Listening in to SMRT's station announcements

Xenophobia, creeping sinicisation, misplaced political correctness, or pure sedition?

The uproar following SMRT's recent move to begin train station announcements in Mandarin seems to be overshadowed by the mishandling by SMRT and NTUC of the recent bus driver strike.

In inimitable Illusio fashion, we of course are more fascinated by last week's news - not just because we have something to say that hasn't already been said by other commentators, but because we believe this issue is more important and urgent to Singapore society than a straightforward industrial action.

Several explanations have been volunteered by commentators to explain how an innocuous decision would lead to widespread condemnation. We examine these explanations in their discursive context of Singapore as an ideological community whose cohesion and coherence can only be maintained through a struggle of positions and positions-taking by different interest groups in a struggle over the right to define what is legitimately Singaporean.

Xenophobia or creeping sinicisation?

The theory goes that the Singapore government under Papalee, Goh Chok Tong, and Minilee have been biased towards encouraging migration of Chinese nationals from the PRC in order to maintain its racial quota for Chinese Singaporeans to form not less than 70% of the total population of the island.

Culturally though, Singaporean Chinese haven't been the ones to demand Singapore be covered in signs and announcements in Mandarin. The popular suspicion is this scheme is an attempt to pander to monolingual migrant workers and immigrants from China.

Since on one hand, they are not eager or willing to participate in public life in any other language than Mandarin (and are perceived to be more exclusive in their interactions with ethnic Chinese than Chinese Singaporeans), and on the other, the Singapore government values their presence, it would rather bend over backwards to accommodate them - whatever other races in Singapore might say about the obvious and indefensible favouritism shown by SMRT.

This line of reasoning ends with the charge of creeping sinicisation, and the corresponding counter-charge of xenophobia. The issue is not about the language used but a resentment against the perceived blatant race-based favouritism of the PAP government's immigration policies from the past decades, and the knee-jerk reaction of some Singaporeans to slander any criticisms of PAP's immigration policies as xenophobia.

We at Illusio believe it would be far more productive to argue the pros and cons of Singapore's immigration policy and its perceived policy failures on their own merit, rather than to pick on any issue as an allegory or proxy for a debate over immigration.

Misplaced political correctness or pure sedition?

It's no wonder then the eventual responses by Gerard Ee (the LTA chairman) and SMRT's essentially pleaded misplaced political correctness. It's evident from their long silence and eventual choice of defense that the LTA and SMRT were unprepared for the uproar, with the implication that these decisionmakers are out of touch with a significant proportion of Singaporeans.

But let's take a look. Gerard Ee and SMRT claims that the new station announcements were offered in Mandarin in good faith. There was commuter feedback, a desire to offer 'service improvements', and seriously, there are "quite a number of Chinese who do not speak English well and refer to places by their Chinese names." SMRT does not intend in the near future to provide train station announcements in Malay or Tamil - Singapore's other 2 official languages - because "most station names, when pronounced in English, sound similar to that in Malay and Tamil." But hey, they're sorry if their best intentions were seen as racist when all they wanted to do was to be politically correct!

We'd like to pause to point out the ridiculous stupidity or cunning mendaciousness of this defense.

Take for example Lynette Sng, the customer relations officer from SMRT.

In her PR release, she spouts gems like "During our review, it was clear to us that most station names, when pronounced in English, sound similar to that in Malay and Tamil" and "Stations names in Mandarin, however, sound different [like] Somerset, 索美塞 (Suo Mei Sai)"

Pre-existing station names are not in English. They are in a multiplicity of languages - some of which aren't even Singapore's official languages! The reason why "most station names in English sound similar to that in Malay and Tamil" is because we have adopted the Malay and Tamil (and Hindi) names for these stations. Not because they're in English, you know.

I may forgive a bear of little brain for mistaking 'verandah', 'bungalow', 'shampoo', or 'jungle' for English words. I find it beyond belief that the aggregate collective intelligence of an organisation like the SMRT can come to the conclusion that Dhoby Ghaut is an English name that happens to sound like its Tamil name. And by the way, it's HINDI. NOT TAMIL. And just so we know that the collective aggregate of the intelligence of SMRT is a flatlined zero, Lynette Sng and her esteemed colleagues miss the point that "索美塞 (Suo Mei Sai)" is a Mandarin transliteration of Somerset. To Mandarin ears, SUO MEI SAI sounds exactly the same as Somerset. That's why it's called a transliteration.

If you believe Gerard Ee and Lynette Sng, up to this month, for the entire existence of Singapore's MRT system, Singaporeans have been content to think of and refer to places in their original names, whether it be in Hindi (Dhoby Ghaut), Malay (Bedok, Kembangan, Kallang, Aljunied, Eunos, Tampines, Pasir Ris, Potong Pasir, Serangoon, Tanah Merah, Rochor, Bukit Batok, Kranji, Marsiling, Paya Lebar, Bugis), Teochew and Hokkien (Hougang which everyone pronounces as "Aw Gang" anyway, Lim Chu Kang, Toa Payoh, Choa Chu Kang, Yew Tee, Boon Keng, Joo Koon, Sengkang), Cantonese (Bishan), Mandarin (Simei) or a happy, neutral compromise of English (Redhill, City Hall, Raffles Place, Marina Bay), or an even happier compromise of a foreign language (French for Esplanade, Arabic for Khatib, Kurdish for Kovan, Spanish for Buona Vista). And now, they've made up their minds and want to hear EVERYTHING in Mandarin.

If you believe Gerard Ee and Lynette Sng, it would seem that Singaporeans who have been content to live with a geography that's multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual, who have no problems referring to and thinking of places in languages other than their own, who celebrate Singapore's diversity in the most everyday act of their lives, have suddenly decided not to do so. And that SMRT and LTA are either fine with that or want to encourage this further.

In a wider context, it has taken decades for a Singapore prone to deadly racial riots to develop a sizable proportion of citizens who are multicultural enough to accept, respect, and use place names in their original languages instead of insisting that every place be imposed a name in their own preferred language, who refer to places in their original names even talking with people of their own race.

To this evidently uninfluential group of happy, multicultural Singaporeans, the LTA and SMRT's decision to force station announcements in Mandarin doesn't come across as an honest mistake erring on the side of political correctness. On the contrary, it sounds like an attempt to harm the racial harmony of the Singapore they imagine themselves living in -- pure sedition, in other words.

To an even smaller group, it might even sound like a regression to the bad old days of the early 1980s, where Singapore chafed under a resurgent tide of Chinese chauvinism. Those days, zealots went around insisting that if you're Chinese, any word coming out of your mouth had better be Mandarin unless you're speaking to a Malay or Indian. There's a reason they were dealt with. That may well be the reason for the seething rage of many young Singaporeans in response to SMRT's ill-advised stunt.

LTA and SMRT had better rethink their train station announcement policy. It's not only misguided and wrong; it may well destroy the harmony between the races in Singapore.

Minilee's keyboard kommandos - exposed!

In 2007, ministers in the PAP government were tasked to set up a 'counter-insurgency' against their online critics. No one paid them attention. No one bothered to read them. If anyone knew which websites they were operating, no one bothered to publicise their writings.

An Aside: What we've learnt from our 2 years on Facebook

That's all changed in the past few years thanks to a more social media and in particular, the rise of Facebook. I'll admit here that like a few other, better-known bloggers, I made the decision to move my commentary online.

Over the months, I discovered that there is a price for giving up anonymity, of having your multiple online personalities and networks all collapse into one. But more importantly, I discovered that Facebook just isn't a natural space for writing long analyses and getting a true public to read them and participate in commentary.

You could write a long, thoughtful post exposing a policy failure. But for reasons of privacy, you're not going to place your profile on public mode. Yet you wrote this precisely so the public could read it, right? You could count on your friends to share your note, so slowly it goes out into the Facebook public. Great. Now there will be some discussion. Most of which will be one-liner comments thanks to Facebook's social engineering constraints. How many of your friends shared that post? There will be that many fragmented discussions to your piece. And how many of their friends in turn bother to share it? Well.

When it comes down to the line, we're not exactly sure if we have that much of a wider reach by moving to Facebook. We're not even sure if moving to Facebook actually promotes greater discussion than posting direct to blogs. We certainly don't believe that Facebook is a medium that encourages deep and sustained discussion in one consolidated place that blogging does. So we're back.

PAP's Facebook Counter-insurgency

What we did notice straight away was how the counter-insurgency on Facebook as its battlefield of choice. As identified by Singapore Hall of Shame, groups like Fabrications Against the PAP are prominent in disseminating their propaganda against public accusations of the PAP's policy failures.

As much as I'd like to protect their rights to free speech, I am not impressed by how often they would resort to going on the offensive against opposition politicians using the odious tools of misinformation, misdirection, and non sequitur. And since this was a feature of Facebook that when you 'subscribe' to your favourite politicians' pages, you can see every post where they're tagged, you could see how often FAAP tagged Chee Soon Juan, Kenneth Jeyaratnam, Low Thia Kiang, Tan Jee Say, and others in posts that had nothing to do with them, just so FAPP could spam your Facebook feed. It's frankly obnoxious and borderline passive-aggressive.

They seem to be doing very well. In 2007, the Straits Times reported that this online counter-insurgency numbered around 20. Reports by Singapore Hall of Shame and Littlespeck put the current count in October 2012 at over 260.

I suppose we should expect that kind of low-down behaviour from a PAP counter-insurgency. But did any of us predict that these Keyboard Kommandos would be so brazen as to offer to buy Internet user IDs from account holders?

Questions for PAP's counter-insurgency ministers and MPs

TO: Messrs. Dr Ng Eng Hen (Minister for Defence, MP-Bishan Toa Payoh), Lui Tuck Yew (Minister for Transport, MP-Jalan Besar), Zaqy Mohamad (PAP-Choa Chu Kang), Baey Yam Kam (MP-Tampines), and Ms Josephine Teo (MP-Bishan Toa Payoh).

1. Please clarify if you are still chairing the PAP New Media committee, and its media strategies and new media capabilities subgroups.

2. Please clarify if your New Media committee has had any hand in organising, funding, briefing, training, advising, or otherwise providing material support to the groups on Facebook identified as New Compass and Fabrications Against the PAP or persons who are its members.

3. In light of their clearly partisan, well-organised activities and a burgeoning membership that suggests strong funding and professional organisation, would you recommend to Minilee to gazette these groups as political associations?

4. In light of their scheme to solicit Facebook accounts for the purpose of identity impersonation, we appreciate if you offer to condemn this scheme as criminal and unethical in light of your own party's sincere efforts to engage in a real Singapore Conversation with all citizens.

5. In light of an actually existing Singapore Conversation as started by your own government, we appreciate if you additionally disband your "quiet online counterinsurgency". Its raison d'etre and modus operandi are incompatible with the goals of your Singapore Conversation.

I love quoting myself from 2007

"But there's only one meaning of insurgent that is implied when you use "counter-insurgent", really. The member of an irregular armed force one... And how one takes action against insurgents (i.e. guerrillas) is simple: you dispense with all rules of war and adopt a black ops manual. Adopting unconventional warfare is a must. Against the Vietcong, napalm their forests. Execute them. Against local bloggers, take on anonymous identities and destroy the blogosphere through disinformation and ghostwritten propaganda."

Book Review: Freedom From the Press by Cherian George II

(Read Part I here)

The curious rhetorical device of Cherian George

Some time back, Cherian George published a book called "Freedom From the Press", where a cursory reading reveals that the good professor doesn't want you to take him seriously as an academic. In fact, we argue that he doesn't even take himself seriously as an academic.

We've made hay of a few instances where he resorts to misrepresentation and strawman arguments by summoning faceless, nameless critics out of thin air. But why is this important to us as an indicator of how Cherian George is unfit to be a respected academic, or even an academic at all?

Citations are important. When we read a non-fiction book by an author or academic who wants to be taken seriously, we want to know WHO said WHAT exactly WHERE and WHEN. That's so that we know the author didn't just make things up, or invent people out of thin air and put into their anonymous mouths lame arguments in order to discredit or divert attention from actually existing, stronger arguments.

Now, here's an experiment: try writing an assignment in first year university without proper citations. I'll bet every single dollar I have the professors will fail your assignment. But if you're "Professor" Cherian George, you'd get the entire embarrassment of a book published by the National University Press. And no, you wouldn't be stripped of your teaching post for doing shit like this - which amounts to technical plagiarism.

No comments necessary

And now for your entertainment and enlightenment, here are all the instances where Cherian George does his thing in FOTP. 

I will keep the commentary to a minimum because these excerpts speak very well for themselves the kind of academic Cherian George is. Take your time to read through these gems, then decide if Cherian George didn't just make things up, or invent people out of thin air and put into their anonymous mouths lame arguments in order to caricature actual critics and misrepresent their sensible and strong criticisms - none of which you will read about in his "book".

Your moments of Zen, or Cherian George forgets to cite actual (and respectable) people, actual publications!

For example, otherwise authoritative sources refer to the news publishing behemoth Singapore Press Holdings as "government-owned" when it is not. (p. 2)

(Interestingly on p. 10, Cherian George admits that yeah if you want to look at it critically, SPH is government-controlled.)

Most critics assume that SIngapore's system is unsustainable because it is undemocratic. (p. 7)

Equally dogmatic are those at the opposite end of the political spectrum, in whose eyes the PAP and its instruments are corrupt usurpers of the people's freedom and dignity. This group includes foreign critics with a barely concealed contempt for Singapore and its people... In their eyes, any attempt to analyse the press system in anything longer than a single, colourful, expleteive-deleted (or not) sentence is at best a waste of time... (p. 18)

By misidentifying the ways in which the government controls media and politics, analysts have arrived at erroneous conclusions. According to some, Singapore's unfree media system was supposedly incompatible with an open economy and First World standards of living; it would soon crumble beneath the weight of its own contradictions. Most of these predictions have been based on crude misconceptions about how the press is kept in check... (p. 25)

(There's an entire page's worth of this spiel -- all without citations, presumably because if you were serious to read actual critics and academics take apart Singapore's press system, those won't be the arguments they'd use. Search for Michael Barr's writings, for instance.)

Take any random group of Singaporeans and you will find among them those who appreciate life in PAP-run Singapore and who support strong, decisive government as an integral part of the formula that has provided security and high standards of living. (p. 25)

(Fascinating strawmen you have there, "Professor"!)

Unlike those who see Singapore's media system as a giant contradiction, I would go so far as to say that the PAP has been on the right side of history. (p. 26)

Critics of the PAP had predicted that Singapore's ambitions to be a media hub would be thwarted by its lack of respect for press freedom. (p. 42)

Yet, contrary to the cynics' view that the Singapore press is content with reproducing government handouts, Newscom citations encourage journalists to dig for exclusives and overcome barriers, including obstructive government officials. (p. 54)

Conventional wisdom holds that the PAP -- a regime armed to the teeth with the powers of coercion --- completely overwhelms any professional norms and ideals that the Singapore press may once have possessed. Critics view journalists in a state of unconditional surrender to the government. "They are running dogs of the PAP and poor prostitutes," said David Marshall in 1994. (p. 69)

(This one is interesting. "Conventional wisdom" as a strawman, followed by our usual nameless critics with extreme views, then backed up inexplicably by the late David Marshall, obviously taken out of context. The real-world criticism of SPH that Cherian George is caricaturing and hiding: the press may be 'professional' but is ideologically enslaved, that its reporters are consciously, willingly making up excuses to toe the PAP line. Like say, making up shit about OB markers in the press.

Or as Cherian George himself puts it in p. 48: Professional journalist's' love affair with 'objectivity' and their rejection of journalism's more activist past has made it easier for them to be turned into scribes for the status quo.)


Indeed, Gary Rodan observes that Singapore's media policy may have been partly influenced by a conscious desire to avoid Malaysia's mistakes. Admittedly, this is the kind of observation that enrages critical Singaporeans who would never concede that their press has any credibility. (p. 113)

Singaporean critics of the PAP want to believe that this backwardness is due to government repression. Such a claim would be an insult to media activists elsewhere. (p. 172)
(Here, we have not one but TWO groups of strawmen! Bravo, "Professor"!)

Most believers in democracy want and need to believe that Singapore is closer to the unstable end of the spectrum. They find it too disconcerting the idea that a modern state may have found a way to consolidate authoritarianism... (p. 201)

Opposition politicians and their followers are counting on the PAP's inertia to be its undoing, causing Singapore to succumb eventually to the tide of freedom. (p. 225)

Book Review: Freedom from the Press by Cherian George

Part I: Cherian George doesn't want you to take him seriously as an academic

If you have a good impression so far of the career of Dr Cherian George as a serious political commentator on Singapore politics or as an academic, don't read his reply to Vernon Chan's review of Cherian's book, "Freedom From The Press" on The Online Citizen.

What are we to make of an academic who reacts in this fashion to an unknown complaining that his book isn't rigorous enough, doesn't follow normal academic writing and research standards? It's one thing to perhaps claim that Chan is a nobody making a mountain of a molehill, or that Chan is wrong about the standards required of academic publications. But it's a very different thing to say: "Fortunately for me, NUS Press – one of Asia’s top academic publishers – applied less lofty standards than Chan." or admit that most of the book is "the result of painstaking original research by my assistant."

We have read Cherian George's book following Chan's review in TOC and Cherian George's curious hissy fit, which is remarkably curious and unprofessional since it amounts to an academic telling a non-academic why he didn't have to declare his theoretical framework, and telling the non-academic why he's pretentious in trying to hold the academic to academic standards in his review.

Now we at Illusio have never shied away from being polysyllabic, hurling theoretical frameworks at readers as a preface before answering any question, or even teaching you all about the media theory of Roland Barthes. We can afford to be pretentious while taking down Dr Cherian George.

Pseudo-Intellectual Waffling

But let's give credit where credit is due. Where it comes to pretentiousness and putting on pretensions, no one outshines Cherian George. Let's take a look at the first two chapters of Freedom From the Press.

Geroge presents no theoretical framework, no consistent strategy of presenting an analysis of "journalism" and its relation to "state power in Singapore". What about the concept of "freedom" then? For some mystifying reason, George spends two entire chapters feeding us red herrings. In the bizarro universe of Cherian George the academic from NTU, there is a huge controversy over the concept of press freedom. He vacillates between acknowledging its existence, viability, and rightness as a concept and denouncing it, Kishore Mahubhani style, as a convenient western invention that isn't quite practised in the west.

Dispensing with references, sources, and resorting to misrepresentation and strawmen arguments

My issue with these two chapters is not the glibness of Cherian's argument but that it's part of his centrist for the sake of centrist schtick, which I've identified before in this blog. Yet what dismays me (and probably Chan) is Cherian's frequent resort to strawman arguments on both ends of the political divide. Sentences like these are littered throughout FOTP, so much so that Cherian should be hauled up for an Intellectual Public Work Order to clean up his tome.

"One favourite retort of defenders of authoritarian press systems is that there is, after all, no country with absolute freedom."

"Those at the opposition end of the political spectrum includes foreign critics with a barely concealed contempt for Singapore and its people..."

In FOTP, which Cherian George crows that NUS Press saw fit to publish, arguments (mostly against the Singapore press system) are attributed to faceless, nameless critics. And foreign academics, who are almost always faceless and nameless unless they happen to be Mary Turnbull, who wrote a coffee table book (commemorating 100 years of The Straits Times, no less!) commissioned by Cherian's former employer, SPH.

We kid you not. This is a sample paragraph in Cherian's book.

"By misidentifying the ways in which the government controls media and politics, analysts have arrived at erroenous conclusions. According to some, Singapore's unfree media system was supposedly incompatible with an open economy and First World standards of living... Most of these predictions have been based on crude misconceptions..."

Who are these analysts? What are the conclusions, however erroneous, they have made? What predictions did they make precisely? What misconceptions did they base all these on? Where are the flood of citations and footnotes that would normally accompany a paragraph like this?

Cherian George doesn't seem to want to be taken as an academic as long as there are mysterious, unnamed analysts whose studies and predictions he rubbishes without the courtesy of 1. naming them, 2. and their actual studies or articles. It's as good as misrepresenting his fellow academics in other parts of the world, who thankfully won't hear of his wretched excuse of a book since no serious journal will bother reviewing it.

On one hand, George wants to be taken seriously eventually as an academic who writes on the media and state control of the media; on the other hand, George also wants to be taken seriously as a serious academic who isn't like the "western critics" and "anonymous critics" whose criticisms of the Singapore press system he denounces - probably because they're not Singaporean, they're Singaporean but anonymous, and they're more truthful about the state of Singapore's press than he allows himself, as a serious and credible commentator within the Establishment on Singapore politics.

Now here's your moment of zen

What gets Cherian George's goat apparently are the Reporters San Frontieres's Press Freedom Index, which places Singapore near the bottom. He seems to be mightily offended, dismisses the entire enterprise of press freedom indices with just one line: "RSF's methodology is dubious, resulting in the Republic being grouped with regimes where journalists lose not just their liberty but even their lives." And just to show what a good little academic he is, Cherian George provides a CITATION and reference for this judgement call. Namely, his own blog post.

No, I guess there haven't been any serious academics publishing articles in peer-reviewed international journals where they try to analyse the methodology, consistency, validity, and coherence of the Press Freedom Index and others.

In the bizarro universe of Cherian George, Google Scholar shows Zero Results for this because Harvard's Ronald Inglehart hasn't bothered to test the RFI, and SAGE isn't interested in academics trying to take apart surveys and indicators to see if they're worth anything. In the bizarro universe of Cherian George, the academics Harvard and SAGE, amongst others, can't really find a way to discredit the methodology or theoretical basis or validity of the various press freedom indices they've looked at.

In the universe we live in though, a simple Google Scholar search reveals all the western academics (amongst others) who have audited the RSF and Freedom House indices for decades and given them a clean bill of health, as well as explain what these surveys are really telling us (and consistently) over time.

I mention Ronald Inglehart because he's a big hitter in the world of political science. His World Values Survey finally made its way to Singapore earlier this decade. The NUS researchers co-conducting the Singapore leg of his survey spent about 6 months of preliminary research to critique or validate the concept, methodology, and validity of the WVS and found it acceptable. Now when Ronald Inglehart spends time doing the same to the Press Freedom Index and finds it passes muster and publishes a paper on it, you'd trust him. Not this Cherian George clown with his glib 'refutation' of the PFI on his 'journalism' blog.

Gee, so much fail just in the first 2 chapters of his book already? We advise "Dr" Cherian George to be a better academic or just stop pretending to be one.

And maybe If you have a good impression so far of the career of Dr Cherian George as a serious political commentator on Singapore politics or as an academic, you should skip the introduction and the first 2 chapters of his book, Freedom From the Press.

Book review and Cherian George smackdown to come!

We have never been fans of Cherian George and his attempts to be a political commentator and commentary moderator of the blogosphere.

It has come to our notice that following our criticism of Cherian's writing and our unmasking of his political agenda, the NTU pseudo-academic-on-a-political-sinecure has changed the URL of his online essay twice in the past year and very conveniently made his entire website unavailable for most of this year, until the last fortnight. We have of course updated the broken links once again, and will continue doing so each time Cherian George shifts his URLs around. And if Dr Cherian George takes his site or essays offline ever again, I have screenshots of his essays primed and ready.

Even though we are an old fashioned and unpopular site that no one really reads, Cherian George seems to be taking extraordinary measures to hide his embarrassment from our criticisms. We would like to think that Cherian George is doing this to protect what little academic credibility he has left. Then again, it seems Cherian George has all but given up pretense to academic credibility, at least if you read his startlingly embarrassing reply to a review of his recent book.

Now. We do have a copy of Freedom From the Press, and we are more than happy to review his book right here. After all for an academic, Cherian George must publish or perish - and then he must be reviewed as well, or perish. Illusio is not an international, peer-reviewed political science or media studies journal, but then neither are The Online Citizen or The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong - which, 6 months after the book's publication, are the only establishments in the world interested in reviewing his book. Of course, we are honoured to increase the reviews of Cherian's book by 50%.

Look for our review this weekend!

Much ado about an Elected President

We hereby state our disinterest and lack of interest in the current election for the Elected President of Singapore.

We might as well vote for a potted plant or a mascot

As the minister of law Mr K Shanmugam has pointed out, the president can be very easily rendered powerless by the cabinet. If the minister - who speaks presumably for the prime minister on this issue - sees the eventual winner of Saturday's election as unsuitable for the post, all respect can go out of the window. The full letter of the law can be ridiculously and unreasonably applied to ensure the president doesn't even have leave to speak to the public on any issue, thank you very much.

Mr K Shanmugam is either the cleverest man in Singapore or its most stupidest man alive. In one single stroke, the minister of law shows any leaders of a future 'rogue government' how to bypass that famed "guardian of the reserves". Either the president is a superman with the power to clamp down the government or he is a potted plant whose presence and function is tolerated by the government. There are no two ways about it - and the law minister and the Ministry of Law has weighed in his legal interpretation that the president is as good as a potted plant. Or a merlion mascot.

The President is guardian of nothing

Once the elected president was the guardian of the reserves of Singapore. Then the constitution was changed so that the president is the guardian of only the current reserves. In one fell swoop, the government negated the meaning of the presidency - though the citizens of Singapore and even the candidates for its 4th election/selection seem unaware.

As 'defined' by the constitution, the current reserves is whatever the sitting government of the day has put in and the past reserves is whatever the government put in the previous parliamentary sessions. Even though the reserves are in fact the earnings of all Singaporeans, the president is only allowed to safeguard, have power and cognizance over the 'past reserves'.

That is all and well if you assume that 'reserves' are money that are locked up safely in a bank. They are not. A large part of our past reserves are in the form of physical assets (like state land) and investments (like shares bought by GIC). Yet investment income and interest is treated as current income, and so are proceeds from sales of land.

In practice, the distinction between past reserves and current reserves is a weak and manufactured one. Need to sell land to keep up or push down property prices? GIC sells off its stake in a bank? You just helped to convert past reserves to current reserves and now the president is guardian of less before the sale.

What does it matter that a president is not guardian of the current reserves? One can imagine a scenario where a rogue government comes into power tomorrow. Why should it rob the entire reserves, killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Why not use the current reserves to ensure that every 5 years come election time, it'll have a private war chest of pork barrel projects to throw at voters? While in between elections, its MPs vote themselves comfortable a pay raise that it will no doubt find some stupid reason to justify?

Why should we even assume this isn't already done by the ruling PAP?

My friends, the president is either guardian of all the reserves or he is guardian of nothing. I would have endorsed any candidate who would fight for this in his election platform. No candidate has!

Bringing the gavel down on Workers Party I

MSN builds campaign against WP and Sylvia Lim

There is an unfolding situation over at Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. No doubt it's been angled ever so subtly by the government-owned media in Singapore as the B plot and convenient distraction to its presidential election due to take place on 27 August. Like a carefully plotted campaign, Singapore's news media is content to put its citizens on a drip on this story, calibrating the slow release of information that may build up to an implied allegation of mismanagement or corruption in the AHTC as well as the original HTC.

The reporters have the full story but they will not release all of it, not all at once - even though they have the fullest access to the information for a long time. Their cynical exercise may be rightly dismissed as a ploy but what if the story does have legs?

Non-transparency? Improper procedures? Or something far worse?

Consider this: Almost immediately after winning the ward of Aljunied, the Workers Party's town council HATC employed a new managing agent without a tender. The managing agent is FM Solutions (FMSS).

What is even more peculiar is how Ms Sylvia Lim, the incoming MP for Aljunied and concurrently the chairman of AHTC and HTC before that, defends this decision. She alleges "the decision to award FMSS the contract without calling for a tender was due to the deadline set by the Ministry of National Development".

That's bizarre logic there, Sherlock! If there's a deadline that the town council can't meet, the most obvious thing to do is to retain the old managing agent temporarily for a year - not replacing the incumbent with a new managing agent!

We see no logic for WP to claim grounds for its extraordinary measures. During the last election, the Aljunied ward had the least amount of redrawing. We do not hear of other town councils having to enact such measures despite their greater turmoil and reorganisation.

What's even more bizarre is how the managing agent was formed and registered with ACRA only just - on 15 May 2011, to be precise. Yes, AHTC terminated the ongoing incumbent whose contract was still in existence so they could hire a managing agent that is literally brand new. According to ACRA reports, this entity was formed not long before the elections with a paid up capital of $500,000 for the expressed sole purpose of providing town council services.

Let's say anyone with access to competent polling would have known Aljunied would fall to the Workers Party. Let's say someone is enterprising enough to do pre-emptively sink half a million to form a company whose sole business activity is "town councils" to bid for the managing agent position with the new Aljunied Town Council. And hire 77 people on short notice. But that doesn't really make sense unless they're very certain they'd get the contract. And it makes even less sense if FMSS was formed just to contest for the sole tender of AHTC.

None of us would believe that a newly established, costly venture will be content to get a one year contract by the back door. For all intents and purposes, FMSS will be awarded the full contract next year by the AHTC and hence help the press build up its allegations of procurement corruption.

One director, five directors, how many key directors?

Now Sylvia assures us that its managing agent's "key directors have been in the field for an average of 20 years". I don't know what this sentence means. No one can know what it means because it means nothing. It's nonsense, gobbledegook, balderdash. Here, I'll hold your hand in this exercise.

What is an "average" and why is it a meaningful number? An average is the sum total of the attributes of all the units divided by the total number of units there are.

The statement "FMSS's directors have been in the field for an average of 20 years" would make sense in this case. But to say that its key directors (i.e. not all directors) have an average of 20 years tells you exactly nothing. It's an intellectually dishonest and cynical statement. It's intellectually dishonest because an average of a subset of a population says nothing about the population, and cynical because legally speaking, all the directors of a company are jointly accountable - key directors or otherwise.

FMSS has 6 directors in total. Which are its "key directors"? What is the average experience of all the directors in FMSS? These are questions we want answered!

Of course ACRA has all this on record. You'll also notice how FMSS suddenly increased from its original sole director, Mr Danny Loh Chong Meng, registering 4 more directors hurriedly on 16 June just after the press started reporting on WP town councils. Who are these mysterious men? Are they normal directors or key directors? Where did they work previously and how much experience do they have in town council management?

Of interest to us is of the 4 new directors found their way into FMSS, a certain How Weng Fan also happens to be a former secretary of HTC, the direct precursor of AHTC. Is this not already a conflict of interest? When did How Weng Fan stop being a secretary of HTC? Was that before or after the formation of FMSS? How many other directors of FMSS have rendered services for HTC in the past? How many of them have rendered exclusive services for HTC?

Now you see why the news media is preparing the ground with the initial charge of non-transparent procedure in the Workers Party's management of the Aljunied-Hougang town council? It's so it can lead to the eventual allegation of corruption in public procurement.

Love me tender, WP

In fact, Sylvia's logic is even more warped if you take into account the fact that AHTC did have the time anyway to call for a tender for four other contracts on 17 June, barely weeks after winning the ward. And again, it made this decision over the option of holding on to its existing contractors temporarily for a year. Yes, AHTC had so little time that it found the time to call for a tender for everything but a managing agent in this Classifieds ad.

It has so little time that the tender period from announcement to closing date is just 2 weeks - a quickie compared to PAP-held town council project tenders, which are normally 3 weeks to 1 month.

To town council service providers and managers, this should set off alarm bells. Players in the town council services industry need at least 3 weeks to compete competently for a tender because of the time frames involved to get the necessary documentation, certificates, and licenses from the Building and Construction Authority.

In a more bizarre note, the AHTC tender insists on a "pay first" scheme. Ordinarily (i.e. how PAP town councils do things), interested contractors attend the tender briefing to get an idea of the scope of work, the coverage and condition of the town council's area. Then if they feel they are up for it and are still interested, they'll pay the money for the tender documents.

In contrast, AHTC demands that interested contractors pay first to attend the tender briefing. Under what circumstances would any contractor take part in this ridiculous process? Your guess is as good as mine, dear readers.

If we assume procurement corruption, AHTC's shortened and backwards tender process will certainly benefit players who are certain they'll get the awards, i.e. players who have links to the town council. It would be interesting to note which companies won the tenders and who heads them. It would fit in with the same shortened and illogical awarding of the management agent contract to FMSS too.

Paul Krugman repudiates High Broderism

The body of David S Broder lies cold in the ground where he is interred but Paul Krugman sees the need to repudiate the zombie idea of High Broderism, which sometime this decade had infected our very own Cherian George, now known as the apostle of High Broderism in the Archdiocese of Singapore.

Let's review what Cherian George wanted so badly, put in such eloquent words that half the blogosphere with less than half a brain clapped so wildly for:
1. Cherian George wants a fair and balanced blogosphere that he can award give gold stars to
2. In that heavenly blogosphere, the tone will be not too hot and not too cold but just right.
3. In that heavenly blogosphere, there must be a full "spectrum of views": for every anti-ruling party blogger, there should be a pro-ruling party blogger.

Let's review Krugman's own words, the central problem with High Broderism:

This gets at the heart of the current pundit problem. If you say that one of our two major parties has gone completely off the deep end, you’re considered shrill and extreme. But if you don’t say that, if you pretend that someone like Barbour is a reasonable guy with somewhat different views, then you’re fundamentally lying about reality.

Sure, Singapore is a one-party state right now. But we do have ministers like Tharman Shanmugaratnam who insist that the GST flat consumption tax benefits the poor. What do you want us to do to get our gold stars, Cherian George? Have enough bloggers to say that Tharman didn't fail Econs101 but he's merely a reasonable guy with somewhat different views?

And this is precisely what you'll get in the ideal blogosphere of Cherian George and David S Broder: rampant intellectual dishonesty.

Meet Cherian George, Singapore's apostle for High Broderism

We have never been fans of Mr Cherian George. When we have actually deigned to speak about him, we have not been kind. He has never given us reason to be kind even today and we will tell you why. But you'll need to read his latest essay first.

Cherian George is Singapore's pale imitation of David S Broder and the apostle for High Broderism in the archdiocese of Singapore. For those unfamiliar with American political culture the late Broder was an American journalist who, for want of a better word, was an extremist centrist who made a career and pedestal for himself out of denouncing extremists on both ends of the political aisle.

What needs to be pointed out is that the absolute mid point between two extreme political positions is not necessarily the correct position to take, that the truth can lie closer to the left than it is to the right. Sometimes the truth has a liberal bias. And yet the Overton Window of 'acceptable opinion' has easily been gamed by arch-conservatives shifting their positions further right, with useful fools like Broder advocating a shift to the new centre while denouncing... the extremist leftists!

Now read Cherian George's article again, with the recognition of his unstated High Broderist agenda of advocating a centrist position when reality and logic does not warrant it.

Note for example how Cherian Broder complains of the rabidly anti-government to moderately anti-government stance of online chatter and blogs. He forgets that PM Lee's cabinet has committed several public policy failures over the past 5 years. We would question why Cherian expects the "right mood" for the blogosphere to be more centrist. We'd assume that even wonkish bloggers, say Mr Tan Kin Lian at theonlinecitizen, would see no choice but to critique PAP public policy. Reality does have an anti-PAP bias, people.

Note how cleverly he builds up his High Broderism to present us with a false dilemma which is as intellectually dishonest as it is an advertisement for his centrist at all cost ideology: "it is a mistake to put all our eggs in the government basket, it is surely also a mistake to put all eggs in the opposition or non-government basket."

There are so many things wrong with that statement. I'm happy to point out just two.

1. For an academic, George is surprisingly politically illiterate, conflating the PAP with the government and conflating the opposition with non-government. He forgets that the government includes the civil service talent which advised and implemented the public policy failures of the Minilee government over the years, that non-government talent extends far beyond the political opposition to the much wider civil society.

2. He conflates the singular PAP ideology and talent base with the multiplicity of that of the opposition. Putting all your eggs in a singular solution means you lose all your eggs if that solution proves wrong. Putting all your eggs in multiplicity of solutions doesn't mean you lose all your eggs... But clearly, Cherian George would love to mislead us with his imagery. Just saying.

Make no mistake about it: like the late David S Broder, Cherian George is putting himself up as the arbiter of moderate political discourse, a wise man who can put down any idea and position too radical in his eyes; even if reality, truth, and logic have a certain bias.

Modelling the Singapore elections II: Are Singaporeans stupid voters?

Why do Singaporeans vote the way they do? What goes on in their heads when they cast a vote? Is the Singaporean voter a rational voter? Or did the Workers' Party and the general opposition call for a First World Parliament flounder embarrassingly, 81 to 6, because there isn't exactly a First World Electorate?

On 7 May 2011, it did turn out that there was an average 6.6% swing against the PAP, Aljunied GRC was lost, and the Workers' Party [WP] became the only opposition party in Singapore's 87-seat parliament, representing almost 40% of Singaporeans with their 6 seats.
Today, we'd like to grapple with three reactions to the results using hard numbers from this election:
1. The politically illiterate voter failed the opposition parties, handing the PAP yet another convincing mandate.
2. Because WP was the only opposition party that has won a GRC, it must have done something right.
3. The GRC system must go; it kicked out a decent minister and let in an airhead.

At first glance, the PAP national vote share of 60.1% and national average swing of 6.6% may suggest that Singaporeans are politically illiterate and as some cynics might put it - fully deserving of the authoritarian government they get.

In these five years, the average Singaporean worked harder, faster and cheaper for shrinking real wages while facing a skyrocketing cost of living in an increasingly crowded country whose infrastructure has not kept along with its immigration policy. In these past five years, Minilee's cabinet has proved itself stuffed silly with clowns who make public blunders of policy and speech and have earned the collective scorn of many. Yet when it comes down to a vote, the PAP was returned with a national average of 60.1% this year, down from 66.6% in 2006.

I present to you table 1: The swing votes of GRCs with unpopular ministers.

Things to note: In GRCs which had not been contested in 2006, I either take the average value of 66.6% as the baseline or 76.6% if the minister in charge was deemed a 'strong' minister with a great coattail then. If a ward has not been contested for more than 2 elections in a row before 2011, the minister is assumed to be a strong one.

(Persistent) groundwork and strong candidates have been advocated by Alex Au, who puts forth the theory that WP won its victory because it had these two principles where it won.

GRC, minister, portfolio	PAP % (2011)	PAP % (2006)	% swing	Party contesting	Groundwork	Strong candidates
Aljunied George Yeo (MFA)	45.3	56.1	10.8	WP	X	X
Marine Parade Goh Chok Tong (SM)	56.7	76.6	19.9	NSP	X	X
Holland-Bukit Timah Vivian Balakrishnan (MCYS)	60.1	76.6*	16.5	SDP		X
Moulmein Kallang Yaacob Ibrahim (Environment)	58.6	69.2	10.6	WP
Bishan Toa-Payoh Wong Kan Seng (National security)	56.9	76.6*	19.7	SPP		X
East Coast Raymond Lim (Transport) Lim Swee Say (NTUC)	54.8	63.9	9.1	WP	X
Sembawang Khaw Boon Wan (Health)	63.9	76.7	12.8	SDP
Tampines Mah Bow Tan (Housing)	57.2	68.5	11.3	NSP

General Observations

The list, as you will realise, is a rogue's gallery, a veritable who's who of the clown show in Minilee's cabinet. Where policy failures have been evident, these are the ministers responsible, and the GRC wards they head.

George Yeo and Mr Goh Chok Tong have been included in the list for comparative purposes - being the biggest losers of this election who are not clowns.

While the vote swing against the PAP has been remarkably consistent in most other wards, an analysis of these battleground wards may teach us a few lessons that other bloggers haven't gleamed yet.

1. Singaporean voters do punish unpopular ministers and policy failures. Note that the swing vote in these wards are in excess of the 6.6% national average.

2. The vote swing is independent of variables such as the opposition party contesting, whether it has done persistent groundwork either in the election or in the years before the election, or whether it fielded strong candidates.

3. Contrary to expectations, Singaporeans did not punish the PAP for its policy failures in cost of living issues (Mah, Yaacob, and the two Lims got off quite well compared to their clown cohort) - but very much for failures of performance, with Vivian Balakrishnan, Wong Kan Seng, and Khaw Boon Wan in a distant third suffering the largest drop in vote shares.

4. Note that Gan Kim Yong, the Minister for Manpower, and Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the Minister for Finance who failed Econs 101, outperformed the national average vote due to the opposition sending in their own clown shows.

4. What is the percentage of voters in Holland-Bukit Timah and Bishan-Toa Payoh who believe in the principle of accountability, that ministers should bite the bullet and resign for embarrassing blunders and incompetence? The answer is: not enough. The answer is also: 9.9% and 13.1% respectively.

5. In general though, the answer in other battleground wards range from 3-5% - which does show that although Singaporeans are mad enough about policy failure and the general steering of the nation by the PAP, they are unwilling to send a strong enough signal to the ruling party. Are Singaporean voters politically illiterate then?

Answering the 3 responses to the election

We now have enough hard numbers to answer all 3 responses

A. "The politically illiterate voter failed the opposition parties, handing the PAP yet another convincing mandate.

While the swing votes suggest there are Singaporeans who behave like rational voters in other democracies, the PAP victories in these wards still show that either i. there are more than enough politically illiterate Singaporeans
ii. understanding that Aljunied would fall, voters felt the PAP should lose a GRC, just not theirs, or
iii. The opposition did not push hard enough on the unpopular ministers.

B. "WP was the only opposition party that has won a GRC, it must have done something right."

The pattern of swing votes show that Singaporean voters in this election did not reward classic retail politics; they voted not for the brand of the opposition, the calibre of team it sent, or even whether that team put in the groundwork.

Instead, they show that Singaporean voters were participating in an election where there is in effect just one party on the ballot - voting for or against the PAP.

C. "The GRC system must go; it kicked out a decent minister and let in an airhead."

Aljunied was won because it was a low-lying fruit on the branch, easily flipping because of the national vote swing. We posit from the table that if the unpopular ministers had been running in single seat wards, Wong Kan Seng and Vivian Balakrishnan could have been wiped out if it had not been for the goodwill generated by their backbencher colleagues, who played their part as grassroots fix-it men.
The GRC system will be kept because it has proven that in good times, popular ministers lend their coattails to green, untested, unready candidates while in bad times, unpopular ministers are bolstered by their decent backbencher colleagues.

Bonus stage: Explaining Aljunied

Aljunied was polled by the PAP (or its hired agents) to be a respectably decent ward fronted by a not-unpopular, non-clown minister. In its projections - published by The Straits Times, Aljunied was expected to be lost by a narrow margin.

We suggest the following as factors that made Aljunied resemble the clown wards more:

1. Clown mentor Papalee's interference, threatening Aljunied voters with everything short of sending in the tanks to punish them if Aljunied flips to WP.

Like it or not, the electorate is getting replaced by younger voters who do not take kindly to this barbaric and backward form of electioneering.

2. Clown mentor Papalee's antagonism of Malay voters in Singapore prior to the elections.

Like it or not, Aljunied precinct is a largely Malay precinct in Aljunied GRC. For that matter, so is the east of Singapore island in general, which explains Alex Au's musings here.

We should also note that the offer to promote Zainal Abidin Rasheed to Speaker of Parliament - a largely ceremonial and toothless role in Singapore - was a clumsy and hamfisted bribe to the Malay electorate, who have sought for years to gain access to the PAP leadership so their community issues can be heard and considered seriously in policy making. That Zainul has since announced his retirement from politics altogether suggests that the Malay community's feedback to him was not entirely pleasant.

3. Lim Hwee Hua's attack on Low Thia Khiang's handling of Hougang Town Council's finances was spun - rightly or wrongly - as a smear campaign. What could have been the equivalent of an October surprise was defanged and turned back onto the PAP, with PR consequences.

Bonus stage 2: Explaining Marine Parade

To be honest, I like Mr Goh Chok Tong. In a cabinet of clowns let by a mentor who just can't shut his mouth, Mr Goh has provided the political savvy needed to navigate a changing Singaporean electorate. Soon enough, I will write a tribute post on him but that will have to wait.

Mr Goh's 19.9% vote swing is the worst result in this year's elections. To be frank, Mr Goh brought this on his head with his dogged defense of Ms Tin Pei Ling. The obviously unqualified and unsuitable political candidate had a negative coattail of her own that clearly tripped up Mr Goh.

Modelling the Singapore elections I: A call for electoral law reform

Why do Singaporeans vote the way they do? What goes on in their heads when they cast a vote? Is the Singaporean voter a rational voter? Or did the Workers' Party and the general opposition call for a First World Parliament flounder embarrassingly, 81 to 6, because there isn't exactly a First World Electorate?

Despite being a parliamentary democracy based on regular, free, and fair elections, the psychology of the Singaporean voter has remained a black box for decades, preventing the scientific modelling of voter behaviour and trends. This is in part due to laws which prohibit the publishing of polls conducted during the elections period.

If information is a resource, this law prevents the monetisation of particular voting knowledge and hence excludes the participation of major polling organisations. In other words, there is no incentive for a polling organisation to conduct regular snapshots of the electorate.

If this information does not flow freely, the overall intelligence of the electorate is suppressed. In other words, the absence of regular, published, scientific polls reinforces the political illiteracy of an electorate; no one knows for sure - aside from parties who can afford their internal polls - what are the important issues, how the ground stands against various parties. No one knows for certain which demographics are truly in play, what the voter psychodemographics are, the issues pertinent to each demographic, and how to reach out to them.

Embarrassingly enough, Minilee and Goh Chok Tong had to admit that they didn't know what the young voter was thinking and that they didn't know the extent of the anger in the electorate until the election period was under way. From this, we can surmise that even the People's Action Party either does not possess adequate  resources to accurately poll the electorate or the polling organisation it hires privately was frankly incompetent.

Taken together, this legal arrangement reinforces the political apathy and illiteracy of the average voter. Without access to knowledge on which national issues are at play, the average voter is atomised and individualised. This privileges election strategies that cater to the voter as a narrow-minded, selfish individual who responds to bribes such as housing upgrading, "grow and share packages", and so on.

The Straits Times and other mainstream media by default are the only entities in Singapore that can get away with conducting informal, unscientific polls and pass them off as credible studies during the elections period. These have very little credibility to academics and statisticians, while having the maximum sway over the average reader due to the pretensions to credibility of these studies.


The electorate, the ruling party, and the opposition parties need access to regular, published polling data so every side can make informed decisions in an election.
I therefore call on our legislators in parliament to end the ban on the publication of polling during the election period in Singapore, and hope you too can join me in this call.

One final question for GE2011

As a voter, I will ask myself this as I enter the polling booth in a few hours' time.

Has my life improved in the past five years? Or do I count myself among the swathes of Singaporeans who had to work harder, faster, cheaper  - while facing rising costs? Did the PAP's idea of their successful five years coincide with how my life went?

Do I see my life improving in the next five years under the incumbents? Do I see myself working even harder, faster, and cheaper in the next five years thanks to what the PAP considers as the right policies for Singapore?

That is all.

On Vivian Balakrishnan

Vivian Balakrishnan and the video that cannot be named

Last week, Vivian Balakrishnan sounded like a sphinx speaking in riddles and conundrums. Singaporeans are used to the fury of People Action Party attacks on opposition candidates during elections but this time round, the attacks have started even before Nomination Day. Adding to the unseasonal and surreal atmosphere this year is Vivian's mysteriously-worded attacks and half insinuations on Vincent Wijeysingha, a likely candidate for the Singapore Democratic Party.

As previous targets Francis Seow, Tang Liang Hong, Steve Chia, and James Gomez will know, the attacks and scandals begin and suddenly the entire news - and the entire elections - for the next few weeks will seem to revolve around their alleged shortcomings, the attacks from the PAP rising to a crescendo, "Please lah, withdraw!"

Dr Vivian's attacks on Wijeysingha, courtesy of Alex Au:

I am not sure what [the SDP] strategy is. I would like to know whether they have confirmed that they are contesting, I would like to know their line-up. I can’t help feeling that part of the reason for their reticence is they have elements of their agenda they are not prepared to disclose and subject to scrutiny. Eventually, they will have to come out of the closet.     (The Straits Times, 20 April 2011)

Dr Vivian Balakrishnan yesterday described the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) team running against him as ‘strange bedfellows’ who do not have a shared vision or ideology...In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said: ‘It has been brought to my attention – in fact it is the SDP which is suppressing a certain YouTube video, which raises some very awkward questions about the agenda and motivations of the SDP and its candidates.’    (The Sunday Times, 24 April 2011)

Why would an attack by a sitting minister on a very naughty opposition candidate be this cryptic? The PAP has never been shy from calling a spade a spade  witness its blunt denunciation of Steve Chia in 2003.

Vivian Balakrishnan, the dog whistler

It's taken the blogosphere half a week to figure out the game. Vivian Balakrishnan alludes to the open secret of Dr Vincent Wijeysingha's homosexuality. He alludes to a video taken at a public forum where Dr Wijeysingha discussed issues which were then popularly discussed like the age of consent and the decriminalisation of gay sex in Singapore.

Why would this discussion - in the video, Dr Wijeysingha clearly does not take a stand on either these two issues! - be so horrendously evil? And why would it then warrant such a roundabout, mincing reference?

Vivian Balakrishnan is not a sage, nor a sphinx, nor a fool. He is putting into practice dog whistle politics - carefully parsing his words to target a key demographic. Balakrishnan is not speaking to the press or to the general public that reads The Straits Times.

He is speaking to a key demographic who is not in on the secret but can decipher it with clues like - an agenda, strange bedfellows, closets. He speaks to a demographic that will be spring into action because there is an insinuation of a gay agenda secretly planned by a gay politician who Vivian Balakrishnan simultaneously accuses of fooling his party on his motivations and is also in cahoots with his party to suppress this video.

Consciously or otherwise, Vivian Balakrishnan furiously dog-whistles the demographic consisting of Thio Su Mien, her co-coup leaders at AWARE, Derek Hong, and other concerned conservative Christians. The "Gay agenda", the spectre of homosexual politicians pushing to overturn legislation - an obvious wedge issue for an obvious demographic, dog whistled expertly by a coy minister of very few direct words.

Vivan Balakrishnan, the enabler of religious identity politics

Consciously or otherwise, Vivian Balakrishnan invites Feminist Mentor and conservative Christians to wage another round of their cultural war in Singapore's general election this year. Consciously or otherwise, Balakrishnan will make 2011 the first time in Singapore's history where the conservative Christian vote has wedge issues in the elections brought to their attention.

Vivian Balakrishnan can right now say he meant nothing, that he meant something else which he will not follow up at the present moment but will reveal when the time is ripe, etc. The fact is the wheels have been set into motion and no one can close this Pandora's box.

If a gay man like Alex Au can hear the dog whistle (even though he misconstrues it to be an ad hominem attack), Conservative Christians can likewise hear Balakrishnan's dog whistle shrilly calling. At best, this will be the year in Singapore's history that conservative Christians gel as a voting bloc. At worst - if the PAP allows Balakrishnan to make Wijeysingha this election's key target -  this will be the year where a conservative Christian wedge issue becomes the key issue of a general election.

Vivian Balakrishnan - now, thou art Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

I was here when Thio Su Mien and her co-conspirators took over AWARE. I was here when Thio Su Mien and her co-conspirators had Singapore civil society under strain with their religious intolerance for secularism. I was here when it seemed we would no longer be at peace between peoples of different faiths, between believers and secularists.

I for one do not wish there to be a new cultural war between conservative Christians and everyone else. And yet if Vivian Balakrishnan continues his attacks, this will surely be an issue for conservative Christians. After all, who else would Balakrishnan count on to attack Dr Wijeysingha? His fellow cabinet colleagues, who tilted against the conservative Christian coup of a feminist organisation? Papalee, who thinks being gay is in the genes and can't be helped - and welcomes gay MPs? Goh Chok Tong, who went on record to say that gay civil servants are perfectly okay?

And should Balakrishnan succeed in making the sexual orientation of Dr Wijeysingha THE issue of this election, it is clear conservative Christians will rise up to the occasion - together with their leaders, who may feel obliged to weigh in especially when it comes to chusing politicians who may change the legislation. And should the conservative Christians rise up, will not their old foes in the AWARE saga - feminists, members of other religions, secular and agnostic Singaporeans rise up to counteract the perceived rise of religious politics in Singapore?

Perhaps Vivian Balakrishnan is pleased at the new cleavages he has wrought on Singapore society? Perhaps he is satisfied at the introduction of dog whistling to religious groups on wedge issues? Maybe he fancies himself a trailblazer but I see him as a sower of potential destruction in Singapore.

Will there be religious riots or even religious-secular riots in the future because of Vivian Balakrishnan's dog whistling? I'll make no bones about it - Vivian Balakrishnan's comments on Dr Wijeysingha constitute a threat to Singapore's long term stability as a secular, multireligious society.

I call on Vivian Balakrishnan to step down as a candidate in this election. You sir are not fit to be an elected representative of the people. Please lah, withdraw!

General Elections 2011: Retrocognition & recognition

2011 will be a watershed year for Singapore politics. For the first time in its post-independence history, the opposition manifesto consists of bread and butter issues, its issues resonating with the common man in the street: jobs, wages, cost of living, the property bubble. For the first time in Singapore's post-independence history, the PAP argues on ideological terms, stating a belief in the unproven, unproveable goodness of immaterial concepts and slogans: leadership renewal, foreign talent, securing the future.

The PAP manifesto and platform for this year will cut no ground with the electorate - as other airy-fairy concepts from campaigns of yesteryear have failed with the electorate. The Singaporean voter was never swayed by an appeal to intrinsic goods like "democracy", "checks and balances", so what makes the PAP clown show think the same voter can be swayed by an appeal to how having "leadership renewal" or bringing in foreign talent will make things automatically better for his lot?

The opposition manifesto and platform for this year has already been written for them, out of pure necessity. Hard statistics tell hard truths; Singapore's mandarins may expend millions on international PR campaigns on its 'success story' but this comes with increased scrutiny from statisticians around the world - whose recent reports put in hard numbers the hardship that the average Singaporean has had to endure for the past 15 years of a failed expansionary economic policy by the PAP.

The profile of the Singaporean voter points towards an interest in hard numbers and the tangibles. For the first time in Singapore's post-independence history, the PAP is the party of highfalutin ideas nobody has the time for, and the opposition is the party of bread and butter issues.

This election is the PAP's to lose.

ASEAN diplomacy, Singapore style!

Will East Timor be allowed to join ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian nations)?

Its application is sponsored by Indonesia, its former occupier. A few days ago, it appeared to be a done deal.

"We have visited all ASEAN countries and everyone has agreed politically that Timor can join," said Ramos-Horta.

That was then. Now, it seems the ASEAN members who have given East Timor's president assurances are backing away. The loudest dissenters, according to Barry Wan from The Straits Times, are a motley group consisting of Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Burma.

Their reasoning?

Singapore has been quite adamant that the prospective new member needs to prepare properly before it can join the bloc.

Cambodia, Laos, and Burma believe ASEAN cannot afford to accept a weak and poor nation as a member.

Vietnam believes accepting a weak nation will put ASEAN more firmly into the Chinese orbit.

In ASEAN, diplomacy is another name for international comedy.

Singapore's diplomats lobbied hard for the entry of the Indochinese nations into ASEAN in its last expansion, knowing full well that Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam were not properly prepared to join the grouping.

Cambodia, Laos, and Burma certainly didn't object to their own membership applications despite being already preyed upon by the Chinese model of mercantile capitalism prior to them joining ASEAN.

As part of the new Indochinese membership of ASEAN, Vietnam's diplomats and politicians should already know that their neighbours (let's say Burma at the very least) report dutifully to Peking the proceedings of each ASEAN meeting they attend.

East Timor, as a Southeast Asian nation with oil reserves, will attract Chinese diplomacy, development, and political influence whether or not it joins ASEAN.

ASEAN diplomacy deconstructed

Being China's second banana in ASEAN, Singapore will not want to see ASEAN fall further under or more obviously into the Chinese orbit because it means having to compete with 10 other countries who also want to be China's second banana in the region.

Similarly, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma are aware that East Timor is an oil-producing upstart. As a new country that needs to build its infrastructure from scratch, East Timor is terra firma and fresh meat for investment and development funds. The three Indochinese nations do not want China to divert its ASEAN warchest (spent partially on building railroads to connect Peking to Indochina) to this new nation.

As Vietnam's diplomats and leaders are aware, being earmarked as a Chinese satellite doesn't mean co-option as a Chinese ally. Vietnam's China policy consists of resisting Chinese political influence in its ruling party and state organs, while accepting Chinese money. Their opposition to East Timor's membership is motivated by the fear that East Timor will better Vietnam on its own China policy.

Will East Timor be allowed to join ASEAN? Even its biggest detractors in ASEAN think it would do just fine in ASEAN!

From civil service to political service

If the leaders of the People's Action Party have been more than truthful, their star recruits for the next election will feature senior civil servants such as the former chief of the army and other permanent secretaries, directors, and assistant directors from various ministries.

Prepare for their bundling into strong Group Representative Constituencies, where their ascension from civil service to political service political mastery will be accomplished on the coattails of popular ministers and senior ministers of state.

Prepare for the attempts to convince that these senior civil servants have earned their right to take charge of public policy, that they have exhibited the skills to lead Singapore as the fourth generation of PAP's leaders.

If you have read my previous post, you'll understand that like Wall Street and its increasingly well-educated financiers and their complicated toxic instruments, the Singapore civil service produces increasingly well-educated bureaucrats who have honed to an art the skill of producing improbable KPIs.

In the Singapore civil service, success is measured through how creatively its bureaucrats can create creatively skewed KPIs. The more educated and scholarly the civil servant, the darker his arts of creating such toxic instruments. This trend will continue as long as Singapore's bureaucracy continues employing expensive, highly educated scholars for fast track promotions.

To allow the continued ascension into heaven parliament of Singapore's senior civil servants is to reward their innovation of inventing KPIs and statistics that have less and less correlation to the base reality. In time (if not now), the map will bear no relation to the territory, the statistics will bear no relation to what they measure, the representation of Singapore will bear no relation to anything existing in Singapore.

Senior civil servants are a dead-end product of Singapore's meritocratic system. Do not expect solutions or initiatives from them. I strongly urge the electors to strongly reject PAP GRC slates that include recent senior civil servants.

Wall Street Smarts

This was your comparative reading for the week:

Wall Street Smarts by Calvin Trillin
Smart Guys and Wall Street by Paul Krugman

As your readings for the week have been suspended for the duration of Singapore's Silly Season, this will be a presentation instead.

What makes a theory valid?

Calvin Trillin is a humorist, not an economist. The essay is a tall tale told by a fictitious man. Wall Street Smarts exists in the realm of fable, establishing timeless truths (or morals) from fabrications.

Why was there a financial crisis in 2008? Trillin tells a story instead, which Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, endorses from his observation of graduate school and the financial service industry.

How do we measure the validity of a piece of qualitative research (or in this case, a qualitative essay)? Without recourse to charts and statistics, the idea expounded must be tested in terms of theoretical rigour, explanatory value (both in context and transferability), and credibility. The biggest test of whether a qualitative piece of reasoning is valid lies very much with its credibility - when deconstructed and restated in its barest axioms, would you be able to buy the explanation whether or not you agree with it?

Wall Street Smarts, restated

Why did the financial crisis of 2008 occur? One could point to the many economic explanations - overinvestment, market bubbles, toxic instruments. But why were overinvestment, market bubbles, and toxic instruments promoted? Why indeed were derivatives invented and then pushed the way they were?

Here, the economists have no answers because the question asks for an exogenous explanation for the crisis, which lies outside the boundaries of the economics discipline.

Trillin in effect proposes an explanation that turns the spotlight on the history of economics, the social anthropology of the finance industry, and the political economy of employment.

1. In the old days where finance was about selling actual industry, the financial services sector largely recruited from a hereditary class of bankers and financiers. Barriers to entry were not too high: a college education would have done it (plus either relatives or friends or classmates in the industry).

2. Owing to comparative lower prestige, the financial services sector did not attract the best, the brightest, the most ambitious, the most greedy.

3. The roots of the financial crises of the late 20th century and 2008 lie in the increase of prestige of the financial services sector, its attraction of the best and the brightest (etc.) graduates, and the increase in university tuition and student debt, and of course the balloon in executive pay in the financial sector compared to other sectors.

4. The last two factors create an industry fronted by innovative, ambitious, and greedy agents who were smart enough to invent complicated toxic instruments, fake products, massaged company accounts...

5. The financial crisis occurs because there is no longer any correlation between the healthy trade of toxic instruments and massaged numbers, and the health of the real economy.

Wall Street Smarts, Singapore civil service edition!

The next best test (other than the very subjective notion of 'credibility') is transferability. What other context, what other industry can we find a similar set of environmental factors?

We note that a post-independence strategy of the Singapore is its much-vaunted introduction of university graduates into its civil service. Gathering pace more in the late 1970s, the policy has morphed into the recruitment of scholars fast-tracked into senior posts and handpicked for politics by the ruling PAP.

Note the increasing salaries and bonuses for the civil service. Note the increasing salaries for MPs and ministers - which only began when the scholars started entering politics. Note the increasing reliance on complicated KPIs and statistics that no one can comprehend and therefore trust, note the trumpeting of dodgy rankings that somehow suggest Singapore is the best nation is this and that and the other. Note the anger from the ground about how far the trumpeted KPIs and rankings are divorced from the everyday reality and experience of normal Singaporeans.

Wall Street Smarts - not just a story that took place a long time ago in a country far, far away.