophy in the cup winner’s cup. But sustained success in Europe was a long time coming. European competitions were dominated by the Germans, the Spanish and the Italians in the 1990s. Even when Man U was dominating the domestic league, it wasn’t until 1999’s treble that they won the European cup, and the sheer romance of that occasion highlighted that they won it as underdogs, rather than as one of the favourites who were expected to win it. 

In this backdrop was the Liverpool Newcastle match. 

There was a fork in the road regarding the premier league. It hadn’t been a league that was as dominated by juggernauts the way it eventually became, after Man U won the league title against Newcastle. For a time, people were wondering whether Man U’s dominance was going to last, particularly as back then there wasn’t anything inevitable about Man U’s ascendence to the top of the pile. The other great sports dynasty of the 1990s was Chicago Bull’s dominance of the NBA, and for some reason it didn’t outlast Michael Jordan being part of that team. 

Various clubs challenged for the top of the premier league. There was a power vacuum because at that time, Liverpool were on the wane. Anybody could be the next powerhouse in football. At various times, it could have been Leeds, who won a title. Or Aston Villa. Or Sheffield Wednesday, who won a few cups and reached a few finals. Or Norwich or Nottingham Forest, who reached Europe. It could have been Blackburn, who actually did win one premier league title with the great 1995 team. Or it could have been Newcastle. 

Newcastle and Liverpool had a lot in common. They had a passionate support. They were northern teams. Newcastle had former Liverpool great players managing them, in Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish. Newcastle was supposed to be the next Blackburn Rovers, who had a generous benefactor bankrolling them. 

Manchester United were there for the taking, it seemed. The season started with an infamous defeat against Aston Villa, where the former Liverpool player turned pundit Alan Hansen said, “you’ll never win anything with kids”. But those kids were not just… it usually is the case that you have one or two great academy products coming through a season. But United had a great bumper crop, in Beckham, the Nevilles, Scholes, Giggs and Butt. And there were the ones who didn’t make it, but had respectable careers with mid-table sides, like Robbie Savage and Keith Gillespie. 

They had a youth team with a miraculous crop of youngsters. Only to be rivalled with the Barcelona youngsters who formed the core of Barcelona when Barcelona and Spain ruled the world. Or the Chelsea of recent times. 

The match was played under very tense circumstances, with Alex Ferguson turning the heat up on Kevin Keegan, the way that he threatened to hound Blackburn off the title race. In fact, there were a lot of tense title races with Man U during that time. There was 91/92, which he lost to Leeds. 92/93 when he had to rough it out against Aston Villa. 93/94, he won at a canter. 94/95, he lost it to Blackburn. 95/96, he had to fight against Newcastle. 

Newcastle were letting the title slip away. Around that time, both Man U and Newcastle were playing Leeds United around the same time, and Alex Ferguson made a mischievous remark about which of them Leeds was going to fight harder against, and Kevin Keegan had an outburst which made it plain that the heat was getting to him. 

It was a big, pulsating match, full of twists, turns, excitement, and one to remember for the ages. This may be me looking at it through the lens of myself also being a teenager, but the EPL seemed to be going through some adolescence during that period of time. The football wasn’t yet world class, but the players were very good, it had the potential to be extremely exciting and entertaining. The players were all free to display their authentic parts of their personality. Eventually this would change: first in the 00s, the players were all media trained to give very prosaic answers that reduced the jeopardy on themselves. And then later, after the rise of social media, then they would be trained to become circus clowns designed to “drive engagement” and be an upstanding citizen of the clownshow which is social media. 

Tactically, it was a freer and more open environment. This would not be Brazil 1982, when everything revolved around individuals. But both teams combined attacking flair and skill at the expense of defensive solidity. In contrast, the league cup finals of 2025 would show two teams which were so defensively well drilled, they defended from the front. (This is now known as “pressing”.) 

In the 1996 match, Newcastle were a new pretender to the throne, and Liverpool were the old guard who had lost their throne and were looking to retake it. (It would have been very demoralizing for them to know that they had to wait until 2020 to see Liverpool win the next league title.)

The fact that Newcastle won this match does suggest that this time, Newcastle actually wins something. They had a rough time after topping the table 12 points ahead at Christmas 1995. They came in second twice. Then they fell apart when Ruud Gullit tried to implement “sexy football”. Bobby Robson restored some pride with a champions league finish, but that was as good as it got. Following their tradition for having former Liverpool greats, they got Graeme Souness, and turned into a grim mid table side. 

Then the Mike Ashley period began, and it was a thinly disguised asset stripping exercise. That only ended when the Saudis bought it over, installed Eddie Howe, and produced a lean and mean side capable of challenging for champions league places. 

It’s possible that the era of oligopolies is finally over. This may not be the post-Alex Ferguson, pre-Guardiola period where the league title pinged back and forth between an unsteady Man City, Chelsea and of all clubs, Leicester, when Tottenham were threatening to win a title. But we now have an elite that not only contains the usual suspects (Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool), but a few genuine UCL places contenders (Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Bournemouth) and a few lost sheep who are hankering for former glories (Man U, Tottenham, Chelsea).

Neverkusen

 There are teams which are “Neverkusens”. This was the derisive nickname given to teams which got close to winning the league title, but never did. There was Roma, who after their title win in 2001 reached the top 3 roughly 10 times without winning anything. There was the Atalanta side circa 2020 who regularly qualified for the Champions League but didn't win Serie A. There was Parma who had a great side in the 90s but no Scudetto.

In the English league, there was Bobby Robson's Ipswich side which came in second 2 times and won the UEFA cup. There was Kevin Keegan's Newcastle. Pochettino's Tottenham around 2017. Houllier and Benitez's Liverpool. One haunting fact is that after Preston finished the first league season ever unbeaten and followed it up with another title win, it has never won the league again, coming close on a few occasions

Then there was Leverkusen itself.

There is the great question of what happens to Arsenal if it doesn't win the league this season. This was supposed to be the year they were favourites, but they they didn't step up. There were always one or two things: they got too many red cards, or they scored too few goals. Gabriel Jesus had a little bit of a renaissance, and then he got injured. Now, Bukayo Saka, Martinelli, Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havetz are injured, which almost guarantees they will not win the league.

Arsenal went from 8^th to 5^th to 2^nd in 3 seasons. Now they have been 2^nd for 2 seasons. The two seasons where they were 2^nd, they could have been champions if Man City were not around raising the levels to absurd heights. But this season, after the Man City collapse, they weren't able to step up. Liverpool are on course to finish wih more than 93 whereas they are only on course with 73, which gets you a title only when everybody else has screwed up. It's true that the premier league this year is much more competitive, because you have 6 clubs in the running for 3^rd and 4^th place, with Newcastle, Man City, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth and Chelsea in the mix. And while Man U and Tottenham are in the bottom half, they can hurt you, especially when Tottenham gets their fit players back.

The question is: are Arsenal going to win the league one day? The galling part for Arsenal is that they had genuine opportunities in the last 2 seasons. They lost in seasons when they were genuinely competitive. In the 22-23 season, they spent the great majority of the season in first place, before Man City went on one of their unstoppable marches to the table. In the 23-24 season, they alternated between 2^nd and 1^st, but were unable to get to the top. They got their best ever points total in the premier league, but was ultimately unable to reach Man City's level.

Arsenal are the classic “things will get better” side. They had a rivalry with Man United but I think they ultimately lost it because while they were knocked off their perch by Chelsea in the end, it was Man U who came back and won 3 in a row when Chelsea were at their best. Arsenal could have had a three-peat between 01 and 04, but they showed their frailty because they allowed Man U back in to win their title in 2003. They had always had a bit of that fragility, even when they were at their best. George Graham's side at their best didn't have this problem, and the 1998 Arsenal side were mentally strong, when the back four were at a late peak. But Arsene Wenger wasn't able to maintain their discipline.

This team is mentally stronger, but they always were a thin squad and prone to a bad spell when the injuries piled up. Liverpool had that problem, but they are reaping the rewards of Klopp building his second great side and Slot finding out how to get the best out of them.

The biggest question mark over the future of this Arsenal side is whether they can mount another title challenge in the future. I think that it's hard to tell. It's possible that having come close on so many occasions would break their resolve. This Arsenal side has had to shed some of the players who brought them forward, and Arteta has already shown his ruthlessness at showing Ozil and Aubamayeung out of the door at the first opportunity. He's since cleared off Emil Smith-Rowe, Aaron Ramsdale, Rob Holding, Fabio Vieira, Granit Xhaka, Eddie Nketiah, Reiss Nelson, Ainsley Mainland Niles and Folarin Balogun. He had a few academy players with some promise, like Ethan Nwanieri and Myles Lewis-Skelly.

But Liverpool are also a side which needs refreshing soon. They might lose Mohamad Salah and Trent Alexander Arnold, and Virgil Van Dijk doesn't have a lot more time. Man City have to rebuild and get back to winning ways – the spine of their team is getting old. Arsenal, if they can push on from this level, will probably find a season in the future where everything clicks.

It sometimes takes time to create a winning side. Arteta started from a low level, when Arsenal were basically upper half of mid table, to regularly challenging from the Champion's League to regularly challenging for the title. But today the competition is very tough, and the bar for Arsenal is higher. For Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest, regularly challenging for champion's league is already considered very good. I don't know what it would do to Arsenal if they were to lose one or two more title challenges, would it trigger them to finally go into decline.

There is the threat from the newcomers mentioned earlier. Any one of them could be on the verge of reaching Arsenal's level in the future and blocking their path to the title. Chelsea and Nottingham Forest's approach of buying too many players doesn't seem to be an outright disaster.

Another possibility for Arsenal would be another 10 years of late Wenger: regularly making the champion's league but never to win the league again.

Emotional Distance

 

I thought about the last few years. Something has changed, and one of the biggest things is that I stopped being very emotionally involved with people.

It is an exaggeration to say that I no longer have a friend in this world, but it's true that I haven't really taken the hard work to hang our with my friends.

I also think about my love life. There's not really been anything. The first phase was when women were untouchable and unreachable. I hadn't really known how to approach them, and they were painfully awkward years.

The second phase was when I was emotionally involved with a girl for the first time. And some of the moments were probably good (probably because I don't really remember.) The term didn't really exist in those days, but I was very likely the victim of narcissist abuse.

The third phase was when I still hung out with that girl, and I thought we were going to be “friends”. But I've come to realise that some of it was that I didn't want to lose her company, and some of it was that I still harboured the hope of getting into her ass. Time went on and it slowly dawned on me that

1. The prospects of consensual sex were very dim.

2. She was a bitch and I was wasting time with her.

3. We were growing apart. You could go along with anybody you found attractive when you were a teenager, but when you grow older, you'll know each other better and the differences will start to matter. I started to see more clearly that the person that she really was was really getting on my nerves. She was studying things that did not have a strong relationship with reality – an incredible amount of postmodernist mumbo jumbo.

We started getting contemptuous of each other, and eventually I made the decision to ghost her, which was quite easy because at that point I was mainly the one initiating contact. To be honest, I ghosted her because it was the one thing I could think of doing that would piss her off the most.

And as time went on, I didn't just ghost her, I promised myself that I would not talk to her, ever (it was surprisingly easy to keep this promise) and I would not hold on to any memory of the time that we had together. It would be like “Sunshine of the Eternal Mind”, when a person wiped his memory of an unhappy relationship. It brought me a peace of mind that I hadn't had for ages, at least since my adolescence. And I wasn't totally unaware of it, but every time I took out pictures of Japanese gravure models to get myself off to, I was emotionally distancing myself from women by reducing them to sex objects (and getting an hour of fun while I was doing it.) If my love life was a cute furry animal, this was a conscious decision on my part to strangle the life out of it, and also inflict the same kind of abuse on my own privates. 

The fourth phase was when I finally got my freedom back and I loved not having around so much that I didn't look for a girlfriend for the longest time. After a few more years, I ended up living in Mexico and that probably killed the prospect of me finding a girlfriend. Life was great.... up till the point when it was not.

I've now realised that that was very short sighted. When you are older, that is when you need the most the girlfriend that you met when you were young. My entire youth had gone by without me being in a proper relationship, and I had missed that rite of passage. I spent half an hour at the public piano, bashing out song after song. It happens very rarely but I did have one or two people clapping for me. That's me, reaping the reward as an old man, for what I did as a young man. Maybe I should have gone through the ordeal of having a girlfriend. Your happiness level outside of a relationship is a 5. Your happiness level in a relationship is somewhere between 0 and 10.

So while I'm happy that I got myself a peace of mind after emotionally distancing myself from that girl, I'm wondering if this is filtering into my contempt for the opposite sex. And while wiping my memory of all the good and bad things that took place was good in the short run, I wonder if it would have cost me in the long run.