Thesis Approval Quotes

Two opinion pieces written by local author Catherine Lim in The Straits Times in 1994 were good examples of the political climate in the early years of Goh’s administration. The first article was titled “The PAP and the People: A Great Affective Divide.” Her thesis was that while the people of Singapore recognized the effective job the party did in running Singapore and providing for its prosperity, many of them did not like their leaders very much. For instance, on National Day, many Singaporeans did not fly the national flag because of the close connection between it and the PAP. Somehow flying the flag indicated you were a PAP supporter or liked the party, which in many minds was different from respecting what the leaders had done. In her second article, Lim questioned whether any significant political change had taken place with the handover of power from Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong. She argued that the large salary increase for government officials that had been approved was an example of the continuing top-down style of government. In a way, the government’s response to these articles proved her correct. Its immediate reaction was to state that local writers had no business being involved in political issues. If they wanted to do so, they should join a political party and not give opinions from the sidelines. The argument was the same one used almost a decade earlier against the law society and against the churches. While there had been an attempt to obtain more feedback from people, there was still a deep feeling among PAP leaders that public political debate must be limited. Even in the mid-1990s, there was still a belief that too broad a discourse would threaten Singapore’s success.

Whoever the author or authors, Putin’s thesis lifted almost verbatim more than sixteen pages of text and six charts from an American textbook written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh, which was translated into Russian in 1982—almost certainly at the behest of or with the approval of the KGB, which under Andropov was eager to find a way out of the Soviet Union’s economic stagnation. The thesis’s bibliography includes the textbook—Strategic Planning and Policy, by William R. King and David I. Cleland—as one of forty-seven sources, including papers and lectures by Putin at the institute, but in the text itself the work is neither credited explicitly nor are the lengthy passages lifted from its Russian translation acknowledged.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

Please allow this book to offer one piece of serious advice (don't worry, this is the only one): Take control. Decide that enough is enough. Stop waiting for your advisor to guide your work - write a paper using your own brain and slap it down on his or her desk. Study - really, actually study - what it is you're studying. Realize that you can't include everything in your thesis, and drop your lofty and unrealistic plan to transform the field. You won't. Plan what you need to do to graduate, write it down, sit with the person whose approval you need, and work up a timeline. Seek out interesting conferences, and if your department won't pay for you to attend them, search for outside sponsorship. (You have the freaking internet, for crying out loud.) Actively pursue your goals, because - and it's so easy to forget this - that's why you're here. Can't find the motivation to work today? Tough shit. It's like a snow day: Every day off you give yourself makes you feel good that day, but it's one more day you'll have to make up in June when you really want to be out of school. It's possible that many graduate programs want you to get depressed, say "Fuck it" and take charge of your own destiny. They may consider this part of your necessary struggle. Well, so be it. Wait no longer. Take charge now. And get on with your stupid, stupid career.

Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13