Singapore creeps towards more acceptance of gay people

In the bad old days, whenever a mainstream newspaper had any report about homosexuality in Singapore, reporters would be obliged by their editors to run to the nearest self-appointed guardians of ‘morality’ for some choice quotes about how terrible the ‘affliction’ was. Some such guardians could be relied on to say that all these ‘perverts’ should go for counselling and be cured. Those bad old days weren’t so long ago. I remember a case from May 2000 and from the ‘gay civil servants’ controversy of 2003.

Vox squawk

A funny thing happened on Tuesday 18 December 2012. Three mainstream media reporters called me asking the same thing: Do I know anything about construction workers going on strike in Yishun? They said that Andrew Loh had a story on Yahoo! and Publichouse about such a strike and they needed urgently to confirm the veracity of it.

“Is the story true?  Where is the worksite?”

As bus drivers strike, government messaging goes into overdrive.

I have three points to make about the industrial action undertaken by bus drivers of SMRT Corp earlier this week.  171 of them, all recruited from China, failed to show up for work last Monday; 88 were absent the following day (Source: Straits Times, 1 Dec 2012, SMRT has deep-seated issues: CEO).

My 3 points are:

1.  There should be equal pay for equal work;

2. The government is shooting itself in its own foot by abandoning principle #1 above;

3. The government pretends there is a process for labour justice, but there isn’t and its absence sows the seed for future instability.

Neither priest nor philanthropist welcome here

Father James Minchin arrived from Australia around midnight between November 7 and 8 and was told that he has been barred from entering Singapore. Immediately, one associates this turn of events with his appearance on a video talk show produced by the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP):

Minchin was held inside a room, his phone taken away, with no access to the internet. Since there were no flights back to Melbourne till around 10pm the following day, he was thus confined for nearly 24 hours.

Alvin and his university, Jovan and his school

If there was any breath of fresh air in the news last week, it was the attitude of Alvin Tan Jye Yee. In a week dominated by Deputy Prime Minister Yeo Chee Hean trying drearily to spin his arm-twisting of the Catholic archbishop into a friendly chat, and the tabling of a data privacy bill before parliament that completely exempted government agencies from its scope, it was wonderful to see a young man stand up against convention.

As most readers will know by now, the law student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) had uploaded onto his blog sexually explicit photos and videos of himself and his girlfriend Vivian Lee (some however have said she is not his steady girlfriend, but this is not a material point). When he posted on an online forum a link to his blog, he became the sensation of the week.

Middling going on to transport hell

Our mainstream media has a habit of trumpeting country or city rankings that show Singapore in good light. It’s part of their mission to publicise the supreme achievements of the People’s Action Party government.

This ranking below would not make the cut:

Blinkered MDA worried that media consumers may trust the internet

The reporter pointed out to me that the survey found that “35% of respondents believe that all, if not most, of information on the Internet is true,” and asked what I thought of that.

I clicked the hyperlink he had provided to the survey results and was momentarily perplexed. To me, the graph seemed quite normal, with a bunching of answers around the middle. The vast majority thought that information on the internet was partly or mostly true — which, if you’re an internet user, would seem like a very reasonable assessment. So why was the reporter’s question phrased the way it was?

Taking the data from a table in the report and converting them into bar graphs:

Beware graveyards of public service

This is a story about a story. The main character, at first sight, is an unemployed Bangladeshi in Singapore. But what happened to him shines a little light into the state of public administration in Singapore — which is the main issue here. The political boast is that we have a top-notch political and civil administration focussed on far-reaching solutions effectively delivered. What happened to him should make us stop and question.

Haircuts, hotels and photo clubs

You reporters are missing the point — was what I felt on seeing that the chief angle of both stories in the Straits Times was how difficult it can be for teachers to maintain discipline in schools if parents did not cooperate. Yes, that’s a valid news angle, but surely the most striking thing about the story was that of a mother who takes her son to a hair salon for $60 styling jobs.

What kind of values does that instill in children?

Why people didn’t care to be the richest country in the world

It must have annoyed a lot of people to see on the front page of the Straits Times, Wednesday 15 August 2012, the boast that Singapore was the ‘richest country in the world’, validated by another hitherto unheard-of ranking study.

There might have been a time when people here would have taken pride in such an accolade. What better proof that all the sacrifices made in the decades post-independence had paid off, and that our city-state had arrived? But several people I spoke too pointed out that not only do we know it isn’t easy to be the richest country in the world, we look around us and we can clearly see so much that is wrong. “Richest country in the world” can’t possibly mean what it means in plain language.

It can only mean another empty boast.