The Brown Writer

Writer of absurdist satires ; split personality: Author - Scientist ; No DM ⛔️

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

𝐇𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐞, 𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐰, 𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐥𝐞𝐝.

Get your copy here:
https://t.co/4uZQFmTtRe

#reading #Kindle #bookish #Satire

[Handre @Handre]

In 1965 Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the Malaysian federation, and Tunku Abdul Rahman thought he had won. He had dumped a port city with no oil, no farmland, no fresh water, and two and a half million people crammed onto an island smaller than Lake Tahoe. Sixty years later Singapore's GDP per capita runs past $84,000 while Malaysia limps along under $12,000. The man who got expelled built the richest patch of dirt in Asia. The man who did the expelling built the New Economic Policy.

Let's study what happened.

Start with what Singapore lacked. No resources. No hinterland. No domestic market worth the name. By every theory that says a nation needs raw materials to prosper, Singapore should have starved. Instead Lee Kuan Yew made his country a place where capital felt safe. Low tariffs. Easy entry for foreign firms. Courts that enforced contracts instead of shaking down the parties. Corporate tax dropped to 17 percent, personal rates capped at 22, no tax on most capital gains. Money flowed in because money is not stupid.

Malaysia chose the opposite. The New Economic Policy was racial central planning dressed up as fairness. Bumiputera quotas demanded that ethnic Malays hold 30 percent of corporate equity, that government contracts favor Malay-owned firms, that universities admit by race rather than ability. The state picked winners by bloodline. Predictably, the productive Chinese and Indian minorities took their capital and brains elsewhere, much of it to (where else) Singapore. You distort prices and incentives long enough, the talented people leave. They always leave.

Lee Kuan Yew was not perfect. The man jailed opponents, sued journalists into poverty, and ran a soft authoritarian state with a fondness for caning. He banned chewing gum, which is the kind of thing a control freak does when he runs out of real problems. Singapore is no libertarian paradise. The government owns Temasek and GIC, sovereign wealth funds sitting on close to a trillion dollars combined, and public housing covers 80 percent of the population. Plenty there for a free market thinker to dislike.

But here is the lesson Malaysia missed. Lee understood the difference between an interventionist government and a parasitic one. Singapore's state stayed mostly out of the price system. It kept inflation low, the currency credible, the bureaucracy clean, and trade open. Transparency International ranks it the fifth least corrupt country on earth. Malaysia sits at 57th, with a former prime minister, Najib Razak, currently serving time for looting 1MDB to the tune of billions. One country treated public office as a trust. The other treated it as a buffet.

Capital responds to incentives, not slogans. When Singapore guaranteed property rights and kept the rules predictable, Exxon and Shell built refineries, banks set up regional headquarters, and the port became the busiest transshipment hub in the world. When Malaysia told investors that race would override merit and that the rules could change whenever a minister felt like it, the smart money discounted everything by a risk premium. Over fifty years that premium compounds into a $70,000 gap in living standards.

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@Monica55dzrh Mamdani 😪

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@MbarkCherguia That she/he is an eggcellent person 😪

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@aaichnairport Provide small trolleys for check-in bags beyond the security clearance zone! These are simple requirements you should be aware of without the need to be told 🤦🏽‍♂️

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@Matt_Pinner Mamdani 😪

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@pixelprayer COVID-19
Xenophobia against Indians
TikTok hatemongering

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@bagshaw2112 He is in an asylum now 😪

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@ohhanxiety Fast forward to 2025 😪

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

Having completed my WIP, i was trying to reach out to Chris Holifield for editing services. Utterly shocked to know about her passing away. When the publishing industry is desperate to fleece indie authors, her firm kept it quite affordable. What a loss!

[T. S. Eliot Prize @tseliotprize]

We are deeply saddened to share the news that Chris Holifield, Director of the Poetry Book Society 2003–16 and Director of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2016–22, died on 3 September 2025.

Read our tribute to Chris in full: https://t.co/iVkw5YoOTw

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

It has been five years since one man (Xi Jinping) with poor leadership skills screwed over the world by refusing to acknowledge Covid outbreak. Calling it china virus was racist, while it was perfectly okay for CCP to mock deaths

https://t.co/LFVUqqMcV6

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

For all ye woke liberals who supported Hamas' cause, you have no clues about who coopted you.

Here's a sample sentiment from a Pakistani Facebook page

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

Taking a leaf out of Coca Cola's marketing strategy, here is Grab, a major conglomerate in Southeast Asia, making itself a part of urban memories and place making.

Photographed at Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

Crossed 50,000 words. Another 10,000 to go. Now I have an almost-done manuscript, bad back, and swollen legs
😪
https://t.co/83Id4aqJCw

[The Free Press @TheFP]

Anti-Jewish libels are a social technology reshaping everything around us, writes Adam Louis-Klein. https://t.co/2e1PiWefjE

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

It's surreal to think that the cellphone centric world we live in--the apps, the payments, and cameras, was an unbelievable dream a couple of decades ago 👇🏾

https://t.co/ZKyBhVk5DL

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@HDunn_Writer Colleagues, is their collective noun

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@mrmikeMTL Because there's no Y 😪

[The Brown Writer @BrownAndUncool]

@DKemeridou Belated Halloween wishes 😪