Stomp: Singapore’s Stasi (and Stomp’s lamest posts ever)
I’m a big fan of Stomp, the Straits Times’ gossip website. In the same way that I’m a fan of Britain’s Daily Mail, fondly known as The Daily Hate-Mail and The Daily Wail among those who claim they never read it.
Both know how to find a big audience. But you do have to question what sort.
If Hermann Göring was alive today, he’d love Stomp. So would the Stasi. It could’ve helped them with surveillance.
For the unitiated, Stomp turns ordinary members of the public who might otherwise be minding their own business into trained snoops.
It is a website where people living in one of the world’s richest countries post pictures of their fellow citizens up to no good, and complain about such heinous acts as a couple hugging at a bus stop or a pizza that is fractionally smaller than advertised.
To give you a flavour of the joy it brings to the world, there are 42,000 search results for the word “complain” on Stomp. There are 10,500 results for the word “appalled”, 14,800 for “upset”, 7,060 for “disgusted” and 8,610 for “disgrace”.
Here are 16 posts that deserve a bit of love, because they are miracles of publishing simply because they exist in the public domain.
First up is a post that is not only remarkable for the crime in question. If you look to the left of this photograph, you’ll notice that someone else appears to be taking a pic of the same scandalous act.
Next up, we learn that Stomper Thivya is prepared to wait for an hour and a half for a sales assistant to get back to man a 7-Eleven when she could walk 500 yards up the road to the next one (there are ten 7-Elevens in the Dhoby Ghaut area).
Hygiene is a big bug bear on Stomp – there are 3,800 search results for the word ‘unhygienic’. Here, Stomper Angela feels that these parents have “no sense of hygiene” for the “inconsiderate” thing they have allowed their son to do. This is also the headline that every journalist dreams of writing.
Now for another foot-related crime.
Man in sleep-on-couch shocker.
I’m an animal lover, but a police report – for this?
Here, a woman uses her dog as a shopping mule. The video exposé is seriously worth 44 seconds of your time.
Woman reads newspaper in unusual way.
Robbed, in broad daylight, of two and a half inches of pizza.
Bus driver eats his lunch. Crime helpfully highlighted with red circle.
Public displays of affection are close to top of the list of shame on Stomp.
Here, we have the scandal of the embracing couple who “failed to press the button” at the pedestrian crossing.
This woman, Stomper Haha suggests, is “a disgrace to Singaporean girls.”
What is, perhaps, more disturbing than some school kids hugging and kissing in a carpark is the individual who photographed them.
This “bad sight for the younger generation” is presented as a photo essay of enlargeable pictures.
The Straits Times is well aware of Singapore’s famous OB markers – rules that forbid anything that might rock the boat of racial harmony. But the ST’s gossip site has the habit of stomping all over them.
The word “foreigner” spits up 22,900 search results (among them the revelation, ‘Foreigner naps in Pizza Hut despite long queue outside’), but the favourite target appears to be mainland Chinese. Here are some headlines from Stomp posts after searching for the words “Chinese national” for which there are 15,700 search results:
Chinese national causes jam at Orchard Road
Chinese national makes himself comfortable on train floor
Chinese national takes a nap in front of everyone at restaurant
Chinese national woman eats on bus and yaks loudly on phone
China national tries to steal my handphone on board bus
Why can’t they obey our rules? China national caught smoking at a bus stop
China national places bare feet on train seat
Chinese national workers hang Singapore flag the wrong way
Here’s a fairly typical post. You’ll notice that these people “seemed to be Chinese nationals”.
Now back to what makes Stomp so great. The gloriously inane.
Here is my own complaint I sent in to Stomp today, which I’m outraged hasn’t been published yet. I was at a Mexican restaurant yesterday, and I bit into a cheese-stuffed jalapeño nugget and hot cheese squirted out on to my hand. The boiling cheese left this red mark on my palm. The restaurant had not warned me that its cheese was hot, nor had it given me instructions for how to eat its nuggets.
Somebody call a lawyer and an ambulance.
Robin Hicks
Interning duties: Kellie Eminson
For some reason, Singaporeans are very “kaypoh” or busybody. Often the things are written in Stomp are done because they are jealous (PDA) or petty (not a 9 inch pizza). It’s also tied into the local concept of “kiasu”.
As for your use of metaphor, perhaps you meant to say that Heinrich Himmler would like Stomp, instead of Hermann Goring. The former was the head of the Third Reich’s Gestapo, the spiritual predecessor of East Germany’s Stasi, while the latter you named was the head of the Luftwaffe. And from what I read, they didn’t like each other very much. If you’re going to try to be clever in a story that puts down Singaporeans, perhaps you should be more accurate in your use of historical German metaphors.
ReplyWe need stomp to show the dirty
Replyand ugly sights of Singaporean.
It is not to penalized but to highlight
and educate them as we are suppose
to be a gracious society.
Stomp is THE fucking disgrace. The biggest shame is that SPH owns Stomp. Seriously, the state press company can’t do some quality control?
ReplyIt breeds pointless non-confrontational behavior. Besides, if we see a problem, shouldn’t the most obvious thing to do is TALK to the offender about it? It’s not like the person is armed and hostile or anything dangerous
Quite ridiculous behavior, “reporting” on Stomp. Like that does anything useful
ReplyIt’s a small point (perhaps appropriate given this article’s subject matter) but I’d just like to point out to abraxis that Goring actually *founded* the gestapo.
ReplyYeah, I get scared of getting a picture taken of me when I sit down on a priority seat on the train to make space for others to enter the train.
ReplyHave your say