Review of some thoughts

I spent 1 hour in the afternoon from around 1530 to 1630 to do my book review, or to be a bit more accurate, to start on my book review on this book called Peoples and Empire, written by Anthony Pagden.

In this book, Pagden attempted to present to us a short history of migration and European empires from Greece to the present day. But this is however not my main focus. My main focus is to evaluate how well Pagden answers the question whether imperialism was the most important force shaping the modern world. This is my job. And my evaluation is that being a bit too concise, it tries to answer a lot of thing in a mere 202 pages, and it is quite impossible for him to really address the issues on hand in just so many pages, considering that he has a lot more questions which he has to address. But nevertheless, the question is still in need of being address in an more adequate manner.

In the meantime, while I was typing this, it also reminds me of an anime. It is an anime which I have watched a long time ago. It was my first anime since Dragonball and it was the one which got me hooked onto Japanese anime. The title is Fullmetal Alchemist.

To make the long story short, in the world in which the adventure takes place there exists a force called alchemy. Those who have the capability to use it can alchemize anything they want into something else. Though alchemy can do unimaginable things, there are two laws that govern it. The first being that you can only produce something with the exact same mass as the materials that you put in, this is called equivalent trade. The other law is that you absolutely cannot alchemize anything into a human. When brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric lose their mother at an early age they break the second taboo and try to bring her back to life. For this, Alphonse loses his entire body and gets his soul encased in a suit of armor. Edward loses an arm and a leg. After they recover, they begin a quest to regain their bodies by finding the legendary philosopher's stone, a device that has the ability to bypass the laws of alchemy and bestow upon the user limitless power.

So, here's the summary. But you may be thinking why am I talking about this anime all of a sudden? Well, upon thinking about it, the anime, unlike the manga and despite its Japanese origin, does ask a lot of questions about this world and life itself and it also attempts to address these question in a philosophical manner. What intrigued me about this anime now is that how much it reflects certain issues pertaining to God and creation. For a start, the whole story begins with the two protagonists attempting to create life out of nowhere, to resurrect their dead mother. In short, the two are playing God. Now that's one thing. Another really significant issue is their search for this legendary philosopher's stone - which to them is the God of their world, only to find out that there is so much blood being shed in order to create the stone. This brings forth the third question - the issue of equivalent trade, whether life is so 'fair' or not. In essence, the philosophical approach of the whole anime to these three issues is waiting to be appreciated, and certainly, it remains ever so relevant even to Christianity.

Well, certain things are therefore meant to be subjective rather than objective though. I was at the MPS and there was this woman (if you can call her a woman). She was complaining how incompetence is the SAF medical board and that her son is being posted to a useless vocation as a storeman. In defence of the move to post her son as a storeman, the woman (if you can call her a woman) accused that my MP is not being objective and is speaking up for the government. I think this woman (if you can call her a woman) has a problem. In my most utmost ungraceful mindset, I seriously think that this woman (if you can call her a woman) has allowed her own arrogance to be shown as stupidity despite her 'education' as a mechanic engineer. Firstly, she accused people of being subjective, but she herself is already subjective of the matter she's complaining on when she came in. Then she accuse us of speaking up for the government... duh... we are the party which forms the government, of course we speak up for the government lah... and she fails to realise that there is no such thing as objectivity in this world of debates and arguments. Also, she claims that the vocation of a storeman is too lowly for her son... and she wanted her son to be posted to the military band because her son enjoys playing the drum!!!! What kind of Singaporean would make this kind of request after claiming that she supports Singaporean males be sent into NS!!!!! To be the most ungraceful and unforgiving and most sarcastic person for once, I will call her the a stuckup, self centred woman (if you can call her a woman), stupid arrogant, and whatever bad words I want to use on her. In chinese, we call it 无可救药. In Japanese, I call it ぶた、ばかやろ. Simply put it, I would even put her into detention under the ISA if I want to. But I know that it is going a bit too far... and well... I'm getting too subjective about the whole issue...

Cool down... cool down....

Well, this is just a complaint.

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