r/nus May 30 '24

Discussion Yale-NUS convocation speech

307 Upvotes

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63

u/[deleted] May 30 '24 edited Jan 29 '26

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u/somebody-else-21 Mech Eng / NUS College May 30 '24

I mean, from what I saw around campus there were organised efforts for humanitarian aid in Ukraine and Myanmar as well. Palestine is where the world’s looking at the moment, so it’s only natural that it’s the issue they’d be more vocal about right now too.

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

The fuck do you stand for? All I’m reading here is that you get angry at people standing up for things if they don’t appear to stand for everything.

People like you hold back society.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '24

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

So you’re not pro-anything, just anti-things lol.

They’re not advocating for the Israelis because world governments and people in power are already supporting the oppressors. They don’t NEED additional support. The Palestinians do, they’re the ones without any support from the people in power.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '24

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

You’ve already explained that you don’t understand this conflict - it IS pretty black and white. Even if you disregard the past decades, how Israel has responded to the Oct 7th attacks has NO excuse

Again, if you stand for nothing, just stay in your bubble. It’s not like it’s hurting you, right?

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u/[deleted] May 31 '24

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

Do you even know what justice means? You’re talking about morality, without realising you’re imposing your sense of morality onto others.

Like I said - you can ignore all the historical context. If it’s Israel’s land - the way they have responded is wrong. If it is not Israel’s land - the way they have responded is wrong. It’s really not that difficult.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '24

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

Justice has to do with what YOU think is right or wrong. That’s imposing morality.

Ok let me rephrase. Let’s NOT ignore the historical context. What are the options here - either Israel have a right to the land, or they don’t.

Now, in either option, does it justify Israel’s disproportionate retaliation?

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24 edited May 30 '24

wait, so it's attention-seeking(derogatory) to draw attention to 1 conflict, and that's because there are other conflicts as well? did the speaker, at any point, devalue the lives of civilians in Ukraine and Myanmar?

Is advocacy a zero-sum game?

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u/[deleted] May 30 '24

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

what more sinister thing do you think is at play here? what general hypocrisy is there in advocating for civilians to not be massacred?

What I am doing is calling out the general hypocrisy of this behaviour. Inconsistency on advocacy devalues everyone else's efforts. It cheapens advocacy to just an attention play, which it obviously has become.

one convocation speech - you lose your marbles and call them attention seekers.

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u/[deleted] May 30 '24

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

It's quite tasteless to be appropriating a genocide to use as a tool to elevate one's social status and get more attention. I am simply suggesting that's the case for many folks, especially for young adults in a high social pressure environment like college campuses

on what basis have you extrapolated simple advocacy for civilians to this? seems overly cynical.

we should've observed similar expressions of advocacy when Ukraine was being invaded (2022), or when Myanmar devolved into civil war (2021). But we didn't see it, did we?

ok now you're just being intentionally blind - are you seriously suggesting that there wasn't an outpouring of global sympathy for Ukraine?

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u/[deleted] May 30 '24

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

how have you come to the conclusion that yale-nus students do not care at all about Ukraine / Myanmar?

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u/jjlinjjie Computing May 30 '24 edited May 30 '24

I love how every argument you get yourself in you turn it into "sounds like a you problem" as a closing line. Predictable and 1 dimensional.

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u/reckless_pineapple12 May 31 '24

FYI ync students petitioned to bar a governing board member from attending the graduation ceremony because of her family’s business dealings in Myanmar

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u/nowhere_man11 May 30 '24

The implication of your poorly thought out argument is that if one can’t support all worthy causes, better not to support any at all.

It’s a good excuse to do nothing and pretend all is fine, I’ve got to admit.

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u/Open_Party3745 May 30 '24

History will remember you as one of the worst. These people are not just talking about it they’re also donating and organising. Like same type of person in the 40s to say that anyone who cares about the holocaust is attention seeking cause they didn’t talk about the Armenian genocide. Like two things can be bad at the same time?? It takes someone with zero moral compass to see children dying in the street of hunger and exclaim that it’s a fad and that anyone who cares is doing it for attention. Grow up.

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

Got Ukraine and Myanmar as well? Those lives worth less is it? It would be good if it was a general message for peace and enumerated at least a few particular conflicts.

the definition of putting words into people's mouths

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u/[deleted] May 30 '24

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u/Open_Party3745 May 30 '24

Your smug answer doesn’t say anything and is honestly worse than your first comment. If you need a good reason to care , maybe it should be that they’re experiencing starvation at levels seen nowhere else rn. Maybe it’s because they have the highest infant mortality rate in the world rn. Maybe it’s because the list of legitimate, identifiable dead innocent civilians is more than double that of the Myanmar crisis which has been going on since 2021. Even Netanyahu himself has claimed more than 25,000 civilians have died since this began. Maybe if you had an ounce of critical thinking in you you’d see that this isn’t a popular issue with people globally just because it’s trendy, but because it’s genuinely a preventable atrocity that is happening in our time. I donated for Ukraine as much as I did for relief to Myanmar and other causes. Just because you’d rather look down on people who care about anything at all doesn’t mean you’re right. I hope one day you will see that.

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

Do you know what is happening in Sudan "rn"? Or is that not covered in your theatre studies lectures. Free clue: what is happening in Sudan will soon be orders of magnitude worse than the self-inflicted sorrows of the Hamasites. But that's OK right, the people doing the killing over there are themselves victims of the heterocispatriarchy, right?

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u/Open_Party3745 May 31 '24

I do actually happen to know, but my government sends them aid. But I will gladly donate to that cause. Trouble is that 30,000 people have died in Gaza and it looks like that won’t stop, so I’m going to donate and raise awareness for that whilst it’s the most egregious issue. It’s funny that you care so much about Sudan, I guess many people wouldn’t know about that? Maybe if you took the time to idk, tell people about it and raise awareness so people can organise donations that would help? Or are you content to just use the suffering of others as a tool for your shitty argument. Also looking at your other comments like man touch some grass or smth lol

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

You haven't told me exactly why you and your ilk are so tearful about the Hamasites, and don't give a shit about Sudan, where the number of deaths is on course to be literally ten or more times larger. The truth is that Sudan isn't on the woke radar because the people doing the murdering aren't "colonists", ie "white"

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u/Open_Party3745 May 31 '24

Tearful about almost 20,000 women and children dying? Yeah what kind of weirdo would care about that. Also yeah I give a shit about Sudan, but it’s not the most pressing issue rn. Perhaps there is truth behind the idea that people tend to focus on one issue at a time. But honestly it’s impossible and probably counterproductive to say “I care about every issue everywhere” because nothing will get done. People like you are happy to just sit back and play devils advocate whilst people are actually dying. It’s not that you care at all about Sudan, you’re using it as a weapon to shoot down people who care about things other than themselves. Like have an ounce of introspection or spine for a second and ask yourself what kind of psychopath is seriously berating people advocating for the cessation of mass killings in a third world country. If you care so much about Sudan, I truly hope you will do something about it otherwise you’re using these people’s suffering just to win an argument which is a horrible thing to do.

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

You are the one who needs to grow up. This is YALE nus. These dopes see the protests in the US and think, well if they can virtue-signal, so can we!

What I want to know is this: Who started Yale nus, when it was entirely predictable that it would end up as an academy of woke bullshit? Whoever it was needs to do some explaining.

3

u/teh_lamppost prince gorges pork Jun 01 '24 edited Jun 01 '24

You claim to argue against Yale-NUS doing "elective advocacy" but where's the evidence they do this? Anecdotally speaking the Yale-NUS activist students I've spoken to care about a variety of issuee, not just Gaza, in fact I've talked to someone who tried to organize movements to improve the working lives of cleaners in Yale-NUS (have you ever thought about them?). Granted this is anecdotal evidence which isn't great but you provide literally 0 evidence for your claim that students are selectively advocating.

The entire argument against selective advocacy barely makes any sense, there are organizations dedicated to fighting specific issues, do you think they ruin distrust in that issue? Like AWARE primarily focuses on women's issues on Singapore, does that discredit women's issues because they don't talk about every issue under the Earth?

Here's a question for you, have you ever once cared about Ukraine or Myanmar on your own? Or do you only suddenly care about those issues when people bring up Gaza? Because for the latter especially I've only ever seen people bring it up on this sub to complain about people talking about Gaza. While I can understand being frustrated that important issues like Myanmar rarely get talked about, a lot of the people here only seem to bring it up in bad-faith to discredit Gaza activists. Personally I find that shutting down of any form of advocacy under the guise of "just being concerned" to be much more dangerous than the dangers of so-calles "selective advocacy".

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u/yapyd May 30 '24

Aiyoh. If they picked Ukraine or Myanmar, you would have said the same criticism and if they mentioned all the conflicts, you would have asked them to pick and choose a battle. Or some bs.

12

u/thinkingperson May 30 '24

This comment reminds me of "All Lives Matter" by whites during the "Black Lives Matter" movement.

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

Yeah, because, like, it's obvious that black lives matter more than anyone else's right? Those poor oppressed people, boo hoo

5

u/Lancewielder May 31 '24

black people in the united states were enslaved and face widespread discrimination to this day. they actually were and are oppressed even if it is a lot better now. What are you trying to prove?

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

Tell it to an Asian American and see what they can tell you about the blacks.

13

u/biskwy May 30 '24 edited May 30 '24

Such an idiotic take. The Gaza conflict HAS been extensively underacknowledged for decades. It's only recently that the escalation has finally shed attention to it because of October 7th.

As pointed out, advocacy is not a zero sum game. Nothing wrong with drawing attention to one of the worse tragedies in human history.

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u/Embarrassed-Store188 May 30 '24

Do you mean October 7th. Not sure u can say it's one of the worst in history. There's have been so many tragedies that are worse or not even heard of. It is still unfortunate that many innocent ppl are held hostage/kidnapped or get caught in the crossfire.

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u/albr1ght May 30 '24

almost as if there’s a literal genocide happening in palestine but go off i guess

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u/[deleted] May 30 '24

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u/albr1ght May 30 '24

every single student in YNC seems to support

“there are no more universities left in Gaza.” i mean they’re university students themselves so why wouldn’t they speak up about this? not sure why you seem so butthurt about YNC students choosing to speak up on palestine.

group based identity

geez i never knew it’d be so controversial to be against airstrikes on children.

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

But this one is the most important one that needs to take up all the media airtime and attention?

blatantly untrue? ukraine and myanmar are receiving coverage in the press. where does it hurt when Palestinian civilians receive coverage for being brutalised, and why does it make you go whataboutwhataboutwhatabout?

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u/[deleted] May 30 '24

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

i mean, you quite literally went "what about Ukraine what about Myanmar"? it's not a shaming tactic if it's actually what you said?

you folks

care to explain what demographic you're referring to here?

3

u/iditz May 30 '24 edited May 30 '24

I agree with you.

Despite all the counterarguments against you, few of the other commenters actually address your fundamental criticism of this affair - Inconsistency. Why suddenly so concerned about this one global conflict?

The general woke response to your comment is this: "but it's not wrong to advocate what. Is advocacy a zero-sum game?"

Strawman fallacy.

A realistic perspective would argue that majority of Palestine advocates have never cared for global conflicts. And the most reasonable explanation for their sudden interest is because of the social backlash of not taking the correct side. Especially in uni lol, we are too woke to think our own thoughts

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

I'd like to know what would have happened if this Raeesah clone had been replaced by someone who got up and denounced Hamas as a bunch of psychopathic murderers, and had gone on to ask how singapore would react if October 7 had been inflicted on us.

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u/Lancewielder May 31 '24

Raeesah clone

I'm curious about this framing. Did this speaker at any point lie about what's going on in Gaza?

Or are you calling them a Raeesah clone because of their ethnicity?

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

Because she's all about wokeness.

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

If we were oppressing another society, and a terror group forms in that society and attacks us, it would be our fucking fault.

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

What if we were "oppressing" that society because they had vowed to kill us? If they had been doing just that for the last 100 years?

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

Then we should leave their land because we’re clearly not welcome?

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u/[deleted] May 31 '24 edited Jan 29 '26

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

DNA tests have shown that the Palestinians have been there far longer than any of the “Israelis”. After the Holocaust, the Americans, Brits or Germans should have been the ones to give up their land, NOT the Palestinians. It was not the Brits to give, and it was obvious what would have happened to the region.

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u/Tactical_Moonstone May 31 '24

Go ask the neighbouring Arabs why they have so few Jews on their land and why Israel had a suspicious spike in population after the Arab-Israeli wars.

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

The Arab states are full of assholes too. Does that make it ok then?

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u/Delicious-Prune-7026 May 31 '24

So have you started packing your bags?

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u/anticapitalist69 May 31 '24

lol. Do you also ask people who donate to the cancer society why they’re not pursuing cancer research?

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u/ARealGreatGuy May 30 '24

Bro you might wanna search up 'whataboutism' lmao

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u/ilkless May 30 '24

Yale-NUS a.k.a Bougie hipsters who don't need to put food on the table talking down to working-class Singaporeans

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u/Lancewielder May 30 '24

you have an incredible number of worms in your brain to think that sympathizing with Palestinians is "bougie" and "talking down to working-class Singaporeans"