Category: Hathos Alert

Hathos Alert, Ctd

by Gwynn Guilford

A reader gives a little more on the backstory of Singapore's "National Night" patriotic procreation campaign:

Thank you thank you thank you for the National Night bit. My husband is from Singapore. It has three main ethnic groups – Chinese, Malay, and Indian.  The Chinese run the place, but they also have the lowest population growth.  And they're scared to death of becoming a minority – so it's not openly spoken, but there's a constant push for the Chinese population – not just the wealthy and educated – to have more babies. Anyway I will enjoy showing this video for him – he's always embarrassed this time of year because of the faux patrotism imposed by the SG government for their National Day.

KC Ifeanyi expands on that point, noting that Singapore's fertility rate dropped to 1.2 in 2011, compared with 1.6 in 2000:

[W]ith verses such as "Like a government scholar, I wanna cram real hard / And tap you all night like an EZ Link card," it’s difficult to imagine how this won’t get the masses hot and bothered. But wait a minute, tiger! Not to douse the flames of passion burning betwixt your legs or anything, but the campaign’s brief explicitly states this libidinal lobbying is for "financially secure adult(s) in a stable, committed long-term relationship(s)."

Hathos Alert

by Gwynn Guilford

From Singapore – the country that prohibits walking around naked in your own house with the blinds up – comes a new campaign for National Day (ahem, Night):

Fallows has context:

[A]round time 2:18, the video talks about "putting a bao in the oven," a bao is like a little bundle or dumpling or bun. And before that, in the line: "I know you want it / so does the SDU," here is what they're talking about. But even if you didn't know that you'd get the idea. … For years [the Singapore government] has been worried about flaccid birth rates among its people, often with an edge of eugenics thinking. So in partnership with Mentos, it's trying a more direct and with-it approach….

The freshmaker, indeed.

Hathos Alert

From the man who is professionally always-wrong:

DICK MORRIS: I guarantee you, Sean, based on what I’ve heard from third parties or I’ve spoken to that William Jefferson Clinton is going to cast his ballot for Mitt Romney.

HANNITY: Wow!

MORRIS: However, he's going to open his mouth for Barack Obama because his wife is hostage. They have her under lock and key as Secretary of State, and he is scared that Obama will lose and blame him if he undermines Obama. So he’ll do everything he asks him to do and then he’ll jab him whenever he can.

Here's his prediction from four years ago in July. As usual, there is no accountability for years of wild errors in predicting political events. Just Hannity's "wow" at the latest fantasy.

Hathos Alert

Screen shot 2012-07-23 at 5.46.41 PM

Behold the campaign website for Mindy Meyer, a 22-year-old Orthodox Jewish law student running against NY State Senator Kevin Parker on the Republican and Conservative Party lines.  Mediaite notes that the homepage is "accented by an unstoppable throbbing house beat (literally, you can’t stop it)". An interview with Mindy offers several money quotes, including:

"My idea is to make it very contemporary, funky, cool, not like a typical senator’s website," Meyer said, adding, "Have you been to Kevin Parker’s website? You could fall asleep when you go to it, everything’s just red, white and blue."

Hathos Alert, Ctd

A reader writes:

I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival this year for the first time (not as an attendee; I worked behind the scenes). Some of those gratingly obnoxious tweets are spot on, but you have to check out the Aspen Pickup Lines.

Indeed you do:

References for this Drezner-instigated mischief here and here. More Dish faves:

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It’s the lack of oxygen that makes them funny.

Hathos Alert

More priceless tweets from Aspen here. My fave:

I had to go to the elite self-love festival when I was working at the Atlantic. I couldn't breathe and couldn't sleep for three days because of the altitude and kept bumping into people I'd trashed on the blog. Good times.