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Our culture of parliamentary debate has the great potential to evolve from a 'circus' and a Balinese cock-fighting arena to a problem-solving forum, if and when we begin to elect more intelligent, rational, and meaningfully-articulate politicians to represent our constituencies.

Our society is becoming more intelligent and our imitation of models of development has become more sophisticated, but some of our parliamentarians need to learn how to speak in public and how to talk sense based on a data-driven style of argumentation.

Must we continue to live with news reports concerning parliamentary debates that have representatives call each other "bodoh", "berok", "baboon", "binatang" and other less than human designation, instead of calling upon facts and scientific reasoning to back up national issues that need to be resolved?

Must we tolerate a culture of shouting and yelling and cajoling in sessions that are supposed to be used to deliberate and mediate our most urgent and serious issues involving the social, economic, and political fate of millions of citizens who voted for those into power?

Must we let the culture permeate into our universities, schools, social and cultural institutions, and homes in which this brand of feudalism and ignorance and brute force rule in a half-baked democracy?

Why have parliamentarians who present well-researched issues in the most civil manner been shouted at and interrupted perpetually by those who cannot mount anything substantial other than foul language and a chorus of gangsterish rowdiness?

Why are we still seeing this culture at the time when our parliamentarians are becoming more and more educated either locally or abroad?

What kind of parliamentarians gets voted into power and do those with brutish public speaking skills really represent their constituencies? Or are they now becoming an embarrassment to their electorate and an insult to its intelligence?

I think this name-calling sessions that waste public money and glorify brute and arrogant ways of presenting opinion need to be ended.

But how? What must we do? Where do we begin?

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