The USA electoral map of 2012 below shows how Americans are divided.
Blue states were won by the Democrat’s Obama and red states were won by the Republican’s Romney.
Coastal states on either side of the continent are blue. California is on the Pacific coast and New York is on the Atlantic coast. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Manhattan are big, cosmopolitan cities.
The coasts are cosmopolitan because they have international ports. These ports see a confluence of cultures because immigrants of various ethnicities had sailed and docked here.
In contrast, the Deep South and Midwest are red states. Their population are more homogenously white. Some of these Republican bastions in the hinterland are landlocked — no seaports, and so the exposure to diverse influences (“diversity”) is not as considerable as say, New York.
Aside from Colorado (marked ‘Co’ in the map) and New Mexico (‘NM’), the boundaries between the red and blue states are quite clear.
In some of the blue states, there were protests and even mini riots against Trump. In some of the red states, Trump was greeted like a rock star.
A number of the blues loathe Trump with a vengeance while a number of the reds love Trump to bits. Americans are divided.
BELOW: DAP is Cina pekat lah — group photo of the party leaders; cuba tengok muka-muka dema
Same like Amerika’s blue vs red
It is most disingenuous and deceitful of DAP Firsters to accuse BN supporters of being “divisive” when the urban Chinese are rabidly pro-opposition.
During the tsunami of 2008, the opposition won the west coast states – Kedah, Penang, Perak and Selangor.- in the general election.
Rural Malays remained pro-establishment and this kept the BN in power.
BELOW: The DAP leaders’ group photo from above is fragmented and enlarged … search each frame carefully to spot the Malay faces
‘Great Wall of China’ in Malaysia
If we were to colour the 2012 opposition seats in Parliament yellow and the ruling party seats red, we will get an electoral map of Pakatan controlling the cities and BN holding the fort in the Malay heartland
Just as we are divided in our political allegiance, so too are we polarized as a population.
All the sweet talk about “building bridges” by the DAP evangelistas is bullshit.
Helen Ang 
“building bridge ”
Bridge should be build on both side and it’s cannot be one sided bridge which go nowhere .
I believe the difference in voting preferences also has to do with the level of affluence and education levels of people in the respective states of the US.
For example, a friend who lives in Virginia (VA) which is very close to Washington DC tells me that it is has an very affluent population, with many professionals business persons and civil servants, so is an expensive state to live in. On the other hand, next door there is West Virginia (WA), known for its beautiful sceneray, as well as its logging and coal mining industries, and its history of labour militancy.
So Virginia is has many middle class and upper middle class residents, whilst West Virginia has more working class residents.
New York City is a world financial centre and Massachusettes is noted for its Harvard and Yale universities, so its a kind of an academic/intellectual place.
The Midwestern states are noted for their automotive and heavy and here is where there is a large proportion of Blacks who worked in these industries and even a majority of blacks in some parts of the Mid West such as Detroit.
Between California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington State, California has the most diverse population, with parts such as Hollywood and “Silicon Valley” (actually the Santa Clara Valley and surrounding areas), are very affluent areas and the San Francisco Bay Area is a hotbed of very socially and culturally radical and libertarian thought in many areas including lifestyle and it is most probably from here that most of the ideology which has influenced the self-aggrandising journos you and I have had to suffer.
Of course, California also has a large Hispanic population who probably vote Democrat plus other ethnicities as well and many parts of California, especially the fruit and vegetable growing regions have large numbers of lowly paid Hispanic workers, so not all of California is Silly Con Valley, hippie-dippie Haight Ashbury, hip, hype and happening San Francisco or glamourous and glitzy Hollywood.
I can’t say much about the rest except that apart from its world famous apples, evergreen forests, pulp and paper industry, salmon fishing and beautiful scenery, Washington State is the home of Microsoft and the largest Boeing aircraft factory.
However, generally speaking the Republican states tend to have more lower income people than Democrat states,with the exception of Texas, the oil state.
As for diversity, well Florida has many Hispanics but it is Republican.
Anyway, a little update – Trump won Indiana in the Mid West.
I believe the above are points to consider when analysing Malaysia’s political scenario and landscape.
(1) Texans really dislike Obama – just saying – looking at the percentage of votes.
(2) In recent decades, the blacks have been leaning heavily in favour of the Dems but their support for Obama, however, shot through the roof. So COLOUR does matter.
(3) Trump alienates the Latinos but is getting uncharacteristically strong support from a portion of the whites
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(3) is the parallel for Najib to consider. It’s a high-wire act where he must get the tension perfectly calibrated.
I failed to mention that the labour unions tend to side with the Democrats which they regard as more friendly towards workers but recently the Democrats have moved to the right and support have done nothing to oppose the trend of companies to move their factories to low wage countries in Asia, resulting in loss of jobs and when a conservative populist like Trump comes along and promises to do something about it in the interest of protecting the livelihood of American workers, well the rank and file workers will naturally support Trump.
In short, a conservative is now doing what the liberals and liberal-left have failed to do, so even traditional Democrat voters will support a Republican, just as Chris stated in his comment below with regards Trump’s opposition to the TPPA.
kak helen ! glad you are back and doing fine..:)
Re: is the parallel for Najib to consider. It’s a high-wire act where he must get the tension perfectly calibrated.
Can’t imagine of his calibration as cash is king were all upturn sudah lebur jadi debu
Jibby has united the races by creating the mother of all scandals, 1mdb.
And now he is throwing back everything to MOF after the milking.
A true statesman he is. Today RM under attack again. He just cakap besar last month, that the country is doing well and RM strenghtening due to govt’s economic policy! What a joke!
Well, Trump and this Democrat share at least one thing in common . . . . . they view the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement unfavorably.
View at Medium.com
No surprise Chris. Traditional Democrat voters will support whoever promises to act to protect America’s interest and theirs when the current Democrat president has not.
Yea Scheiss, their travails resonate with common joe Singaporeans who are having a hard time competing with the massive influx of foreigners for decent paying jobs. That’s the outcome when government involves itself in business and commercial entities big-time. The bureaucracy makes the money, they also make the laws – that inevitably protects their interests against private entrepreneurs.
However, in Singapore’s last GE the Workers Party lost a seat and the absolute vote for the PAP when up. I think it was the Straits Times which attributed this to the PAP government having listened to the people’s concerns over issues such as foreign workers.
Studying the 2015 election results on the Singapore Election Department website, the Workers’ Party won by a small margin in Aljunied Group Representative Constituency and by a wider margin in the Hougang Single Representative Constituency.
On the other hand, adjacent to Aljunied and Hougang is the Ang Mo Kio Group Representative Constituency where the PAP won by a huge margin.
I am no expert on Singapore demographics but looking through the other constituencies, I noticed that the PAP won by over 70% in constituencies such as Jurong, West Coast, Tanjong Pagar, Sembawang and others which from what little I know have a large proportion of working class voters. Jurong has a major concentration of manufacturing industries, Sembawang the shipyards, Tanjong Pagar is near to the sea port.
http://www.eld.gov.sg/elections_past_parliamentary2015.html
As it was just after the election results, I could only manage to find an research study of Singapore’s 2011 election results and found some interesting observations.
One is that most of Singapore’s constituencies have a large proportion of HDB and other public housing flats hence dwellers.
More interesting was that voters with up to Year 12 education (I suppose that is Junior College), will almost all vote for the incumbent (the PAP), whilst the higher one’s education level, the higher one’s income, the more IT savvy one is and the more social media savvy one is, the more one tends to vote opposition.
In short, what this report tells me is that a rather comfortably well off, elite, small minority in Singapore vote for the opposition, whilst the “plaebian masses” vote for the PAP.
Unfortunately, I have lost the link to that study, though if I recall right, it was by one of the Singapore universities.
I also understand that the passing of Lee Kuan Yew could have played a part in the PAP’s gain in 2015 over 2011, in terms of a sympathy vote by some and a “feeling of relief” vote by others, now that the senior Lee can no longer exert his influence over Singapore’s governance.
Sure, his son Lee Hsien Loong is Singapore’s prime minister now but from what I have heard, the junior Lee is much more approachable, gentlemanly and abreast with the times than Lee senior.
Whilst I disagree with Hsien Loong on his adoration and glorification of the United States, I agree with his reply to the question of human rights that each and every country and society is different and one cannot simply take a “one side fits all” approach to questions of democracy and human rights.
that different governments have to address different pressing concerns and problems amongst the people in their respective countries and simply apply a western liberal democratic across the board.
Also note, that multi-party based representative democracy is not the only form of democracy, since even a one party state can be democratic by allowing the people to exercise their demands and choices through votes in their local council and for their council-level vote to made through their deputy at a higher level council, with the process repeating up to the supreme council.
For example, Vietnam is a one party state which is divided into 58 provinces and 5 municipalities. The provinces are controlled by the People’s Councils which are elected by the inhabitants and the each People’s Council appoints the People’s Committee serves as the provincial government.
In Switzerland, a multi-party representative democracy, the results of popular referenda supersede the power of elected governments at federal or regional levels.
For example, the Swiss federal government disagreed with the referendum’s decision to ban further construction of minarets on mosques but had to comply with the popular democratic mandate.
What many fail to realise is that democracy can turn out to be the tyranny of the majority over a minority, which is what happened in Switzerland. In some other countries, there would have been constitutional or bills of rights provisions which would protect the rights of the minority from the democratic tyranny of the majority but not in Switzerland.
Lee Hsien Loong is right that Aung San Su Kyi is faced with a dilemma of sorts in that if she were to speak up against the discrimination and violence of the Buddhist majority against the Muslim Rohingya minority, then she risks losing the support of a large proportion of her support base. Again, that’s the democratic tyranny of the majority.
Thus each country has its own unique characteristics at any given period and trying to force an model of governance which works well somewhere else upon a country where such as model is incompatible very often results in endless trouble and disaster for the people.
For example, many countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia are not paragons of western-style liberal democracy but just see what happened when western-backed rebels defeated and murdered Ghadaffi in Libya, which has since descended into chaos for its people.
The “great democratic” imperialist West proverbially upset the apple cart in Libya and now faces a flood of refugees which it finds hard to cope with.
Ghadaffi did warn, that if his government was toppled, Libya would no longer be a barrier against mass people’s movement into Europe and this is exactly what happened.
In my younger days, I believed that the countries of Asia must all have western-style liberal democracy and civil rights but now I understand that there is no one size which fits all at a given period and that it may take several generations before Malaysian society is ready, culturally and politically, for the kind of liberal democracy practised in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and India today.
re: “In my younger days, I believed that the countries of Asia must all have western-style liberal democracy and civil rights but now …
But now (with ref. to me personally), I’m inclined to conservatism having seen what dajjals the DAP are.
I also keep in mind that Beijing simply rolled its tanks in Tiananmen over the Chinese subversives.
If only the DAP evangelistas could be dealt with by our authorities with the same level of firmness that the Chinese troublemakers are dealt with by the China government.
The Tian An Men protests and rioting definitely received the backing of many western imperialist media and even some of the western left.
This is what Global Research has to say about Tian An Men:-
“In an article on June 5, 1989, the Washington Post described how anti-government fighters had been organized into formations of 100-150 people. They were armed with Molotov cocktails and iron clubs, to meet the PLA who were still unarmed in the days prior to June 4.”
“What happened in China, what took the lives of government opponents and of soldiers on June 4, was not a massacre of peaceful students but a battle between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the so-called pro-democracy movement.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/what-really-happened-in-tiananmen-square-25-years-ago/5385528
Today, China keeps subversive, western-financed NGOs in check.
At the time, influenced by media reports, I felt that China had been too heavy handed with the students until our storekeeper, a Chinese said that the China government did the right thing.
Many of those students who went into exile in the west were well received.
re: “subversive, western-financed NGOs”
Agree that particular western-financed NGOs – like Bersih – are subversive.
re: “a Chinese said that the China government did the right thing”
Our Umno-led gomen is too soft on the dajjals.
Oh Chris,
I forgot to ask, which party in Singapore has promised to do something substantial about the influx of foreigners?
I also wonder why Lee Hsien Loong is so concerned about the shrinking Singapore population. Sure, Singapore may have to find ways to take care of the larger number of aged Singaporeans but won’t fewer Singaporeans allow for more space for each, such as larger flats, gardens and so forth.
If he is worried about labour, why not resort to higher levels of automation, encourage and provide more affordable opportunities for Singaporeans to continuously upgrade and acquire technical, scientific, management and other skills so they can be more productive and creative per capita.
Singapore has a similar population as Finland and has the added advantage of being located at a maritime crossroads, unlike Finland which is on the far edge of Europe and at the end of trade routes.
However, I wonder why, unlike Finland, Singapore has not built up at least a handful of notable companies producing consumer or industrial industrial equipment.
Here is a list of some Finish brands, ranging from startups to multinational corporations – familiar names such as the Nokia telecommunications equipment maker, Kone lift maker, Wartsila diesel engine maker, Neste petroleum company, F-Secure computer security, Tekla software modelling company, Fiskars which is noted for its scissors (I have one which is almost 40 years old and is still as strong and serviceable as ever) and the Finnish product I love best – Finlandia Vodka.
There’s so much coming out of this little country of five million to mention, so I’ll leave you to check out the rest over here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnish_brands
Why can’t Singapore with five million population, one of the highest standards of living in Asia and with students who are amongst the highest high scorers in PISA tests do like Finland?
In fact, all of us in South East Asia are great copy cats but have very little to shout about as creators and innovators.
I’ll pass over your beloved Finnish product, Scheiss. But I think you summed it all up: “Why can’t Singapore with five million population (2 million foreigners), one of the highest standards of living in Asia and with students who are amongst the highest high scorers in PISA tests do like Finland?”
A Beijing engineer friend of mine whose teenage daughter is studying in Singapore remarked last year he was surprised how a Chinese national managed to create Alibaba.com – he really thought it should have been a Singaporean given how many light years ahead Singapore’s commercial networking was 25 years ago. The grass-root complaints are that grossly high rentals and tough business conditions discourage small start-up enterprises. It’s hard today to nurture the 80’s success stories like Creative Technologies. There’s also the issue of academic credentials versus untutored genius, the latter being smothered by a paper-chase society like Singapore.
Firstly.I believe that the success of Alibaba.com, as well as Bollywood and Hong Kong and Taiwan movies is the size of the addressable market – i.e. well over one billion of Chinese and Indians worldwide.
Even if Singapore had all the financial and easy business conditions as China, without the addressable market size, I believe it would have been difficult to spawn and grow an “Alibaba” or a “Google” or a “Facebook” in Singapore and this applies to Malaysia as well.
Several years back, I attended a media interview with the head of Jia Yu Home Entertainment, a Malaysian startup which produced TV programmes mostly for China and he told us about how local-oriented audiences and viewers actually are, from Jia Yu’s own experience.
As an example, he said that a movie celebrity who is hugely popular in Hong Kong often is unknown in Taiwan and quite often a movie or music star celebrity in Beijing and not highly regarded in Shanghai and vice-versa.
A way to get around this regional/cultural bias is animation, where the characters can be made to assume a more global persona with the soundtrack dubbed in a language suitable for each respective market.
Examples include Ultraman, a Japanese animated sci-fi TV series screened on TV in Malaysia in the late 1960s and the Astro Boy Japanese animated manga series.
Based upon this approach, Les’ Copaque Production produced an animated children’s movie “Geng: The Adventure Begins” released February 2009. Production cost RM4.7 million and it grossed RM6.3 million in ticket sales but that was where the the adventure also ended,as there were no sequels to Geng produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geng:_The_Adventure_Begins
However, perhaps as a teaser for Geng or perhaps to help finance the production of Geng, Les’ Copaque took the two main characters in Geng – i.e. the twins Upin & Ipin and created a side animated TV series featuring them which made its debut on TV9 on 13 September 2007 and this series has continued until today.
The Sound Track is in Malay on TV9 and in English on Digital Channel Asia and ATV World Hong Kong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upin_%26_Ipin
Formerly of Les’ Copaque, Nizam Razak, Safwan Abdul Karim, Anas Abdul Aziz and Kee Yong Pin established their own production startup Animonsta Studios to create an animated TV series featuring the character BoboiBoy boy who has superpowers and the ability to separate into three. With his friends, Ying, Hannah (Yaya in the Malay version), Gopal, and Fang, they fight to protect the earth from alien threats who aim to conquer the Earth in the hunt for cocoa beans.
This made its debut on TV3 on 13 March 2011 and today it is also screened in Malaysia on NTV7 and Disney Channel Malaysia, on MNCTV in Indonesia, on TV5 Philippines, in Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmmar via Disney Channel Asia and via TVB Pearl and ATV in Hong Kong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoBoiBoy
A very good example of the difficulty for an Asia-based service provider to compete with a US-based one is that of CatchaCorp, which introduced four of its Catcha.com web portals catering to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia in 1999.
Back then, Yahoo! was riding high as the prominent web portal and search engine worldwide and it appeared that Catcha Corp was trying to make its Catcha.com the “Yahoo!” of Asia but it was badly affected in the dotcom crash of 2000 and by 2003, it had to admit that Catcha.com did not work out and at the time, it turned to producing two free-of-charge, advertisements supported lifestyle print magazines Juice and PM, which it distributed for free in the respective outlets of its advertisers and at other locations.
I nearly fell over when one of the founders Nic Lim told me in 2003 that for once they had registered a positive EBITDA and I saw that this web portal company had turned to print magazines to survive.
Yes, I guess Singapore’s focus on paper qualifications, in attracting multinationals to set up their regional offices, in attracting financial institutions to make Singapore a financial hub and now a gaming rival to Macao, coupled with high rental rates, tends to make Singapore an unattractive place for startup creative entrepreneurs such as Sim of Creative Labs today, through Creative is still going strong as an internationally recognised brand today.
Also another Sim created the OSIM brand of massage chairs and also the Aztech Group which produces several types of affordable quality home and enterprise communications and networking products, a few of which I have used as well.
However, whilst Singapore is known as an assembly base for multinational TV brands and other consumer electronics and home appliances, including some research & development activities, I do not know of any Singapore companies which have successfully designed, developed and produced their own home grown brand of consumer electronics and home appliances, most probably with production in lower cost countries such as China, Indonesia or Vietnam.
That is what the oft stated cliche “moving up the value chain” is all about – where when you previously just assembled products for others, now you design your own products and perhaps also assemble them yourself or outsource its assembly to others.
On the other hand, if the consumer market place is saturated, with wafer-thin profit margins, then why not design, develop and produce products and equipment for industry customers.
Karamjit Singh’s article in Digital News Asia mentions that Nic Lim, finally got to do his IPO on the Singapore Stock Exchange in August 2014, and it’s not Catcha.com that he listed.
“Instead of a consumer play based on the Internet, Lim has opted for an enterprise play based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which, if you believe the buzz, is going to become the de facto business model for enterprise software.”
https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/sizzle-fizzle/catchacoms-nic-lim-to-get-his-ipo-14-years-later
I have been rather against the narrow emphasis on information technology, biotech and nanotech as examples of “moving up the value chain”, since even if such startups are successful and grow, how many people will they employ and how wide will their market be.
There is a tendency in Malaysia and perhaps also Singapore to ignore these “non sexy” industries in “moving up the value chain” but of these can bring in foreign exchange and provide plenty of jobs, why not.
similar question, why taiwan can, hk n spore cant, the similarity of the latter 2 is both a financial hub, a strategic port, n the obvious, scarcity of land. singapore brand is not in the field of technology, more in retail, wholesale and food chain store.
I suppose that Singapore’s focus on retail, wholesale and food chain has much to do with the mental perspective it fosters.
Also, if there still are enough well paid jobs available, there is less incentive to take risks to become an startup entrepreneur.
The idea to become a startup technology entrepreneurs very much arose from the Silicon Valley at a time when employment in established IT giants was becoming harder and some were already laying off staff, or some saw an opportunity to make it big with an emerging new technology, with the view of cashing out in an IPO, and that made technology entrepreneurship trendy.
However, I have heard that engineers working for IT multinationals in Penang are quite contented with the job security of employment and in their work with established companies, so are not all that enthusiastic about becoming technology entrepreneurs, when the experience with Silicon Valley startups and in Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC Malaysia) is that the failure rate is 90%.
I have enjoyed secure employment with decent pay and benefits most of my working life and that sense of security put my mind at rest to concentrate on my work which I enjoyed, so why take the risk to become an entrepreneur and perhaps deny myself pay for a while to get my startup through difficult times, even though the entrepreneurial journey can be exciting, especially of there is a strong possibility of a big reward at the end of the rainbow.
As for Taiwan, we have to understand the factors which drove entrepreneurship at a particular times and my guess is that startup entrepreneurship happened especially in the electronics industry there when was opportunity to capitalise on the emerging PC and PC peripherals industry in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s and Taiwan is best known for these kinds of products.
However today, the more successful amongst those startups back then have become a relative handful of established corporations such as Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, D-Link, HTC, etc., whilst the weaker ones known for lower quality products have fallen by the wayside and were forgotten in the industry shakeout, and with rising costs, most of the kinds of electronic components, connectors, cables, switches and so forth come out of China, whilst nothing much which is new exciting comes out of Taiwan, certainly not a Taiwanese “Alibaba”, “Google”, “Facebook”, etc which has gone global.
So I guess, it’s best that Singapore do what it’s best at and make the best of it, until it is no longer viable or lucrative, then try to move on to something else.
No point being a startup entrepreneur just because it’s the trendy thing to do.
I found an interesting infographic on the distribution of low-income students in U.S. public schools in 2013 and there appears to be a certain degree of correlation between poverty levels in each state as suggested by the percentage of low income students and the tendency to vote Republican or Democrat, though this correlation is not close.
http://www.southerneducation.org/Our-Strategies/Research-and-Publications/New-Majority-Diverse-Majority-Report-Series/A-New-Majority-2015-Update-Low-Income-Students-Now.aspx
However, it does appear though that poverty levels are lower in the northern states across the US, whilst higher in those states further south, including California, a state much touted for Hollywood and Silicon Valley.