Questions for Heterosexuals

Ordinarily I’m not overly enamoured of The Online Citizen, but this gem caught my eye. It is a little screwed up, but not more screwed up than the kind of stuff LGBT people put up with.

Questions for Heterosexuals
developed by Martin Rochlin, Ph.D., 1977

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
2. When and how did you first decide you were a heterosexual?
3. Is it possible your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
4. Is it possible your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?
5. Isn’t it possible that all you need is a good gay lover?
6. Heterosexuals have histories of failures in gay relationships. Do you think you may have turned to  heterosexuality out of fear of rejection?
7. If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer that?
8. If heterosexuality is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients heterosexual?
9. To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies? How did they react?
10. Your heterosexuality doesn’t offend me as long as you don’t try to force it on me. Why do you people feel compelled to seduce others into your sexual orientation?
11. If you choose to nurture children, would you want them to be heterosexual, knowing the problems they would face?
12. The great majority of child molesters are heterosexuals. Do you really consider it safe to expose your children to heterosexual teachers?
13. Why do you insist on being so obvious, and making a public spectacle of your heterosexuality? Can’t you just be what you are and keep it quiet?
14. How can you ever hope to become a whole person if you limit yourself to a compulsive, exclusive heterosexual object choice and remain unwilling to explore and develop your normal, natural, healthy, God-given homosexual potential?
15. Heterosexuals are noted for assigning themselves and each other to narrowly restricted, stereotyped sex-roles. Why do you cling to such unhealthy role-playing?
16. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
17. With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
18. How could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual, considering the menace of overpopulation?
19. There seem to be very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed with which you might be able to change if you really want to. Have you considered aversion therapy?
20. Do heterosexuals hate and/ or distrust others of their own sex? Is that what makes them heterosexual?

Lies, damned lies, and GDP figures

This morning I read ST’s front-page article “Economists raise growth forecast to 9%” with more than the usual distaste. Besides the fact that it came next to a picture of the Health Minister exposing more skin than I can block out with one eye closed, the article reinforced a simplistic, flawed understanding of GDP.

GDP is simplistic and flawed as a measure of an economy’s health. This should be clear to anyone looking at the growth figures from the last few years. According to this table from the department of statistics, GDP grew 1.8% in 2008 and shrank 1.3% in 2009. Breaking it down, in Q1 of 2008, GDP grew 7.4% – which was offset by low growth (2.7%) in Q2, complete stagnation (0%) in Q3 and shrinkage (-2.5%) in Q4. In Q1 2009 GDP shrank another 8.9%. Yet I’m sure if it wasn’t pointed out, no one would have noticed that our economy was 11.4% smaller in Q1 2009 compared to six months ago. Did you earn 11.4% less at the start of 2009 than in the middle of 2008? Similarly, did you earn 15.5% more at the end of Q1 2010 than at the start? Probably not. Looking at it from a different perspective, how would you like it if the price of meat or eggs or milk went down 9% in 3 months and up 15% in another 3 months? This should make it clear that the volatility of Singapore’s GDP figures (down 9% one quarter, up 15% in another) makes analysing them, even attributing any significance to them, an exercise in futility – and what use is a statistic that can’t be analysed?

Another thing about GDP figures: they’re a mere numbers game. As CIMB-GK economist Song Seng Wun puts it in the article, “the simple mathematics of the numbers suggests that it’s quite tough to fall below 10 per cent growth for this year.” What he’s saying is, even if the economy stagnates for the next six months, we’d still be “growing” at least 10% for the whole year. What he’s saying is that the next 6 months and whatever follows next year is irrelevant, at least for this year’s growth forecast. This is attributing way too much importance to the figures and too little to actual movements in the economy – it’s akin to saying “who cares about the next half of the year? The numbers still look good!” I’m sure this isn’t quite what he intended, but the image of Nero fiddling does come to mind.

Besides criticising the utility of GDP figures in general, there are some aspects peculiar to (or “uniquely Singapore” about) Singapore’s GDP figures. Singapore is a small, open economy – when we say that, we mean that Singapore is a relatively small economy compared to, say, the UK, or Brazil, and that it depends on international trade far more than most other economies. In fact Singapore is the one country that’s more dependent on international trade than any other in the world (that’s because we’re not counting Hong Kong). As a result, a slight shrink in big economies (and trade partners) like the EU and the US can result in a very big drop in GDP here in Singapore. We’re like a small sampan caught in a huge storm in the middle of a very big ocean. In more technical language, that translates into more volatility in the growth statistics – rendering them even more useless as a measure of economic health. Is the strength and robustness of our economy – our companies, our institutions – dependent on what’s happening in the US or Japan or the EU? Probably yes, but probably not to such an extent as the statistics suggest.

Furthermore, there is massive foreign participation in our economy. Take a look at the table on page 5 of this document. Total GDP in 2008 was $257.4 billion, out of which the share of resident foreigners and resident foreign companies was $117.6 billion (roughly 45%) and “indigenous” GDP $139.7 billion (55%). In most economies the foreign share of GDP is far lower, and the indigenous share far higher. What we can expect from this is that the amount of money taken out of Singapore by foreign companies would be far higher than in most other economies (profit repatriation and such), and proportionately less would be available to trickle down into the wages of the man on the street. I expect the picture for wages is similar, since expatriates probably make up a disproportionately large minority of high-wage earners, compared to most other countries. I am not advocating that we chase foreign companies and expats out of Singapore – the benefits they bring in job creation, experience and other less tangible areas surely outweigh the costs. I’m merely pointing out that, given that their share of GDP is so high, GDP itself is not useful as an indicator of the benefits of economic growth that accrue to Singaporeans.

Given all the above, I do find it distasteful that the media adopts this relentlessly self-congratulatory, back-patting tone every time it reports good GDP growth figures. It would be far more revealing and truthful if they reported good wage growth or a fall in income inequality, and we would be the better for it.

“Spoilt princesses”, rly?

A nation of spoilt princesses?

THE Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) seemed to suggest last Thursday (‘Singapore still far behind in true gender equality: Aware’) that women are free from blame for the declining birth rate in Singapore.

In Singapore, most parents urge their children to excel in studies and focus on their career. Few prepare their children for the rigours of parenthood.

Many households also employ maids. As a result, our boys and girls grow up lacking parenting skills and are clueless about household chores. The boys, however, have responsibilities forced upon them in the form of national service. Not so the girls. They are free to place personal ambition above all else.

Many women choose to remain single because they do not see the need or the urgency to get married. They do not need a man to provide for them and they can always depend on their girlfriends for emotional support. As for sex, few see the need to have it regularly.

Even when a woman does want to get married, her expectations get in the way. The man must be her ‘type’. He must have a great job, good income, be reasonably good-looking and he must also charm her off her feet before she will contemplate marriage.

Our society glorifies the career woman. Lifestyle and fashion magazines devote pages to tips for the career woman to get ahead. Floors in shopping malls cater exclusively to the needs of these women and credit card and insurance companies vie for their money.

As a result, women are spoilt for choice. Egged on by society, free from national service and reservist obligations and not needing a man, they are totally free to focus exclusively on their careers. Choosing to get married and have children is committing career suicide.

The conclusion is inevitable. We have raised a nation of ‘spoilt princesses’ unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood.

Sulthan Niaz, May 26 2010, ST Forum

I’m guessing Sulthan Niaz must have suffered a whole lot of painful dumping experiences because I can’t think of how else such concentrated misogyny could ever have developed. “As for sex, few see the need to have it regularly” – clearly this suggests that he isn’t getting any.

Okay, other than dissing this poor sick dude, I think that putting the blame on the ladies is going too far. Playing a blame game isn’t going to solve anything. Is anyone seriously going to advocate motherhood classes for schoolgirls to “prepare children for the rigours of parenthood” (at the very least it would be sending out terrible mixed messages – on one hand “don’t have sex”, on the other “this is how you look after kids”)? Is anyone seriously going to try to reduce the role of maids in our society (what conceivable mechanism – short of increasing the maid levy – would achieve that)? Or encourage / tell / force women to get married? Make them lower their expectations of an ideal partner? De-glorify career women? Reverse decades of social progress by reducing the choices available to the modern Singaporean woman?

Some social norms are changing, while others aren’t. For instance, it’s become far more acceptable to stay single, especially for women (think Sumiko Tan, Lee Wei Ling), yet I’m quite sure cohabitation and having children outside of marriage is still beyond the pale. Put more bluntly, it’s more acceptable for women to stay single but not for single successful career women to have kids. Obviously having a growing segment of the population on semi-enforced chastity (or at least childlessness) is bound to have an impact on the birth rate.

Clearly something has to be done about the birth rate (I agree with Mr Niaz on that point). If that entails the diminution of the role of marriage as an institution, so be it. Society has naturally evolved in response to modern career pressures; we need to keep up with the times, not turn back the clock as Mr Niaz seems to be suggesting.

Mr Niaz pins the blame squarely on the women but how about employers and broader society? We hear too often of women employees sacked or their career advancement put on hold because they choose to have kids – this reflects terribly on employers here and the kind of zero-sum relationship they have with their workers. Besides becoming more accepting and encouraging towards unconventional partnerships and living arrangements, Singapore society needs to change attitudes towards childbearing and childcare, especially amongst employers, so that having kids is no longer “committing career suicide”.

Mr Niaz ignores the broader social circumstances completely, choosing instead to paint a simplistic picture of increasingly modern, selfish women who, quite rightly, refuse to go to bed and have kids with men like him. After having cultivated well-educated, (somewhat) independent-minded women, it would be a huge mistake to pander to the kind of half-baked neanderthal drivel that Mr Niaz espouses.

In memory of greatness

It’s almost a general truth that generation after generation, people tend towards mediocrity, in the stature of their accomplishments and the strength of their character.

Examples abound in literature and the written word. Genesis 5 has the pre-flood patriarchs living about 900 years on average. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, in its large-scale structure (but I’m not a LOTR fan and my memory could be wonky) deals with the passing of the age of Elves and the coming of the age of Men. Michael Ende’s Neverending Story is about the decay of the realm of Fantastica (the spread of “the Nothing”); similarly The Magician’s Nephew (the first Narnia book) has Queen Jadis from an older, dead world coming to London and messing up.

(Incidentally CS Lewis, as narrator, often inserts his own commentary on the more mundane action of the story, for instance “she (Polly) was given dinner with all the nice parts left out and sent to bed for two solid hours. It was a thing that happened to one quite often in those days” – and through that he makes a clear distinction between the time of the narration and the time of the action – ”those days”. But I digress.)

Dr Goh Keng Swee passed away 10 days ago, and was immediately remembered as a giant of a person. Quite rightly so. I was surprised that Temasek Review put out an article “Why Singaporeans do not owe Goh Keng Swee or other PAP leaders a ‘debt’ of gratitude” which to my mind bounded on historical revisionism. It was at the very least rather petty to politicise the whole thing, given that the guy’s dead. Some points are valid or at least worth consideration, but TR should have had the decency to leave a seemly interval between his death and running that article. And I don’t buy their “PAP propaganda” spiel, just like the way I don’t buy most of the stuff that passes for commentary in ST – I resent that their pieces are uniformly and predictably biased, which is an insult to the discerning reader.

But I’m not so much thinking about his achievements, as wondering why there is such a tendency to mediocrity. I think it’s perceptible in many areas – school exams always seem to be getting easier; politicians make larger boo-boos more often these days; and of course decay is a favourite theme in literature (especially fantasy – which is about the only genre that explores story arcs on the scale of generations).

If this is indeed the case, what’s the reason for it? Why is it that we had such people as Dr Goh, S. Rajaratnam, LKY, David Marshall, while now we simply don’t seem to have people of equivalent calibre (in a population more than twice the size)? I think this is worth examining, because as trends go this one is particularly alarming for the quality of the political leadership we’re going to get in a few decades’ time.

I have no answers but a few guesses – partially reassuring.

1. Eulogies are invariably glowing, glorified affairs; it’s a given that they put a positive gloss on everything a person has done.
2. The crop of post-independence leaders were taking over at a low point in Singapore’s development; naturally there were more avenues and opportunities for development then compared to now, and since we’ve come so far their achievements are also bathed in the same light of glory. To my mind this does not quite address the objection that many other post-colonial states failed to achieve similar trajectories of development despite starting from a similarly low level.
   (However it does present an interesting (though irrelevant) form of observer bias – a well-educated observer living in a state of material well-being is more likely to be living in a country where, at some point in the past, good leadership has emerged that has brought about the current state of affairs.)
3. People’s achievements are built up over a career spanning decades – most of the political leadership are still in the prime of their career and it’s understandable that their accomplishments aren’t of the same magnitude as the founding fathers. (But this seems to be too charitable in that it relieves the current leadership of the pressure to excel.)

I hope I’m wrong about the tendency to mediocrity, and somewhere out there there’s an answer that I just haven’t stumbled across.

I pity Dr Ng

It’s quite rare to see a full minister so thoroughly and publicly rebuked as Dr Ng Eng Hen was last week. If you still have the ST from last Wednesday (May 12), he looked absolutely dejected – and on the front page too, what an embarrassment! He issued a public apology (for giving the false impression that Mother Tongue weightage at PSLE might be reduced) and sent a letter out to all Mother Tongue teachers for reassurance. I can’t think of any incident where a minister has been left quite so spectacularly to take the flak for his ministry’s screw-up.

My purpose here is not to thrash out the pros and cons of reducing the MTL weightage, to highlight the disproportionate amount of airtime that’s been devoted to Chinese Language advocates, or indeed to comment on the pedagogy – I’m not an expert on that, and many better (and worse) minds have covered the ground quite thoroughly enough. What I see here is a bureaucratic mess-up leaking into the public sphere and igniting general fury; in short, the grind and gristle of government, but in public, for a change. Too public, too messy and too embarrassing for the people in charge.

I’m not going to call for anyone’s scalp to take responsibility, neither do I see this as a victory or defeat for anyone – it was just an idea that got floated out before its time had come, and got spectacularly shot down. But I do think this should be taken as a sign of two things – the civil service is very perceptibly losing their connection with the feeling on the ground, and the same is starting to be true of politicians, even ministers. Although we have no idea what happened in MOE HQ in Buona Vista, it’s plausible to suggest that this incident happened because there aren’t enough MT advocates in the MOE bureaucracy (or that they aren’t being heard).

One other thing – I find it inexplicable that Dr Ng took three weeks to finally cool the sentiment, and that when it happened the PM had to get involved. It looks like a big slap in the face for Dr Ng (literally, if you take a look at the front-page photo last Wednesday). If the PM got involved, obviously it was considered to be serious enough to warrant his involvement. This begs the question: if it was that serious, why did Dr Ng take so long to call that press conference? If it was indeed a policy turnaround, why were people not consulted before his “wrong impression” interview last month? Focus groups, dialogues, all that jazz – that would have saved a lot of embarrassment all round.

A charitable interpretation (that I choose to believe) is that Dr Ng suffered a momentary lapse of judgement in his choice of words – perhaps he thought he wasn’t being clear enough and ended up reaching beyond his brief. Or perhaps it was a genuine signal for a policy shift, but the semi-public hush-hush consultations that should have occurred were overlooked (an unforgivable oversight). A less charitable, but plausible, interpretation is that the government (civil service and political leadership) is losing the political will to make decisions that matter. And if that’s the case, it had better address the problem before it loses the political mandate to make decisions that matter – still a long, unthinkable way more, but perhaps – worryingly for the people in power – not quite so unthinkable as three weeks ago.

[ST Forum] UN Official’s Remarks

I think this was one of the most cogent and persuasive responses I’ve seen to the UN Special Rapporteur Githu Muigai’s comments – in stark contrast to the MFA’s own disappointing response.

UN official’s remarks
Don’t be too quick to dismiss views

Rather than adopt a knee-jerk response to United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Githu Muigai’s proposals on Singapore’s policies on race, meritocracy and related issues (‘UN expert’s comments draw swift govt reply’; last Thursday), should we not, instead, have signalled our open-mindedness to reflect on the proposals, especially coming from an experienced official with UN credentials?

Mr Muigai’s recommendation to consider offering Malays a ‘stimulus package’ within a specified timeline, particularly in education, should be mulled over rather than dismissed hurriedly.

I would certainly have disagreed if he had called for abandoning meritocracy or implementing a permanent policy of affirmative action, practised, until recently, by Malaysia.

While meritocracy has benefited Singaporeans, it has been less successful at resolving the educational and economic gap between Malays and non-Malays. The disparity has persisted since independence; Malay progress is slower and less than that of Indian Singaporeans whose population is half that of Malay citizens.

Official data on students’ performances in the Primary School Leaving Examination and the O and A levels in a 25-year period from 1980 to 2005 showed that while students from all ethnic groups have progressed, Malays still lagged behind Chinese and Indian students in all these exams, and in mathematics and science.

So too with median household income (2005) and occupation (2007): The Malay figure of $3,050 was the lowest among all ethnic groups, and Malays held a mere 2.4 per cent of administrative and managerial jobs compared with Indians (11.4 per cent) and Chinese (14.6 per cent). It is imprudent of us to stick rigidly to meritocracy.

After all, government pragmatism has seen meritocracy fine-tuned. The rule barring Malays from sensitive appointments in the Singapore Armed Forces and the adoption of group representation constituencies to prevent qualified Malay candidates from defeat are evidence of this.

That our brand of meritocracy can do with a bit more equitable tweaking is apparent if we reflect on this poser: Why, after 45 long years, have the socio-economic gap between Malays and non-Malays and the jarring absence of Malays in senior positions in the civil service still not been resolved adequately?

One can think of two possible answers to this conundrum, both of which cannot be true: First, Malays (acknowledged in our Constitution as the indigenous people) are being discriminated against, and second, non-Malays are simply smarter than Malays.

Associate Professor Hussin Mutalib

Prof. Hussin is right to suggest that there is a middle way between pure – and increasingly inequitable – meritocracy, and affirmative action. I think the government has done too good a job of making affirmative action look evil, so much so that even any hint of it becomes unpalatable without question. The fact that the Malays are under-represented at the top of our society, and like the elephant in the room it goes quietly unaddressed and unnoticed. What Prof. Hussin leaves unsaid in the last sentence is particularly sharp – is there a third option? what’s the right answer? And coming from a Malay, this shouldn’t be ignored.

2 weeks more to get your pink shirts!

This is the first-ever picture on this blog, and for a good cause! Pink Dot 2010 is happening on 15 May 2010 (Saturday), 5pm at Hong Lim Park. If, like myself 5 minutes ago, you don’t know how to get there, it’s just across the road from Clarke Quay MRT (map here).

Why show up? Whether you’re gay or straight or anything in between, your presence there is going to be a powerful signal and a great comfort to all those out there who’re lost and alone and confused because our society has rejected them. This isn’t about repealing 377A or legalising gay marriages (not yet, anyway) – it’s about their readmission into the human race. This isn’t a protest or indeed a “procession” – it’s a celebration of human love, whatever form it takes.

For more info: pinkdot.sg or pinkdotsg.blogspot.com

A Liberal Arts College in Singapore?

Ever since Dr Tony Tan spoke on how a liberal arts college would be good for Singapore (that’s a couple of weeks back in early April) there’s been a lot of talk about it in the papers. Well and good, but it’s an idea which has died and been resurrected many times before (at least since 2004). I hope it gets moving now that Dr Tony Tan has invested his considerable political heft into the idea.

Many people however don’t know what “liberal arts college” entails – yes of course small class sizes, studying in varied disciplines – but it stops there. I saw a Straits Times YouthInk article about two weeks back where the last author (in a set of four) understood a liberal arts education to have a “special focus on the humanities”, and went on to characterise it as not “radically different” from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS. The second-to-last author talked about institutions such as Lasalle and Nafa, which are specialist colleges for art (as in painting, drawing, music and so on). There are a lot of misconceptions floating about and it hardly does the concept any justice.

To be fair, though, the concept is ill-defined. Wikipedia, for instance, makes a hash of it. There are good reasons why it’s ill-defined – liberal arts colleges in the US differ so widely in culture and character that any attempt to define it with a specific set of criteria is an exercise in futility. So they have small class sizes, but so do ‘normal’ universities. So they allow students to take whatever courses they fancy before specialising in their junior (3rd) year, but that’s true of most if not all American universities.

The one defining characteristic of liberal arts colleges is perhaps that they are colleges rather than universities – they focus on undergraduate education (though some liberal arts colleges take graduate students too). It might be illuminating to note that many universities call their undergraduate components colleges too – for instance Harvard College, Yale College, and the College of the University of Chicago – and their professional (business, law, medicine, divinity, etc.) and graduate schools have different names.

Other than that one characteristic, I can’t find any other qualitative difference between liberal arts colleges and universities. And it might be shocking for some Singaporeans (advocates and detractors alike) to find out that most universities in the US allow undergrads to take many courses (not just one or two) outside of their intended major, and that many have a significant liberal arts component – such as the University of Chicago’s renowned (and frankly fearsome, I’m glad I’m not going there) “Common Core” curriculum including components from the sciences, humanities and arts, which every undergraduate takes.

So the fact is even the more familiar names among American universities implement an undergraduate curriculum that is liberal arts in spirit, if not in name. Given that for years Singaporean agencies (including the PSC) and companies have seen fit to send their scholars to American universities for a liberal-arts-in-spirit education, this whole debate about the merits and downsides of a liberal arts education is really way overblown.

On euthanasia

It is a common characteristic of polemicists arguing against euthanasia that they fail to define it properly, occasionally going so far as to suggest that it is a slippery slope leading us to the indiscriminate killing of the old and poor. A case in point (though certainly not the worse; there was an article a couple of weeks back in the venerable ST whose title and author unfortunately escapes my memory) is this one from TOC, Killing the Dying.

Inexplicably, the author even uses “The Slippery Slope” as a section header. Someone please let Dr Wong know that slippery slope is the name of an informal fallacy i.e. something that should be avoided in one’s arguments. If I made such an egregious error I would be mortally embarrassed. I say this is classic shooting-yourself-in-the-foot:

The danger of active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide is that once we accept killing, it just becomes a little easier the second time, and each time thereafter, until it becomes routine and mechanical, totally devoid of compassion.

The Slippery Slope

What then comes next? We will then start using pain, disability, suffering and, worse still, age and economic status to assess the worth of a human life and as reasons for the doctor to end his patient’s life.

This relies on a series of unexamined assumptions that the author slips under the carpet of his argument. He assumes that euthanasia will become a standard or “routine” medical procedure (fair enough), “totally devoid of compassion” (just a bit iffy), leading (how?) to a kind of means-testing in reverse where the medical establishment will (how?) calculate “the worth of a human life” and decide whether or not to kill people. He’s deftly transformed a reasonable proposition which can be argued by both sides, into a callous, scheming, monstrous idea that no one would accept, simply by being ever more vague and nebulous on what he’s arguing about. And next he doesn’t even pay attention to what he’s writing:

Imagine how you would feel when you are old, poor, disabled, sick and an economic burden to have a doctor telling you to get off his uncaring face!

I would have thought that he wouldn’t condone describing a person as “an economic burden”, but this is precisely what he’s doing. At the very least, this sends mixed messages; at worse this suggests he’s piecing phrases together just to make his opponents seem even more monstrously immoral. Unfortunately, poorly-written, ill-thought-out arguments such as Dr Wong’s above still dominate our online discourse.

—–

Nevertheless, I’ll attempt to advocate the legalisation of euthanasia, yet do my opponents no such disservice.

First, to get it out of the way, I am absolutely for palliative care – “any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than striving to halt, delay, or reverse progression of the disease itself or provide a cure.” Palliative care is offered to patients suffering from incurable terminal illness, solely to ease pain (since all other medical interventions will prove pointless). I’ve heard enough stories of relatives and friends’ relatives who blow away sums of money they can ill afford on increasingly experimental treatments with minuscule chance of success, only to prolong their loved ones’ agony when their illness can’t be cured. By all means, focus on the realistic (easing pain), rather than the vastly improbable and all its attendant unintended consequences.

I am also absolutely for the Advanced Medical Directive (AMD) – ”a legal document signed by a person in advance to indicate that he does not wish to have any extraordinary life-sustaining treatment to prolong his life in the event if he becomes terminally ill and unconscious.” When there are no avenues left for hope it serves no one to start digging dead-end tunnels for yourself. I believe the debate is moot as the relevant law has already been passed – at any rate, this is something you opt for, unlike the Human Organ Transplant Act (which is opt-out).

Now to euthanasia. Put aside all the emotional baggage, the slippery slopes, the sinister talk of “death panels” and other such nonsense, and focus on the essentials. Euthanasia, as an informed choice by a conscious and legally-capable but terminally-ill patient (i.e. with no hope of recovery) to kill himself or herself via a painless lethal injection, should be permitted under the conditions I’ve just set out.

Once again, these two conditions should apply: the patient must first be conscious and capable to make decisions (of sound mind) – otherwise the AMD applies. In addition, s/he must be terminally ill with no chance of recovery, as advised by a qualified medical panel. If s/he is conscious and simply waiting for death to overtake him or her, there is no reason to deny him or her the option of euthanasia. After all, it’s either killing yourself or waiting to die; why should such a patient be denied the choice to go in tranquillity and in a manner of his or her own choosing?

Furthermore, it must be pointed out that euthanasia should only be allowed when the patient is able to make the choice. It is of course immoral to administer a lethal injection to an unwilling party, or to one who is already unconscious or incapable of making his or her own decisions. Yet opponents of euthanasia must recognise that legalising it doesn’t mean that all terminally-ill patients will automatically be administered the suicide pill! Legalising euthanasia simply means that all terminally-ill patients gain the right to ask for it, should they be fit to make the decision for themselves.

A worry is of course that families may pile pressure on their terminally-ill relatives to spare them the financial and emotional burden, and choose euthanasia. The financial burden argument simply reflects poorly on our society, that we have failed to address the medical needs of the needy sick. Given that our healthcare system is often touted as a model of efficiency and financial prudence, I’m sure such cases should be a negligible proportion – and even then there surely exists financial counselling and help available through hospitals and other health-care providers. As for the emotional burden argument, if families use that to convince their terminally-ill relatives to take up suicide (however unpalatable that may be) it is still a conscious choice by two or more parties who are legally aware, well-informed, and able to make their own decisions, and the tutting masses should have no say in it.

There remain some misconceptions about euthanasia that remain to be addressed – claims that euthanasia will be offered to the poor, the merely sick, and the old, as a means of lightening the burden on the rest of us. Nothing could be further from the truth. In an ideal world, euthanasia (under the strict conditions set out above) should be allowed, and these other problems (poverty, sickness and the problems arising from old age) would be adequately addressed through other means. Singapore has tried to fashion itself into a utopia for various groups of people – foreign investors, business travellers, expats; the list goes on. Now, what it should do is to work towards is easing the burdens of the disadvantaged.

The regulatory process and the weight of public opinion is surely sufficient to guard against the temptation (wherever it exists in our society – if at all) to get rid of the poor, sick and aged through administered death. Euthanasia, strictly controlled and properly administered, is a humane tool and a valid choice that should be made available for those who, of their own accord, wish to take it; and the rest of society has no business trumpeting its visceral disapproval.

Miscellany

I was searching for Janadas Devan’s article “Connecting the dots” from yesterday’s opinion section on the Straits Times’ website. Couldn’t find it; apparently opinion is prized so little that there isn’t even a link to it. It’s either that I’m missing something glaringly obvious, or our national newspaper of record is missing something glaringly obvious.

I did manage to find his previous article on holistic education though (printable edition here), and I’m going to type out yesterday’s opinion piece so the set’s complete. I think he’s probably the best writer that ST has. The earlier article “The hard truth about soft skills” was an excellent examination of the – let’s be honest – ludicrous suggestion that the Minister for Education made in Parliament about developing soft skills in students.

If he gets his way, “Schools are to develop in their charges ‘social and emotional competencies’ – everything from developing ‘care and concern for others’ to establishing ‘positive relationships’ – as well as a list of ‘key competencies for a globalised world’: among them, ‘global awareness and cross-cultural skills, civic literacy, and critical thinking, information and communication skills’.”

The Minister’s speech no doubt signals either that some bureaucrat has just produced a rather well-written (though pig-headed) paper on the importance of “soft skills”, or that the bureaucratic cogs and gears are creaking away to produce a new-and-improved directive on how to conduct civics and moral education. The problem with the Minister’s suggestion is that it simply creates an incoherent patchwork of Big Ideas that have no unifying theme or concept; unworkable in theory, unteachable in practice. Much like other changes to our education system over the last few years, this smells like another bureaucratic patch-up job.

(And I kid you not: MOE’s Pre-U Civics syllabus is really structured around “Big Ideas”. Scroll to page 5 of this document.)

Enough about the globalised world! Care and concern! Social and emotional competencies! Civic literacy! The one thing that the Minister forgot is that education exists to open minds. Surely all else follows from that.

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I haven’t been writing much; the last few weeks have not been edifying either in terms of news or in the work I’ve been doing.

I’m sick of hearing about Jack Neo. He’s a private citizen after all and we should respect that; unfortunately reporters and the tutting, tsk-ing masses don’t believe in that apparently. I have no desire to join them.

The budget’s out and for a week we had the same old glorious parade of self-congratulation and back-patting in Parliament, duly reported on by the media who wasted no time trumpeting it up as a bold investment in Singapore’s future – who hasn’t heard that line before?

Also, a subsidiary of City Harvest Church invested $310 million in Suntec, amazingly. The fact that they have that kind of money, just lying around the place waiting for an investment opportunity, is nothing short of chilling. Putting things in perspective, that’s in the same region as the budget for the Law Ministry this year ($319 million). How on earth do they harvest money like that?

The most interesting thing that I picked up on was an open letter from Reporters without Borders (available here); they’ve hit the nail on the head in saying that the “judicial harassment” is used “to prevent foreign news media from taking too close an interest in how you run your country”. I doubt there’ll be a satisfying response from the PM’s office.

All in all, ‘unedifying’ is the best word for it.

Limits to Freedom

Some observers note that while comments on political, social and economic issues could heat up cyberspace without inviting official intervention, when it comes to remarks on race and religion, the instinctive reflex is to summon the authorities. Indeed, the irony of anti-establishment netizens clamouring for the iron fist of the law did not pass unnoticed.

– Can Singapore cyber-police without the police? by Rachel Chang, ST 6 March 2010

…I was disappointed by the hypocrisy of some of the so-called liberals who wished the authorities/ISD/police did a better job by arresting him. Hey, you can’t just support an individual’s freedom of sexual orientation by suppressing another individual’s freedom of speech… to put it in another way, you can’t ask for tolerance by being intolerant.

– What is wrong with the whole Pastor Rony Tan affair. My belated 2 cents. by Singaporean Skeptic, 27 February 2010

Well, just to get it out of the way, I think that what Pastor Rony Tan said about Buddhism and Taoism would indeed be an offence under the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act Section 8(1) (find it here), but I am no lawyer. However, this is not the issue at hand.

It has been argued in the press and in some quarters of the online community that there is an inconsistency between the liberals’ or progressives’ ideal of freedom of speech and their vehemence at calling for his arrest. In other words, you can’t call for freedom of speech and suppress free speech of the Rony Tan variety; freedom of speech must apply equally to all.

I think I am firmly in the liberal camp, and I believe firmly in the freedom of speech. While I don’t agree that Rony Tan should be arrested for his remarks on Buddhism and Taoism (I believe the ISD questioning was adequate), I sympathise with the arguments of those who think the authorities should have been more firm with him, especially with respect to his remarks on homosexuality. Neither do I think this is inconsistent with upholding freedom of speech.

Society is a collectivity of people whose aim is (or should be) the maintenance and development of its constituent individuals. It should be a tool for self-actualisation and human flourishing. In a society as diverse as ours, there are people with widely-differing aspirations and value systems. Shouldn’t we aim to accommodate as many as is feasible?

Within any society, freedoms and rights exist to grant people the free choice to pursue whatever aspirations and maintain whatever value systems they want, to the extent that they do not undermine the state. I don’t think it’s feasible at all to argue that freedoms are granted ex nihilo, from nothing – freedoms necessarily bear some relation to and have some implications on society and its aims.

Specifically, freedom of speech is granted to allow the propagation of ideas without censorship or limitation. It is closely related to the concepts of the marketplace of ideas and of social space. If I haven’t misunderstood the concept of social space, it is the abstract “place” where social interactions take place; it is shared by all in society and can be enlarged or reduced by people’s actions and words. Certain ideas, such as those espoused by the extremist “Christian” right, detract from our social space, for instance by limiting the ability of people to pursue their own religion without interference. Freedom of speech should be used to increase the extent and quality of social space, not as a defence for those who would damage it, as Rony Tan has done.

We do not ask for freedom of speech – rather, it is granted us by society, and we have an obligation to society to exercise it with discretion. Neither is it true that netizens are “anti-establishment” without qualification – it is clearly a generalisation to assume that netizens are anti-establishment because they are liberal or they blog about politics, and the Straits Times does itself and the online community a disservice by portraying netizens as being opposed to the establishment (and by extension, opposed to itself).

In sum, Rony Tan’s remarks on Buddhists, Taoists and homosexuals go against the purpose and intent of free speech – to build common ground within which we can co-exist peacefully. I would argue that it is not a contradiction or an irony for liberals or netizens to want to call in the police or impose legal sanctions on those who would attack the existence of society by espousing hatred and ignorance, as Rony Tan and his ilk do.

We have nothing to fear from love and commitment

This is a speech made in the New York State senate during the debate on legalising gay marriage. It’s a few months old but better late than never. Transcript available here.

Two points here:

1. This is one of the best pieces I’ve come across on marriage equality – and it was done impromptu. Here we’re still whispering about decriminalising consensual homosexual sex. Why?
2. This is also one of the most persuasive arguments on anything I’ve come across, but perhaps that’s because it resonates exactly with what I believe. Excellent oration, really well-constructed argument, and she was extremely perceptive especially towards the end (it may help to read the transcript after you watch the video, to let it sink in).

On Rony Tan, religious pluralism, and homosexuality

With all due respect, Pastor Rony Tan is sick – at the very least, more so than the homosexuals he victimises. I’ll explain.

Okay, just so that we all know it’s wrong to put down other faiths, let’s run through a few reasons (via Kohlberg’s stages of moral development):

• Stage one (Obedience and punishment orientation) – because ISD will haul you up for questioning
• Stage two (Self-interest orientation) – so that you can avoid trouble with the authorities and vocal members of the public
• Stage three (Interpersonal accord and conformity) – because good people don’t do it
• Stage four (Authority and social-order maintaining orientation) – because it’s bad for society
• Stage five (Social contract orientation) – because the society in which we live is multi-religious
• Stage six (Universal ethical principles) – because all faiths have elements of truth and the good in them, and should be celebrated as valid routes of spiritual and moral development

I wonder how many people belong to mega-churches – the sort that spring up like mushrooms after rain, centred around one particular charismatic individual (or family), spouting doctrines of questionable validity and provenance that they call “Christian”. I’m sure they provide some spiritual nourishment to their flock; that much is certain. What I’m not so sure about is the good they do for the wider society. Do they enlarge the common space and mutual understanding between various groups in society, or do they detract from it?

I think quite a few independent churches detract from it. They promote the view that Buddhist, Taoist and traditional Chinese beliefs and practices are backward and incompatible with Christianity, and that the only route to salvation is through themselves. They enforce a disturbing form of loyalty – one that can collect hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few short years to build a massive edifice that they call a church. And they also enforce a rigorous and intolerant conformism, manifested most starkly in the phenomenon of “Christian” children refusing to participate in the Taoist funerals of their parents. How does this build common space, or an atmosphere of trust in society? The sheer amount of loyalty they inspire should give us pause for thought.

I don’t believe Christianity is mistaken. Don’t get me wrong. There is much in Christianity that I admire. It’s the practice of Christianity getting out of hand that gets me worried – the practice of Christianity that sees the church not as a people gathered together in love for the celebration of the divine and the human, but as a cold hulk of concrete and carpet and stained glass.

And so Pastor Rony Tan has apologised for denigrating the beliefs of Buddhists and Taoists, and moved on to homosexuals. Now the issues are murkier, and more clouded with ethical difficulties. So let’s try to reason from first principles.

Just as surely as people exist, gay men and lesbians and queer people of all stripes exist. Just as surely as people exist, sex and the desire for sex exists too. Now, whether or not you believe homosexuality is immoral, it exists, and no form of suppression can stamp it out, short of testing every man and woman naked in front of a pornographic video and executing every single specimen of deviance. And I’m pretty darn sure no one will suggest that we go down that route (what if some unfortunate straight person had a latent undiscovered bisexual streak?)

So suppression of homosexuality is, practically speaking, impossible. Yet it is attempted all the time. And what good has it done for the people involved? The only ‘productive’ thing it does is draw attention to a motley crew of self-important media whores for whom no publicity is bad publicity. As for others, it denigrates and demeans the existence of well-adjusted people in loving relationships who are normal in every way except for the fact that they happen to be queer. And it forces young people who are questioning their identity to hide and deny even the existence of a problem, only to grow into twisted, maladjusted characters later in life – human bonsai. What good does this do?

Rony Tan claims that “If we don’t warn people against this, then there will be more and more homosexuals because many of these people will be harassing and seducing young boys, and they in turn will become homosexuals.” Absolutely wrong. Because he and his ilk are kicking up such a stir about this, they are forcing people who would otherwise grow up healthy and full of potential, to hide and suppress their desires. Nobody who isn’t already questioning his or her own sexual identity will turn homosexual under the influence of gay people, for various reasons – the social costs are high, and more importantly the sexual urge is psychologically the most fundamental and probably the most resistant to tampering. (Development yes, tampering no.)

And when people end up suppressing their desires (especially the sexual), it often backfires on them in later life. And that’s when we have old men eyeballing and molesting young boys – because of a latent sexual urge built up over years of suppression at the hands of societal disapproval. People like Pastor Rony Tan aren’t the solution; they’re part of the problem. They’re the ones creating maladjusted people, people deformed in moral character because of the intense moral and psychological pressure that’s been exerted on them. Sadly, they’re the ones growing human bonsai.

I was recently back near the alma mater, at Junction 8, and spotted the same old Bishan Gay who’s creeped out generations of guys from RI and other schools, and even had an article or two all to himself on the Straits Times. So after the initial goosebumps (it’s an instinctive reaction, one of the formative experiences of any RI boy of the last 10+ years) I started thinking – if he is what we all assume him to be (looking at teenage boys), what made him that way? Why does he ‘appreciate’ the “Bishan scenery” that much? I can only conclude that there’s something unfulfilled in his life, if he spends a large part of each day sitting around at the J8 KFC. And what’s responsible? Himself, or the social context and circumstances that have formed who he is?

We are all built out of layers and layers of formative experiences. I’m sure that for many gay people, the cruellest part of life is the attitudes of wider society towards them. Whether they become productive and constructive members of society, or they become (literally) a blight on the scenery, is not just up to them; it’s up to society at large too.

Dear readers, whoever you may be and whatever your stance on homosexuality, consider this: who is more sick, a couple in a relationship of love (and, well, sex) regardless of gender, or a disapproving, moralising leader of a flock of sheep? Is Pastor Rony Tan more a sower bringing forth “fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some a hundred”, or is he more a grower of bonsai?

Housing Issues

Housing has been in the news recently: HDB announced the release of some Build-to-Order projects and there was a huge uproar over two rental flat developments in Tampines and Pasir Ris. (Added to that, the NSP announced back in November that they would contest Tampines GRC because of National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan’s housing policies – a story that was only picked up by ST in January, talk about lag.)

So – build-to-order projects: according to this document a shoebox-in-the-sky studio apartment one-twelfth the size of a basketball court (35 square metres) costs $64,000-$71,000 while a four-room flat in Punggol will cost $247,000-$301,000. My gut feeling is that although they’re relatively affordable compared to flats in mature estates, they still represent a huge financial burden especially for lower-income families. There’s a set of figures released by HDB which sets out a typical loan schedule for the 2-room, 3-room and 4-room flats – a 2-room flat is projected to cost $240 monthly over a period of 30 years. Although it’s standard, 30 years is an awfully long time to commit to a loan repayment. I don’t think it’s too much of a generalisation to say that for a family earning a monthly income of $1300, that income stream can be highly variable over a period of 30 years – anything could happen.

Moreover, I’m sure there’re lots of families out there who simply don’t save enough to tide them over a dry period, much less pay for their kids’ education. For kids growing up in those circumstances (rental flats, low family income and so on) I wonder how many make it to tertiary education – and get a lifeline out of the poverty cycle. Certainly the chances are lower and the circumstances are far more unforgiving.

This brings me to the second topic – rental flats. I think the attitudes of some Singaporeans (as reported in the papers) were disgusting, but typical. There were people worried about drug users, smokers and gamblers congregating in these neighbourhoods and “leading their children astray”, an “image problem” of old and dirty rental flats, and (of all things) bad ventilation and blocked views. Some of these were ridiculous; others were just sad.

For those residents who’re worried about their kids picking up gambling and smoking, this reflects badly not on the rental flat occupants but on their own parenting skills. That was a complaint born out of sheer ignorance of the circumstances of the rental flat occupants – I’m sure many of them are decent, hard-working people just trying to get a leg up in life, a taste of the security that’s afforded by a home. Those who raised the concern of old and dirty blocks becoming an eyesore in their neighbourhood could easily organise projects to help rental flat occupants clean up their flats – it would be a great learning experience for them and their kids.

And as for blocked views, the views in question were of fields and secondary forest; highly uplifting and gratifying views indeed…

I thought the controversy that arose from the two rental-flat projects reflected poorly on the attitudes of “middle Singapore”, the people who’ve left behind the struggles of finding a job and a decent place to live. Perhaps in their self-satisfaction they’ve forgotten that there’re still families camping out at East Coast Park who’re down to their last couple of ten-buck notes. A house is a visible, tangible reassurance of security; it’s the first step out of poverty and dire circumstances for the poorest families. Some countries (notably France) have recognised the right to housing as a human right, and this is probably something we should consider too. In our context this could be a significant, though symbolic, recognition of the difficulties that low-income families and foreign workers face in Singapore.

On Child Prodigies in Singapore

TLDR Summary: knowledge vs. wisdom; Singapore’s education system is depriving our society of the latter.

There’ve been several news reports recently about really smart kids 11-13 or so, who’re taking and acing their O- and A-level exams. There’s even this (if I’m not wrong) 13-year-old who’s applying to enter NUS Medicine. Well, all the best to him – but I wonder how’s his bedside manner going to be like!

Still that gives pause for thought – do these people, intelligent though they are, really have the capacity to make the fullest use of their education? Education isn’t simply about grades; it’s about the receptiveness of the mind to knowledge and wisdom. I wonder how mature these kids really are – are their parents pushing them too far, too fast?

Moreover, I notice they all, without exception, take the Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry or Biology papers, and never the humanities. This should indicate something to us – they’re all particularly bright in one area, one ‘kind’ of intelligence; correspondingly they might lack the capacity for reflection and introspection that the humanities subjects challenge and nurture. No doubt they are precocious in their field but put them in front of a poem or a play and they’d be as stumped as any other 11- to 13-year-old.

And armed with this observation, take a look at Singapore’s youth. Few students challenge themselves with literature or history; they’d prefer to mug maths or chem. The favourite subject combination in JC is physics, chemistry, maths and economics (so popular it has its own acronym, PCME) – economics for the sake of fulfilling the requirement of a ‘contrasting’ subject from the arts.

This is simply because the sciences (and even economics, to some extent) are eminently ‘muggable’. In the way they are examined in our schools, they have right answers – answers which, once provided, close their questions. They seek to test knowledge and its application; rarely do they develop wisdom, and the capacity to question. More broadly, our education system cultivates experts in their fields – engineers, maybe even the occasional research scientist (but even then I believe the ‘pure’ sciences are rather neglected – but we don’t cultivate thinkers; we don’t cultivate wisdom.

This is symptomatic of one of our society’s ills – we don’t question, we don’t look to questioning as a form of fulfilment. This makes our education a one-track road straight to a career, and closes off more paths than it opens. Seen in this light it becomes clear that we are somewhat the poorer for it, despite all the prodigies whose talents are being paraded in the Straits Times. In a very real sense, Singapore is rich – yet impoverished.