No Concept of Liberty

As we were saying...

2006-09-22T21:28:00.000+08:00

It appears that the new regulations, which provide a pathetic semblance (but some semblance nonetheless) of labour rights for migrant workers in Singapore, have finally taken effect, with a conviction for some bitch who forced her maid to climb out of her window to clean the outside of it. ChannelNewsAsia reports here.

This sort of shit really annoys me. Of course, the lack of any laws protecting the right of migrant workers to safe and humane working conditions was (is?) an outrage, but it is mind-boggling that, even had no laws existed prohibiting such behaviour, an employer would actually make her maid do something that is so obviously unacceptable and unsafe. Indeed, the maid in question is fortunate to be alive: there have a few cases in the past where maids have fallen to their deaths as a result of acrobatically balancing on window ledges in order to 'clean the outside'. In any case, appliances (which are, incidentally, extremely inexpensive) exist which allow one to clean one's window without fear of death. Why these employers did not simply buy these appliances and provide them to their maids is beyond comprehension.

Also incidentally, it has been most convenient for Ng Eng Hen to trumpet these new regulations when the Roman Catholic diocesan Justice and Peace Commission called for their introduction more than ten years ago. Of course, when such ideas are put forward by people who are not government ministers, they are naturally 'Marxist' and thus the originators of such ideas must be arrested under the ISA. Perhaps it is progress after all; ten years ago, such ideas meant the arbitrary imprisonment of Catholic diocesan workers as Marxist conspirators, today, these ideas have become government policy.

But this then brings us to what Quentin Skinner has been on about with his 'Third Concept of Liberty'. Skinner's so-called neo-Roman theory of liberty is most apropos here. This theory is that one is not free insofar as one's so-called 'rights' and 'freedoms' and held in trust by the authorities. One is a slave, and one's rights and not truly rights but privileges, granted to one by an indulgent prince. This is the answer we must give to all who continue to laud the technocratic, top-down 'reform' being pursued by Lee fils and friends. Of course, a shift from bad policy to good policy is to be welcomed, but ultimately, we must not be content simply with remaining slaves/dogs, to whom scraps of freedom are to be given when it is judged convenient by our masters. We must not be content until there are no masters or slaves, but only democratic and unaccountable leaders, agents and not rulers of the people.

Waiting for a funeral

2006-08-31T23:59:00.000+08:00

First of all, I must of course apologise for my very long absence, which I must put down to laziness, as well as basic exhaustion -- I don't know if I can really be bothered arguing against the bullshit that goes on in Singapore anymore.

Take for example, the lastest case of Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi, only 19 years old, who has been convicted of importing heroin into Singapore. Naturally, he is facing the death penalty. Isn't that nice? Amnesty has more here, but really I have little hope for Tochi. He is Nigerian, and the Singapore establishment know his case won't excite much sympathy because the Singapore public are simply racist, and won't give much of a shit about his fate.

Of course, the same old nonsense will be trotted out in justification of taking this young man's life. It is necessary, it is claimed, in order to deter drug dealers from entering Singapore. Strangely, given that Singapore has the highest per capita rate of execution in the world, and most of these execution are for drug-related offences, no one seems to question why on earth the supposed deterrent effect doesn't seem to be detering these new cases which seem to crop up year after year after year.

However -- and herein lies the reason for the exhaustion I mentioned above -- I've realised those who think there is some kind of serious debate about this issue going on here are utterly mistaken. Using reason is pointless here because the Singapore government mafia and totally impervious to reason. Indeed, there is no debate either way, for no thinking, sane, reasonable person could find any justification for taking the life of a 19 year old boy (that's three bloody years younger than I am for God's sake) or indeed of any person, for an offense that neither directly causes death nor poses any immediate threat to society, and through a legal system which is crafted to assume guilt and impose mandatory death sentences for such offences. The thinking world, i.e. the world of adults who have moved past the mental age of four, knows there is no debate here. The mandatory death penalty for drug offences is repugnant, and can never be justified.

But in the world of the Singapore mafia, and the drugged population fed on pedestrian, inane, half-truths by a propaganda mouthpiece media, there is also no debate. This is a literal fact. There is no policy debate about anything fundamental; all the debate there is is about technocratic details of already existing policy. Singapore is governed by the 'home-truths' and private prejudices of Lee Kuan Yew and his mafia and the rest is just the icing on the cake, or rather the flies on the turd.

Now, I realise this makes me sound like a rabid, conspiracy-mongering, Chee Soon Juan-like figure. And one month ago, I would have reacted in the same way to some of the comments I am myself making here. But one month ago, I had not had the misfortune of working in the so-called Foreign Service of Singapore; I had not had the chance to listen to Ambassadors and High Commissioners and Desk Directors mention 'Lee Kuan Yew's book' every few sentences and the convoluted and supremely uninteresting and unobjective history of Singapore in the 1960s contained therein. I had not had the opportunity to learn that our fanatical fear and loathing of Malaysia, and our ridiculous inferiority/superiority complex is almost entirely driven by the private hopes and fears of that one man, Lee Kuan Yew, literally four decades ago. The only response when I hear this crap being spouted from the mouths of these High Commissioners, Ambassadors and Desk Directors, crap which they think are pearls of wisdom being carefully imparted to an ignorant younger generation, is to say: 'I don't care. And neither should you.'

So really all we're doing is, in Yawning Bread's phrase, waiting for a funeral. Not just a literal funeral of course, although that would certainly be a start. Once the Dear Leader is gone, perhaps his heir will not be so strong. Perhaps the fundamental -- and fundamentally repugnant -- values will be torn away and replaced by something more humane, more reasonable, more compassionate.

Until that time, there will be a lot more funerals to endure. When your basic values are the fascist ones of complete regard for the loony ideas of your Fuhrer, and the complete disregard for the worth evident in every human being, regardless of their intellectual, physical or emotional capacity, then one or two deaths along the way are nothing to lose too much sleep over.

As for me, I'll be waiting for that funeral.

Quote of the Day

2006-05-22T08:11:00.000+08:00

Since someone posted a comment obliquely alluding to Christianity, I've decided we could do with a nice quote from St Ambrose:

"It is not with your own wealth that you give alms to the poor, but with a fraction of their own which you give back; for you are usurping for yourself something meant for the common good of all. The earth is for everyone, not only for the rich."

Indeed.

The Day After

2006-05-07T08:17:00.000+08:00

My people, what have I done to you
How have I offended you? Answer me!

I led you out of Egypt,
from slavery to freedom,
but you led your Saviour to a cross.

My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

What more could I have done for you.
I planted you as my fairest vine,
but you yielded only bitterness.

My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

I led you from slavery to freedom
and drowned your captors in the sea,
but you handed me over to your high priests.

My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

One Last Thing

2006-05-06T14:43:00.000+08:00

I think if you've read my earlier posts then I don't need to say more about how you should vote. But one last thing -- some of you might be thinking 'I don't like the way things are going now, but the alternative party candidates probably won't be able to do much better. So why should I vote for them?' You might thus be thinking of casting a spoilt vote, or even of voting for the PAP, just to be safe.

If you are, you should think again. Without a base in Parliament, non-PAP parties simply can't sustain much momentum. They have little resources, they are under constant threat of defamation suits and other attacks on their character (and finances). They have no access to the media, and outside of election time they can't hold rallies so there is no way they can speak up or communicate with the electorate in a mass way. They have to start from somewhere, and if you withhold your vote from them, you are yourself complicit in the fact that opposition candidates remain 'not good enough'. If you think Singapore deserves to evolve into a mature democracy, then please do not hesistate to give an alternative party your vote.

What if you think the alternative party contesting your constituency is really unsavoury/incompetent? Well, if you're thinking that way, many other voters are probably thinking in the same way. To be honest, if you live somewhere like Sembawang, there is no real chance that the alternative party will win a majority. But that shouldn't prevent you from voting against the party which in its last five years in government has done little to provide succour for the disadvantaged, and has certainly done little in leaving even a small private sphere of non-interference for the individual citizen. Protest votes aren't irresponsible. In certain circumstances, they're the best you can do.

So, if you have yet to cast your vote, please think on these things.

What You Won't Read About in the Straits Times II

2006-05-03T06:34:00.000+08:00

During the 2004 US presidential elections, much hype centred on the role of the 'new media', especially political blogs and podcasts, and their success in raising the profile and campaign contributions of candidates like Howard Dean. Much was also made about how they would provide an alternative source of information and comment from the sycophantic Fox News and the other 24-hour news networks.

Well, I don't know how the US fared in the Reporters Sans Frontieres global ranking of press freedom, but I'm fairly certain the American press was ranked quite a bit higher than 140th. Yes, that's right, Singapore was ranked 140th, below Russia, Afghanistan and Bhutan, for press freedom. If political blogs and podcasts played even a tiny role in the 2004 US election, their potential impact in terms of providing an alternative (i.e. more reliable) news source in Singapore must be exponentially higher.

Of course, the PAP has taken steps to ensure that even the freedom of speech on the internet is severely constricted. It has, for example, banned podcasts, and has established fairly strict rules on the discussion of the elections and political issues on blogs. Nevertheless, there have been a good number of new blogs (and old) which have dedicated space to covering the election. I include a partial list below, but please feel free to suggest others if you know of them:

http://sgrally.blogspot.com
http://www.yawningbread.org
http://commentarysingapore.blogspot.com
http://www.djourne.net/sgelection06/
http://singaporeelection.blogspot.com
http://electionrally.blogspot.com
http://singabloodypore.blogspot.com
http://happycitizen.blogspot.com/

What's interesting I think is that from my perusal of the comments pages on some of these blogs, there is a real feeling among bloggers and blogbrowsers that the media in Singapore is utterly unreliable and filled with biased reporting and sycophantic praise for the PAP. Obviously the realisation that the media can't be trusted and thus that reliable information should only be sought elsewhere is the first, tentative step towards breaking the monopoly that the state-controlled media have on public debate.

An excellent example of this is the contrast between comments I've read about what I will call 'the James Gomez soap opera' -- where the general feeling is that it was an honest careless and most importantly insignificant mistake by Gomez -- and the declarations of anathema now emanating from the Singapore press. Indeed, there seems to be a significant amount of residual public outrage over the National Kidney Foundation scandal, and particularly with Mrs Goh Chok Tong's 'peanuts' comment, and the attempt by the PAP to kick up a fuss over the Gomez saga seems oddly to have re-focused attention on that, by way of contrast as it were.

In any case, my advice is read the Straits Times and to watch the news only if you're feeling like a bit of comedy (or outrage, if you are so inclined), and even then, to prepare way before hand a big bucket of salt.

What You Won't Read About in the Straits Times

2006-05-03T06:23:00.000+08:00

Let Us Face the Future

2006-05-01T04:33:00.000+08:00

Ok, I know I've neglected this blog for more than two months now, and I do apologise, but I've really been very busy. But, as you know, 6 May 2006 is polling day for the Singapore general elections, and I think it's time I spoke a little about this.

When the PAP won with an increased margin of popular support at the last general elections, I felt intensely frustrated. I hadn't expected them to lose, of course, and indeed they were returned to power on nomination day. But, I had expected at least a slight erosion of support for them. I thought that four years of economic hardship would have undercut the basis of their legitimacy, i.e. their claim that they provide and guarantee economic growth and development. Unemployment was rising, and there was frustration over the 'foreign talent' issue. Unfortunately, the PAP once again decided to use the politics of intimidation -- fearing that they would lose Cheng San GRC, they reverted to their old tactics of defamation suits and biased attacks in the press. Besides the big stick, they also offered the carrot of 'upgrading', using it quite shamelessly in Potong Pasir in fact. In any case, I think people were faced with a genuinely bewildering situation -- structural adjustment in the economy -- and decided to stick with tried and trusted solutions. This year, however, I think there is a real sense that the tide is turning. The economy has faltered, and despite high growth rates income inequality has widened. I can't say I have a mastery of the stats or that I can speak from personal experience, but from reading other blogs I think I can say with some certainty that material conditions for the average Singaporean have declined. I think the main reason the parties like the SDP under Chee Soon Juan and the Workers' Party under JBJ have done badly in the past is not so much the lack of credibility of such candidates but a wrong focus. Most working-class people are probably not that interested in civil liberties. While I have argued in the past that it is misguided and unreasonable to claim that certain people are not fit for democracy or don't care for or don't want democracy, I meant that when democracy is properly understood and when the average reasonable wishes of the average reasonable person are understood, it is reasonable to say that everyone desires democracy. The problem here is that not everyone explicitly cares about democracy. And it is mostly the explicit and conscious opinions of the electorate that count most in an election. Of course, the main blame for the state of public apathy and illiberalism must be traced back to the PAP and the media that they control. But blame games, while they have their place, don't often win elections.

Nonetheless, the recent and now infamous Channel News Asia show, reported on by The Economist, which featured a few young professionals talking to Lee Kuan Yew demonstrates that middle-class opinion among the young is probably shifting. I doubt that this explicit concern for democracy and civil liberties is shared by the majority, but I think a substantial portion of educated opinion is now broadly critical of the more outrageous breaches of fundamental civil liberties and political rights that are routine in Singapore. Moreover, I suspect that many young people in the lower middle classes (I apologise for these vague terms being bandied about but in the absence of any election studies or opinion polls in Singapore vague speculation is the best I can do) who have grown up in fairly affluent surroundings no longer care very much for the PAP's old chestnut of 'hard work saves the day (and the GDP growth)'. Consumerism and sentimentality seem to be the order of the day among this social group, and appeals to national unity and greater future glory and material abundance at the price of obedience and hard work, are unlikely to appeal today. For this I need only direct you to certain blogs, such as this one. (Ignore the long discussions about weekend quickies and penis length though, as they are not really that relevant to our present concerns. Although I suppose they do also illustrate my point in some twisted way.) Anyway I've rambled on for long enough now, and I have an essay to write. But just look at the wonderful picture of a Workers' Party rally at Hougang, which I've included right at the top of my post. I cribbed this from a really really good post at Yawning Bread, which I urge you all to read.

This is a bit of a rehash, but, just as Britain did in 1945 after the rubble of almost seven years of war, let us face the future. After the rubble of five years of wasted opportunities, of increasing hardship for many and a government whose concerns are more their own than our own, it really is time for us to face the future. If you are lucky enough to be able to vote on 6 May, make sure you use your vote wisely.

It's Snowing! (Part Deux)

2006-03-03T09:29:00.000+08:00

I realise the photos from the last time were actually quite pathetic. They are thus being supplemented by:

and

and

It's Snowing!

2006-02-25T07:27:00.000+08:00

The evidence:

and

and

No!

2006-02-06T05:39:00.000+08:00

I have just read this very depressing report by Human Rights Watch on abuses in the Russian armed forces. The accounts from recruits about their treatment at the hands of more senior conscripts sounds very familiar (though, of course, much more vile than what is the norm on Vile Isle) and is absolutely repugnant. However, if you need some of the interviews with the abusers/abused you'll realise the psychology of perpetuating abuse as a compensation for past abuse is shockingly similar to Vile Isle.

Actually, similarly degrading acts were perpetrated in the US Navy and Canadian Army not too long ago (at least according to Human Rights Watch) but it seems these institutions have recently realised that -- surprise, surprise -- systematically abusing and degrading your personnel is likely to reduce their level of trust and confidence in each other and in their superior officers -- not to mention in the entire military organisation. Oh, and there's that other insignificant issue that it's apt to cause long-term physical and mental damage as well. But I suppose such pansy considerations are not too important to the generals.

More will follow soon: 4th week is very busy for me.

I Am Amused

2006-01-30T18:18:00.000+08:00

Jaques Peretti for the Guardian:

In a perplexing and little-known 1970s erotic thriller with the half off-putting, half-intriguing title of The Sex Thief (directed by Martin Campbell, who went on to make Bond movies), there is a single scene, lasting barely 20 seconds, that pretty much encapsulates the entire male attitude towards his penis (and, by extension of that penis, the female sex). This is the scene. A naked woman is lying on a bed. The Sex Thief - a burglar who breaks in to women's flats and takes liberties with more than just their video recorders - stands enigmatically by the window in his 1970s underpants. The camera remains on the woman's face as this Milk Tray man in a balaclava (and not much else) approaches. "No! No!" she gasps as he brings his crotch closer and closer to her face. He unpeels his 1970s briefs. "Oh yes!" she gasps, fainting in amazement.

Stupidity

2006-01-25T07:34:00.000+08:00

ChannelNewsAsia reports here and here that the PAP (in particular Ng Eng Hen and Lee Hsien Loong) are urging the Workers' Party to revise their 2006 manifesto because the proposals to abolish Residents Committees and racial quotas for HDB flats are too radical and 'undermined the basic principles on which Singapore depends'.

This is by far some of the most stupid crap I've heard in a long time. The Workers' Party manifesto is, naturally, the prerogative of the Workers' Party. That's the point of a manifesto -- it is supposed to represent the views and programme of a particular party. There is absolutely no reason why the Workers' Party should feel obliged to change their election manifesto just because some other party thinks it's too prickly. If parties agreed to remove issues which upset the other parties from their manifestos, we might as well not have an election.

As Lee Hsien Loong and friends have been saying for so long, 'if you feel so strongly about these issues, form your own party and fight it out in an election'. Well, that's precisely what the Workers' Party is doing. But apparently, such 'sensitive' reform proposals 'should not be used as General Election issues', at least according to Mr Ng/Hen. Yes, only issues which have been carefully selected and deemed acceptable by the ruling party should qualify as legitimate election issues. That way, we will ensure a free and fair election that is not a waste of everyone's time. This pre-selection will in no way mean that the mindset and worldview of the PAP will be externally imposed on the election debates. It just means we will have more responsible and sensible discussion, say, about whether we should nationalise garbage collection.

I need to know: does Ng/Hen actually hear what he's saying?

Whatever

2006-01-20T05:03:00.000+08:00

The Economist apologises:

We recognise that the statements attributed to Mr Lee in the obituary on Devan Nair and which are referred to in Mdm Yeong Yoon Ying’s letter, are false. We apologise to Mr Lee for having published them, and we unreservedly withdraw them. We have agreed to pay Mr Lee damages and to indemnify him for all costs incurred by him in connection with this matter.

I especially enjoyed the part I have highlighted in bold. I wonder if KYjelLee donates the money he makes from these neat little suits to charity as he claims he does with the damages he wins from Singapore opposition politicians.

On a separate note: are you fucking kidding me?

Ouch!

2006-01-18T21:45:00.000+08:00

TODAYonline reports that 'Violent protesters at World Bank, IMF meetings face caning, imprisonment'. What a pity. I had hoped a diverse range of civil society and anti-globalisation groups would be descending on Singapore this year. Now it seems only protesters who are also SM and corporal punishment enthusiasts will be coming.

All the same, it will be interesting how this plays out. Singapore is keen on improving its international image, and I'm sure will be orchestrating a suitably 'vibrant' range of public assemblies and processions, all (not so) subtly proclaiming the wonders of the Lee Mark II age. (Think 1936 Berlin Olympics and the wonders it did for Hitler.)

Nevertheless, it might be rather an embarrassment when it becomes widely known that under Singapore law, any gathering of more than five people is illegal without a police permit. Yes kids, remember that time you walked around Orchard Road with your Sec One classmates? Doing that was actually breaking the law! Wow.

The way I see it, this is a lose-lose for the Singapore government. If the demonstrations turn out peaceful, the local population may finally get it into their heads that such things don't always end up in rioting, death, bloodshed and national education videos. If the demonstrations do turn violent (whatever that means), I'd like to see them caning a few Canadians or South Koreans under the full glare of the international press. Ouch.

Word of the Day

2006-01-16T18:18:00.000+08:00

OK, this is somewhat out of point, but:

eleemosynary , adjective:

1. Of or pertaining to alms or alms-giving; charitable. Eleemosynary House, Corporation, one established for the distribution of alms, etc.

quotations: 1630 "These her eleemosinary acts... are almost vanished." Risdon; 1827 "The blind eleemonsynary spirit inculcated by the Romish church is notoriously the cause... of beggary." Hallam.

2. Dependent on or supported by alms.

quotations: 1654 "If we be a mere elemosynary Parliament we are bound to do his drudgery." G. Goddard; 1667 "Is not the whole World the Alms-house of God Almighty... in which he had a right... to place us his eleemosynary Creatures?" H. More .

3. Of the nature of alms; given or done as an act of charity; gratuitous.

quotation: 1849 "Eleemosynary relief never yet tranquillized the working classes." C. Bronte.

Something new every day.

Death by Mindeath

2006-01-02T21:50:00.000+08:00

Second Sergeant Ong Jia Hui's death has been shrugged off by Mindeath. Although the 24-year-old Army regular had 10kg of equipment strapped to his body when he drowned off Changi Naval Base in June this year, the 'Defence' Minister dismissed this as 'not unusual for [Ong's] unit'. Realising that everyone with half a brain would realise that swimming with a 10kg load is an invitation to drown (which I assume is the meaning of his cryptic 'It may seem unusual for a civilian or even an ordinary soldier to carry equipment like that' comment) he resorts to Mindeath's set-piece response: the training was 'tough but progressive'. Of course a normal person would have tried to find a way for the divers to board to ship with lighter equipment (what, after all, is DSTA for?) but no, we can 'train them progressively' and, in the last resort, dice with their lives:

Military training is such that it has to be realistic for it to be useful, and the people will be ready. From time to time, there will be incidents and accidents, even with the best of efforts. I think the Singapore public is mature enough to understanding it.

And, no, actually I'm not 'mature' (i.e. sheep-like) enough to understand why people have to die to defend the status quo against some imaginary threat. I don't understand why young people have to die in the name of realistic training, and unnecessarily dangerous procedures have to continue while the hapless personnel who have to actually carry out the 'training' are blamed and branded as negligent whenever something goes wrong.

Happy Christmas!

2005-12-26T10:13:00.000+08:00

Ok, a day late, but still. I'm munching on mince pies and reading The Economist's obituary for Devan Nair -- I'll post some choice bits soon when I have time. By the way, I'm back in Singapore for the next three weeks so don't forget to ring me for a coffee (well those of you who know my number anyway).

Oh and there was a really amusing opinion column in yesterday's ST -- by the ST's resident lapsed Catholic Ignatius Low -- about how (pious) people who carp on about The True Meaning Of Christmas are bratty and annoying and spoil people's enjoyment of Christmas. Unfortunately for me, I endured a two-hour long confirmation of this phenomenon when I had to go along with my parents to their Christmas morning service (which even they slept through by the way). Like what Holly Q has reported about her parish priest banning festive Christmas decorations, the torturous Christmas service I attended had all the fun traditional carols thrown out, to be replaced with more 'devotional' hymns, all of which had obscure and asinine tunes, and (of course) truly cringe-worthy lyrics. While people in the US have been bemused by their phoney-war on Christmas, I'm not sure I'm too pleased by puritanical attempts to cut out all the cultural bits of Christmas and re-invent it as a purely religious holiday, which it never was anyway.

One piece of good news though: the Ministry of Health has taken steps to monitor church groups who show up at public hospitals to sing carols to prevent them from proselytising to the patients. I can think of nothing more annoying than falling sick during Christmas and having people pretend to come and bring me some musical cheer and then not-so-subtly shoving a gospel tract in my face. Tan Tock Seng Hospital has even banned the singing of 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' though, apparently because of its 'religious overtones', which I thought was a bit much.

Asian Values, or The Follies of Cultural Determinism

2005-12-10T07:25:00.000+08:00

The Economist has a good report in this week's issue on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Strange how those 100,000 people who marched on 4 December were living in Hong Kong, an Asian territory, were mostly ethnic Chinese, an Asian ethnic group, and were holding banners with slogans written in the Cantonese dialect of the Chinese language, a major Asian language.

Strange, because they're supposed to be sitting quietly at home with their families and thinking how best to submit to their Prince, and if they are women, to their husbands, or if they are children, to their parents. We Asians are different, see. We have no conception of Enlightenment values, no desire for representative government, and no attachment to the value of the individual in moral and political considerations. Instead, we're supposed to act as though our every thought, word and deed were dictated by the precepts of a long-dead Chinese philosopher whose works 90% of us have not even read. We're supposed to think only in collective terms, putting our families, our clans, our communities, and our state above ourselves. When we want the best for our families, that isn't because we are normal human beings shaped by the rise (in recent decades) of the nuclear family. It's because we are 'Asians' whose thoughts are inevitably controlled by our 'culture' and that 'culture' dictates that collective and involuntary associations like kinship groups are more important than individuals.

That's right, folks. All that stuff you read about submissive Asian bitches -- it's all true, and it's all been pre-determined by the wise words and piercing sociological insight of Confucius (who died in 479 BC). Well, that is, if you believe this crap from that shining intellectual light, Lee Kuan Yew:

We also have a different culture, a different way of doing things. The individual is not the building block. It's the family, the extended family, the clan [Editor: Hahaha!] and the state. The five crucial relationships are you and the prince [Editor: see previous comment] or the ruler, you and your wife, you and your children, you and your parents, you and your friends. If those relationships are right, everything will work out well in society.

By the way, Mr Lee, you know those characters in big white bold strokes on the black banner in the foreground? (Hint: It's in Chinese -- you know, that language you tried to learn when you reached your 30s in order to win more votes?) It says 'People Power'. Not 'May the Emperor live for ten thousand years!'

Oh, but I've got to go now. I've got a foot-binding appointment that would be torture to miss.

Nguyen Tuong Van, 1980-2005

2005-12-02T07:45:00.000+08:00

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.

Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

Slavery Makes A Comeback

2005-11-26T20:23:00.000+08:00

I've just learned that Melvyn Tan (whose period instrument recordings of some Mozart sonatas are really quite good) was once from Singapore but escaped when he was 12, when he went to attend the Yehudi Menuhin School in Sussex. Yet he remained liable for National Slavery, despite having left the country at the age of 12 and having later renounced his Singapore citizenship, taking up UK citizenship.

This makes very little sense to me. How can someone be liable to perform 30 months of forced labour simply because he was born in Singapore? How on earth can this be justified as a contractual relationship? When I say National Slavery, it starts to sounds more and more accurate -- if one is bound by birth to perform NS, and that liability is not removed if one emigrates, then surely it is literally a form of slavery.

I'd link to the ST article, but their archive sucks, so I'll just quote it in full here:

Pianist pays NS dues - 28 years later

By Kristina Tom

AFTER staying away from Singapore for nearly 30 years because he defaulted on his national service, pianist Melvyn Tan has finally paid his dues. The 49-year-old, who has lived in the United Kingdom for the last 37 years, has paid a fine for not fulfilling his national service duty and will be performing at the Esplanade next month. In an interview with The Sunday Times, a visibly relieved Mr Tan said that he is glad to have put the past behind him. He has not stepped onto Singapore soil all these years because he had feared that he would be arrested and thrown into jail. But his 86-year-old father and 80-year-old mother are getting too old to make the regular trips to London to visit him at his home in Notting Hill, London. So he decided to take a 'risk'. After informing the authorities of his intention to return, he came home in April for a court hearing.

The hearing lasted 30 minutes but he had never been so nervous in his life. 'It was very, very nerve-wracking,' he said. To his relief, he was asked only to pay a fine. He claims that he cannot remember the amount. Under the Enlistment Act, those who evade national service can be fined up to $5,000 or sent to jail for up to three years, or both. Although Mr Tan became a British citizen in 1978, he was still a Singapore citizen when he failed to fulfil his NS duties, making him answerable for the offence in a Singapore court.

In 1994, The Straits Times quoted a lawyer who said that one of his clients, a 39-year-old French citizen, was arrested at the airport on arrival, fined and made to complete nine months of training.

Mr Tan, who has an elder sister, was studying at Anglo-Chinese School when he left Singapore to study at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Sussex. He was then 12 years old. After he finished his course, he stayed on in England to study at the Royal College of Music instead of coming home to serve national service in 1977. He said: 'When I was at the Royal College and I got my final call-up, I was just on the brink of starting a career. I thought about it and thought about it and realised that I was not going to get this chance again.' So I made that very difficult decision to not return. It meant I could never come back.'

The part about the French citizen who was forced to undergo 9 months of training was farcical, to say the least. Other examples of farce include the bitter gripings of angry forum letter writers, who gnashed their teeth about how their sweat and tears were only worth $5000. They somehow failed to factor in the human costs of being legally prevented from seeing his parents. (Although I must say the house in Notting Hill sounds very nice indeed.) But then again, I suppose that is still better than a lifetime of bitterness and indelible psychological damage. Oh well.

Oh and Melvyn is playing at the Jacqueline Du Pre Music Building in Hilary Term. Sounds like fun.

Great Minds Think Alike

2005-11-25T23:33:00.000+08:00

Having been invited by the Asia Pacific Society, Anwar Ibrahim was over at Balliol College giving a talk on economics and democracy in Asia. What amused me most was when this idiot in the audience challenged Anwar over his claim that a free press was necessary for Malaysia to move ahead. The idiot insisted that since Malaysia was a multi-racial society, there was simply too much risk of a free press exploiting racial issues and stirring up ethnic tension. Anwar became visibly irritated, and asked the idiot if he thought the ability of newspapers to effectively expose corrupt practices had anything to do with racial issues. He proceeded to say that unless Malaysians thought that they were plain stupid, there was no reason why they should think that they would be unable to distinguish between responsible journalism and bigoted rhetoric. It was most amusing to see that besides being bound together by ties of kinship and shared culture, Singapore and Malaysia also have the same tastes in propaganda and lame excuses for authoritarian government.

Punishment, Please III

2005-11-20T21:45:00.000+08:00

Apparently, moral bankruptcy and a predilection for unjust executions are not confined to the Singapore government. The Guardian reports on a spate of new attacks on Christians by jihadists in Indonesia. Laskar Jihad, which isn't so interested in planning extensive terrorist attacks as in randomly kidnapping Christian schoolgirls on their way to class and cutting off their heads with machetes, has somehow got it into their heads that brutally murdering teenage girls is in accordance with the will of God.

I remember watching this clip on ChannelNewsAsia of a group of Indonesians jihadists carrying out a pogrom on restaurants which chose to remain open in the daytime during Ramadan. As they went about smashing up windows and overturning tables while cheering and chanting Quranic verses, they looked a) retarded, b) like there was no shadow of doubt in their minds that they were doing the right thing and c) unafraid of being sanctioned by the law.

I think c) is the big problem here. Unless the Indonesian government takes more determined action to hunt down these assholes and lock them up for a long time, these people will think that they can act with impunity. I suspect that these are not really the willing-to-blow-themselves-up kind of jihadists. They appear to be petty bigots and sadists who would rethink their commitment to such atrocities if they were fairly certain that they would end up in jail for the next few decades.

Punishment, Please II

2005-11-19T22:19:00.000+08:00

Here's Andrew West for the Sydney Morning Herald renewing the call for a boycott of Singapore goods. His characterisation of Singapore as 'a petty dictatorship that pretends to be so much more' is exactly right. I also note in the comments columns that Australians of Asian descent are particularly turned off by Singapore's Asian values rhetoric, or 'Asian values shit', as one Burmese-Australian called it. When you see that the campaign to save Nguyen is headed by two young Asian-Australian women, you really begin to see how hollow the Asian values arguments ring. And indeed, why should the Singapore government presume to speak for all Asians? In claiming an Asian values apologia for their authoritarianism and moral bankruptcy, they have silenced all those right-thinking Asians who through no fault of their own have been thus branded with the mark of slavery.

I'm also pleased to note that Lex Lasry intends to continue an international campaign for the abolition of the death penalty for drug offences in Singapore. Unfortunately, given the helpless opposition of Phillip Alston, the UN special rapporteur for extra-judicial and summary executions, I am not quite sure that such a campaign will achieve much. Still, one must hope.

Murder in December

2005-11-18T08:29:00.000+08:00

The date has been set. That stubborn, morally stunted cabal of self-styled ministers will have its way. One more hanging, one more flogging, it doesn't really make much of a difference to them. After all, did not Goh Chok Tong, when once asked how many people were executed in Singapore the year before, say 'I have more important things to worry about'? What does matter, however, is letting everybody know they're in charge. That's what they're all about really. And if that involves shitting on everyone else, if it involves exercising the power of life and death over others for the most trivial of reaons, then so much the better.

For those of you who would prefer to have less infantile, pathetic and nauseating creatures leading your government, and lording it over you, please remember to send a big 'fuck you' to your local PAP MP(s) when you vote in the incipient 2006 General Elections. If, like me, you are disenfranchised as a result of living in a walk-over constituency, then... er... hmmm... uh...

Tough Times For Poor George

2005-11-06T07:26:00.000+08:00

Being the fans of paternalism that they are, the Singapore government likes to pretend that they somehow speak for the Singaporean people. They like to think that their policies are determined by a magnanimous regard for our welfare. They are a responsible government, and their responsibility is to us, their ignorant and vulnerable 'charges'.

This habit of theirs is usually extremely annoying. But in the case of a recent letter from George Yeo to Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minsiter, 'extremely annoying' should be replaced with 'nausea-inducing'. Yeo writes:

I received your letter of 25 October 2005 with a heavy heart. I fully understand why the family of Mr Nguyen Tuong Van and many Australians must find it hard to accept the President's decision not to grant clemency.

[...]

We, in [sic] our part in Singapore, have a responsibility to protect the people of Singapore from the scourge of drug addiction, which has destroyed many lives and inflicted great suffering on many families. We also have a responsibility to prevent Singapore from becoming a conduit for the trafficking of illicit drugs in the region.

In his great solicitude for the people of Singapore, of which I assume I am a member, George Yeo seems to have come up with an apologia for the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking. Yes, that's right: in order to protect people like me from the 'scourge' (brilliant choice of words there, especially since the government remains committed to the actual judicial scourging of its citizens for petty offences) of drug addiction, he has been driven, with what he says is 'a heavy heart', to very regrettably having to commit judicial murder and moral depravity. What tough times for poor George! What searching moral dilemmas!

Sadly, the only succour I can give to poor George is to tell him to fuck himself. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be too pleased if someone said that he authorised an act of obvious moral depravity because of his 'responsibility' to me. As far as I am aware, I have no need of other people committing atrocities so that I can remain safe from the 'scourge' of drug addiction, or indeed any kind of scourge.

In any case, a moment's reflection will reveal that this 'we need to murder Nguyen in order to protect our citizens' line of argument is crap. Indeed, there are to me only two possible justifications for the death penalty -- one is the purgative justification (which by definition must only apply in the most extraordinary of cases, and thus also on the very rarest of occasions) while the other is the protection from immediate danger argument.

The latter argument is interestingly the ingenious justification used by the Catholic Church to claim that its position on the death penalty has been consistent through the ages (well, more or less). But, as the Catholic Church so rightly points out, that justification is no longer available in the modern age. It is inconceivable that any modern state, least of all a state like Singapore which possesses such a powerful apparatus of coercion, would only be able to protect its citizens through executing the criminal. I'm quite sure that our prisons are safe enough to make the possibility of even the most clever of convicts escaping almost negligible.

Moreover, Nguyen is obviously not a clear and present danger to the community. He is not violent, he does not have a previous criminal record, and he has expressed remorse for his crime by giving information about the drug ring he worked for, even though this might have endangered the lives of his family. To say that his death is required for the 'protection' of the Singaporean people is blatantly dishonest.

Of course, I'm sure some people will pipe up at this moment and point me to the 'deterrence' argument. The death of Nguyen will presumably protect me in an indirect way, and indeed the gut-churning injustice of his sentence will act as a further incentive for others not to do as he did.

But all deterrence arguments fail unless they can show that there is a significant deterrent effect over and above a long prison sentence. This is unlikely. Studies on the death penalty with regard to deterring criminals from committing murder have shown that the death penalty has no special deterrent effect. Furthermore, there have been no studies on the deterrent effect of the death penalty with regard to drug trafficking. In the absence of any hard empirical evidence, George Yeo's grunts about the need to kill Nguyen can be based only some mythical belief, probably formed long ago in the murky depths of Lee Kuan Yew's mind, that the death penalty has a special deterrent effect over and above imprisonment. (As for those who say that the death penalty intuitively has a greater deterrent effect, since it is obviously harsher than long-term imprisonment, I would ask them to consider whether someone's life is worth less than their 'intuitions').

Instead of saying all this crap about protecting Singaporeans, George Yeo should have said, 'We are a morally depraved government. We have no regard whatsoever for the basic moral claims of other human beings. All we care about is maintaining our immense and unaccountable power and our S$1000000-plus salaries. To that end, we’ll try to keep people happy by shoring up the economy. But beyond that, we couldn’t really give a fuck.’ That, at least, would have had the virtue of honesty.

The Forbidden City

2005-11-01T08:15:00.000+08:00

I found this late-Qing Imperial edict from 1810, and it was uncannily familiar:

Opium has a very violent effect. When an addict smokes it, it rapidly makes him extremely excited and capable of doing anything he pleases. But before long, it kills him. Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. Its use is prohibited by law. Now the commoner, Yang, dares to bring it into the Forbidden City. Indeed, he flouts the law! He should be turned over to the Board of Punishment, and should be tried and severely sentenced [my emphasis].

Of course this edict and the 'severe sentences' meted out failed to stem the spread of opium addiction. The Qing government's administrative machine was simply too weak to properly enforce the law. Its lame attempts to use harsh punishments as a deterrence failed.

This merely goes to show that it is effective law enforcement and not harsh punishments which will ensure that the drug trade does not expand unduely. Unfortunately, most people seem to forget this part of the story, preferring instead to rely on half-remembered, atavistic and irrational gobbets from their secondary-school Chinese classes: 'drugs dangerous... must stop... must punish... severely... no to Western imperialism... no to foreign intervention...' and so on.

Despair

2005-10-31T06:47:00.000+08:00

Sensible stuff from Holly Q (and I'm beginning to share her despair):

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act in Singapore, convicted drug traffickers face a mandatory death sentence. There was, in other words, no room for judges in Nguyen's trial to consider mitigating factors that might lead them to impose a more lenient sentence. This has led Singapore to the dubious honour of holding the world record for the highest number of executions per capita. According to Tim Goodwin, Anti-Death Penalty Campaign Coordinator at Amnesty International, Singapore has executed 420 people since 1991 - that's 420 people, out of a country that currently has only 4.2 million people.

(...)

Still, on 21 October 2005, President S.R. Nathan of Singapore denied Nguyen's plea for clemency. Singapore officials argued that Nguyen had received a fair trial, that the rights of victims and society outweighed his rights, and that Singapore had a "send a message" to drug traffickers elsewhere.

You would think that having sent the same message 420 times in the past fifteen years, Singapore would by now have managed to spread the word that the island is not a good place to traffic drugs. It seems, then, that "sending the message" through the execution of one man - who poses no further threat to society - won't really do anything to stop the next poor fool who decides to strap cocaine or heroin to himself before he marches through Changi Airport.

Of course, it's pointless arguing "the right to life" or "human dignity" with the Singaporean government. A government which believes it should have the power to inflict grievous bodily harm on people by caning them if they do wrong, or which maintains the right to use anti-personnel landmines, won't really care if they execute one more person.

(...)

What can one do? Write to the president, the Prime Minister? I feel utterly helpless. I could say "Singaporeans, show you care, and write to your MPs". But I know what their response would be - "Don't impose your liberal western values on us". It's completely depressing.

Cut To The Heart

2005-10-30T02:17:00.000+08:00

I read this off the CNA forum, but I think it bears repeating here. I recently had a long chat about post-independence Singapore history, and I think the one great suppressed theme is the strangled cry of 'Merdeka', once so ringing, so loud and so true, but now crushed under the great weight of cynicism and hypocrisy. It was no use at all replacing one undemocratic government with another -- the fact that the dictators are now home-grown is nothing to cheer about. So please listen up:

You people in Singapore will be judged elsewhere by your actions in how you treat this particular justice issue. I couldn't help but notice that there is little or nothing in your news media about this imminent execution. That doesn't change the fact, however, that you will all be responsible. Don't help the Australian government to manipulate your government into incarcerating and hanging Australian citizens in your country. It is your fault if you have acquiesced to a cunning regime which no longer bothers to inform you of what it does in your name. The old methods of caning and hanging still linger in your hearts and collective memories of the ruthless British colonial regime and the millenia of struggles of the peoples of Malaya, China and India. Those days are gone but you are still bowed by them.

Punitive Minds, Primitive Minds

2005-10-29T06:59:00.000+08:00

'A MURDERER KILLS A PERSON AFFECTS A FAMILY. A DRUG TRAFFICKER KILLS MANY PERSON AND AFFECT WHOLE OF THE SOCIETY.'

So says -- let us humour him by according these jottings the status of 'speech' -- Picaso (sic), a poster on a ChannelNewsAsia online forum about Nguyen's impending execution. Despite his illiteracy and his mistaken belief that shouting will make one's argument more persuasive, he has managed to sum up quite neatly the thoughts of many who support the death penalty for drug trafficking. It is their answer to the charge that the death penalty is absurdly disproportionate to the crime of importing drugs, and although I'm not sure if it has received official sanction from the goverment, it is I think floating in the minds of many Singaporeans.

Basically this argument sees murder and drug trafficking as analogous. The death penalty for drug trafficking (henceforth DPDT) is therefore as justified as the death penalty is for murder. (I personally am in favour of the death penalty for extraordinarily grotesque crimes -- so, for example, I accept that Saddam should be executed -- but not for ordinary murders, nonetheless I think that there is room for debate about the issue. My point here is that there is no room for debate about DPDT at all. It's immorality, stupidity and illegality are overwhelming. So basically I shall concentrate on demonstrating that DPDT is substantially different from the death penalty for murder and that while the latter may in some cases be justified, DPDT is never justified. Whether capital punishment per se is justified is another story for another day.) Another thing to bear in mind about this argument is that it is essentially retributive: the drug trafficker should face death because the harm he causes is as grave as death.

Supporters of this line of thought point to the empirical fact that a substantial number of heroin users eventually die from an overdose. Users of other hard drugs such as cocaine also potentially suffer great damage to their health, and in the case of crack cocaine, deaths from overdoses are also not unknown. On the basis of this fact (i.e. that consumption and especially addiction to hard drugs is very harmful and potentially fatal) they see an equivalence between murder and drug trafficking.

But this is clearly mistaken. For one thing, murder is not potentially fatal, it is a priori always fatal. Yes, the death of a drug addict may be the reasonably forseeable consequence of my selling drugs to him, but it is not the direct and inexorable consequence. That is surely an important distinction, legally if not always morally. For if not then, as I have said before, Marlboro execs, Absolut Vodka distributers, drunk drivers, hell even the people at KFC and McDonald's, should also be executed. They knowingly sell products which have the reasonably foreseeable consequence of potentially causing the death of consumers. Yet these people are not executed; they are not even in jail (well, ok some drunk drivers are jailed). Some of them are probably even given tax breaks.

Some may say 'oh but I think they should be executed'. Well, but the point is that at present they are not and the Singapore government has no intention to change that. And if they really think so, they should certainly find it morally disturbing that only one group of these individuals is thus penalised -- it should be morally imperative on them to campaign loudly for the execution of all these other irresponsible groups. It should also be morally imperative on them, by the way, to insist on the strict criminalisation of the sale and possession of tobacco and alcohol, since these may cause death through lung cancer, heart failure, or alcohol poisoning. But somehow I suspect that this will not be the case; I suspect the vast majority of people regularly consume some amount of tobacco or alcohol quite insouciantly.

Secondly, a murder victim does not consent to the murder, nor co-operate in any way with the murderer. On the other hand, when the drug user buys from the drug supplier, she is entering a contractual relationship. Some may argue that drug addicts are driven by their addiction and are thus cannot properly give consent. But this fails to note that their addiction must have had a beginning, and at the beginning they were surely not absolved by this 'I was addicted' excuse. Furthermore, those who claim that drug addicts are coerced by their addiction into using drugs are usually at the same time strangely unpersuaded by those who point out that many drug traffickers are driven to it by financial difficulty. To them, 'My poverty and not my will consents' is meaningless, whereas 'My addiction and not my will consents' is entirely meaningful. I do not mean to say that addiction doesn't screw up people's minds and cause them to do things they otherwise would not do (again, this is true of addiction a priori) -- accordingly I think drug suppliers and traffickers should be penalised in some way. But there is simply no moral equivalence to murder here because the addiction caveat has no over-riding significance; the death penalty would be completely disproportionate.

Indeed, a very simple thought experiment will demonstrate my points. Consider the following scenario: A is a drug dealer. A sells heroin to B. B dies of a heroin overdose. Now consider this other scenario: C is a drug dealer. C hates D intensely and decides D has to go. C intentionally injects D with an overdose of heroin. D dies. Now the result of both scenarios was the same. Both B and D die of a heroin overdose. But the two scenarios are vastly different -- and only the latter scenario can properly be classified as murder.

But this is not the end of the story. While the argument that trafficking heroin or crack cocaine is analogous to murder has at least the faint appearance of plausibility, this argument even more completely fails when applied to cannabis. There have been no documented cases of death from cannabis overdose. Yet Singapore law provides for the death penalty for cannabis trafficking.

But perhaps then we must rely on the deterrent argument, which was also hinted at in Picaso's gem of a turd. He claimed that drug trafficking 'AFFECT (sic) WHOLE OF THE SOCIETY (sic)'. I think most people who support DPDT are also thinking in terms of deterrence, but specifically deterrence in the context of preventing a potential social scourge. Another post from the CNA forum puts this more clearly: 'you seem to forget that drugs is a real social problem and the West cannot handle it so they refuse to acknowledge the repercussions in drug addicts, druglords, drug money, drug problems ... family lives are destroyed forever'.

I shall not dwell on the ineffectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrence since I think the evidence for that is fairly clear. I shall instead focus on why the supposedly terrible social consequences of drug-taking are no good reason to implement DPDT.

Firstly, I would question this caricature of the effects of drug-taking in countries with more liberal (what an understatement) drug laws. Contrary to what some people in Singapore think, drug use is not an epidemic in Western liberal democracies -- in fact, illegal drug use among the young has declined precipitously and the drug of choice these days is the perfectly legal alcohol. Having witnessed quite a few undergrad parties here, I can assure you that anecdotal evidence strongly confirms this trend. Indeed, as Yawning Bread points out, drugs (especially hard drugs) are much more of a problem in, say, Thailand or China, where authorities are also given to killing drug dealers, sometimes, as in Thailand, through what are in effect extra-judicial executions.

Secondly, there is again the problem of inconsistency. Gambling, for example, may be a social problem, but we all know what the Singapore government now thinks of that. And even before they decided to build the casinos, we didn't see Singapore Pools execs being hanged.

Thirdly, the idea that public interest should be of such great weight in sentencing that to unjustly impose a hugely disproportionate sentence on one man would still be legitimate is morally repugnant. Yet this idea is there, as another piece of barely intelligible rubbish from the CNA forum shows: 'To kill one drug trader, is better than to destroy of (sic) thousands of our country folks (sic)'. Unfortunately, this idea of balancing moral claims is ethically dubious, and the troubling moral issues surely come to fever pitch when we are talking about taking away someone's life. It might also be expedient to consider the fact that such arguments have been used throughout history to commit the most brazen injustices. Remember this guy called Jesus of Nazareth and what the high priest Caiaphas said about his crucifixion?

I could go on, but another issue about the Nguyen case calls for attention: some have banged on about the 'sovereignty' issue. Basically they think that Singapore law is clear on DPDT, and that he still did it despite knowledge of Singapore's infamously harsh laws. Thus, he has brought this on himself and should 'face the music'.

But this is merely an attempt to distract us from the issue at hand: the obvious and outrageous immorality of DPDT. It is the equivalent of saying 'Oh that Jew knew of the Nuremberg laws, but she still went ahead and refused to wear her yellow star. Well, then, to the gas chambers!'

For more, see here.

Woman, Behold Thy Son

2005-10-27T17:10:00.000+08:00

Singabloodypore has more on Nguyen Tuong Van, including an article from the Sydney Morning Herald which takes a look at the case from a more personal angle. Another article here from the Sydney Morning Herald gives us a look at Nguyen's face, as well as the face of his mother. I'm not sure how many remember this, but back when an anti-death penalty group in Singapore staged in concert in memory of Shanmugam, police censored the posters for the events, objecting in particular to the fact that Shanmugam's (smiling) face was splashed across the poster. Apparently showing his face constituted the outrageous act of 'glorifying a convicted criminal'.

And it now occurs to me that the whole law enforcement machine in Singapore would very much prefer us not to put a face on the people that are sent, in a way in our name, to their deaths. They would rather us shut it out of our minds, the troubling fact that these people have (had) lives, have (had) families, have (had) friends. It's much easier to sign up to killing a faceless dehumanised lump of criminal lard.

So, look long and hard. (I can't remember exactly now, but I think it was Helen Prejean who said something about 'seeing the face of Christ in him'.) And think about the life he once had, and the life he will now leave behind:

As his execution looms, Nguyen prays for God to watch over his family and friends, particularly his mother, Kim Nguyen, who collapsed yesterday while speaking to reporters.

Punishment, Please

2005-10-25T20:54:00.000+08:00

Now when I read this article (which was helpfully drawn to my attention by 'anonymous') I thought it would be one of those 'another day, another human rights abuse' type of story. Which it was. I first became aware of the case of Nguyen Tuong Van when I became involved in the (futile) campaign to save Shanmugam Murugesu's life. Now it looks like both Nguyen and Shanmugam will be lost to the gallows -- although Nguyen's case is much more disturbing from a procedural rights point of view, and it seems that the rights of the defendent and indeed all legal arguments which are deemed to be based on 'unimportant' technicalities basically count for fuck in a Singapore court.

What is interesting though about the article is that it ends with a call to action. Now I'm not at all sure that anything will ever come of it, seeing as how Vietnamese-Australian drug traffickers are not the sort of thing to ignite waves of public sympathy or even interest, but Mark Baker provides us with some really good tips on how we can all contribute to the punishment of Singapore:

They can boycott Singapore-owned companies such as Optus and Singapore Airlines, they can take their shopping holidays elsewhere, they can protest against the thousands of Singapore military who train on Australian soil and they can start flying to Europe via Bangkok — not a bad idea when a visit to the transit lounge at Changi Airport can finish in a cell at Changi prison.

Naturally the 'protest against thousands of Singapore military who train on Australian soil' part spoke the loudest to me, but all of them I think are sensible suggestions. Indeed, I shall assist Mr Baker's campaign by shamelessly (literally) plugging Thai Airways. Really, Singapore Airlines is shit, and they make a fortune out of ripping Singaporeans off.

Lux et Veritas II

2005-10-25T04:14:00.000+08:00

It seems the August 2005 ruling by a Hong Kong judge that laws prohibiting gay sex by men under the age of 21 were discriminatory has become something of a landmark and is attracting lots of press attention. BBC News has a photo journal on gay life in Hong Kong which can be found here. Some of the pics look scarily familiar, others sadly unfamiliar (i.e. those involving any sort of activism as opposed to those centred on getting tanned/laid).

Lux et Veritas

2005-10-23T07:08:00.000+08:00

From The Economist:

Hong Kong’s civil-rights groups were fuming in early October, after an anti-gay organisation won a government contract to instruct teachers on human rights and non-discrimination. The Christian Society for Truth and Light beat two other proposals—one from a Hong Kong University law professor and the other from the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor’s legal expert—for a contract to teach a 20-hour training course, starting in October.

The organisation has annoyed civil-rights groups for some time. It was the lone opponent to a September court ruling which overturned a ban on sodomy with or between men under 21. And last December, it distributed in schools leaflets that described homosexuality as a treatable mental illness, and ran a “sexual re-orientation” seminar that suggested that wearing a dress could cure lesbianism. Hong Kong’s education bureau has not explained its choice, insisting that there was no funny business in the bidding process.

Incidentally, Hong Kong has slipped in the WEF rankings to 28th, largely due to concerns over flagging rule of law since 1997. One country, two systems my arse.

New Economic Policy

2005-10-22T06:30:00.000+08:00

Although I am usually wary of such things, the 2005-2006 country rankings of economic competitiveness by the World Economic forum is instructive. Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden place highly, with Finland in first place, Sweden third and Denmark fourth. The Economist's Charlemagne column recently compared what it identified as a Nordic social model with the continental (essentially Franco-German) model. It pointed out while countries like Denmark and Sweden spend a lot on reducing poverty and have among the most generous unemployment benefits in Europe (and, let's face it, the world), they remain competitive by having much more flexible labour laws than France and Germany. This might also explain why French unemployment is now above 10% while the unemployment rate in Denmark is 6.4% and in Sweden about 5.9%.

The much more interesting thing is that Singapore ranks at number six, just below Taiwan. So yes, Singapore is competitive, but its competitiveness is not the product, as we are incessantly told by our Dear Leader(s), of artificially depressed wage costs or our effective lack of any social security or unemployment benefit (except for maybe CPF). If that were the case, we would be far more competitive than Sweden. It would also mean that a place like Hong Kong should be topping the competitiveness charts, which it isn't.

Of course this is all deeply unfashionable these days, but I actually do think we need more government spending on things like public health and unemployment benefit. The currnet level of medical coverage, especially for serious and chronic illnesses, is pathetic and I think morally deficient. And if you fear that any rise in welfare provision will bring about the 'erosion of competitiveness' that the government has been warning about for the last three decades, well, just take a look at the World Economic Forum report.

The State We're In

2005-10-21T04:54:00.000+08:00

I think there can be no better illustration of the failure that is the government's attempt to freshen up the arts scene in Singapore than the fact that one of this year's big shows looks set to be this shit. Note to the MITA (or whatever it is known as now): while you may think that mindless shows will have mass appeal, and while you may not actually be wrong in thinking that, where you are wrong is in thinking that an endless parade of mindless shows will not a) bore and b) turn people off permanently.

Oh and by the way, those of you who have any 30 minute-ish scripts you wish to proffer me for Drama Cuppers, please email me as soon as you can! (Especially if any of you have 'This Is My Body', I've been trying to find my copy of that, without success.)

100 Ways of Sodom

2005-10-11T16:22:00.000+08:00

Thanks to The Virtual Stoa for reminding me of this gem of a turd from the Book of Judges.

Basically, the story is about a guy who is travelling with his concubine. They stop for the night in some (Israelite) town and some other guy offers to let them spend the night in his house. Unfortunately, while these guys were having a nice hospitable dinner together, a mob from the town comes and bangs on the door, demanding that they get their hands on the visitor so that they can gang-rape him. The kind master of the house is naturally disgusted at their unnatural request, and offers them his virgin daughter and the other man's concubine so that they can gang-rape them instead. In the end, the first guy pushes his concubine out of the house and the mob gang-rape her through the night. By the time morning comes, the concubine is one the verge of death. She collapses on the floor outside the house, with one hand on the threshold. When her husband discovers her in this state, and when she does not give any response when he tells her to get up, he loads her onto his donkey and heads home. Thereafter, he cuts her body up into twelve pieces and sends one piece to each tribe of Israel.

By now, you should have noticed the keen similarities with the Sodom and Gomorrah story. Of course, for the Sodom story we don't have the corpse mutilation and dismemberment at the end, but we do have two entire cities destroyed by fire and brimstone.

So really the correct response when reading these things is not to try to argue them away by explaining how they are really about showing hospitality or whatever. The correct response is to regard them as the rabid tales of some barbaric ancient tribe and then toss them out of the window.

Rants and Raves

2005-10-08T23:40:00.000+08:00

Raves:

I've got a room in Meadows Building, which means my room is bigger, warmer and has a better view than most. I'd have preferred a room facing Meadows Quad instead of the meadow (Christ Church meadow = hordes of noisy tourists), but my room is quite high up so it isn't too bad really.

My upstairs neighbour is a brilliant Polish biochemist who worked in a Bosnian hospital before coming here. We had a really nice chat about the recent Polish elections and she invited me to visit her in Gdansk one day.

Rants:

Oxford apparently is not exempt from annoying jocks. Indeed the number of first years whose conversations revolve around Chelsea and Real Madrid and God knows what is distressingly high. There is this particularly annoying Scottish-BBC duo who think that acting like one is 15 years old is all the rage. It is not.

The university is unbelievably disorganised. Ones of the options I wanted to do (a quantification paper which teaches the use of chi-tests, regression analysis and the like) has been suspended because the guy who teaches it has been promoted to become the Principal of Hertford College -- or so they say -- and the History Faculty claims they can't find anyone else to teach it. Which, by the way, is completely unconvincing. This course isn't called 'cutting-edge statistical methods in the social sciences'. This course is about simple regression analysis and tests of statistical relevance. Even a first year grad student can teach that. I find it very hard to believe that in a university like Oxford they can't find one person who is able to teach it. More likely they can't find someone willing to teach it. But that should hardly be a consideration.

Christ Church actually does live up to its shitty aristocratic reputation. The number of insular and unengaged people walking around half-drunk in blazers and college scarves is not negligible. What is even more annoying is that the other people doing my course both fall into this category. I remember at Freshers' Dinner a Princeton exchange student was telling us about Bernard Lewis -- which I thought would be immensely interesting, given that the Princeton student was Israeli and was taught by Lewis last fall -- but this all registered a complete blank in the minds/faces of the other two MHPists. When it came, however, to regaling the tutors with tales of 'how I am fluent in both French and German' or 'how I interned with a US senator last summer', they were suddenly extremely animated. I wonder why.

A Moment of Silence

2005-09-29T00:36:00.000+08:00

As you might have noticed, this space has been streaming silence for some time now. Partly, it's been a lack of time -- I had an unexpected job teaching History, plus there's all the last-minute stuff I have to do before flying off this Sunday like packing, completing the reading list, etc etc -- but mostly it's because I'm having one of my regular bouts of depression/crippling self-doubt.

I've worked out that I have these inconvenient bouts about once every two years. Which is useful, in a way, since it makes them much more predictable. They were there in 1999, 2001, 2003 and so the next installment was due this year anyway. Still, I had a really lousy April 05, when I should have been relatively pleased about having finally been liberated from Slavery, so I thought I was done for 2005. Apparently not.

For some reason, I became very unnerved when I read this column by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian about the ITV programme 49 Up. As Freedland himself explains, this programme is the latest instalment in a series that began in 1964, when World in Action interviewed a group of seven-year-old children -- and which has caught up with them every seven years since. I suppose ITV meant it to be a kind of micro social history -- the kids were deliberately chosen from a wide range of backgrounds, from some prep school boy who, at 7, could name the Cambridge college he wanted to go to, to some East End kids who asked what the word 'university' meant -- but I suspect that far more interesting to viewers would be the chance to see the arcs of entire (real) lives.

Freedland, who watched all the installments, comes to this conclusion: 'We realise that the drama that animates most lives is not about governments or politics, but marriages that work or fail, children who are born or missed and jobs that flourish or founder. [...] Above all, we see how people learn to let go of the dreams of their youth. Once they talked of fame or power, of acting in movies or journeying to the moon. Now they accept who they are - and long for nothing more than health and a loving family.'

To me, there was something utterly depressing about that. Of course, an ITV programme is hardly the best answer to the meaning of life, but these were real people and real lives, and it seemed that their experience, over the space of more than four decades, stands as a paen to the philosophy of Victorian (Singaporean?) domesticity and quietude -- getting on, hopefully getting rich, getting married, having kids, living a quiet and comfortable life, blah blah blah blah blah, and basically retreating into a private citadel and abandoning public life and public reasoning to those powerful or naive enough to bother with it. It seems to say: a life of compromise, accommodation, comfort, and quiet happiness is the best one can hope for; anything else is a recipe for disappointment.

Well, if that's the case, then I've got it all fucking wrong haven't I?

Hold That Vomit, Please

2005-09-12T15:50:00.000+08:00

Everyone who can get their hands on a copy of the 12 September edition of the Straits Times should carefully read Chua Lee Hoong's repugnant editorial, Hold that cynicism, please. Now, I don't mean that this editorial should be read because it contains intelligent analysis or important new ideas. I don't even mean that it should be read because it offers comic relief for those who like picking apart absurd arguments. This editorial is certainly absurd, but no one who reads it will be laughing.

No, everyone should read it because it will offer a glimpse into the dark and farcical mental universe of the people who run this country, and it will confirm (or, for the uninitiated, at least expose) just how dark and farcical that universe is. Chua, an erstwhile PSC scholar who worked with the ISD as an 'intelligence analyst' for nine years before joining the Straits Times and whose columns are predictably and unfailingly pro-government, is clearly a mole, who is at SPH to ensure ideological conformity. Occasionally -- and this is one such occasion -- she even acts as a direct government mouthpiece (although obviously she takes great pains to sounds like an intelligent neutral commentator). Reading what she says will offer a glimpse into official thinking. It'll be hearing it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Or, in this case, the horse's anus.

Look for example at her rancid second paragraph: 'If the perpertrators are found to have been (mischievous) grassroots activists with the PAP, and they are let off with a mild warning, will people say, "Double standards. It would have been different if it had been an opposition party"? If they are levied a stiff fine, will people say, "Oh, it's all for show?" In other words, will the people insist on, Heads I win, tails you lose?' I almost had an aneurysm while reading these words. Well, Miss Priss, have you considered that 'the people' might think neither of these things? Might it have occured to you in your tiny, uncompassionate head that perhaps people just think that even investigating this incident is draconian and farcical? Have you forgotten that it is cardboard white elephants we are talking about here? Do you think you are a strict headmistress who needs to keep her mischievous and stupid schoolchildren (a.k.a. 'the people') under control?

These elementary facts also seem to have escaped Chua when she speculated about the possible defence the 'perpetrators' might invoke: '[They] would probably argue that what they did was harmless enough. After all, it was just eight cardboard cut-outs, which remained in the public eye for less than 24 hours before they were taken down'. Well, yes they would probably argue that wouldn't they? As would anyone with half a brain who takes seriously the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and expression. If she thinks that displaying cardboard elephants which look like they escaped from a tumble-tots display presents a sufficient threat to public order such that the right to freedom of expression can be abridged, then she must think that the constitution is written on toilet paper. Either that, or she must be retarded. Or a cynical bootlicker. Or all of the above.

Chua also makes the absurd claim that the placing of the white elephants on a road-divider can be 'easily construed as falling within the meaning of "public entertainment" as governed by the Public Entertainment and Meetings Act, and required a licence'. Well, I'm not a lawyer, but I think it is quite obvious that if a licence was required to put up the cut-outs, then I must equally apply for a licence should I decide to stand on Orchard Road with a T-shirt saying 'McShit' or when I tie a yellow ribbon round some road-side tree.

But even if a licence is technically required, Chua is still wrong, and her approving quote from the Home Affairs Minister is chilling: 'Regardless of whether he thinks it is a silly law or not, he does violence to the rule of law even if his actions are peaceful.' Chua, and Wong Kan Seng, display an idiosyncratic and untenable view of the rule of law. The rule of law is not merely obedience to the law; if this were so, then one who carefully follows every law passed by SLORC in Myanmar or by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe would be a paragon of respect for the rule of law. There is a dictinct difference between the rule of law and rule by law. Without even going into the countless reasons why a law enacted by the Singapore parliament probably does not meet the criteria for a properly-constituted law, Wong's comments about the need to uphold the rule of law by obeying the law are clearly inapplicable here. If he had meant by 'silly law' some traffic regulation, he would have indeed been quite justified in expecting compliance. One cannot simply disobey a law because one disagrees with it. On the other hand, since the 'offence' here touches on the very foundation of the procedural rule of law (specifically, respect for civil liberties and especially freedom of speech which is the oxygen of all the other liberties); and since, as Wong himself noted, the activity in question was perfectly peaceful -- indeed it was largely a joke -- to suggest that it 'does violence to the rule of law' is the merest sophistry.

Even more annoying was Chua's spurious attempt at a reductio ad absurdum: 'Buangkok station today, Raffles Place MRT tomorrow? White elephant today, hammer and sickle tomorrow?' I was like, 'So?' So what if tomorrow someone puts up a hammer and sickle sign at the Raffles Place station? Would this incite anyone to commit violence? Would this make hate crimes more likely? Would it cause a breakdown in public order? No, no, and no. So what is she talking about?

And, finally, for the killer: 'Where does one draw the line between promoting residents' needs and pushing the boundaries, between acceptable political activism and unacceptable civil disobedience?' Indeed, where does one? I mean, we can't have people pushing the boundaries and engaging in extremist political activism by taking the piss in the form of cartoon cut-outs! What next? Unacceptable civil disobedience will be everywhere! We'll have scum like that rogue, Ghandi! Or that rabble-rouser, Martin Luther King Jr.! We must never let that happen! EVER!

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

2005-09-07T23:09:00.000+08:00

I find that schools often teach students a wrong conception of objectivity. Teachers (especially a certain JWR) often assume that objectivity means looking at 'two sides' of an issue -- 'on the one hand... on the other hand'. An extension of this is the view that a truly able argument is one that is a synthesis of two opposing viewpoints, one that picks the best of both worlds, so to speak.

While this is useful to the extent that it prevents wildly polemical answers, this isn't the same as 'objectivity'. An objective argument is one that is rigorously supported by either rational argument and/or empirical evidence, and which takes into consideration a comprehensive range of caveats and objections. Simply churning out a dialectical thesis-antithesis model is not in itself a guarantee of objectivity and indeed might be damaging insofar as it makes for unnecessarily dichotomous thinking. The thesis-antithesis model can also give certain utterly delusional viewpoints the semblance of credibility; when arguing with a Holocaust-denier, for instance, the correct response is not to argue, for that would be to concede that the Holocaust-denier actually has a point which has to be given consideration.

As the ever-impressive Paul Krugman says about attempts at so-called unbiased reporting in the media: ''Rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column -- in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally -- was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth--Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.''

This confusion between even-handedness and objectivity also penalises those whose views are more radical/strongly-held. The 'synthesis' usually presented is some 'happy mean', i.e. an insipid attempt at moderation. But surely such an intellectual framework merely covertly excludes the possibility of radical scepticism or indeed radicalism of any sort, which is condemned as 'extremism'; it is a framework which inherently limits the possibilities of thought and encourages insipidity, timidity and waffle.

Living In A Moral Community

2005-09-06T00:57:00.000+08:00

After the Lion decided to make the improvement of service standards in Singapore his new mission in life, the Straits Times has predictably been filled with 'buzz' about this exciting new topic of discussion. As a collorary, the usual bourgeois platitudes about courtesy and politeness and social graces have been trotted out.

This is irritating, for two reasons. Firstly, I think that the vast majority of social conventions should be abolished -- they are irrational, impossible to universalise (which means that in a global world they will increasingly become barriers rather than glues), and most of all, much more ideologically tainted than they appear. When we say that such-and-such a form of behaviour is rude, our opinion is formed not by reference to some objective and universal code of acceptable conduct, but by reference to either what offends us personally, or to a social code which is a product of our social background (which includes class, culture, and educational background). Therefore when we say that so-and-so should be more polite or should behave in a more 'becoming' way, we are not judging this person's behaviour by any objective criterion, or indeed by any definable criteria, but are simply arbitrarily and unjustly imposing a particular social code on that person. Social conventions merely serve to reinforce social division, a sort of covert social cordon sanitaire. Furthermore, all this becomes all the more absurd when one considers that globalisation has meant that what is polite and what is rude now sometimes reflects not even the code of a particular class or social group but a personal opinion.

Secondly, it seems to me that the most uncivil and repulsive behaviour I encounter invariably comes from people in positions of power -- the very people whose social codes would most likely prevail if an organised campaign to make people more polite were to materialise. Consider for example the PSC, who think that when someone applies for one of their slavery contracts, that someone also silently gives permission to be asked irrelevant and intrusive personal questions and have a member of the interview board pretend to fall asleep. Strangely, when I applied to work at some cafe in some menial position, not only did the interviewer decline to ask intrusive and irrelevant personal questions, she also apologised in advance for any offense she might cause later on. How rude of her! She should learn from the PSC and live up to their shining example! Or consider how the worst 'service' I have ever received were at certain glitzy schools where, among other things, I was made to do push-ups for failing to recognise that the breasts and buttocks of a Baywatch model were a cipher for the sine curve, and where I was treated to four terms of a history teacher who thought that teaching in Singapore would mean 'a holiday in the Orient', and where a bitter old British man masquerading as an English teacher thought that gossiping about his students when they were no longer in school constituted justified behaviour. I was really impressed!

So, Mr. Lion, here's what I think. Instead of chattering on about how to improve service/servility (because, dear Mr. Lion, the perceived better service in places like Thailand is all down to cheaper labour costs -- when you have one person to carry your bags, another to massage your head and another to suck your toes, I assure you you will find the service very satisfying), and thinking about how to impose your silly ideas of politeness and social grace, perhaps you should think about simple issues like solidarity, fair treatment, compassion and help for those who are in need, and all the other things which are truly vital to say with sincerity that we live in a moral community, and which your father and your predecessor seem to have flushed down the drain a long time ago.

As Michael Ignatieff puts it, 'It is this solidarity among strangers, this transformation through the division of labour of needs into rights and rights into care that gives us whatever fragile basis we have for saying that we live in a moral community.'

And, by the way, You Know Who You Are, I'm really impressed by the way you realised I am 'contemptuous of all authority'. You were so in a position to judge my motivations and you are such a genius to have noticed that.

BlogWatch

2005-09-05T23:36:00.000+08:00

'The Marginal Revolution' is back, although now known as 'Stupid Shit'. Don't read this one if you work for Channel News Asia, though. I'm quite pleased that Rantboy has discovered the CNA website ; I didn't even know they had online news. The Straits Times Interactive website has become fully paying, which is annoying when I only want to read it for a bit of a laugh.

Meanwhile, over at Consider Phlebas, there's a good post on national values (in this case British values) and how they are coercive and unnecessary: 'thick shared political heritages have to be imposed on people who don't quite see things that way, usually coercively imposed, which is hardly a tactic with an unchequered record on the peace, love, milk and honey provision stakes, an obvious way of excluding some from full citizenship, and a violation of people's freedom of conscience'.

And while they are coercive and unnecessary in Britain, in Singapore they are positively damaging, since when we talk about national values here we aren't talking 'respect for the rule of law' or 'parliamentary sovereignty' or some other such (vaguely) liberal notion. We're talking 'community above self', 'Asian/Confucian values', social conservatism, non-democratic consensus, etc. And of course, preserving national values is far different from manufacturing national values, which is what Vivien Balakrishnan, Irene Ng and friends have been talking about at the Oxford Singapore Forum. I was particularly amused by this gem from their website: 'We also believe that the vitality of the Forum will benefit in no small measure from the intellectual tradition of Oxford University'; I was not aware that having a floor entirely composed of Singaporeans was the best way to benefit from the 'intellectual tradition' of a university which is largely composed of non-Singaporeans.

Twenty Years And The Spring Is Over

2005-09-01T01:55:00.000+08:00

First, the announcement:

Unfortunately I can't say this in person, but thanks, all of you who attacked me with random cards, letters and gifts. Thanks also for the alarming/disarming final send-off (you know what I'm talking about) -- despite my scampering off, which in retrospect must have looked very odd. You've all been very kind.

And now, the random observations:

I went to look for Maddie Yeo today, but she was nowhere to be found. So Jireh and I left her a message and then went to S-11 to sample the ban mian. What scared me though was that I kept bumping into students from the class I taught for one week in April and all of them were like 'Hey, Caleb!'.

I was very pleased to note that the official RGS programme did not include any moralistic skits or fawning 'tributes' -- perhaps these are a speciality of a certain school in Bishan. The rows and rows of schoolgirls singing/screaming made me think of something in Jude the Obscure which I've been thinking about a lot recently. My recollection of Jude is usually restricted to the more irritating parts, such as 'his face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene', but for some reason my memory of this passage has been triggered an inordinate number of times in RGS, especially during Assembly when everyone looks very finishing-school in their ties and their sweetly-sung pagan hymn. I thought of it again today:

'They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of whose pathos and beauty they were themselves unconscious, and would not discover till, amid the storms and strains of after-years, with their injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds would revert to this experience as to something which had been allowed to slip past them insufficiently regarded.'

Hardy is talking about Sue Bridehead's classmates at the Training College at Melchester lying asleep in their dorm beds, and means this to be some proto-feminist dig, but I think his point actually transcends gender here. Before the 'storms and strains of after-years' life seems to lie ahead glistening with possibility, and people often act as if they will all stick things through together etc etc, but of course as more of life passes more options are closed or missed.

Sad, really.

Harsher, But Not Safer

2005-08-28T12:47:00.000+08:00

One of the duties of a state is to protect its citizens -- and to protect them equally -- from attacks to their person (i.e. to protect them from foreign attack, from homicide, from terrorist attacks, and from various other forms of aggression). To this end the government is allowed to accumulate vast coercive powers in the form of the police and the armed forces, and the legislature is allowed to make law which is enforced by the same police force. Given the vast concentration of coercive force in the hands of the state, it is vital that the government is held accountable in its use of this force (for example, through regular competitive elections) and that the public is aware that the state is given such a near-monopoly of the legitimate use of force precisely in order to protect the persons and property of citizens such that they can conduct their lives in liberty and peace and be free to pursue their respective conceptions of the good. We rightly fear sudden and violent death, as well as sudden and violent loss of our capabilities and property, not merely because of the attendant pain, but because they constitute arbitrary, unforseeable and unjust external incursions on our ability to carry on with our lives and our projects.

If a government uses its coercive powers to bolster its own position, or if in the process of using its powers to protect it unreasonably or unnecessarily curtails civil liberties, or if it begins to wield the law unequally such that the law protects some at the expense of arbitrarily and unfairly penalising others, or if it unnecessarily erodes the rule of law through emergency measures, then its use of coercive force becomes questionable, even illegitimate. Such policy and such laws may appear 'harsher' and thus pacify those in search of superficial and quick solutions to security problems, but they do not always make us 'safer' -- they go against the very reason why we wish to be protected in the first place. In such cases, the government has made itself a threat to the ability of its citizens to lead their lives in peace and freedom.

Naturally, such laws and such policies are easier for governments to push through during times of heightened danger, as Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot Act have shown. On the other side of the Atlantic, in the wake of the London bombings, Tony Blair's government has proposed new laws which will make it possible for the Home Office to deport foreigners and foreign-born British subjects who 'glorify' or 'justify' acts of terrorism. Indeed, there is even talk of making it an offence. John Gardner, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford has much to say about this (I'm quoting this in full since he has a habit of removing old posts from he website):

********************
'The rules of the game have changed.' Like many other peace-loving people working in legal and political philosophy, I believe that political violence is sometimes justified, even in a democracy. Of course I don't believe anyone is ever justified in bombing a bus or train, or even threatening to do so. But I do believe, for instance, that there is sometimes adequate justification for entering an arms industry site and disabling a fighter plane that is about to be delivered to a murderous regime. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, this act of symbolic sabotage is classed as an act of terrorism. So what I have just said, in the terminology of English law, is that sometimes acts of terrorism are justified. According to Home Secretary Charles Clarke it is 'unacceptable behaviour' for me to say this. If I were not a UK citizen, he would now regard my having said this as sufficient cause to exclude me from the country under his discretionary powers. For I am 'using a position of responsibility, such as teacher ... to express views which ... justify ... terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs' (as the Home Office announcement puts it). So now, presumably, my colleagues and I can't host an international conference on the subject of political violence because some of our guests - any that are willing to argue the case for occasional resorts to political violence - will be refused entry to the UK under the new rules of the 'game'. I intend to test this out in the coming year or so by organising an international conference on the subject of political violence. And I will be inviting Charles Clarke. I may even apply for Home Office funding.

Worse, there is still talk of making it a crime to express the philosophical position that I just expressed. At that point the fact that I am a UK citizen won't help me one bit in the Home Secretary's little 'game'. I will have to be charged under the Terrorism legislation for what I say in my graduate seminars. Or will the powers-that-be be overlooking the words of relatively clean-shaven pallid types like me and using the law only against heavily-bearded dusky gentlemen? To see whether they still believe in the Rule of Law, I will have to schedule a course on the subject of political violence for 2006-7. And I suppose I will have to invite the Thames Valley Police. (Presumably, once I am duly arrested, my lawyer will also be committing the same crime when he or she argues, in my defence, that some acts of political violence are justified?)
******************

The really bad thing about such 'harsher but not safer' laws is that they tend to become entrenched, especially when the government in power has no special dedication to civil liberties or the rule of law. An excellent example is Singapore, where the Internal Security Act, a colonial law passed by the British to suppress anti-imperial as well as communist elements, was retained even after the Emergency had passed (although the government claims the Act has been 'useful' in detaining members of the Jema'ah Islamiyah, it has also been 'useful' in the past to detain peaceful dissidents such as Chia Thye Poh -- one of the world's longest serving political prisoners -- for 32 years without trial). The ISA allows for detention without trial for 30 days, followed by preventative detention without trial for 2 years with presidential approval. This period of preventative detention can then be extended with the approval of the Home Affairs minister and the president. Needless to say, the public has no say in this -- nor indeed does the public have any right to know who is being detained and for what reasons. This colossally bad law should go, or at least, be radically reformed (then again, given the political monopoly the government enjoys, it would be hard to ensure that it isn't abused for private political gain, so I guess abolition is the way to go here, really). Other bad laws introduced under the pretext of fighting terrorism (including a ridiculous anti-hacking law supposed to combat 'cyberterrorism' whatever that is) should also make their way to the bin.

Of Antiquated Attitudes And Their Suppression

2005-08-22T22:06:00.000+08:00

While blog browsing today I came across some RI sec 3 gepper's blog, in which I found the interesting post 'Of Boys' Schools and its [sic] Conversion'. He claims to have a more rational piece somewhere else on his blog about why co-educational schools are the way forward, but I did not really bother; what interested me was his evident homophobia (taken here in the original meaning of fear of homosexuals/homosexuality). As he so succintly puts it, 'I was very freaked out'.

Now why was he so gripped by fear? Did he discover that after completing his A-levels he would waste 2 years of his life adorning a superfluous and callous organisation? Did he uncover some deep dark secret about the origins of his birth? No -- it turns out this fear and loathing was entirely prompted by his knowledge that one of his friends kept a photo of the RI deputy head prefect in his wallet. (Needless to say, my reaction to this anecdote was quite the reverse. Coupled with his maudlin description of Kaiying -- the said deputy head boy -- as 'not bad', I was almost killed by the cute.)

This unfortunate boy then goes on to list in some convoluted detail other similarly 'freaky things', such as 'couples of people [I assume he means 'male' people] that stick together all day long'.

Of course this is just his blog, not a survey of opinion across RI or even RI GEP, but it would be extremely disappointing if his opinion were somehow representative of wider attitudes among students. I had the impression that hostility and incomprehension were slowly being replaced by either normalisation or apathy. But upon further reflection I realise that this impression was guided merely by some vague and unsubstantiated belief in moral progress over time. It is up to either teachers, or more likely the students themselves, to change mindsets.

On the other hand, he does have a point about the higher prevalence of homosexual experimentation by otherwise heterosexual boys in single-sex schools. That, at least, is what I've gathered from anecdotal evidence, and Robert Graves mentions something similar in Goodbye To All That. The headmaster of Graves' school makes a further distinction between 'amorous' and 'erotic' relationships (Graves himself had an amorous relationship with someone he names as 'Dick'), while implying that amorous ones are an unfortunate inevitability but erotic ones are a dangerous. In fact, I think erotic experimentation is relatively harmless since it leaves no lasting effect, while amorous entanglements are potentially emotionally damaging if one of the partners is only experimenting while the other takes it as genuine. As they say: 'for you this is just a good time but for me this is my whole life' -- such asymmetrical relationships are likely to leave more lasting damage than any amount of fumbling under the table. It is for this reason that I actually agree that co-ed schools are a much better idea. But this is quite different, of course, from saying that it is the homosexual nature of the relationships per se which gives cause for concern.

Frère Roger est entré dans la vie d’éternité

2005-08-22T01:15:00.000+08:00

Brother Roger Schutz, Prior of the ecumenical Taizé community, died on 16 August after being stabbed in the neck by a (probably deranged) Romanian woman during evening prayer. The Times obituary is here, the Telegraph obit is here, and there is more information on the Taizé website.

I certainly admired Brother Roger's dedication to ecumenism and his original commitment to political and social justice (though I admit these days Taizé chants belong firmly in the repertoire of young, middle-class, leisured spirituality) and I think the Times obit was right in saying that he filled the gap in 'European Christian leadership left by the premature death of William Temple, the brevity of the pontificate of John XXIII, the hanging of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the loss of many young Christian leaders in wartime'. What defined Brother Roger though, was not I think any particular commitment to the religious left or indeed to any general movement of renewal or reform, but rather his commitment to ecumenism. And this also explains I think the attraction of Taizé: ecumenism tends to be non-dogmatic since the need to reconcile different faith traditions naturally fuzzes over dogmatic details, and this sidelining of dogma while maintaining a liturgical and even sacramental framework makes Taizé attractive in a way that the churches are not.

A Joke That Has Worn Thin

2005-08-21T23:08:00.000+08:00

First, the story:

Iskandar Muhamad Nordin, 18, has an IQ of 58, which means he has the mental age of an 11-year-old. He was abused as a toddler and has lived in welfare homes since the age of four as his mother is missing and his father is in jail. He is physically stunted -- a spokesperson from the Muhamadiyah Welfare Home where he used to live describes him as a 'skinny boy, only about 1.5m tall'.

In September 2004, he molested a woman and was sentenced to jail. He was given a conditional release in April 2005 after he apologised to the woman in court, but within hours of being released, still not far from the prison gates, he grabbed another woman's breast and was re-arrested.

He was sentenced for this second offence to 9 months' imprisonment and three strokes of the cane. I am not sure what the mandatory sentence for a repeat molest offence is (perhaps someone with access to the details of the Singapore Penal Code can enlighten me on this) but I suspect the judge did not have much room for discretion in his sentence.

Iskandar then appealed his sentence; specifically he pled that he be spared the cane and be given a longer jail term instead. Such an appeal is of course legally quite unsound, but since he represented himself -- despite having almost half the IQ of an average person -- and received no legal advice (in Singapore, legal counsel is not provided to those who cannot afford it except in capital cases), he went ahead with the appeal.

Iskandar then had the most wonderful fortune of having his appeal heard by the Chief Justice Yong Pung How. Being the very learned, just and decent man that he is, Pung How decided to increase his sentence to 2 years' imprisonment and nine strokes of the cane. Justice has indeed been done!

Now the nausea and fury:

I was not impressed by an apology for Pung How by Mr Aaron Ng, executive director of MINDS, in the Straits Times today: 'We cannot blame the judges [...] Sometimes if someone is charged under a section of the law that carries a mandatory sentence, a judge has no choice but to mete it out.'

While this apology might have been valid for the initial sentence, the fact that Pung How increased the sentence on appeal shows that Pung How was not in this instance actually constrained by the mandatory sentence. The apology might have been more apt had Pung How fought to reduce Iskandar's sentence but then have come up against the wall of statute law. But clearly in this case Pung How bears full moral responsibility for his repugnant decision.

As I said earlier, I don't know what the actual mandatory minimum sentence for repeat molest offenders is, so I can't assess the extent to which the first judge could be 'blamed'. But that, indeed, is not the point. The point is that such cases illustrate with great clarity the failure of the mandatory sentencing system. The Penal Code brims with mandatory sentences which often stipulate harsh sanctions for crimes which are perceived to be particularly heinous or which the government just decides they particularly wish to control -- sanctions such as long prison terms, judicial corporal punishment, and even capital punishment. For example, importing more than 1kg of cannabis carries a mandatory death sentence (bearing in mind that scientific evidence provided by the WHO has shown that cannabis is not demonstrably more dangerous than, say, tobacco or alcohol), while harbouring an illegal immigrant carries a mandatory jail sentence because the government deemed the level of illegal immigrants 'unacceptably high'.

As a mandatory sentence is by definition meant to preclude mitigating factors, even very strong mitigating factors -- such as the fact that the offender is effectively a child and is not fully capable of understanding his offence or the implications of his actions -- must be cast aside by judges, a situation which systematically leads to unfair sentences. Furthermore, mandatory sentences are an unnecessary and illiberal incursion by the legislature on what should be the discretionary power of the judiciary. We have judges for a reason, and judges are meant not only to decide on verdicts but on sentences. Stipulating mandatory sentences violates the separation of the legislature and the judiciary and implies that judges are too stupid or unreliable to properly take into account mitigating factors.

Furthermore, the case of Iskandar Nordin very aptly demonstrates why rehabilitation should be a central consideration in sentencing. Rehabilitation not only benefits the offender by allowing her a fresh start, but also benefits the community by reducing the rate of recidivism. Had Iskandar received proper counselling and treatment, he might not have reoffended, and at any rate, he would certainly not have reoffended hours after leaving the prison gates. His case shows a profound failure to achieve any level of rehabilitation. Still, this is not surprising -- I doubt that Queenstown Remand Prison actually operates special programmes catering to the counselling and rehabilitation of intellectually disabled inmates. Indeed, prison qua prison is clearly not appropriate as a rehabilitative tool for intellectually disabled offenders. The president of the Association for Persons with Special Needs (APSN) was quite right in pointing out that such offenders 'often do not understand the link between the punishment and their crime'. I fail to see how putting an intellectually disabled person in a prison where they have to share a living environment with other inmates as well as prison officers who may have very little understanding of their condition is either humane or beneficial to society in reducing the possibility of reoffending. But much more than that, I am simply at a loss when I consider the possible effects of subjecting an intellectually disabled as well as emotionally and physically stunted person such as Iskandar to judicial corporal punishment. Of course I cannot see how judicial corporal punishment (or, as I prefer to see it, torture and mutilation) can serve any rehabilitative purpose at all in any class of offender, but in the case of Iskandar it would be especially cruel and incomprehensible.

We need to abolish mandatory sentences and amend the Mental Disorders and Treatment Act to include intellectually disabled persons. Sin Boon Ann, MP and other critics of such a move are simply mistaken in suggesting that it would be open to abuse and trigger larger implications. As a lawyer, Sin Boon Ann's comments in the ST today were peculiarly bereft of any legal sense. His claim that 'if being slow is a lack of knowledge, then by the same token people who are very smart [clearly not Mr Sin] should be given a harsher sentence' and that 'we may have to provide considerations for others who may be disabled, but not intellectually' are absurd. The test here would obviously be as to whether intellectual disability impaired the offender's ability to fully (morally) understand her act and the consequences of that act, and to be in full control of her actions. The idea here is of a threshold -- below this threshold of intellectual capacity a person may not be able to completely understand the moral and legal implications of her acts. It is analogous to how children are sentenced differently from adult offenders -- the law accepts that children may not be able to fully understand their acts and the implications of their acts. No one then says 'oh we should sentence children equally since if not we will have to sentence old people more harshly'. Really, was Mr Sin asleep in law school?

But speaking of legal practitioners with faulty legal (or moral) senses, we must surely turn our attention to the Chief Justice. His habit of arbitrarily increasing the sentences of those who appeal and his constant disregard for valid mitigating factors (he once sentenced an illiterate woman in her 70s to jail for harbouring an illegal immigrant, despite the fact that this woman was probably unaware even of the concept of an illegal immigrant) in sentencing are disgraceful. He should retire or be impeached. In fact, he is past retirement age and only continues in his post by leave of Parliament -- in clear contradiction of the principle of judicial independence. Virginia remarked that she once used to think of Pung How's antics as a joke, but increasingly she finds that there is in fact little to laugh at. The Chief Justice is a joke that has worn very thin indeed. He should go. Much as US conservatives in the 1960s used to shout 'Impeach Earl Warren!', I say, 'Impeach Yong Pung How!'. It would do Singapore -- and the criminal justice system -- a world of good.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

2005-08-10T21:23:00.000+08:00

The German Katholische Gemeinschaft is organising an organ recital by Markus Grohmann on Friday, 12 August at 8 pm. Grohmann will play Bach and other (unspecified) German composers at the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd (the ugly maroon building which looks like St Paul's in Covent Garden, facing CHIJMES). I can't make it for this one -- I'll be prancing around the Night Safari with 12-year-olds -- but it sounds vaguely good so if anyone is interested, please go.

It's Been Great

2005-08-04T23:48:00.000+08:00

Edith was cleared by her cardiologist today. So she'll be back at RGS on Monday. It looks like it's really over now -- a whole month longer than I expected. Actually, given the chance, I think I'll do this again some time. Besides, I must continue my crusade to a) evangelise the joys of liberalism and b) ensure that students no longer tolerate being treated like dirt. Sadly, I am far from achieving even b), as was amply demonstrated by my previous post.

Quiz Time!

2005-08-04T22:47:00.000+08:00

Although this blog was meant primarily as a political comment blog, and although there is an interesting debate raging over at Young Republic about democratisation, utilitarianism and other such exciting things, I simply must take some time out from our regular schedule to hold a little quiz (you'll find out why soon). Here's how we play: I will describe a scenario and then you will answer a simple question afterwards.

First, the scenario:

There is a junior college in the Bishan-Toa Payoh area. For convenience, let us call it XJC. At XJC, there is a very disagreeable and arrogant expatriate English teacher. Let us call him Mr Purv-ert (henceforth Mr P for short). Mr P is in charge of helping students at XJC apply to UK universities, especially two universities which we will know only as O and C.

In order to help students at XJC who are interested in applying to O, Mr P invites some ex-students to give a presentation and answer some questions about O. On the scheduled day of the presentation, Mr P suddenly changes the time of the talk from 4pm to 5pm. This results in much inconvenience for both the ex-students and the current students who wanted to attend.

At 5 minutes before 5pm, the ex-students duly turn up at XJC. One of the ex-students, let us call him A, sees Mr P first and says 'Hello'. At this, Mr P looks very displeased. 'How rude!' says Mr P. 'My name is Mr P, not ''Hello'', so make sure you call me Mr P!', continued Mr P. He then drones on about the various other instances of 'rudeness' which he had the great misfortune to encounter. To spice up his account, Mr P adds interesting jokes like 'You know at XJC they say they're nurturing leaders, thinkers and pioneers, but we expat teachers like to say leaders, thinkers and... well something else which I won't say out loud'. Ha ha ha.

Some of the ex-students then comment on the fact that the audience of current students comprised of a grand total of two people. Mr P then mumbles something about how he had done everything possible to publicise the event -- including, of course, suddenly changing the timing of the event.

While waiting for more students to arrive, Mr P strikes up a conversation with an ex-student he is fond of (let us call him B). After a few minutes, about 15 more students drift in. Mr P continues his conversation with B even as the students start to get restless. Another of the ex-students (let us call him C) decides to engage his audience before they lose interest, so he asks them a few preliminary questions to find out what exactly they would like to know. Upon hearing this exchange between C and the audience of current students, Mr P blows up, and storms out, but not before shouting 'My advice to you [students] is to go to America! Maybe they'll teach you some manners there! If you [C] want to find out why I'm so angry you can come and look for me later!' B, looking worried, runs out after Mr P.

Eventually, after the presentation and Q&A are over, B reveals the reason for Mr P's hysterical fit -- apparently, C had violated all the rules of good manners by starting the session without the hallowed approval of Mr P.

Now, it's your turn:

Do you think Mr Purv-ert's behaviour was a) acceptable, b) unacceptable, c) extremely unacceptable or d) what the fuck?

Answer now!

An Appeal

2005-08-01T22:22:00.000+08:00

This evening a 9-year-old I was helping to mind suddenly had an asthma attack -- and naturally he forgot to bring his Ventolin. Although the attack wasn't severe and I managed to calm him down after a while, the incident made me realise that I don't actually know any real first aid. Not that it would have helped if he really was in the throes of a severe attack, but I'm sure fanning a victim with a folded bit of paper really isn't that best that one can do for him in the absence of actual medication. Bearing in mind my previous comments about the usefulness of doctors, this gap in my knowledge is really quite inexcusable. So, if any of you are willing to teach me CPR (for starters) I'd be very, very thankful. One caveat though: if you learnt your first aid under the auspices of the SAF Medical Corps, I'm going to have to say no. I distinctly remember being told by some medic on Vile Isle (you know, at that lecture where they claim to teach you field first aid) that 'succesful CPR results in the rib cage being broken'. Of course.

My Life is a Roller Coaster

2005-07-31T13:51:00.000+08:00

I have just received news that Edith wasn't able to see her cardiologist in Singapore because he was off on some conference overseas. And Deborah Tan is very frightened by the prospect that she will collapse in class and that RGS will be liable. Hence, I have been asked to reprise my role as a respectable instructor of the young. This is going to be, like, so corny.

The Wife of Bath

2005-07-31T03:24:00.000+08:00

Tonight's YR Summer Jamboree was really too sedate for my liking. I think there were too many people, and the space didn't really allow us to fragment into smaller groups to talk properly. Ah well. Nonetheless, thanks to He Who Must Not Be Named who was very keen to talk about finding suitable mates, we managed to chat a bit about sociobiology and feminism. Just to add to the point I made about Focus on the Family and their agenda, an excellent piece of evidence of the shifting perceptions of the relative profligacy of the sexes -- and the basis these perceptions have in the dominant discourse about the place of women -- can be found in the form of Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale (or, more accurately, The Wife Of Bath's Prologue). Not only does it suggest that women were thought to be more horny in medieval times, it also shows clearly the links this had with the dominant feudal/Christian ethic:

Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, is right ynogh for me

To speke of wo that is in mariage:

For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,

Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,

Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve,

If I so ofte myghte have ywedded bee,

And alle were worthy men in hir degree.

But me was toold, certeyn, nat longe agoon is,

That sith that crist ne wente nevere but onis

To weddyng, in the cane of galilee,

That by the same ensample taughte he me

That I ne sholde wedded be but ones.

Herkne eek, lo, which a sharp word for the nones,

Biside a welle, jhesus, God and man,

Spak in repreeve of the samaritan:

Thou hast yhad fyve housbondes, -- quod he,

And that ilke man that now hath thee

Is noght thyn housbonde, -- thus seyde he certeyn.

What that he mente therby, I kan nat seyn.

She mentions the biblical story of the loose Samaritan woman, and of course there is also the episode of the woman taken in adultery. And indeed 'honour killings', which are in a way relics of that kind of pre-modern civilisation, continue to this day in places like Pakistan. So perhaps Focus on the Family and their emasculating narratives about sweet, passive and desireless women chastely (and 'naturally') shielding themselves from lustful male attention is an improvement on the idea that women are wells of unbridled desire who should be restrained, but surely this new discourse similarly restrains, albeit through more gentle means? FotF's supposedly liberating message fails to transcend the traditional Virgin/Whore (or Mother/Whore) dichotomy in which women remain trapped.

The Writing on the Wall (or Floor)

2005-07-29T22:09:00.000+08:00

I just got this in my email: graffiti against the death penalty (in Singapore!). Plus the guy (or girl) who did this even bothered to create a stent for it so it would turn out looking professional. Very impressive. The slogan isn't very good though; who is the 'WE' in 'WE ARE NOT MURDERERS'? Humans? Citizens? Members of his pressure group? I'm sure he'll do better next time though. Here it is:

For the sceptics out there: the 'NO PARKING' sign is pretty common fare for HDB carparks, so this really is Singapore.

More Universities Stuff

2005-07-29T21:02:00.000+08:00

Over at Gabriel's, they've been talking about SMU and its annoying management guru psychobabble. I've personally never heard their "We're from SMU so we're special" spiel, but apparently the group leaders for their orientation programme incessantly call up incoming freshies and are as insistent (and annoying) as insurance agents, so obviously the bright-and-energetic-bunny persona does wear thin after a while.

What I did hear today though was an equally annoying spiel from the RGS school counsellor. Actually she worked at the Kaki Bukit Prison School before she came to RGS so I'm sure she must have seen more of life than I have, but she made the egregious mistake of recommending that Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book. Together with From Third World to First, I can think of few other books which I find more irritating. From what I gained (or what I could endure) from flicking cursorily through it, the book essentially comprises page upon page of common sense advice dressed up as a paean to embourgeoisement -- the catch here being that the author of the said tome has earned millions in royalties while the average reader thinks he's buying a book which reveals the meaning of life or some other such life-transforming wisdom. (Incidentally the first day Jeremy started working at RGS I saw him reading Seven Habits in the staff room. Ah well.)

The counsellor also reminded me of Wendy Tong, which can only be a bad thing. Wendy Tong's story has an unhappy ending though. In 2002 (if I remember correctly) she quit after a Sec 2 boy she was counselling killed himself hours after a 'special' counselling session she held with him. To this day I wonder why she didn't ensure that he received more psychiatric care and medication, which possibly possibly might have saved his life. Actually to clarify about the counsellor reminding me of Wendy Tong, it was more the fact that she was a counsellor with annoying psychobabble which reminded me of Wendy rather than her general personality. Wendy Tong was really out of her depth when she got that boy who eventually killed himself. She was much more useful for things like kick-boxing, hair-flicking, and long talks with the rugby team. Very Ally McBeal so to speak. The RGS one was much more True Files, if you will. Whatever.

Anyway, the interesting thing about SMU is that they have been incredibly successful at marketing themselves. Apparently their grads, even the airhead ones, all get posh jobs at swanky i-banks and the like. Which I suppose is in a way a strangely twisted tribute to the school's ability to deliver the 'M' part of its name.

Meanwhile, Jiekai has received the relevant financial statements from Corpus and it seems Oxford has raised their tuition fees for non-EU students by 21%. Which makes me quite annoyed, and a lot poorer. Christ Church, in contrast to Corpus, has not deigned to send me anything other some dingy letter from the Modern History tutor asking me to choose my papers for next year. Naturally, all information found in the letter was inaccurate or outdated. I'm beginning to see what Mr White meant when he talked about 'the British way'.

Back to School

2005-07-29T17:35:00.000+08:00

I've just realised that term has started this week at NTU. NUS starts later and SMU later still but the orientation activities and matriculation etc, etc have already begun to kick in at both institutions so I suppose my title is more or less justified.

Of course, I'm still waiting. Oxbridge terms are famously short and that means school -- for me at least -- will only start in October, i.e. a good two months away. Still, the knowledge that (male) people from my year are now able to finally get on with their lives is strangely comforting. However vicariously, I am beginning to see the end of the Wasted Years Of Stupidity, Inanity and Servility. And you have no idea how good and yet how bitter that makes me feel.

Fuck you, Mindeath/Mindef.

Famine Alert

2005-07-20T23:24:00.000+08:00

The World Food Programme has reported that food supplies in Niger have reached critical levels. An estimated 1.2 million people, including 800 000 children, in what is the world's second least developed country face food shortages. The Guardian has a comprehensive special report, and a good commentary on the gap between aid pledges from political leaders in the developed world and the actual situation on the ground in places like Niger. The reports also include photos provided by the WFP, including some of severely malnourished children which are especially harrowing.

Oxfam and the WFP both have websites where you can contribute. Please help. Thank you.

Misplaced Moral High Ground

2005-07-17T13:30:00.000+08:00

I'm quite fascinated by the way the T.T. Durai saga has triggered such a huge public response. The Straits Times even reported that police were bracing for a possible demonstration in support of Mr Durai by NKF patients -- although naturally the police response was that such an action would be illegal, because in order to exercise one's constitutionally-defined right of free speech, one would first have to apply for a licence from (guess who?) the police -- which would really have been a first for Singapore. On top of that, we saw the NKF headquarters becoming the target of vandalism, an equally illegal act which oddly drew no police response.

There has been some interesting discussion of the whole saga over at Young Republic, and Gabriel's comments have been particularly enlightening. He thinks the saga has basically been manufactured by the government to mobilise public opinion and distract it from the similar ethical inadequacies of our Great Leadership:

The current public outcry over the NKF can't help but remind me of how, in Communist China, there will be a governmentally-sanctioned (or at least ignored) pogrom every now and then over some minor municipal issue - a cover-up of some rich person's running down of a peasant, one of an umpteen number of corruption cases, or Japanese businessmen having a 2-day orgy in a hotel.

I don't know if the original point of manufacturing the Durai affair was to distract the public, since I can't think of any particular political embarrassment the government is suffering from at present (aside from the constant one of being undemocratic and unaccountable), but I certainly do agree that the anti-Durai campaign was at least government-sanctioned, if not government-orchestrated.

Note, for example, how the original catalyst for the entire saga was a Straits Times column by Susan Long, a senior journalist at ST. This column, if I remember correctly, was almost certainly deliberately provocative. The Gold Tap Accusation was backed up by an anonymous contractor, and the other insinuations about Durai's lavish perks were similarly based on hearsay. Susan Long's seniority and ST's usually cautious editorial line both suggest that this was a calculated attack on Durai.

Note also how SPH was represented by Davinder Singh, who has a history of representing such luminaries as Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong. Note too how the new NKF CEO Gerard Ee, who has had no previous connections to the NKF, was previously an NMP and was appointed by the government previously to head the National Council of Social Services -- and that his accession was basically a result of some power-broking by the Ministry of Health.

My guess is not so much that this was an exercise to divert public discontent but an attempt to assert government control over what has become an increasingly rich and influential interest group. Indeed, before this scandal broke, the NKF was in the midst of fund-raising for its new cancer charity, and if Durai had not been foolish enough to fall into the trap set for him, the NKF might well have continued its expansion and ascendency. It also seems that the NKF's policies have become increasingly of interest to the MOH because the Health Ministry has basically outsourced dialysis treatment to the NKF. Clearly a more unambiguously government-friendly figure at the helm of the NKF would prove more convenient of the MOH.

The gem of Gabriel's musings on this subject must have been his comparison of Durai/the NKF and the Lees/the government:

Consider that the NKF:

- started off destitute and unremarkable ("in an unprepossessingSingapore General Hospital attic with just two beds and one metal trayin 1969") but managed to make itself incredibly successful

- masterfully uses the local media to promote itself, including thecommissioning of moralistic Channel 8 dramas

- uses defamation suits (almost never glimpsed in that industry) freely against critics to defend its reputation

- pays its management way above industry rates

- has $262 million of reserves, enough to last 30 years, yet has no plans to use them

- makes those relying on its "welfare" and "charity" co-pay due itsphilosophy of not giving people a free lunch

- crowds out initiatives other than its own (With everyone donating tothe NKF, donations to other charities are reduced, and it's expandinginto cancer now)

- is (was) extremely secretive about accounting- elicits much grumbling and strong reactions, yet is still supportedby 2 out of 3 Singaporeans via donations

- justifies all this self-righteously with their "we know best sodon't poke your nose in our business" attitude

What is sad is that the government has been able to maintain its moral high ground, with Durai (albeit more or less rightly) bearing the brunt of public anger. I remember, for example, a comment from a lawyer in the ST forum about how Durai might have been legally clean but still ethically wrong. Surely the same applies to a government which pays the Prime Minister in excess of S$1 million per annum, on the grounds that this would provide an incentive for him not to indulge in corruption. That may be true (in the sense both that he is already awash in cash and that the cost of losing his job if found out would be higher) but surely there is something deeply morally troubling about the idea.

Unvarnished Shit

2005-07-07T22:06:00.000+08:00

I've been busy with my new teaching job at RGS, so this space has been lying lifeless for a while. I still am busy, but I've found time to register on this blog just how shit the Al-Qaeda in Europe attacks in London were. I don't even think you can say these people have an ideology -- they aren't targeting policy-makers or people who have actually been involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the reason for the attacks, or so Al-Qaeda in Europe has claimed). Their aim really was to kill ordinary people who simply happened to be in the British capital, going about their lives. Merrily killing random people to make a point doesn't even deserve the status of 'ideology' or 'fundamentalism'. It's just unvarnished shit.

Comic Relief

2005-06-25T15:04:00.000+08:00

Ok this is little old I know, but I just read this in the 20 June edition of Today newspaper, and it is such a good joke:

'When asked for an assessment of [his son] the Prime Minister, Mr Lee [Kuan Yew] said: "Well, that's for history to prove, for time to prove. If he is leading it the wrong way, the economy will suffer, he will be out in the next elections." '

I was like, 'My ass'.

Cardinal Sin

2005-06-23T13:10:00.000+08:00

Jaime Cardinal Sin, former Archbishop of Manila and architect of 'People Power', died on June 21. In a way I do agree that he was often too eager to use his immense influence to intervene in politics, in a way that raised questions about the separation of church and state and the role of non-elected figures in the political process. But surely his insistence that democracy is integral to good governance, his unfailing denunciation of vote-rigging, corruption, curbs on freedom of the press, and his refusal to accommodate the entire apparatus of martial law and authoritarian rule, even when the church was left relatively unscathed, deserve our admiration and praise. Cardinal Sin was a far more committed champion of democracy and rule of law than the Vatican under John Paul II had been -- despite all that has been said about JPII's role in undermining Communist dictatorship in eastern Europe, he was far more concerned about the Communist regimes' atheistic complexion and their restrictions on religious freedoms behind the Iron Curtain than he was about their generally oppressive and undemocratic nature -- and indeed than the United States. After all, when Sin was busy criticising Marcos for his repressive and unaccountable personal rule of the Philippines, the US was busy propping up Marcos, just as they were propping up various other right-wing dictatorships across the globe.

More here and here.

Two Months of Captivity

2005-06-22T11:37:00.000+08:00

Straits Times correspondent and Hong Kong national Ching Cheong was unfairly detained on 22 April 2005 in China. He has been accused by the Chinese authorities of spying for foreign intelligence agencies. This absurd charge can more easily be explained when one considers that Ching Cheong has been gathering historical information on the Tiananmen Square atrocity over many years now. Ching Cheong used to work for a pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po, but left the paper in response to the Tiananmen incident. Probably the Chinese authorities believe that he has managed to get his hands on information which would being to light the errors and deliberately cruel decisions made by the Party leadership in June 1989.

As of today, Ching Cheong remains under detention. Beijing has justified this by producing a forced confession, in which Ching Cheong supposedly admits to all of the 'crimes' he has been charged with. Perhaps this is much less nasty than the 3000-odd executions China carried out last year alone, but it is yet another reminder that the regime in Beijing is not, despite the naive hopes of many who thought that economic liberalisation would be accompanied eventually by political reform, committed to genuine political reform. The Communist Party has precious little incentive to loosen its grip on power, and this incentive has grown even less as a result of the recent lovefest for China, especially from the EU.

For those who are bothered, there is more on Ching Cheong here, and a petition for his release at Reporters Sans Frontieres.

Big Lessons

2005-06-13T23:31:00.000+08:00

There's a good comment column in the Observer by Nick Cohen on the waning enthusiasm of Amnesty International for straightforward human-rights advocacy. I particularly like the concluding paragraphs:

====================

Zimbabwe is on the edge of starvation because it doesn't have freedom of expression, among other human rights. The great lesson of the 20th century was that tyrannical regimes - the British Empire, Mao's China, Stalin's Russia, Mengistu's Ethiopia - presided over enormous famines. Democracies didn't.

In other words, the choice between human and economic rights isn't either/or. It's both or neither.

====================

Perhaps the interaction between human and economic rights isn't as stark as Cohen suggests, but a simple antagonism between economic reform and political reform is similarly inaccurate. And it is this implicit idea that economic reform and political liberalisation and democratisation represent different priorities that surely underlies this statement by Irene Khan, quoted by Cohen in his article:

====================

'If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues.'

====================

I suppose one can read this as nothing more sinister than a re-appearance of the old socialist critique that liberal theories privilege political coercion in their analyses and correspondingly neglect the reality of economic coercion. Certainly a fuller appreciation of the effects of economic coercion would paint a more accurate picture of the extent of the crippling of human agency in the developing world.

It would be sad, however, if a re-evaluation of the importance of economic coercion led us to doubt the need to be wary of political coercion and to limit the domain of such coercion by establishing an effective human rights and civil liberties regime.

Even sadder would be an attempt to suggest that human rights are superfluous and self-indulgent products of a pampered Western civilisation, a mere distraction from the 'real' task of economic reform. This viewpoint is hinted at when Khan notes that 'Amnesty has a middle-class, Western, complacent, white image in many parts of the world'. It is the references to 'Western', 'middle-class' and 'white' which are most disturbing. Like the misguided antagonism between economic and political reform, this idea that human rights are not universal but rather are a 'Western' ideology has been used as an apology for repression by various nasty regimes in both Asia and Africa. It is unfortunate that Irene Khan thinks that the best way to correct this impression is to turn Amnesty's attention to socio-economic problems like hunger and disease, instead of mounting a defence of the universality of human rights, since this in fact confirms the idea that 'economic realities' are somehow more real and pressing, while human rights per se are so much neo-colonial fluff.

I certainly agree with her that civil liberties may seem hollow when large swathes of people are struggling for physical survival and even more lack the basic education that would enable them to participate meaningfully in political life. But it is a great mistake to suppose that human rights are therefore a peripheral concern. Human rights and accountable, democratic politics are not cultivated add-ons, to be pursued after economic success has been achieved. Surely human rights and democratic politics are so valued because they involve all aspects of life -- they are hugely beneficial (and the lack of them hugely detrimental) to economic life as to political life. Indeed, the distinction between economic and political life is perhaps an artificial one, because so much economic activity depends on state involvement. Without a reliable, impartial judiciary, it would be impossible to uphold contracts. Without accountable government, there would be no incentive to pursue economic policies which are not wildly inimical to the majority's interest. Without civil liberties and especially the freedom of expression, the market would be severely distorted, because it is new ideas which lie behind new products and services. Indeed, genuine economic reform -- or any reform for that matter -- is impossible without a relatively healthy state which can administer and, when needed, impose the reform measures over a wide area of the country.

So really, political reform and economic reform do not represent different priorities at all. They can -- and should -- be pursued in tandem.

I Like

2005-06-03T02:25:00.000+08:00

More good stuff from Two Sleepy People:

==================

There was this one time when I slept under a little tent and counted stars. That one time, I ate soft pureed baby food from little green packets. That one time, we climbed trees and formulated plans to kill the Invisible Enemy Who Would Destroy Our Nation. We had -psst, don't tell any any anybody, not even your mommy- big bad guns, and -psst, don't tell any any any anybody!- Universal Bullets That Kill Everything Invisible. That one time, we said 'Bang, bang!' an awful number of times.

They say that in the army, you cease to be a boy. You become a man.

Bang bang, I shot you down
Bang bang, you hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang, your baby shot you down

===================

Revival

2005-06-02T12:17:00.000+08:00

I have returned, and alive. I will begin posting again, and soon.

(Just a quick note: ain't it lovely how the first words you hear upon touching down in Singapore are 'Please note that the possession or trafficking of drugs in Singapore is a serious offence and may result in imprisonment or the death penalty'? Nice.)

Temporary Resurrection

2005-05-12T08:15:00.000+08:00

I have briefly interrupted my hiatus to being you this most amusing quote from Lee Kuan Yew, circa 1956. It really is hilarious:

"Let us get down to fundamentals. Is this an open or a closed society? Is it a society where men can preach ideas—the novel, unorthodox, heresies. . . where there is a constant contest for men’s hearts and minds on the basis of what is right, of what is just, or what is in the national interest? Or is it a closed society where the mass media—the newspapers, journals, publications, TV, radio. . . feed men’s minds with a constant drone of sycophantic support for a particular orthodox philosophy?”

Oh, the irony.

A Hiatus

2005-05-11T00:09:00.000+08:00

As I am presently hopping about various cities on the east coast of the United States, looking up friends, I shall be unable to update this space regularly until I return on 29 May. See you then.

(Oh and by the way, if any of you get the chance to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, you really should. It is crazy. Crazy.)

That's What I Said

2005-05-01T00:29:00.000+08:00

One bad thing about my 'A' level education is that it has quasi-permanently destroyed in me any writing style other than the 'academic essay' and 'irritated but considered jibe' modes. Hopefully, this stylistic incapacitation (a) won't really be permanent and (b) won't diminish the impact of what I'm actually trying to say.

Nonetheless, in case (b) is true, I shall offer you here a nugget from Two Sleepy People which returns to my point, expressed many a post ago, that National Slavery and in particular the vile isle period is not, as some naively suggest, an opportunity for personal maturity and development forged in the school of hard knocks etc etc (cf. the 'BMT -- it's not what you leave behind, it's what you gain in the days ahead' propaganda posters as well as the general 'rite of passage'-type apologiae) but rather a farcically infantilising experience. It also nicely revisits the theme of Slavery being a largely theatrical and hollow exercise put on for the benefit of a government which continues to think it all a wonderful experiment:

Pulau Tekong is a disfigured grotesque Neverland of Singapore. Where time stops and people cease to grow up. Where men of 25 have minds of 18 year olds. Where we are all part of a big handpuppet play and the fat boys of Neverland sing songs and makebelieve. Where Captain Hooks linger galore and impose false and comical tyranny. With extra swashbuckle oomph and chinkchank flurry. We are a motley crew of stage soldiers. With wooden swords and little Robin Hood caps. Aye aye.

I particularly liked the reference to 'comical tyranny'. It is comical, really, though it may not seem so at first hand. The comedy or rather farce lies in the dramatic irony which only the audience (in this case those who perceive that the entire thing is indeed a play) is able to aprreciate, at the expense of those who think that they are living The Real Deal, a real apotheosis of their power.

The 'extra swashbuckle oomph' also made me think of how these idiots like to make you shout ever more loudly and conform ever more strictly to their little ballet of marching ('Shoulder level, shoulder level!', or 'Dig in your heels!', etc ad nauseum) . These deliberately ostentatious and petty exercises of authority are all quite Foucauldian, and crisply illustrate the whole total institution / Panopticon society thesis. Indeed, they can be said to function as a play-within-a-play in this context, thus magnifying the potential for irony.

Then again, when one is actually being subjected to the abovementioned ostentatious and petty exercises of authority, I suppose one is less inclined to pontificate on the many layers of hidden ironies. Still, I think it could be a very effective antidote for boredom whilst one is actually still enslaved.

Death II

2005-04-27T01:16:00.000+08:00

Oh yes, I now realise that I have made a glaring omission in that list of people most responsible for the promulgation, maintenance and execution of that evil law of judicial murder. We must not spare our dear Chief "Justice" Yong Pung How. Once again the Today newspaper has proven most informative:

In an exchange during the final appeal of Malaysian trafficker Vignes Mourthi, when asked by the defence counsel if the public prosecutor was still maintaining that an innocent person be hanged because of legal procedure, Chief Justice Yong Pung How replied, "Yes. The answer is yes." (Today, 27 Sept 2003)

In this case the innocent blood which is on his head is that of Vignes Mourthi, not Shanmugam Murugesu, but nonetheless, I am sure you will agree that the Chief "Justice" is clearly amenable to the idea that human lives are worth less than dogshit.

The other point which I forgetfully left out was the fact that while the Singapore government delights in hanging petty traffickers, it has extensive investments in companies owned by a notorious Burmese druglord, Lo Hsing Han who supplies heroin, a drug far more dangerous and destructive than cannabis. For more on this gem of a turd, go here.

I'm glad to know that I am ruled by a morally degenerate government.

Death

2005-04-27T00:18:00.000+08:00

Today, I went out shopping for a new pair of spectacles and after that I spent 3 very enjoyable hours learning how to turn German adjectives into nouns (for example, ehrlich -- Erlichkeit) and catching up with my Goethe Institut friends. For me, my (comfortable middle-class) life went on.

But today was also the day S. R. Nathan, that former secret police operative, made the decision to reject Shanmugam Murugesu's appeal for clemency. While I was out and about, someone else whose only crime was to import one kilogramme of what is essentially a weed found out that for him, it was the end of the road.

I will not dwell on why the application of the death penalty here is nauseatingly unjust. I have dealt with that issue more than clearly already. In any case there is really no debate here. There need be no casuistry, no agonising moral decisions, no grey areas. There are not two sides to the coin here -- like debates with holocaust deniers, "debate" is futile because the contrary opinion is not even worthy of consideration. For no thinking person, no person with an ounce of moral sense in her body, could ever accept for a single second the possibility that executing someone for trafficking cannabis is justified.

All I will do is I will assign blame. For me this was never a jurisprudential issue, nor a political one. It was primarily a moral question: do we or do we not accept that a person's life is worth more than a piece of dogshit, and cannot be thrown away simply because we think it will bring about some policy advantage?

Someone once suggested on the Young Republic list that the Singapore government merely adopts a utilitarian ethics and that from this eminently rational standpoint it is led to conclude that the suffering of executed drug traffickers is outweighed by the benefit of a drug-free (or relatively drug-free) society. But this completely misses the point. For even if we accept a utilitarian ethics, this cannot lead us to conclude as the Singapore government concludes unless we count the worth of a human life to be no more than dogshit -- a worthless turd which can easily be dispensed with for the sake of a little extra flourish of supposed deterrence. We cannot say that execution in this case is the only way of protecting society against drug trafficking, since long-term imprisonment would have the same effect. Therefore the only possible argument of the putative utilitarian here would be to say that a human life is worth less than the unproven marginal deterrent effect of the death penalty over long-term imprisonment. And that, when rephrased, is simply saying that a human life is worth less than a piece of dogshit.

But even leaving aside this little exercise in utilitarian ethical analysis, I doubt very much that the moral intuitions of any well-informed person could actually lead her to support, in good conscience, the judicial murder of a cannabis trafficker. Any person who is actively involved in and gives support to this repulsive law is therefore guilty of formal co-operation in evil. Gilbert, in his blog on the Singapore legal system, has a post called No One is Guilty, So Everyone is Guilty, in which he also tries to assign responsibility for this evil. His point is that the law enforcement and judicial bureaucracy disperse personal responsibility so far that no one person can actually be said to be guilty of killing, say, Shanmugam. This may be true with respect to the people involved in the day-to-day processing of capital cases. And indeed, since drug trafficking carries a mandatory death sentence, the judges really do have very little room to manoeuvre.

But surely this means that it is those who promulgated this law, and those in the cabinet who have the power to abolish it but do not, and those who possess constitutional rights to commute death sentences by administrative fiat whose hands and hearts are the most soaked in blood. It is these people -- the cabinet, legislators, the President -- who hold in their hands the power to stop this vile process of judicial murder. But they choose not to do so.

They have a choice, and they choose death. May his blood be on their heads.

Shanmugam Murugesu

2005-04-18T11:23:00.000+08:00

I have already said all I can about his case in my previous post. I also accept that the chances for a presidential pardon are not good. Still, I went down to sign the petition and now I am waiting and hoping. The prospect of a man dying because this turd of a state decides that basic moral principles of justice and respect for human diginity are too abstract and should be flushed down the toilet in favour of their perverse idea of utilitarianism/pragmatism really makes me physically sick. This really keeps me awake at night.

In any case, I offer you some further thoughts on this from caustic.soda:

the children are even more pitiable. they are surviving solely on sinda welfare grants and being taken care of by the ailing letchumi. neither of them are in the best educational circumstances, which means no scholarships or merit bursaries for them, and given the singapore government's fabled stinginess, i doubt that there is even enough money for them to buy school textbooks and stationery. yet instead of studying for their exams (it's mid-april for crying out loud!), they are out on the streets giving out flyers to try to save their father's life. not that that's not a worthy cause (far from it), but given that educational standing is by far the most important factor for future social success, it is going to be that much harder to break out of their economic situation. grief is hardly the best emotional frame of mind of which to do anything. (if you don't believe that, i can personally testify to it.)

in fact, several background factors conspire to suggest rather strongly that the motive is rather simple: money. shanmugram was a combat engineer for eight years and a national athlete at some point in time. neither of these is exactly a high-paying profession. i remember a staff sergeant in my previous unit who has so many monetary problems that he had to take home cookhouse food before booking out for his wife to eat. and i have it on good faith from someone who knows national team players that national athletes get paid a miserable amount of about s$2000 a month (the bumper awards are one-time pats on the back for winning awards. no award, no cash.). so much for compensating loyal, fervent citizens. the sick mother, the subsistence on handouts, and the less-than-lavish career track all point to a desperate need for money, precipitating the intention to commit a crime out of sheer desperation, and certainly not one of drug-trafficking for the sake of an immoral profit.

the law reflects the singapore government's stauch stand on rationality, that reason stands above all other factors no matter what. but is rationalism is hardly most people's choice of ideology when living out their daily lives. rationality has no stand on the existence of family, nor of love, nor of altruism or friendship, yet what is life without any, or even all, of these? is there really a solid, undeniable bedrock of logic for the existence of the nuclear family, the grc, or even the nation-state? not to mention that beneath the veneer of cool-headedness lies a squirming morass of contradictions: double standards for white horses and the ordinary nsf; legal loopholes that make it possible to get arrested just for opening your mouth at the wrong place and the wrong time; competitive school rankings to boost education standards that end up depriving students of critical faculties... make your own list. i would argue for including this case on the list of contradictions as an example of unjust justice. yes, the evidence is overwhelming for demonstrating his guilt, but is the death sentence really appropriate for this person, at least? are there no mitigating factors for clemency?

the movie clips state that shanmugam is due to be hanged on or before the first week of may, 2005. so for those of you who care, do spread the word. civic duty compels us to do something. the presidential clemency is the final mechanism for appeal. it exists for a reason. if you care, please write in. remember, the death sentence is irrevocable once executed. there is no "undo" button or "load saved game" checkpoint once a life is taken.

Very Very Very Very Angry

2005-04-14T13:31:00.000+08:00

I have just come across this frightful story on the Young Republic blog, about the imminent judicial murder of Shanmugam Murugesu for trafficking marijuana. I shall reproduce the relevant article from Today in full:

Tuesday • April 12, 2005
Jose Raymond

WALK down Orchard Road at almost any time of the day and you are likely to be "accosted" by any number of people handing out flyers selling everything from shoes to timeshare properties.

But yesterday, people outside Centre-point Shopping Centre received flyers from two teenagers with a serious message — a plea to help them save their father, Shanmugam Murugesu, from being executed after he was convicted and sentenced to hang last April for drug trafficking.

Twins Gopalan and Krishnan Murugesu, 14, distributed more than 500 flyers detailing Shanmugam's plight yesterday on the advice of their father's lawyer.

Shanmugam, 38, was sentenced to death after being caught with more than a kilogramme of cannabis at the Tuas Checkpoint on Aug 29, 2003. He has asked the President for clemency after his appeal was dismissed.

On their lawyer's advice, the boys made their public appeal, hoping that members of the public would join their cause.

Said Krishnan, a Secondary 3 student: "My parents are divorced and my father has been looking after us. My mother remarried, lives somewhere else and doesn't see us anymore. If he is hanged ... we will become orphans."

The twins' grandmother, Mdm Letchumi Murugesu, has been looking after them since Shanmugam was imprisoned. According to the twins, Mdm Letchumi is unemployed and relies on handouts from the Singapore Indian Development Association to pay the bills.

Said Gopalan, also a student: "My grandmother will not be around for much longer to care for us. What's going to happen to us after that?

"We have taken our appeal to the streets to seek some compassion."

The boys are hoping that the public can write to President S R Nathan to help their cause. In the flyer, there is also mention of a public forum this weekend where members of the public can sign a petition, which will be delivered to the President.

Among the speakers scheduled for the forum are former Workers Party chief J B Jeyaretnam and Singapore Democratic Party leader Chee Soon Juan.

Shanmugam's lawyer, Mr M Ravi, who is working the case pro bono, stressed that he was not trying to politicise the situation.

He said: "Mr Jeyaretnam is only going to talk about the rule of law on the issue. It is rather hard to keep Dr Chee out of this because he is willing to go against the use of the death penalty.

"But there are other speakers who, like me, do not have any political inclinations and are only doing this because their consciences tell them to."

It is unacceptable that the death penalty is being applied at all, but to apply the death penalty to drug traffickers, and especially to people who traffic cannabis, is utterly repugnant. There are many good arguments for why we should abolish the death penalty, but all that eloquence and insight would be wasted in this case. For here we have an absolutely clear case of blatant injustice. Every honest person with a modicum of medical knowledge would be able to point out that the health risks of cannabis use are not significant. Yes, it is true that cannabis causes mental health problems if heavily used. But cigarettes cause lung cancer and heart disease, and alcohol causes liver cirrhosis when heavily used. What is the fucking difference between the good (and rich) people at Salem or Marlboro or Absolut or Chivas Regal and this poor man who supplies pot? If the government wishes to contain drug use, yes, it can always criminalise cannabis and put dealers behind bars for some years. But to fucking kill traffickers is incomprehensible. It is grossly disproportionate to the offence, and is utterly, utterly unjust. I am made physically sick by this news.

Oh, and there are some people who say, 'But it is a deterrent'. Well, fuck them. Human lives are not your play-thing, and they are certainly not the play-things of the Singapore government. The reason our reptilian legal system is so fucked up is because our judges and legislators think that human lives are pawns in their little real-life game of SimCity. Some are even so clever as to claim utilitarian justification for this shit. Well, if so they have adopted the most crude and indefensible form of utilitarianism conceivable, one that no thinking, humane person could ever accept.

Besides the in-your-face injustice that slaps you immediately on reading the article, there is also the economic injustice. Marx Oh, as we know, was also in danger of being judicially murdered not too long ago. But he could pay for a competent lawyer and for expensive overseas testing (in Switzerland and Austria) which showed that the amount of pure cannabis he was found in possession of was not high enough to cross the death-penalty threshold. But of course, if you're poor and don't have access to Swiss and Austrian labs to test your drugs, too bad, you gotta die. For more on this, I believe Amnesty's annual report has more details, especially on how the death penalty falls disproportionately on the poor and on how mandatory sentences and the obsession with "thresholds" beyond which the death penalty must be imposed reduces judicial independence and constitute a presumption of guilt.

There is a petition somewhere you can sign to lend your support to these people. Please, please, please go and sign it. I will. "There are other speakers who are only doing this [...] because their consciences tell them to". Indeed.

New Job II

2005-04-09T12:50:00.000+08:00

Correction: RI is NOT less Hitler Youth-like than it was when I was there. It seems I only got this impression because I had successfully avoided all the nasty bits, having only frequented the staff room (oh, okay that's turned out to be pretty nasty too, but on to that later), the library, and the classrooms.

You see, RI has a little bit of a split personality. Sometimes, it behaves like it is a faux Victorian public school, hence the teak furniture in the library, the silly ceremonies with gowns and ties, the Houses, the boarding school, the sanctioned abuse of younger boys by older ones, and the inflated sense of its own importance (I shall pass over the buggery and that sort of thing, but I suppose that fits in quite nicely with the public schoolboy theme). At other times, it thinks it is a junior wing of The Government, and most particularly, Mindeath. This explains the militarism, the Morning Assembly with silly drill commands, the Big Brother-like atmosphere, the obsession with regulating everything, the will to power attitude with regards to everything from school league tables to sporting triumph, the glorification of the physical over the mental, and the denigration of independent thought in favour of cramming and the ironically-named "critical thinking", leading to a lamentably low standard of education -- I learnt almost nothing from my time there. (Arguably the last two points there could in all justice be part of the faux public school ethos, but they are certainly much to the tastes of Mindeath and Mafia that runs this country.)

Still, I have discovered that some of the sins of RI/HJ are actually the result of wider factors. Take, for example, the daily drill session in the parade square and the worship of the Nation which follows. I have discovered that this practice is in fact ubiquitous. I mean of course I knew the flag-worship part was MOE policy but now I've found out that the incomprehensible Malay drill commands and the ludicrous militarisation of a school event are also MOE policy.

I have also discovered that the people who are drawn to the teaching profession in Singapore tend to be, on the whole, stultifying, narrow-minded morons who think that their job gives them the right to dictate and intrude into the lives of their students. So far, I have already witnessed two bitching sessions in the staff room where teachers gathered to discuss how best to humiliate troublesome students without incurring too much parental resistance. And, from what I heard, these people are not above deceit -- one teacher even remarked that she felt like she was "agent 007". This is not to say, of course, that all teachers are like that; indeed we need more teachers who do not have this "I-am-God" mentality.

All this also explains why I am still very much in favour of normalising relations between students and teachers. I think past the age of 12, most people can think fairly well for themselves and should be treated accordingly. In the past, the argument that women were less rational lent justification to their subordination. Today, this "less-rational" argument is still applied to adolescents. In the future, I think, we will see that this too was misguided, as we learn to accept that we all share in a common rationality. The dominant/subordinate core of the teacher-student relationship is a cancer at the heart of our education system which destroys any possibility of a genuine learning experience. For the point of learning, after all, is to be better able to use one's reason. But by postulating that students have a lower level of reason, and by taking that as a fundamental assumption of teacher-student relations, it takes away the incentive, both on the part of the student and of the teacher, to actually make education a learning experience. It becomes, instead, a site of hidden agendas and mind-numbing cramming.

But, of course, this present shit state of affairs is all rather covenient for the government, so I doubt that educational reform will ever touch on this issue.

New Job

2005-04-06T22:39:00.000+08:00

I have started on my first non-slave term of employment -- RI has offered me a relief teaching position teaching English (Lang. and Lit.). Actually for now it's only going to be for a week, but supposedly the teacher I'm relieving might need more home rest after she's discharged from hospital next week so I might be doing this for longer.

The good news is that RI seems rather less Hitler Jungen-like these days, but that might simply be because I took great pains to avoid the track, the field, the PE department, the Morning Assembly, the NCC, the NPCC, etc, etc. I have tried to stop them calling me "Sir" though, but my long tirade against treating this, a school, like a barracks was met with bewilderment.

But as they say, "try, try again".

My Time Is Not My Own

2005-03-31T11:11:00.000+08:00

As I have mentioned somewhere earlier on this blog, I am in the process of 'clearing leave', and as such have been happily absent from Stagmont Slave Market for about two weeks now. (And by the way, those of you who have already been liberated are not allowed to comment at this juncture. I have had quite enough of friends telling me, 'Hey, let me show you something', only to have them shove their civilian identity cards into my expectant face.)

The beginning of the end of shit hasn't been all I thought it would be though. I feel disorientated, aimless, desireless. There is so much I could be doing, so much I have been putting off doing, yet I am paralysed by lethargy. Silly bits of T.S. Eliot keep floating about in my head, like the phrase 'the years of l'entre-deux-guerres', from East Coker -- I feel like this is my year of l'entre-deux-vies, between the rubbled-over, painful, farcical life of the past twenty years, and the life of the future which in my mind is a vista of both possibility and tranquillity. Between these two lives, these six months until I fly off to Oxford in late September seem so vestigial.

Oh, and this line from Ecclesiates which Eliot likes to allude to (he refers to it in his notes for The Waste Land) keeps intruding into my mind too: '... and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets'. A shrink would probably look at this and say, 'He has thoughts of morbidity, put him on suicide watch!', but that isn't it at all, I think. It's the 'fears shall be in the way' and 'desire shall fail' that I'm thinking of most of all, and anyway my point is that I have already died, in some way. When they took my time and my body away from me on 13 December 2002, I shut down all my faculties of self. I put away like old toys all capacity to feel, to keep for the future, and most of all, to desire, firstly because they were utterly useless to me, at least for the duration of my slavery, and secondly because I was determined not to normalise in any way these 30 (now 28) months of shit. But after this long winter's hibernation/pseudo-death, I am realising that resurrecting the self will not be so easy. Sitting at home, away from the Slave Market, with mere days to liberation, I still feel bound, Lazarus-like, by the grave clothes the slave masters bid me wrap around myself. And even when some semblance of a life has been restored, what will remain for me will surely be an unvarnished bitterness at the wasted years.

Nevertheless, this quiet contemplation of bitterness is infinitely preferable to actually setting foot in the Slave Market. Two days ago, I had to return to Stagmont to attend my medical FFI (or free-from-injury, an ironic term to say the least). I reached the medical centre at 10.45 am, only to be told to return at 11 am. At 11 am, when I dutifully returned, I had to wait until 11.45 before some bored medic deigned to attend to me. This bored medic then noticed that my dental FFI form had no 'unit stamp' from the dental centre and thus violated the sacred laws of FFI processing. I helpfully pointed out that the dental form bore the signature of the dental officer, which was after the main thing. But this helpfulness was merely met with a mute stare of incomprehension, and a command to return to the dental centre -- which was at Kranji, not Stagmont, Slave Market -- to procure the stupid stamp. I tried to put on an act of righteous wrath, pointing out that this lack of a unit stamp was the error of the medic at the dental centre and no fault of my own at all (actually by now no acting was required, the feelings of impotent rage and intense irritation at Kafkaesque bureaucracy, so common to all national slaves, having already returned to me in full force). But of course, these protests were once again met with a mute stare of incomprehension.

So, I gritted my teeth and travelled to Kranji Slave Market. By the time I reached the dental centre, it was already 12.15 pm. At this point I was informed that they were taking a half-day and would only open at 1.30 pm. Having had no other option, I sat it out until the appointed hour. But when that hour arrived, absolutely nothing happened. No medics, no dentists, nobody came. Only at 1.45 did some lardy dental officer emerge munching on a chicken wing. And only at 2 pm did the medics decide to open the registration counter and stamp my papers. I had therefore wasted 3 fucking hours getting one useless stamp, and all through no fault of my own. When I finally arrived back at Stagmont Slave Market, it was already 2.30 pm. As usual, the medical officer could not be bothered to see us, having met some old classmate of his among the reservists who had returned for in-camp training. Only at 3 pm did he deign to attend to me, and processed my FFI in all of ten minutes.

To sum this day of shit up, I wasted 4 ½ hours for a procedure which could have taken ten minutes. But of course, this was never a problem for Mindef (Mindeath) and her minions, because the gloss they put on the National Service (Slavery) Act is that it abrogates all personal jurisdiction over one's time and life, and hands authority over these to Mindeath. Or, to see it from another perspective, since conscription makes the labour cost of slaves near-zero to Mindeath -- and indeed the cost is zero to the particular unit/Slave Market that Mindeath assigns one to -- then they treat the slave's labour as something they can afford to spend like water.

Quite literally, speaking as a slave, my time is not my own.

What the Doctor Doesn't Know

2005-03-20T22:08:00.000+08:00

As most of you should know by now, as part of the government's attempts to kiss and make up with the moral majority (although arguably they are in fact a minority, albeit a well-educated, middle-class and therefore vocal one) in order to smooth the way for their grand casino plan, a lot of anti-homosexual noises are now being made. The noisiest mouthpiece so far has been the good doctor Balaji, who recently claimed that Nation 04 was behind last year's rise in HIV infections. This is in addition to other noises he made in the recent past about gay bath-houses and saunas being a hive of unprotected and therefore HIV-prone sex. Except, of course, he seemed to focus much more on the fact that the sex was gay, rather than that it was unprotected. This, I presume, will be the prelude to banning the Nation party this year, which will then be paraded around as the government's guilt offering to the abovementioned moral majority/minority.

As most of you should also know, I am no friend of bigotry or of legal moralism. The Singapore government would do well to read the 1957 report of the Wolfenden committee, commissioned by the British government to investigate the legal issues surrounding homosexuality, which recommended the decriminalisation of private and consensual homosexual acts. The report points out in distinctly Millian tones that the chief aim of the law is to protect individuals from others, not from themselves:

"The function of the criminal law, as we see it, is to preserve public order and decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive and injurious and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation or corruption of others, particularly those who are specially vulnerable because they are young, weak in body or inexperienced.''

It is extremely unfortunate that such views are not shared by the Singapore legislature, and indeed are not shared by some leading constitutional lawyers in Singapore, such as my favourite mother-daughter dynamic duo of Thio Su Mien and Thio Li-Ann.

Of course, in this case, Balaji would probably be gagging to point out that it is not so much a case of morality as of public health. That may be so, but clearly the lack of a sensible way forward on the issue of HIV/AIDS in the gay community here is at least partly the result of the criminalisation of gay sex. That Action for AIDS had their safe sex booth at Nation 04 closed down by the police on the grounds that all gay sex, safe or not, is illegal and therefore promotion of safe (gay) sex is illegal -- which was true, but only in a most twisted, legalistic way -- is perhaps only too obvious an indicator of this. Beyond that, and more importantly, there is the basic fact that trying to engage with a community whose very existence is technically illegal is most unlikely to result in constructive dialogue and will inevitably fall into mutual mistrust, hysteria, and acrimonious incrimination. This new concern with HIV/AIDS among gays in Singapore, if concern it truly is and not merely a tool of cynical demagogic manoeuvring, should wake the government up to the fact that their 'don't ask, don't tell'/'criminalisation-as-moral-appeasement' policy is untenable. It is time to speak with one voice on this matter, not with one underground voice targeted at AIDS interest groups and another, sanitized, voice to some abstract public which is too conservative/polite/whatever to hear of such naughty goings-on. Decriminalisation now is of prime importance because we need to hear open, informed and disinterested views on this issue, not lobotomised anti-gay propaganda, and most of all we need to hear gay men and women speak up without fear about safe sex, the problem of AIDS and indeed about the myriad possibilities of gay life beyond sex.

Which brings me to the Other Side Of The Coin. Many gays are well aware of the dangers of barebacking, especially if one keeps multiple sex partners. Yet they persist in their insouciance and indifference to basic safe sex measures. (Importantly, though, this is 'many', not 'all'. I think that there is a not insignificant number of young and less-educated gay men who are much more uninformed and are therefore a prime and unfortunate target for bareback-fetishists. But really, this merely brings us back to the Wolfenden report and my previous point. It is precisely this group which is 'specially vulnerable' and which is constituted of the 'young' and 'inexperienced'; therefore it is precisely here that the law must act to protect them, not by continuing to criminalise homosexual acts, but indeed by allowing for proper and value-neutral outreach and education programmes by removing the current barrier of hypocritical criminalisation.) They accept and indeed embrace a gay culture which has turned them into lobotomised, superficial, sex-obsessed, gym-enslaved, catty indentikit robots, where having unlimited and preferably unprotected sex with an unlimited number of similarly tanned and muscular 'MSM' is considered the very paragon of a good life and is indeed their only conception of a good life for a gay man. In an important sense, therefore, those who are active in 'the scene' here must look to themselves first if they want to find the origins of the recent spike in HIV infections among gay men -- a phenomenon that AfA had already warned about last year.

But it is already way past my bedtime and I have spoken so much and someone else has already written an insider's story here. So do have a read and we shall speak soon.

Good night.

Life On The Outside

2005-03-11T23:41:00.000+08:00

I had this annoying anti-epiphany today. Allow me to explain:

Having decided that going to town, chatting up a friend and buying a new digital camera would constitute an infinitely more interesting afternoon than languishing in camp, pretending to edit a Look How Far We've Come This Year propaganda video and furtively trying to read a long unread very short introduction to Hobbes, I managed to escape Stagmont Gulag after lunch. This I achieved by taking leave, so I suppose this vaguely marks the start of what my gaolers call 'clearing leave'. Not that they've noticed though -- they seem intent on keeping me until I finish off that Look How Far We've Come masterpiece. I shall therefore have to wriggle my way out of their claws through various cunning machinations. But let us not dwell on them since that would be very dull indeed. No, really, it would be.

So, anyway, there I was, getting off the bus next to Chijmes and preparing to look for my friend who was somewhere in the bowels of Raffles City. It was 2pm and the sun was shining and the gothic window tracery with the cinquefoils and the trifoils were gleaming and the shadows were playing in the cloisters. It was all quite shockingly intricate and sun-kissed. Well, shocking to me, at least, since I have spent the last two years of my life in an equally shocking building -- shockingly ugly that is -- under the thumb of idiots whose view of life is so impoverished that all understanding of douceur de vivre probably left their minds 20 years ago. Indeed, one cannot even say that their devotion to ugliness and squalour is ideological: it is not because they embrace a spartan or an ascetic/monastic ideal that insist on a mind-numbing 'standardisation' which cuts out all possibility of putting an individual imprint on the space of one's life and indeed on what are, after all, one's personal possessions. It is merely because they are entirely ignorant of the potential of human agency and individual human expression, preferring instead to think that a life can be built on food, shelter, and dog-like obedience. But, as I said earlier, I shall not dwell on the gaolers, since that would be an exercise in tedium.

The crux of my anti-epiphany, then, lay in my sudden and horrible realisation that I had not been in that part of town on a weekday afternoon for well over two years. Indeed, apart from lame pre/post-medical appointment visits, I have not properly been in town on a weekday afternoon since I was enslaved. This thought gave me a very 'Ex-cons can serve society with conviction' moment.

Oh, and for those of you whose gaolers like to justify their cult of squalour, ugliness and stupidity with the ol' 'we will provide you with your needs, anything above that is a privilege' shit, you can toss them this quote from Shakespeare's King Lear:

'O reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous;

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man's life is cheap as beast's.'

I think that says it all really.

Primary Source

2005-03-06T21:56:00.000+08:00

An intrepid blogger has actually decided to chronicle his journey through the wastelands of national slavery. In fact I doubt that this is the only one of its kind, except that it is the only one of its kind that I know of. Perhaps in future such blogs will provide a rich resource for social historians of conscription and/or of Singapore. Assuming, of course, that such historians with such interests will actually exist. Hmmm.

go here.

To Lead, To Excel, To Overcome

2005-03-06T02:15:00.000+08:00

I came across these wise words (by someone we shall simply call ST) on power and authority in the SAF in a blog recommended to me by a friend; being angered by such petty shit may seem puerile once one has left the vile isle of P. Tekong Besar, but after all that is because Basic is such an infantilising experience, and anyway, the principle holds for the entire SAF edifice:

this is what (okay, another thing) i dislike about the army - quite randomly it bestows power on individuals who often have no clue how to handle it, and quite frankly no right to wield it at all. our sec comms are what, seven months older? our platoon sergeant a year? power corrupts. how can any sensible person punish his peers, shout at them, scold them for say, a dirty bunk, with no hint of irony at all? the sergeants are hoity-toity about their standards: fucking hell we didn't train you for six weeks to have you litter the campsite like that fucking hell knock it down knockitdown! but then when we walk around later we see cigarette butts everywhere, coke cans and paper lunchboxes. sometimes i see why girls want angmoh boyfriends. for the cocks and much more.

ST is quite right to say that power is conferred in the most arbitrary and illegitimate ways in the SAF (and, indeed, in all militaries, in my opinion). But where he has truly hit the nail on the head is his observation that many of those who actually wield this power seem to be utterly oblivious to this fact, or else actively choose to ignore it. To them, the institutional structures of the SAF have duly annointed them, and that is that. Indeed, for many, there is some unconscious calculus of reciprocal pain which -- for them -- legitimises their power: it is the 'I endured months of meaningless suffering in ______ (insert suitably unpleasant military training brig), therefore it is now my natural right to inflict an equal measure of equally meaningless suffering on you' discourse.

Needless to say, this perverse internal rationalisation of their own power can only add to the farcical lack of perspective which ST has so ably characterised. When these people are barking out orders to their minions, or dishing out inane and arbitrary 'punishments', they really do believe that they are dutifully fulfilling their rightful role in the great Chain Of Command, and that they have 'earned' this exalted position as result of having weathered various (naturally artificial and self-propagating) tribulations.

This is odd, since when I observe them in their daily exertions, I merely see some pompous, deluded halfwit foolishly and enthusiastically acting out the part he has randomly been assigned in the great charade of petty power which is the SAF.

I could say more, but it has already been said, and by someone more eloquent than I, in Jean Genet's The Balcony. Go and read it, people.

David Miller, Friend of Singa

2005-03-04T22:19:00.000+08:00

I have been reading David Miller's Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, and it has been at best a disappointingly sketchy read, at worst a rancid apology for the idea that apart from a few basic rights, human rights are not universalisable and are mostly culturally determined. Among the rights he considers not necessary for a fully human life (and therefore not strictly 'human rights') we find, surprise surprise, what he calls rights 'that liberals will applaud', as if democratic rights and civil liberties receive the attention they do merely because they are the flashy objects of liberal fetishisation. He goes on to make the point that most societies throughout history were neither liberal nor democratic and therefore to argue that without democratic rights life would be intolerably oppressive would be presumptuous, elitist and absurd. But this argument has certain frightening and unsavoury results. Torture, for example, was an accepted form of interrogation and punishment through many ages. Following his line of reasoning, we would have to conclude that freedom from torture is not really a human right, merely an innovation peculiar to liberal societies.

But really, Western endorsements of Asian Values-type arguments infuriate me so much. It's all very convenient isn't it, for these people, cocooned as they are in the freedom and security of their liberal societies, to bloviate about how perhaps this same freedom and security is only a good idea for them but not for the millions in China or Singapore who still have to live in fear. God, I so should not have bought his stupid book.

Still, I managed to glean some delicious little nuggets from this otherwise fetid tract, such as the following quote from Locke, writing about irrational fear and how it leads to tyranny:

'Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions.'

These words should prove useful the next time some national education outfit drags out the whole 'We are vulnerable to invasion! We are kept safe because the SAF acts as an effective deterrent!! We should therefore be obedient, earnest and loyal conscripts (did I mention conscripts?) because if not Singapore's fucked!!!' bullshit.

This is all particularly apt considering the identification of the 'nation' with the lion in the nationalist ritual/drivel that has come to pervade our schools/barracks. Something about 'Singa' and some Sumatran prince I think it was. Whatever.

Amnesty Begins at Home

2005-02-28T22:00:00.000+08:00

Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, died 25 February 2005.

In 1961, lighting the first Amnesty candle, he said, "I’m reminded of the words of a 16th century man sentenced to death by burning: We have today lit such a candle as shall never be put out."

"The candle burns not for us," he declared, "but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who ‘disappeared’. That is what the candle is for."

One day when I have read enough and have thought enough about it, I hope that I will be able to present a cogent, slashing and unanswerable defence of human rights, civil liberties, government by consent, and liberal politics in general. I know that what I take to be the self-evident ground of human dignity and a perfectly rational wish to have a say in the way my life is run is neither self-evident nor rational to some. Many people on this vile isle, or so the story goes, would rather not sacrifice their insouciance and happily ordered lives full of peace, progress and prosperity, for what they think is the superfluous good of being in control of their own lives.

But for now, all I can say is that, given what we know, about the deaths by dunking, the deaths by hanging, the deaths by suicide, the deaths by neglect, the little everyday deaths of giving over your body and your will to a screaming 20-year-old, being forced to do what you loathe, being forced to be what you loathe, shouldn't we start to ask ourselves: isn't something very very wrong?

And unlike Peter Benenson, standing in Trafalgar Square in 1961 lighting that candle, should we not say rather that the candle burns precisely for us, victims as we are of MINDEATH, a muzzled press and a state that treats us as means and not as ends?

Why don't we for once, if only for ourselves, recognise that simple fact?

Psittachosis

2005-02-27T02:42:00.000+08:00

This is going to be a crap first entry. But that will be entirely the fault of the brilliant and compassionate officerly minds who devised Battalion Maintenance Day, recently inflicted on the national slaves in the said battalion (a battalion in which I have the misfortune of being interned). You see, besides having no concept of liberty, they apparently also have no concept of public health. In forcing their slaves to clean out a room that had not been touched for a decade and which was littered with dust, mouldy foam, pigeon shit, decomposing pigeon bodies and other delights, and in failing to provide us with any masks or protective equipment, they have once again demonstrated their stupidity, cruelty and indifference. So now I am afflicted with some cold/flu complex, which I hope is not the prelude to psittachosis or some other nasty malady. Which is why, coming back to my first point, this first entry is about nothing. Nothing except pigeon shit, possible psittachosis, and the petty cruelties of the SAF.

Which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad introduction to the rants which lie ahead.