Mushrooms in a Fairy Ring

A quick one:

I was reading The World is Flat again while in Borders for the 20% discount sale they held this week; Thomas Friedman has come up with yet another revised edition (the Red Edition) with two additional chapters, the ones I was reading. They didn't add much to the overall story, merely expanded some anecdotes in the Green Edition of last year, except one thing: he said, and i paraphrase, if what you want is not being done, that just means you're not doing it. In reference to Internet information uploading technologies and the Net itself as a medium of dissemination and civic action.

Civic action. I'd met Alex Au in person the other day and he said that political participation only counts when it is offline, in real life, otherwise it'd just be all sound and fury and merely an outlet for venting et cetera.

And then I read Sze Meng's latest post in Singapore Angle about what attributes the next PM should have, where he said in reply comments that "maybe the system is not cranking along fine because there are not enough robust actual dissent (aka make it harder to run) taken into serious consideration in major policies."

And it all sets me thinking. Thinking about political participation online and offline, about political participation as a citizen and as a member of Parliament. Do you see the false dichotomies and parallels that Alex Au and Friedman have drawn? - Like mushrooms sprung up in a fairy ring after some rain, there have to be roots that were always there growing deep and quietly, but steadily. Political participation of the true type, that is offline and in the real world by citizens, or that is offline in the real world in a political party by very active citizens, does not jump straight from total apathy. Civic action and becoming a member of Parliament both do not occur overnight; there has to be some effort and thought given by concerned individuals or groups, to matters at hand. To me there is no significant distinction between growing roots and growing mushrooms, because when the rain comes, as it will one day to all of us somehow or other, you will get good mushrooms from good roots anyway. So we can keep busy growing the roots, it is quite a full-time endeavour, as well as not being afraid to grow large nice mushrooms when we ownself feel necessary.

Let us talk more about roots and mushrooms. If the mushrooms, the desired outcome, is to have public policies that show equal concern and respect (concern for the individual's well-being, respect for the individual's right to self-determination and privacy), you must have the roots, people who are interested in discussing policies on those merits of balancing concern and respect, which is something different from the power struggle for policymaking in a government setting. Some people also call this rather altruistic type of action "civic action". If "civic action" sounds too fiery to be palatable, I would personally consider this roots to be a large but essential part of the political structure known as "deliberative democracy". To get a government of this type, you must have citizens who deliberate and discuss in meaningful ways (that means with good intentions for being constructive contributors), and who have been tested through the fire of public debate exposed to all persons in society (yes I mean all) on public policies.

To get good government, you must have citizens who can be government. This means your citizens should be interested in government and in policies. Yet in this country the average citizen's opinion is constantly devalued as too unsophisticated for thorough and fair hearing ("heartlanders" vs "cosmopolitans", "the conservative majority"), as if they can't speak for themselves liddat. And browbeaten endlessly with this personal attacks, we end up being the sheep we were told we were. Much kudos to Shianux for his stunning exposition on this, a while ago.

I wonder. I wonder why it seems to be the unspoken status quo in this country that deliberative democracy is perceived as a social ill, as "dissent", the Freudian slip of Sze Meng's mind*, when in fact it is the sole right and responsibility that every citizen has towards the care of his country. How could anyone rely on others to do his thinking for him, to align his values for him, to declare without transparency or accountability that 'this' is dissent and 'that' is not? Indeed, why is robust actual "dissent", the voice of your people, hardly officially acknowledged to exist?*

Civil and rational discourse. Deliberative democracy. Civic action.

Perhaps a short course of self-study on political philosophy is in order. Blogging has to wait till later, then.

*I acknowledge Sze Meng was discussing the question of why the citizens' roots and mushrooms don't seem to affect any government policy. But the authoritarian nature of this country's present political structure is not something I am well-read enough to critically discuss. I can only bitch about it very quietly in my offline world to raise some minimal awareness. Definitely need to grow more roots in this area of thought.

Disclosure

I think enough people know my real identity that I could not care less about being anonymous now. Anonymity hasn't furthered my cause in any way that I know of, in any case. Who likes talking to anonymous people who drone on and on about issues when they don't reveal enough about themselves to let others know why they talk about such issues? Nobody cares who I am and given how I write, I won't get sued anytime in the foreseeable future.

So. It has been said in my profile for some time now that I am a social work student. That is true. I am, however, a part-time social work student. In my normal daily hours I work. I work as a very little cog in a very large machine. I enjoy my paid work very much. Occasionally I get upset with the futility of being a very little cog in the very large machine, but on those days I remember I like my salary, if little else. Such upset phases often pass as unremarkably as they came, after some diddling and talks with the boss and colleagues, and I enjoy my work again. It is work of the type I can think about 24/7 and make some progress on, anytime 24/7.

As a very little cog in a very large machine I am, as I have said, part of a very large machine. I write this now because I have been doing a great deal of 'very large machine' work that I hope will further my little cog career, into a medium-sized cog perhaps. All is going well, but I am restless. I am restless that I am only doing things that will further my little cog career. This slavery to the 'cog'-ness of it all, the insistence that if I think this and do this I will get that (and I will be safe, because people say so), quite simply drives me up the wall if I do it for a long time without break, and I get itchy and rebellious. I want to be all aspects of me. The longer the denial, the more independent critical thinking I crave to do. So I talk.

I examine the things that matter to me on a larger scale. I cogitate on the Cognitive Dissonance blog (argh, stopstop). Love matters to me, as do hope and faith and the ability to define one's own path. Empathy and altruism matter to me. And you, who are reading this, matter to me. Because if you did not matter to me, I would not be writing this on a public medium. If you did not matter to me at all, if I did not care about you at all, I would be a happy little silent cog, content to be one, living in a bubble world pursuing my cog path. Content to be one day a medium-sized cog, and then a larger cog. But that is not my nature, I could never be happy that way. And so, perhaps, if you are like me, I want you to know that you are not alone, first. And that you will not die if you speak your mind.

Education and the Theory of Comparative Advantage

Sooner or later, every blogger worth his salt writes about the education system in Singapore. It makes sense; the topic is familiar to all in this country, giving an instant bloodthirsty audience, and (less cynically) it is worth reviewing how opinions are formed in youth, in the hope of affecting those opinions in the mature reader towards the goal of enhancing critical thinking in social and political matters. Notably it also provides a vehicle for people of limited life experience to rant and rave about their limitations.

Enough with the cynicism. I was reading KTM's reply comments to Piper in his article on social mobility recently, where he mentioned that there existed a deep-seated belief that hard work can confer greater material success i.e. lead to upward social mobility, and expressed his own sentiments that "hard work is a pre-requisite for success, but hard work doesn't guarantee success".

I agree with KTM in this. Here are my two cents' worth.

There is hard work, and then there is hard work. Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage simply states: Work hard at what you naturally do better at than most other people. Right now I could probably do multivariate calculus and advanced physics, if I spent 10 years learning and practising it without any other activity. This would be hard work. Hard work brings success, no? No. This would also be profoundly stupid compared to those more naturally talented in physics who do their undergraduate courses in the normal 3-4 years and then come out to become investment bankers. Sure, if I master the stuff and thereafter become an investment banker (I hear the banks love these maths skills), I will have material success and social mobility. But it is simply very unlikely that any bank would hire an aged decrepit slow learner unless truly outstanding reasons were provided to offset the lack of "normal" ability.

I may, instead, spend some time in my youth exploring my interests to see if I have enough aptitude for a few of them to make those my career choice.
[Update: takchek: "I learnt more about China and Taiwan when I was trying to date girls from those countries, than from my 10 years in SAP schools"]

And, as always, your career choices do not dictate your present and future interests :) .

Okay that's the end of my obligatory post on education. No anecdotes, no apologies, simply a word.

Selfishness and Altruism

From The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand:

"Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if you ever hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason."

This is the reason why this blog does not exhort the reader to make some sacrifice, despite it being a social work blog and for all my own very selfish :) purposes altruistic in intention. Instead I insist upon the right to choose your own happiness, as opposed to having others choose it for you.

(for my own reference)

Recognise gay rights, Ian McKellen urges Singapore
http://tomorrow.sg/archives/2007/07/18/recognise_gay_rights_ian_mckelle.html


Hundreds attend forum on decriminalisation of homosexual acts
By Pearl Forss, Channel NewsAsia Posted: 15 July 2007 2147 hrs
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/288311/1/.html

A short note: Be Happy Doing Nothing

Last week I wrote about a young one asking me for advice on how to develop his interests. Today he wrote again to me, "I have no interests. What do I do now?"

....

I told him to be happy doing nothing.

Social work* is, after all, respecting the choices of the client. Apart from special situations of imminent harm or criminality, which are governed by our Codes of Ethics. I think this is something you the reader should know if one day you should ever decide to seek help.


*More accurately this refers to direct social work practice, not the entirety of social work.

How Do You Capture An Idea Or An Action Into Achievement

I.

From time to time, I start writing a post, and don't know what to say. So I was sitting here blankly after a two-month hiatus from blogging, and wondering that same thing. Everyone has ideas all the time, after all; walking is an idea, computer programming is an idea, and vegging out at home watching DVDs with your wife over the weekend is also an idea. My mother has a thousand and one ideas about my elder sister's upcoming wedding. How do you then capture an idea into writing?

II.

I had a conversation with a young one a short while back, and when I asked him to read more of what he loved, and do more of what he loved, and hang out with communities who do the same (he enjoys oceanography, not drugs, so this sort of advice is okay), he asked me, How?

He asked, how? That terrible lost look. How can I do it?

III.

I have read the recent series of discussions on how to discover one's purpose in life that Mr Wang hosted. His present post is on how to refocus one's sense of duty and obligation onto one's self. He has ambiguous feelings about that approach to life; on the one hand, he considers it necessary, but on the other, he wonders if it is selfish and bad.

I would prefer to think of Mr Wang's approach as self-centred. To do I. or II. or any other action, you must move yourself to do it. To move yourself, you must feel obliged to yourself to move, and your duty to yourself to learn. You must know the concept of the self-disciplined self as primary. How, again how?

*

We all ask "how?" so often, it has become a stopping point for critical thought. After taking the trouble to find something we might like, we stop, tear our hair out, and turn round and round in circles. We fear it can never be done. We hope it can be done. And fear and hope are a potent combination by themselves, in causing us to lose whatever sense of direction and purpose we once had. In causing us to build on worry, to panic, and to fear more, and in the end, to never find our way. Does this sound familiar?

*

You'd realise, in the entire previous paragraph, there was not a single word about rational thought, about planning, and about persistence. Yet these are as vital human qualities as are worry and hope and fear. And all involve only the self in some manner.

And strangely, my only answer on how to capture an idea or an initial action into achievement, is to keep going, and to always know that you are searching for your ultimate purpose, and to remember these two things when nothing seems right. That is all. Once you get moving in that way, you will know where you are going next. Rational thought is involved when you reflect on the actions you had chosen. Planning is involved when using those reflections to help decide what to do next. And persistence carries everything through dark times. So it doesn't matter what direction you take at first, as long as you are developing one or a few (best if all) of your present interests.

At the end of my young life, I found that it wasn't my lack of inspired direction that was stopping me. It was the fixed thought I had that I definitely had to pick the shortest and most "beautiful" path. No one path is beautiful, every life has its shortcomings. It is the greatest tragedy of our education system that we have been indoctrinated into thinking there is only one perfect way. Instead, I believe the way that belongs to you will unfold itself gradually in a process of constant feedback and refinement.

Incidentally, this post also encapsulates my views on university admissions.

On the Notion of Free Will

Work is falling on me like a ton of bricks. In lieu of a proper post, I offer you this, and note it for my own reference as well. =)

Edward O. Wilson writes this in his book On Human Nature, p. 72:

Consider the flip of a coin and the extent of the coin's freedom. On first thought nothing could seem less subject to determinism; coin flipping is the classic textbook example of a random process. But suppose that for some reason we decided to bring all the resources of modern science to bear on a single toss. The coin's physical properties are measured to the nearest picogram and micron, the muscle physiology and exact contours of the flipper's thumb are analyzed, the air currents of the room charted, the microtopography and resiliency of the floor surface mapped. At the moment of release, all of this information, plus the instantaneously recorded force and angle of the flip, are fed into a computer. Before the coin has spun through more than a few revolutions, the computer reports the expected full trajectory of the coin and its final resting position at heads or tails. The method is not perfect, and tiny errors in the initial conditions of the flip can be blown up during computation into an error concerning the outcome. Nevertheless a series of computer-aided predictions will probably be more accurate than a series of guesses. To a limited extent, we can know the destiny of the coin.

An interesting exercise, one can reply, but not entirely relevant, because the coin has no mind. This deficiency can be remedied stepwise [...] Let the object propelled into the air be [...] a honeybee. [...] The bee appears to be a free agent to the uninformed human observer, but again if we were to concentrate all we know [...] and if the most advanced computational techniques were again brought to bear, we might predict the flight path of the bee with an accuracy that exceeds pure chance. To the circle of human observers watching the computer read-out, the future of the bee is determined to some extent. But in her own "mind" the bee, who is isolated permanently from such human knowledge, will always have free will.

Pearls Before Breakfast, from the Washington Post

What if beauty is right before your eyes, and you walk past it unseeing?

What would you be, then?

Love

Love. Sometimes known as Charity in other versions of the Christian Bible.

I intend to talk about ministerial pay and social work pay, about just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those, and the nature of public service for both ministers and social workers.

Of course whether this intention has been realized in this article is not for me to judge, at the end. :)

We begin. And begin again and again, on the topic of ministerial pay. Presently the ministers are paid 1.2m a year. According to a pay peg to the salaries of the most highly-paid 8 professionals in 6 fields of the private sector (Yawning Bread), they should be paid 2.2m. Our Prime Minister wishes to "close this gap" (direct quote). Needless to say, the question of perverse incentive to not spend effort on closing the other gap has been raised elsewhere.

It's going to rise no matter what we say. You know it, and I know it. A question to consider is: why is it that we know what we know? My suggested answer is, because there is no clear accountability for performance of the ministers. If they advocate that they deserve to have their pay pegged to the private sector, where are their KPIs, and thus the sword of Damocles that falls when they perform badly?

I hear only a ringing silence on this.

A hypothetical scenario for comparison: If I walked into my boss' office today and asked for a pay raise without justifying the contributions over and above my job's required specifications that I had made, he would not only laugh in my face but possibly fire me for arrogance (except that it would be called lack of team-playing skills or something). But this situation would never arise amongst the citizens and the PAP, because they were voted in without any clear mention of their jobs' required specifications a.k.a. KPIs. Thus the screaming of the cows (Ringisei).

But all this isn't quite about what KPIs they have. The present state of affairs has not even reached that stage of transparency yet. It's about on what basis (KPIs, pure randomness, the 66.6% vote?) they are paying themselves more. Let those criteria be held up for open scrutiny by the citizens, our country's stakeholders - only then will the increase in pay begin to be rationally justified.

Alternatively, the pay peg to the private sector would be acceptable if, like the masses they govern, each and every one of them could do this: Go to a private sector company with absolutely no ties to their original company Singapore (no suggestion of possible corruption or vested interest for our PAP, no), apply for a job, get selected for the interview, pass the interview, get offered a certain salary, and then bring that salary amount back to their original company Singapore as a competing quote. How the ministers are going to put this into effect, well we will just have to rely on their work ethics to find such jobs.

Other comparisons have been offered, from the method of selection of PAP ministers (LuckyTan), to the lack of further increase in Public Assistance (PA) funding, to the recent GST hike to "help the poor" ...

On to social work pay now. Yapdates mentions (found via The Void Deck: Minsta Pay Increase Special!) that people do not want to become social workers because of the low pay.

"I think back on those social organizations where social-workers receive one of the lowest pay in the whole economy, yet people continue to say that the work they do are 'priceless.' Isn't it common to hear positive comments about social workers helping an unemployed widow of many children find a job? Yet how many people will raise their hands to become social workers? Not many, as one of the reasons is that it does not pay adequately). "

Please, this is a pretty inaccurate analogy. From anecdotal evidence, I have heard that the threshold for "being paid adequately" in the social service sector is a question of whether one can support a 1-child family on social worker income. This criterion is one of basic subsistence; it is a far cry from the proposed increase in ministerial pay. So please do not insult the social work profession in this manner, by saying that its inadequate pay is comparable to the ministers' inadequate pay and that its selflessness is comparable to the ministers' selflessness. Notably, on Jan 21 2007, a day after the ST ran their Saturday profile on Social Workers' Day, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan announced in the ST that 11m would be set aside for the social service sector, some of which would go towards an increase in social workers' pay. 11m happens to be more or less the same sum as that required for the salaries of 10 Cabinet ministers to reach their proposed benchmark.

Which leads on to whether ministers are more talented than social workers? Undoubtedly they are. (okay, indubitably, you pedants. :) ) But...

...On just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those. LuckyTan has another interesting piece on this. Less rantily, there will always be a pay differential amongst various occupations, though all are required to keep the society running. This pay differential would ideally be based only on the fruits of one's talent (therefore, the existence of KPIs) as a contribution to society, but this view ignores pre-existing variation in people's talents or backgrounds in contributing to those fruits. Say, if one had enough space at home to store all the books one wanted to read, one would tend to buy those books instead of renting or borrowing them, thus enabling 365/24/7 access to the ideas in those books. This is quite different from borrowing those same books and taking the extra time to summarize them quickly for future reference before returning them, to achieve the same outcome of round-the-clock access. In the former, the cost is in money; the latter's cost is in time. If society places a premium on group availability of the individual's time instead of group availability of the individual's money, then the financially poorer one would be disadvantaged no matter what claims of equal starting points the meritocracy rhetoric has. The word for unequal starting points, in the social work conceptual framework, is 'privilege'.

So there are pre-existing variations in people's talents or backgrounds already. But does it therefore follow that those variations must be reinforced, or worse, solely attributed to one's individual intrinsic 'talent'? Is it really true that the poor deserve to live poorly while the rich deserve to live richly? Well this is up for debate and is a huge topic in itself, but I have taken the step to be a social work student so I clearly do not think so. Neither do the many people who have made their stand clear that the nature of public service is one of selfless generosity.

Ian, especially, talks about how public service can never be bought over by large sums of money, just recompense for the fruits of one's labour aside.

"Finally, I think the people in civil service and government should be people whose morality cannot be affected by money. We shouldn’t give more money to ensure people don’t be corrupt. We should give more money because it is fair to give them that amount of money for the work they do and their contributions to Singapore. To say X amount of money is enough to prevent corruption is to me naive because someone else could always offer X + 1. But if the argument is that there is indeed a threshold where a person would be less susceptible to be corrupt (if not totally not corrupt), then shouldn’t there also be a threshold where enough pay is enough to want to keep the person from jumping ship to the private sector.

And there is indeed such a threshold. It is the benchmark to private sector salaries. But the benchmark will change won’t it. And if such a benchmark changes which means the threshold changes, then by working backwards, doesn’t that mean the people we have are just being bought off now at current market rates so they won’t be corrupt.

And if so, doesn’t that mean they have a price. Which comes back to the first point. If there is a price, there is always an X + 1. "

It was supposed to be about Love and Charity. Are you committed to serve?

[Edit: One more thing I forgot to discuss. Social workers are bound by their national organisations' Codes of Ethics. The comparable document for government ministers would presumably be the Constitution. Your thoughts on this?]

Faith (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the previous post but it was written in January - some things had changed from Nov to Jan.

It should be noted that "The finished Penal Code Amendments Bill, with adjustments for opinions from the public feedback consultation exercise, will be tabled for Second and confirmatory Third Reading in Parliament in the first quarter of 2007." Which is soon. :)

The January 2007 issue of the Singapore Law Review has a editorial and some contributed articles on the Penal Code amendments, do look through it if you can.

1. Responses to this social issue in Singapore (Key Debates)

In this part (II) of the paper I continue the discussion on whether civil unions or gay marriages can be legalized in Singapore, and the steps that can be taken to achieve social legitimization of such partnerships.

Since the submission of part (I) of this paper on 17 November 2006, I have had the privilege to participate in my personal capacity in the women’s focus group discussion on the proposed Penal Code amendments, organized by the government feedback unit REACH on 30 November 2006 [1]. It was explicitly stated by the REACH moderators in their introductory preamble that lesbian sex had always been and would continue to not be criminalised, although they acknowledged that section 377A of the Penal Code (pertaining to all sexual contact between men) was proposed to be left unchanged and that this was a point of dispute. One of the moderators was Ms Ellen Lee, cited in part (I) of this paper as speaking for the general Singaporean population in being averse to the removal of s.377A. The mood however was relaxed and friendly, with the moderators taking on the role of facilitators instead of being arbitrating judges, and a large part of the discussion was taken up on the sexual aspects of the proposed amendments. Five of the nine women who spoke made it clear before they began that they were attending the event in their private capacity, and spoke in favour of abolishing s.377A. The remaining four were from the local feminist group Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) and spoke both about abolishing s.377A for moral and economic reasons and about extending the coverage of the marital rape amendments.

Not long after on 13 December the mainstream broadsheet The Straits Times reported a summary of all the focus group discussions (Nadarajan, 2006) [2] in a manner that suggested that only AWARE had mentioned abolishing s.377A and for the completely inaccurate wrongly cited reason of lack of police enforcement at that. To clarify, the REACH moderators had clearly stated during the session’s preamble that s.377A although left unchanged was not going to be enforced as is the status quo, and yet passionate views about abolishing s.377A still continued in full flow after that. Lack of enforcement was never an issue in the ensuing discussion. In the Straits Times article, no views of any of the private individuals or AWARE members who had spoken about s.377A were quoted, nor paraphrased.

In part (I) I had expressed the hope that greater social acceptance of non-heterosexual Singaporeans would eventually be supported bureaucratically. In light of the Straits Times report, Singapore is only in the extremely early stages of legal acceptance of homosexual partnerships. The finished Penal Code Amendments Bill, with adjustments for opinions from the public feedback consultation exercise, will be tabled for Second and confirmatory Third Reading in Parliament in the first quarter of 2007.

2. Strengths and Limitations of this Response with reference to Gay Marriages and Civil Unions

Although the likelihood of gay marriages and civil unions being legalized in Singapore within the next 15 years looks bleak, a framework and a plan must be set up before any goal is to be set on its path to becoming reality. Blogging has become a popular method of expression for Singaporeans, and the government is paying enough attention to thought expression in this medium [3] that it has set up its very own blog for junior members of Parliament, at http://p65.sg/ . Bloggers’ views have been cited in the mainstream media and by journalists when questioning government ministers. One of the issues that can be raised in the blogging medium is therefore the issue of gay marriages and civil unions. Mr Alex Au, of the blog Yawning Bread at http://www.yawningbread.org/, is a noted gay rights activist and well-respected for his clarity of thought on matters not limited to gay rights. Local pro-LGBT organisations such as Sayoni, People Like Us, and Oogachaga have also formed communities by blogging on their own websites on the Internet. As of the present moment the Singapore government is not censoring any of these websites nor blogs.

3. Social Workers’ Roles – A Model of Stages

‘Begin where the client is’, goes the social work intervention axiom. Bearing in mind the current rigidly conservative legal and social environments of Singapore, the ‘traditional’ institution of marriage was defined in very practical terms for this paper, as the only existing definition of marriage in Singapore to be between a man and a woman, in line with section 12 of the Women’s Charter. The combination of ‘gay marriages and civil unions’ in this paper’s title is deliberately chosen to reflect the early stage of legal acceptance of same-sex partnerships in Singapore, as the distinction between ‘marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is only viable if acceptance of rights and privileges of homosexuals is already widespread. The recent October 2006 case of Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris etc. et al. (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006) will be used as a guiding example of the various stages of specific conditions necessary for same-sex partnerships to achieve full marriage or civil union status.

In the New Jersey case, firstly it was decided that the definition of marriage and its associated rights and privileges could not be defined as between a man and a woman because the denial of equivalent rights and privileges to same-sex couples violated the New Jersey Constitution’s equal protection clause (p. 22). A look at Singapore’s corresponding equal protection clause in its Constitution, as mentioned in part (I), states that persons shall not be discriminated against based on religion, race, descent or place of birth, and that “all persons are equal before the law” [emphasis mine]. The most fundamental document of Singapore law thus suggests Singapore law itself to be the initiating point for change; it offers no expository insight into the basic moral need of the law being constantly vigilant in at least considering the judicial possibilities of reflecting contemporary social mores. Neither does it offer any broad ideals for law review committees to act upon.

It may however be fair to say that the Singapore Constitution is too venerable a document to be open to rewriting and change, by association with the touchstone Constitutions of other countries. In what other ways then might Singapore law itself monitor its own changes and adaptations? The New Jersey legislature had enacted an amendment to its Law Against Discrimination (LAD) in 1992 to include sexual orientation. The LAD stipulates that homosexuals will not be discriminated against in “pursuing employment opportunities, gaining access to public accommodations, obtaining housing and real property, seeking credit and loans from financial institutions, and engaging in business transactions.” In comparison, Singapore fares relatively badly in terms of principles in common with the New Jersey LAD; the legal and social environment is pro-business and thus in business transactions sexual orientation is irrelevant. However in the pursuit of employment opportunities, access to public housing, and financial credit, it has no anti-discriminatory laws for sexual orientation or same-sex couples. In fact, as in the above anecdote on the Penal Code amendments focus group discussion, the not improbable suggestion to strike off existing homophobic legislation that is not enforced anyway was not well-received by the government authorities. Logically, if Singapore is to move towards acceptance of same-sex partnerships, section 377A has to be struck off the Penal Code. This would clear the way for other changes in legal rights pertaining to same-sex couples.

In brief, New Jersey enacted a Domestic Partnership Act in 2004 that allowed same-sex couples to have death estate rights, guardianship rights, tax-related benefits, medical visitation and decision-making rights, and spousal health and pension benefits. In the cited October 2006 case, additional full rights of marriage afforded to same-sex couples were as follows: joint property ownership, tuition assistance for tertiary education for children and spouses of selected groups, testimonial confidentiality given to spouse of an accused in a criminal case, spousal care and childcare leave benefits, revocation of rights upon divorce, duty of care to children from the relationship, spousal maintenance allowance after divorce, and division of assets after divorce. All these rights are well-afforded to married couples in Singapore, but not to same-sex couples. We may be able to introduce these rights to same-sex couples in Singapore in similar stages.

The matter of children in a family with same-sex parents can be operationalized legally and socially as well. Allen and Demo (1995, p. 119; cited in part (I)) [4] has an overview of how family research is turning away from the original paradigm of “benchmark family versus deviant alternative family” to embrace the diversity of family types now in existence. Herek (2006) [5] describes the legal recognition of same-sex families throughout the United States in a comparatively up-to-date review.

Social workers can advocate for these changes in policy.

4. Conclusion

Given that social change does not occur overnight, and that the lack of gay marriages and civil unions though bringing much pain to homosexual individuals and couples does not fare well in comparison with income inequality and structural unemployment issues in Singapore, it is not easy to describe how this may be desirable for Singapore in the long term. Singapore is not a country known for prizing its civil liberties above economic ones, but perhaps when that changes, the stage-by-stage framework suggested or modified by future events will come in useful in thinking about the issue of homosexual rights and making gay marriages a reality here.


References

[1] Another first-person account by Ms. pleinelune can be found here on the Sayoni site.

[2] Nadarajan, B 2006, ‘Feedback focuses on sex laws: marital rape laws inadequate, say some; continued outlawing of gay sex also questioned’, The Straits Times, 13 December 2006. I am unable to find the fulltext version of this article online and instead provide a link to Mr Wang's partial extract of it here.

[3] Also see Ms. Kitana, 'Why the internet is the most powerful voice we have', 26 October 2006. <http://kitana.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/why-the-internet-is-the-most-powerful-voice-we-have/>

[4] Allen, KR & Demo, DH 1995, ‘The families of lesbians and gay men: a new frontier in family research’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 111-127.

[5] Herek, GM 2006, ‘Legal recognition of same-sex relationships in the United States: a social science perspective’, American Psychologist, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 607-621.

Faith (Part 1)

Ohaiyo :) I got no pithy quotes on Faith, unfortunately. Especially Faith in the context of this mini-anthology of Hope, Faith and Love. (1 Corinthians 13:13, Bible.)

Religious faith however can be discussed in a tangential manner - today we write about homosexuality instead. Aaron had a hot discussion over at his blog a few days back, and Ben and Kitana had weighed in earlier as well, with Ben rounding up the discussion just this weekend.

This is one of my favourite topics of all time, and I wrote a short paper on it last November when the Penal Code amendments public consultation sessions were still going strong. Acknowledgment: Much of the inspiration for the paper has to be credited to Yawning Bread [1], where I first saw the New Jersey case.


Gay Marriages and Civil Unions – the Singapore Context

1. Overview

The issue of whether gay marriage should be legislated for first garnered worldwide attention when the then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom declared in 2004 that gay marriage was a fundamental human right and proceeded to sign marriage licenses for gay couples without any concern or regard for the legal repercussions of those documents. Since then the state of Massachusetts in the United States has legalized gay marriage while the states of Vermont and Connecticut have legalized civil unions.

The case of Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris etc. et al. (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006) indicated two main points of contention in the legislation for or against gay marriages and, more broadly, civil unions between same-sex couples: 1. the right to marry, and 2. the rights of marriage. The right to marry was the right that Gavin Newsom was asserting by his brashly independent action. The rights of marriage are those that are already accorded to heterosexual couples when they marry, in the country they choose the marriage to take place in, as well as any other countries who have pledged to honour extraterritorial marriage contracts. The situation of a country refusing to honour an extraterritorial gay marriage has thus far not been reported.

In this paper I discuss whether civil unions or gay marriages can be legalized in Singapore, and the steps that can be taken to achieve social legitimization of such partnerships. Towards this end a literature review is timely.

2. Marriage

It is well-known that the traditional definition of marriage specifies that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, in a clear example of heterosexual privilege. The Constitution of Singapore specifies in its equal protection clause under Part IV: Fundamental Liberties that no discrimination against Singapore citizens can be effected based on religion, race, descent or place of birth; both sexual orientation and sexual identity are notably absent from this clause and from any other part of the Constitution. Section 377 of the Penal Code of Singapore criminalizes carnal intercourse ‘against the order of nature’. Marriage as specified in the Women’s Charter of Singapore is restricted to the traditional definition only.

However a recent New Jersey case brought before the state Supreme Court in February 2006 described seven same-sex couples being in a permanent committed relationship for more than ten years, some having children and grandchildren through the reproductive method of artificial insemination. The family lives of these seven couples are briefly summarized in the case (pp. 8-12) as “being remarkably similar to opposite-sex couples”. Allen and Demo also describe in a meta-review (1995) [2] similar functioning families with same-sex parents and constructively criticize the prevalence of negative case same-sex family studies over positive ones in the field of family research. There exists therefore empirical evidence that same-sex families are not a priori dysfunctional.

3. Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders (LGBT)

As part of a prospective longitudinal study on the upstream-downstream relationships between past temporal orientation, long-term distress and temporal disintegration in a California population after a firestorm event, Holman and Silver (1998) [3] reported significantly higher levels of immediate temporal disintegration in individuals who had had direct experience with chronic trauma prior to the fires, compared with individuals who had instead directly experienced prior acute trauma, p < 0.05, and in their Discussion they acknowledged that “the role of temporal disintegration in response to chronic forms of trauma remains unexplored” (p. 1158). Temporal disintegration is cited and defined therein (p. 1151) as “confusing day and time, narrowing attention to the present, perceiving oneself to be in slow motion, feeling as though time itself has stopped, confusing the order of events experienced, experiencing a sense of timelessness, feeling fragmentation in the continuity between past and present, and having a foreshortened or obliterated sense of the future”. How this is applicable to the LGBT sector is that one’s sexuality is not only chronic, it is constant. And it can be traumatic to ‘come out’ to declare and maintain one’s alternative sexual orientation in the face of societal disapproval, as seen in Price (2001) [4] and Vaughan (1999)’s [5] studies on homosexual women.

In Singapore, homosexuality is still very much painted as a social taboo, as evidenced by frequent association of drugs and crime with homosexuality in the daily mainstream broadsheet The Straits Times, and the government’s reluctance to remove or amend section 377A (pertaining to all sexual contact between men) of the Singapore Penal Code during the ongoing public feedback discussion of extensive proposed Penal Code amendments. Such pandering to the homophobic ‘conservative Singaporean majority’ (no demographics data available) is highlighted in the quote below from a ChannelNewsAsia article on 8 November 2006 [6] by Ms Ellen Lee, a member of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs and Law.

“I think the general feel is that we're still not ready to introduce major changes in these areas. … It's not necessarily [sic] for major legislative change to signal changes. But the legislation will only be changed when there is sufficient justification to warrant it, because the larger section of society [sic] think that it's time for those changes to take place.”

– Ms Ellen Lee

From a humanistic perspective [7], this resistance to ending open prejudice and discrimination could hardly be affirming to the homosexual person. Given that 'risk and resilience' literature emphasizes risk factors and protective factors [8], the taboo of homosexuality in the mainstream media and high echelons of government, without balancing effects from civic pro-LGBT organisations, could make homosexuality in itself a risk factor for living in Singapore.

4. Summary

Although the ground for gay marriages and civil unions may not be fertile in Singapore at this moment in time, there exists hope that greater social acceptance of non-heterosexual Singaporeans will eventually be supported bureaucratically. This will be elaborated further in my analysis.

References

[1] Au, A 2006, ‘New Jersey court orders legislature to provide for same-sex unions’, <http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2006/yax-670.htm>

[2] Allen, KR & Demo, DH 1995, ‘The families of lesbians and gay men: a new frontier in family research’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 111-127.

[3] Holman, AE & Silver, RC 1998, ‘Getting “stuck” in the past: temporal orientation and coping with trauma’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 1146-1163.

[4] Price, MF 2001, ‘Early trauma, societal oppression and coming out’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 59 (abstract only).

[5] Vaughan, SC 1999, ‘The hiding and revelation of sexual desire in lesbians: the lasting legacy of developmental traumas’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 81 (abstract only).

[6] Ng, J 2006, ‘Penal Code review to add protection for minors, flexibility for judges’, ChannelNewsAsia, 8 November 2006. <http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/240179/1/.html>

[7] The humanistic perspective, in brief, states that each person is unique and has value, that each person is responsible for the choices he or she makes within the limits of freedom, that people always have the capacity to change themselves, and that human behaviour is driven by a desire for growth, personal meaning, and competence, and by a need to experience a bond with others. Source is Hutchison, ED & Charlesworth, LW 2003, ‘Theoretical perspectives on human behaviour’, in ED Hutchison (ed.), Dimensions of human behaviour: person and environment, 2nd edn, Sage Publications, CA.

[8] Hutchison, ED 2003, ‘A life course perspective’, in ED Hutchison (ed.), Dimensions of human behaviour: the changing life course, 2nd edn, Sage Publications, CA.

Hope

Every year, at around this time, I have thoughts about my own mortality.
Every year, without fail, someone somewhere out there will try his very best to kill me. I do not know who he is, nor who he will be, the next year and the year after that.
Each year, I hope beyond all hope that it will not happen again, but I know better.

And it's not only me, it's my entire family who's involved as well.

I'm referring to CNY driving on Singapore roads.

*

Hope is really a topic best left unexplained - almost everyone knows what it is. It's the quality that makes the events of each day worth living. And it drives the search for meaning.

But for some, each day is "more of the same", and little brightens it.

Part of social work requires the rebuilding of hope. And it has to be the person's own reframing of his situation, and enlightenment about his support networks and habits of self-care, that allow hope to regenerate. No one else can do those for him. No one else can take those steps for him. He has to find within himself the emotion to change.

Often the way is obvious, even to the person.

This bears repeating. Often the way is obvious. But what makes him take it, is an emotion. It may be ratified by post hoc justification, or it may not. That does not much matter.

If I were to advise CNY drivers to be more careful, I could do it till I was blue in the face, and I would still have to drive as defensively as always. Because not everyone would see. Not everyone would see the need to not hurt, not kill, and not threaten to take by force another's life, simply because they are lost on the roads, or impatient, or, good grief, drunk.

Please. Do it. Feel it.

CD's Priorities, and Reflections on Writing

My present priorities in CD:

1. (1) Pseudonymity
2. (2) Expression of my thoughts and opinions on various matters
3. (3) Tailoring my writing to an audience (what audience? Invisible, unknown, silent <- this is why this point is ranked lowest)

The ordering of (1) over (2) is why this blog is primarily reactive for now - in my posts the reader will find many references to other blogs discussing current issues as well as a lot of quotes from and hyperlinks to various reading materials. What the reader will hardly find at present, beyond the initial few entries, is any valiant attempt to begin topics of discussion close to my heart that will be new in the blogosphere. I'm not quite capturing enough eyeballs for me to think it worth my time in terms of opportunity cost for other life activities - serious social/political writing is an endeavour of blood, sweat, toil and tears, for me. Pretty high toll.

The ordering of (2) over (3) is only because as said previously, I really have no idea at all who reads this and who has expectations of this.

Happily, (1) and (3) do not conflict. I know my writing style is very characteristic of me (this is why some of my friends, having passed by this blog, can do a double take and go, "This? Eh? Hmm!" and ask me in private if this is mine) and this fact doesn't trouble me. Consider how deep a blog persona goes and perhaps you will begin to see why being known to my friends does not bother me in the least.

Reflections on Writing

A friend passed me some material on how to write well in a scientific context (he has interests in that area), and I was struck by this particular paragraph:

[Sentence immediately preceding the following quoted paragraph: "Had the author placed all stress-worthy material in stress positions, we as a reading community would have been far more likely to interpret these sentences uniformly."]

We couch this discussion in terms of "likelihood" because we believe that meaning is not inherent in discourse by itself; "meaning" requires the combined participation of text and reader. All sentences are infinitely interpretable, given an infinite number of interpreters. As communities of readers, however, we tend to work out tacit agreements as to what kinds of meaning are most likely to be extracted from certain articulations. We cannot succeed in making even a single sentence mean one and only one thing; we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions. Such success will follow from authors becoming more consciously aware of the various reader expectations presented here.

- The Science of Scientific Writing
George D. Gopen, Judith A. Swan
more acknowledgments follow at the end of the text

This explains in more formal and restrained tone just why I need to know who my audience is. I assure you it is not because I am some egomaniac. =)

Some thoughts on Singapore Angle

In my previous stub written while I was still on break, FO asked me why I was aghast at the thought that my blog appeared to be a Singapore Angle clone. I didn't reply then because I didn't want to have anything to do with the blogosphere at that point in time ;-)

But it's a fair comment, and needs a reply.

So. Singapore Angle is great, and et cetera et cetera et cetera. With every article it makes an impact, and its quality remains consistently high, due to its doubleblind review process by prominent (...wordfind)personalities in the field for every article submitted - very academic journal-like. :-) As time passes it has also evolved - having spawned a smaller, cuter, bite-sized version of itself in Perspectives, perhaps it has come of age. Or perhaps not. ;-) Perspectives is still toddling along, but is doing well.

What has this got to do with my blog? Well. I wrote the stub not to diss Singapore Angle, but because I fervently believe that half of what made and continues to make Singapore Angle's success is in drawing many different people to comment on what was written there, to comment in a measured, reasonable, substantiated manner of discussion in the spirit of contribution to greater knowledge/understanding. Given that this blog CD has little to no comments of that nature, it falls far short of the standard that SA has set. And that is why I, as writer of CD, was in sum total aghast at the comparison.

Know Your Darknesses

"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

- William I. Thomas,
sociologist

"Ask yourselves, all of you... what power would Hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to Dream of Heaven?"

- Morpheus (Dream),
Neil Gaiman in Sandman #1

"Every endless night has a dawning day
Every darkest sky has a shining ray
...
It's a private emotion that fills you tonight
And a silence falls between us
As the shadows steal the light
And wherever you may find it
Wherever it may lead
Let your private emotion come to me."

- Private Emotions,
(singer) Ricky Martin

Something a commentor wrote in one of Mr Wang's posts caught my eye and set me thinking. Amongst other things, he wrote this sentence, "Surely a counsellor [social worker] should point towards the light, rather than dwell on the dark." Rather than hovering on the endless issue of the papanons, I am in favour of discussing this notion of light and darkness today.

The above quotes have expressed my position eloquently - in so many other words, I am who I am because of all the joys and sorrows I have encountered. My life and ability to help would be much poorer if I only looked at the light and never upon the dark. How would one know the qualities of light if one has never seen pure darkness? Nevertheless I understand the importance of being a light for my clients, as they usually come to us because of their various perceived darknesses, personal and/or structural. We bandage their wounds, and we fight for them when they are in a better position to challenge their circumstances.

Feedback

While scouting for feedback on who reads this blog, as per my previous post and takchek's point 1 in his latest post, I was emphatically informed that this blog sounds like a Singapore Angle clone.

*aghast* No way....

Break.

My home printer has died on me after 12 years of service (may it rest in peace), and I'm also struggling to balance some things in my personal life. Writing here will be put on hold while I scout for a new printer.

That said, I really don't know who reads this blog, actually. =)

Life Transitions

Disclaimer: This short note is to enhance general knowledge and should not in any way be taken as professional advice specific to any individual’s unique situation. Contact points for social services are available at your nearest Family Service Centre on an islandwide basis. Please feel free to call or walk in for assistance, you are always welcome to come by and talk with us.

The life course perspective looks at the brief lives of human individuals, using time as a linear dimension. It emphasizes the diversity of life experiences that individuals go through. At this point we will take a look at its major concepts.

A life event is “a significant occurrence involving a fairly abrupt change that may produce serious and long-lasting effects”. A mid-term change in class teacher may be a life event for a child. Other occurrences will be life events for a young adult who is a college student. Having life events is normal. (point)

A transition is “the change in roles and statuses” that occurs as a result of life events. Transitions are also normal. The developmental change in an individual who moves from school/part-time work to full-time work is one such normal transition. (line)

A turning point is a special life event or transition that produces a “lasting shift in the life path (also known as life course trajectory)”. Life events and transitions become turning points when they “close or open opportunities, when they make a lasting change on the individual’s environment, or when they change a person’s self-concept, beliefs, or expectations”. (point/line)

The life course trajectory is, as said, a life path. It is a “long-term pattern of stability and change in a person’s life, and usually involves multiple transitions”. Trajectories can be drawn up for work, health, education, and family, and these in total make up the individual’s life. (line)

(Quotes from the above are from the first chapter of Dimensions of Human Behaviour: The Changing Life Course, 2nd edn, by Elizabeth D. Hutchison. Sage Publications 2003.)

What distinguishes the life course perspective from the well-known psychology theory of developmental stages is its focus on human agency in making choices, the deliberate acceptance that chronological age is not necessarily an indicator of life stages, the other deliberate acceptance that the order, length, and pace of life stages are not universal though they can be broadly generalized, and the importance of linked lives (family, social networks) in affecting an individual’s life paths. What it shares with developmental theory is its acknowledgment of time as a common leveller. You can’t run away from time, both say.

Or so you think.

*

I think that Singapore has lost this sense of time. We grow up, learn our maths and our sciences, learn our languages and mother tongues, get streamed, pursue some form of further education in yet more specialized subjects, get a job, buy a house and thereafter seem to do nothing at all but wait for death. In these stark terms of economic production we pursue the eternal; by describing the modern history and the future of Singapore as one of overcoming constant economic struggle, our linear dimension has become wealth instead of time. This has become our Singapore Story by default, our living legend endlessly reproduced in all our unthinking workers’ lives.

Now, dissatisfaction may be part of the human condition - “the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted”, says the character Dream in Neil Gaiman’s famed Sandman collection. But how dissatisfied can you get with a life’s time, when no one ever outlives it? :) We can only make the best of what comes. There is something very reassuring about knowing that some things shall eventually pass, in the dimension of time.

We grow up, get educated, get a job, buy a HDB flat, and then die.

Is this Dream the choice that you have, with all your heart, made? Or have you just gone with the flow?

“We are particularly prone to ignore information that is contrary to our hypotheses about situations. Consequently we tend to end our search for understanding prematurely. One step we can take to prevent this premature closure is to think about practice situations from multiple perspectives.”

- Gambrill, in Hutchison p. 84

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

Will it change the world? Of course not. Will it change anything? Not directly. But is it worth three hours of your time? Yes, definitely. Bloggers often feel themselves to be at liberty to pass comment on political issues and politicians. They do have, and must have, that liberty. But I cannot help but feel that their commentary and criticisms would be taken so much further, and would be delivered/crafted which so much more insight and clear-mindedness, if they were willing to step up and say these things openly and face to face with the person/policymaker they are criticizing, so that the latter will have the right of reply and also so that you, as a commentator, do justice to your views. [...]

A reply means it is a conversation. [...] It does not mean that I am converted to their thought - often I come away with new points of disagreement. But my perspective is always developed, because it has ventured out of its safety zone, and dared to engage. If we become blase and disinterested, distancing ourselves, then is it really the government's fault when we complain of an affective divide?

- Gayle Goh

Mr Wang, Gayle, Rambling Librarian and Bernard Leong have written about this. Not.

It seems to me that there are two issues here: one, talking about the blogosphere in the mainstream media (MSM), which has been cautiously disparaging of 'the new media' at best and virulently abrasive at its jealous worst ('blogs are worse than porn'). And two, the opportunity of having a face-to-face conversation with a Cabinet minister. Gayle's position, if I have not misunderstood it, is that the advantages present in the latter outweigh the pitfalls of the former. Mr Wang's position is simply the uselessness of the latter. (Although he was the first to get the ball rolling. He maintains this view in comments to the post though, at time of this post's writing.) Rambling Librarian says the personal disadvantages he perceived in the face-to-face conversation outweighed its advantages. BL takes a more convivial tone in saying that "the discussion before and after the actual event was actually more interesting" and goes on to hint of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting in his chatter about "surprising excerpts".

So I'm not sure how to title this post, since everyone has begun by talking about very different things. I could turn this into yet another insipid post on the joys of civilised discourse, but the question is: How does meeting someone in person enhance respect for the other?

(I wholeheartedly support Gayle's take on it, by the way. If that makes me '[bursting] with emotion', so be it.)

This isn't an easy question to answer. The Singapore government has often been accused of being a faceless monolith. In fact there is this joke going round about how the Feedback Unit was renamed REACH because its original acronym cut a bit too close to its actual response to citizens. But my cynicism digresses.

As a general rule, it is a given that we don't rob or kill people whose viewpoints and hopes and dreams and actions we know, as compared to those we don't know. (Some of us still do. But it's considered a disease.) Well, it's much harder to coldly kill someone we feel has a wholeness of his own and yet a shared humanity to ourselves, even if it is only something as irrational as having eyes, a nose and a mouth. One only has to look at Mickey Mouse's cute neonate features to understand that humans are very strange. Alternatively, nobody loves a sea urchin but harp seals (oh, so adorable!) were a hot environmental cause a few years ago.

So what makes George Yeo less credible than a harp seal? Is it because he lacks "wholeness of his own self" as a Cabinet minister? Do you think that for any person in a value-judged profession, his professional identity must necessarily have eclipsed his personal one at all times? Even if it is this profession.

"I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP."

- PM Lee Kuan Yew, 1982
via Singabloodypore

Perhaps the story from this is that politicians are people too.

P.S. At the time of this post's completion, Michael Palmer has replied to Mr Wang to apologize and invite him to re-post his comment that was, I quote, inadvertently censored on his p65 blog post.

Circularity and Balance

Allow me to reframe F.O.'s belief in civil and rational discourse in this post. It converges with my own aims; call it confirmation bias.

In any discussion,

"... the development of a critical approach to our own understanding of, as well as to existing knowledge about, the world is fundamental for students and educators alike."

- Anonymous

Let's ignore the part about "students and educators" for the moment to talk about critical reflection. Critical reflection is one of the higher-order cognitive skills of mankind, and like other such intelligences, is prized both for itself as well as for its practical usefulness.

In terms of style, critically reflective discussion can go one of two ways: circularity, and balance.

Valuing critical reflection for itself, i.e. ‘understanding of the world’ as in the quote, does not convey the world's impact upon our own understanding as in the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective, and therefore has its limitations in real life. This refers to people who hold their opinions very firmly and refuse to budge from them.

One could think of the discussion between two (or more) such "critically reflective" people as a circle on a plane. They will endlessly be at cross-purposes. Now hold the image of circle on plane firmly in your mind for later comparison.

What distinguishes circularity from balance?

Balance is where discussion moves away from going round in circles to going somewhere else. You have two (or more) people who hold their opinions firmly but can be budged due to rational or emotional persuasion, or what F.O. calls civil and rational discourse.

So instead of limiting themselves to two dimensions on the flat plane (you say to-may-to, i say to-mah-to), it is possible that they still go round in circles but in a screw sort of symmetry instead.

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "screw you".

But more seriously, screw-type critically reflective discussions takes you places; if you have a preference for exploring circles in flat planes, screw-type discussions gives you a wonderful variety of circles to play with. And if you have the other preference for learning from others (balance, or screw-type discussions), civil and rational discourse is a great way to gradually do so without too much cognitive dissonance occurring.

These are possibilities.

(Update 02/01/07: While searching for something else, I have just come across one of Catherine Lim's articles in which she says "One gets the surreal feeling that everyone seems trapped in a Samuel Beckett-like circularity that nobody knows how to break out of". How apropos. Link here: 'Utopia or dystopia' ST 10 May 2005)

Not.

It's the middle of the workweek, but I thought I'd drop in to say ...... something very unoriginal, that makes me smile nonetheless.

The seven stages of life:

Not old enough to know better
Old enough to know better
Not old enough to know
Old enough to know
Not old enough
Old enough
Not

*chuckles* Not. Indeed...

Happy holidays, especially to you who "read the blog and kinda got this gut feeling.." and to you my brother in the Alliance of Awfully Long Names. Have a joyous 2007.

Statement of purpose

The goals of this blog are as follows:

1. to assist in the ongoing social constructionist creation of the Singaporean blogosphere as a shared platform for civil and rational discourse,
2. to advocate for specific causes the author of this blog believes in, over the long term,
3. for the author of this blog to commit herself to engaging in heuristic learning with other people on matters of substance, so that we may all grow and mature as individuals and as a cohort,
4. for Singapore society to eventually become more vibrant, more open and more democratic.

The author of this blog is not affiliated with any political party and does not wish such affiliation. She blogs as an empowered private citizen of this country and will continue in this capacity and only this capacity. Draw what inferences from that you will.

The author also likes chocolate, for your information.

The Values of (Social) Work

Often I am asked about my profession: "Like that need training ah? So many volunteers around, all can do the same thing as you, only give out food and chitchat what".

(The other question I am frequently asked is "Like that can earn money ah?" Of course the short answer is No, absolutely not, but the payoffs come in other forms.)

I illustrate the first question with an analogy between physics and social work:

Work is done on an object if and only if:
1. a force is exerted on the object, and
2. the object moves as a result of the force exerted in 1.

If a force is exerted on the object but it does not move, no work is done.

If the object moves but not because of the force exerted on it, no observable work is done either, and the system is artificial and bounded wrongly - we must look outside this defined system for the source of the force. Implicit assumption: There is a force.

So the popular conception of social work is like saying that work is done only because the force of human generosity and compassion is exerted on the object. Whether any effect is achieved seems to be irrelevant. And if such effect is observed, it seems to be "understood" without question that it must have been due to the force of human generosity and compassion acted on it. This view of the profession is so ... wrong.

I have not even begun to look into the efficiencies of such forces, yet. :) And that is why social work is a profession and not a mere leisure activity.

Comfy Chairs

From the ST, Dec 16 2006:

... thousands of middle-aged managers who lost their jobs during the late 1990s downturn and have yet to make their comeback.

Many have tertiary education, speak good English, own private property and used to hold middle and senior managerial positions paying $5,000 to $20,000 a month.

But these days they shuffle around office buildings and shopping centres, a tatty plastic bag of dog-eared CVs and documents in hand, looking for job-vacancy signs.

They first ended up on the chopping board after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Since then, the forces of technology, management de-layering, right-sizing and outsourcing have shoved even more off their comfy swivel chairs.

[...]

In particular, psychiatrist and suicidologist Chia Boon Hock, who has studied thousands of suicide notes, is keenly watching this vulnerable group. He notes that the chief reason why those aged 45 to 59 kill themselves is financial. (emphasis mine)

Sitting on my comfy swivel chair at home reading about other mature adults being shoved off the ultimate Comfy Swivel Chair ... struck fear into this one's heart, especially when I am wondering about my own financial future here from age 40 onwards.

*

Is it more true that some industries are overhyped and later marginalized, or more that individuals blindly follow trends like lemmings under the 'old social compact' , such lemming-like behaviour subsequently much criticized by the government when things started to go sour? What do you think motivates each and every person's choice of career path?

In another paragraph of the same article, finally even the ST itself has said, "'self-improvement' is a bad word for many in this group, who used up chunks of savings to pay for courses leading to diplomas and degrees, only to find these of little use when the crunch came"! Also see this article by Terence Chong on Dec 11.

Please take heed of your own chairs before they become so much flotsam in the ocean.

"Facing the Challenge of a New Age"

Both Fearfully Opinionated and Kitana have commented recently, with deeply felt sorrow and some bitterness, on how people who graciously leave comments do not always, well, graciously do so. Fearfully Opinionated goes so far as to call his post a "rant" :) , which I would not agree. Perhaps a few words from Martin Luther King may shed some light:

A third challenge that stands before us is that of entering the new age with understanding goodwill. [...] There is the danger that those of us who have lived so long under the yoke of oppression, those of us who have been exploited and trampled over, those of us who have had to stand amid the tragic midnight of injustice and indignities will enter the new age with hate and bitterness. But if we retaliate with hate and bitterness, the new age will be nothing but a duplication of the old age. We must blot out the hate and injustice of the old age with the love and justice of the new.

[...]

Now I realize that in talking so much about love it is very easy to become sentimental. There is the danger that our talk about love will merely be empty words devoid of any practical and true meaning. But when I say love those who oppose you I am not speaking of love in a sentimental or affectionate sense. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. When I refer to love at this point I mean understanding goodwill. [...] we will be able to stand amid the radiant glow of the new age with dignity and discipline.

[...]

I am afraid that if I close at this point many will go away misinterpreting my whole message. I have talked about the new age which is fastly coming into being. I have talked about the fact that God is working in history to bring about this new age. There is the danger, therefore, that after hearing all of this you will go away with the impression that we can go home, sit down, and do nothing, waiting for the coming of the inevitable. You will somehow feel that this new age will roll in on the wheels of inevitability, so there is nothing to do but wait on it. If you get that impression you are the victims of a dangerous optimism. If you go away with that interpretation you are the victims of an illusion wrapped in superficiality. We must speed up the coming of the inevitable.

- Facing the Challenge of a New Age,

December 1956

As this is too long to leave as a comment on their blogs, I have put it here. It is also for my own reference when I wonder the same.

The Blogosphere is an Emergent System

A note by Elia Diodati on Dharmendra Yadav's proposal to form a self-regulating Blogger Association briefly discussed emergent phenomena, as below.

"... the term "Singapore blogosphere" at best describes the transient, nebulous association of cross-referenced, internetworked blogs that nominally claim some affiliation with Singapore; like all emergent phenomena [#3 in original article], there is an inalienable quality of intangibility and ineffability to the very concept of a blogosphere." [emphases mine]

One may say that this is nearly religious in nature; equally it could have been asserted that the blogosphere is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", but that was not Elia Diodati's meaning. Intangible, ineffable - these are words that bound and enclose in .5pt border the fairy-wisp idea of utter indescribability, and that poorly sing the praises of the extraordinary stability of emergent systems. Elia's cited reference #3 gives a much better picture of emergent systems:

"... orders arises from elements within a system acting independently from one another within a framework of procedural rules or laws that generate positive and negative feedback such that independent behavior takes the actions of others into consideration without intending to do so, and that the impact of that behavior tends to facilitate more complex relationships of mutual assistance than could ever be deliberately created. Such systems generate order "spontaneously." In doing so they can act in unanticipated ways because there is no overarching goal, authority, or blueprint that orders the actions of their components or the responses they make to feedback generated within the system." [emphases mine]

Emergence is the opposite extreme of reductionism; emergent properties are what disappear when things are broken down to their component parts for study. The stability of emergent systems can be observed and verified by small testing perturbations. Such systems can have negative feedback models within, or both negative and positive feedback models within. (A Watt steam governor is an example of a negative feedback model.)

Returning to the self-regulation of the Singaporean blogosphere, Mr Yadav's original proposal of "procedural rules or laws" suggested centralized regulation by bloggers among bloggers, and both Elia Diodati and Bernard Leong have argued that this type of rules breaks down the blogosphere into scrutinizing its component blog posts one by one, therefore constraining the natural "vibrant, organic realm of discourse" and inherent positive/negative feedbacks in the blogosphere. It should be noted that emergence arises from independent factors interacting with each other in positive and negative feedbacks. Small perturbations within the emergent system will self-correct through such feedbacks; bloggers criticize, deterrently ignore, and encourage one another to share views in civil and rational discourse. To over-protect bloggers from the large ocean of opinions is, in my view, destructive to the community, and I leave it to the reader to decide if the proposed centralized regulation is good.

Quotes, Humour, and Beginnings

"A woman’s wisdom is her gift to women. Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God. So why do you intend to inflict your wisdom on this poor unfortunate man you say you love?"

- Orson Scott Card, Tales of Alvin Maker: Prentice Alvin

from Wikiquote

Because I choose to.
- Neo, The Matrix