Is the party the government, or does the party form the government?

Semantics - or the world that we come to recognize as reality

As a friend commented - your writings are so long, boring and plain. No color. Well, colors are an ebellishment. It should be the ideas-that-words-inspire to make life exciting. (anyway, too much background, no context, and digressing from the post.)

This was the contents of a mail I had sent to the SiGNeL mailing list after being told about MM Lee's open debate with the youth (well, university students.) I was told it was rather fiery. So off I went to the state-owned media company's website, to find a report and writeup. Well I found it, and also found evidence that even the mightiest can only stay so long in the sun.

As a lawyer, it is about the worst sin you can commit to argue illogically. Well, I think i found evidence that the argument used was illogical.

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When a political party wins an election and forms a government, is its mandate to take care of the entire nation or only the wards that it wins?

I have no issue with some pork-barrel politiking, since you do have to reward your supporters, but to what extent should the government act for the party's supporters' benefit, and to what extent ALL citizens benefit?In our case, WHO are party supporters? Wards where the opposition did not contest? that seems to me a not-false premise, but not necessarily a true premise.

Going by the pork-barrel logic, one must reward those wards first that voted, then those wards that didn't vote, because the latter is suspect, and the former has declared its support.

Is the government to represent a country's citizens, or only citizens who voted for the party in power? (again, did they get a mandate, or was it a walkover?)

Where lies seperation of church (party ideology) and state?

I guess SG's world-reknown personality has defined it. In his opinion,
it clearly seems, the equation is:

the party = the government

the government = the party


and NOT

The government = sum(elected representatives who
may be majority from one party)

see the statement he made and question the logic of what he said:

"does any government help the opposition to displace itself?"

Should it have been?:

"does any party help the opposition displace itself?"

(caution: he does ask the rhetorical question in a debate-style response to a queston on the viability of other political parties etc etc, but flaw in logic is a flaw in logic. The party is not the state!)

The party is NOT the government. The government is not the party. It appears that to him, for all intents and purposes, the party IS the government. If so, then we cannot call ourselves democratic anymore, for the state is now opposed to helping any opposition displace the ruling
party.

We're now no better than any other nation state that has fused church and state. Sure, our ideology may be less limiting, or restrictive, and may not be based on the religious written word, but in no sense does it that mean we are better for it. We have fused church and state in our own unique way, and the democratic experiment is over.

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This mail was sent before the elections were called, so I guess the SG democratic experiment is not yet over. No educated society will ever want to be told what it should be, but rather, want to be given the freedom of choice to determine what it wants to be, at the individual, and at the societal level. Maybe the SG democratic experiment is still going on.

One can only hope. Potential and realization are not mutually exclusive, but they are also not sequential either. We will know by May 7th if the experiment is still on-going.