In trying to kill fake news, we lobotomise ourselves

Everything is fake until it is true. This sentence may sound glib but I think it is fundamental in epistemology. This is not to say that everything will eventually turn out to be true, but merely that everything we know as true was once easily dismissed as fake.

Truth does not emerge wholly formed. Truth is a consensus reached when empirical evidence and logical construction have attained a critical mass, enough to far outweigh any other plausible explanation. However, it can take a very long time for evidence to be found and the dots connected. Even then, ‘truth’ remains contingent on the evolving pattern of evidence.

Singapore bicentennial: Revising history, as it happens

These two sentences almost made me cough out my coffee:

“The journey towards prosperity and a First World status began only in 1959, when the People’s Action Party took over the government. Clearly, then, Sir Stamford could not have been the founder of modern Singapore.”

These assertions were contained in a letter to the Straits Times Forum, published 5 January 2019. Written by Anthony Oei, it was in response to an earlier letter by Loke Hoe Kit published on 31 December 2018.

Loke had been critical of the way the bicentennial narrative was focussing

“more on the island’s 700-year history with greater emphasis placed on the 500 years of history preceding 1819, instead of primarily focusing on modern Singapore’s 200-year existence.”

Anthony Oei’s response letter was full of poorly-founded statements, and I wondered how it made it past the editor’s eye. 

Of China and India: wandering thoughts from streets, boats and trains

Boats in Chongqing (L) and Kochi (R)

[2,900 words]. Ever since China began to be a major part of the global economy in the early 1990s, one of the most enduring themes in American media is the country’s rise and its future challenge to US dominance. A subsidiary theme is whether India may be on the same path to parity, with this subtheme often coming across as prayer and hope: that India, as a fellow democracy, could help the US contain superpower China.

Much Indian discourse about China in recent years has adopted this lens too. Discussion about China in Indian media (at least the English-language media that is accessible to me) tends to take on a comparative and competitive tone. A good example is this online discussion at Quora.com: Which country will be next superpower: India or China?  It is rare to see discussion about China as itself.

Avoiding vengeance: Why teaching religion is the wrong thing to do

“Not if but when” says the poster. Indeed, an attack of some sort will happen in Singapore. But let’s not be ahistorical about it. Throughout history, highly aggrieved individuals have lashed out at society or authority with violence. Sometimes they act as loners, other times as part of an organised network. We’ve had bombs going off in Singapore within living memory — for example on 10 March 1965 at MacDonald House in which three persons died. We’ve had the Sepoy mutiny in 1915 in which over 100 people lost their lives, including 56 mutineers. 

Clean hands to eat poisonous vegetables

The toilet at this coffee shop is quite serviceable

I wonder how many people are as surprised as I was to read that a coffee shop had its licence suspended for a day over the absence of soap in its washroom. Gee, if that’s the case, I said to myself, hundreds of food establishements should be shut down. Dirty, broken and ill-provisioned toilets are everywhere in Singapore.

There was once a buffalo here

Making small provisions to enable people to upskill through bite-sized training courses will not be enough to cope with a world in which lifelong continuous learning and career switching has become necessary — I argued this in my previous post Spreading a bit of money to “position Singapore for the future”. But in the interest of length, I left untouched an even bigger question: What if, for all the retraining, adjustments and preparations we make, there simply isn’t enough work to be had? It’s a question that’s not only for Singapore.

Did we get more economic growth by giving up our freedoms?

“The Singapore economy outperformed expectations,” reported the Straits Times on 5 January 2017. The economy was said to have expanded by “1.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2016 from a year earlier, putting growth for the whole of 2016 at 1.8 per cent, according to advance estimates from the Ministry of Trade and Industry…”

Without questioning how earlier forecasts were developed, the newspaper wrote, “Growth last year was well above MTI’s earlier announced forecast of 1.0 to 1.5 per cent.” I couldn’t but suspect that the ministry had long ago prepared for this day by massaging expectations downwards. I think they do that year after year; it’s getting old. 

Rebuilding from the rubble of 2016 voter-quakes

Pic from BoredPanda/EFE

2016 will be remembered as one of those break-point years when an old order started falling apart. The worrying thing is that there is no sign that any better new order will be born.

Still, 2016 had its uses. The series of victories by what had been unlikely personalities and movements — Rodrigo Duterte winning the Filipino presidency, Brexit, and of course, the Donald Trump victory, have been cathartic. Some good commentary in various media have followed as a result, full of soul-searching and self-criticism.

The gay issue in Malaysia and Indonesia as a window into the civilisational crisis of the Islamic world

(Beware: approx 3,500 words)

LGBT Malaysians are unlikely to see a significantly better situation in their country for at least two decades, quite possibly not in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, LGBT Indonesians are facing unexpectedly chilly headwinds, and things will get worse before they get better. To understand why, it is important to see that the issue has nothing to do with sexual orientation or gender identity. These individuals and their lives are collateral damage from a much bigger event that is going on: a long collapse in civilisational Islam.

Bad news: wages up, unemployment low

There were two noteworthy nuggets of information in Straits Times’ front page story about employment numbers in 2015 (Friday, 29 January 2016). This essay will discuss the nugget from this statement:  “Just 100 more citizens and permanent residents were in jobs at the end of last year compared with the year before, although unemployment remained low, said the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) yesterday.” My main aim in this essay is to examine the unquestioned assumptions that too often skew our appreciation of the facts.