The Sounding of a TOCsin: Blogosphere in a Bog

I’ve been MIA for sometime, clearly… was planning originally to make a comeback with an essay of sorts on the constitutional rights (if any) of non-citizens in Singapore. Am still working on that. But this rather bemusing fracas has impelled me to write, a little sooner than planned:

• soc.culture.singapore: Beware TOC (The Online Cons)
• Newsintercom: The Unknown Extent of the PAP’s Net Offensive
• The Wayang Party Club of Singapore: 8 questions for The Online Citizen’s Remy Choo

All this talk of moles and counter-offensives! It makes one incredulous, the paranoia that’s awash in the blogosphere. But let’s try to draw some rational observations from the hullabaloo.

Press freedom and social stability — of cake, and half-baked assumptions

I’ve actually got a few issues that I want to blog about, but let me focus on just one: the BBC World Service Poll on press freedom. Some pertinent links here:

• BBC World News, “World ‘divided’ on press freedom” (10 December 2007)
• BBC, BBC World Service Poll: World Divided on Press Freedom, (10 December 2007) (“BBC Report”) (1.86MB .pdf file)
• Todayonline.com, “Social stability is key: Poll” (11 December 2007)
• Readings From a Political Duo-ble, “Singaporeans for Free Media?”
• theonlinecitizen, “A government-controlled media is superior to a free media?”

Anyway, these are the portions of the BBC Report I wish to address:

GlobeScan President Doug Miller comments, “While people generally support a free media, the Western view of the necessity of a free press to ensure a fair society is not universally shared across all regions of the world.” (p. 3, BBC Report)

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Freedom of the Press vs. Social Stability
People across 14 countries were asked to choose which of two statements on the freedom of the media was closest to their own view:

• Freedom of the press to report the news truthfully is very important to ensure we live in a fair society, even if it sometimes leads to unpleasant debates or social unrest.
• While freedom of the press to report news truthfully is important, social harmony and peace are more important which sometimes means controlling what is reported for the greater good.

In most countries, press freedom is considered more important than stability. The exceptions are India, Singapore and Russia where around 48 percent support controls to ensure peace and stability and around 40 percent feel press freedom supersedes stability. (p. 5, BBC Report)

I will attempt to deal with the normative, rather than the positive: should press freedom or social stability be regarded as more important?

Why blogging is not the antidote to illiberalism.

And so, I’ve again reneged on a promise to blog more frequently. I’ve been working / interning, so much of my day is consumed by the mundane. Some of my time at home is also devoted to editing and proof-reading any number of soon-to-be-published academic articles. Plus, I’ve also been catching up on my reading on legal philosophy, so outside of work, I’m usually in a ruminatory frame of mind, not at all conducive to dolling out trenchant social critiques.

One of the books I’ve been reading is Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com (not the latest edition, Republic.com 2.0, which I must get my hands on). His basic thesis is a provocative and counter-intuitive one: government should regulate the Internet in order to promote freedom of speech. His supporting arguments are too intricate to be set out in full here.

An important cornerstone of his view, however, is that there is a distinction between ‘freedom’ in the sense of consumer sovereignty, and ‘freedom’ in the sense of a true deliberative democracy. Left to their own devices, people will choose based on their pre-existing inclinations, i.e. as mere consumers of information. These inclinations, however, are the very product of the environment we happen to be placed in.

Final Reflections on s 377A – For Now…

Lest I begin sounding like a broken record, this will be my last commentary on s. 377A for some time. It’s not what I envision to be my cause célèbre, unlike a contemporary of mine =)

Section 377A: The Final Bastion?

From the viewpoint of many conservatives, s. 377A is their Alamo — the final bastion for the forces of goodness, decency and propriety, the place where they must valiantly make their last stand. Lose s. 377A, and (if the conservatives are to be believed) the gates of hell will be irreversibly opened, unleashing wickedness and depravity upon our society: sexual licentiousness, bestiality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, and other unspeakable abominations.

Very gutsy, very sanctimonious… the only problem is that they have chosen the wrong place to make their stand.

Thio Li-Ann’s Speech in Parliament: Homosexual Sex and 377A — A Rebuttal

Prologue

Self-professed liberals have difficulty grasping this basic tenet of democracy: that whatever your argument, there is bound to be disagreement. “I refuse to engage you… you must be stupid not to see my reasoning” — that line, which I have seen ad infinitum, ad nauseum, reeks of a cop-out, a more urbane, unctuous way of saying, “Lalalalala… I can’t hear you… nanny-nanny-poo-poo!” If indeed we yearn for a true deliberative democracy, an effervescent civil society of free and equal citizens… then learn to accept that deliberation is a process, and that it is most effective when approached with maturity, thoughtfulness and prudence on all sides (notwithstanding that a real democracy entails giving all citizens a strong prima facie right to offend and insult one another, as I’ve argued before).

The Heart of the Matter

So let me go on to what I had intended to talk about: Thio Li-Ann’s speech in Parliament. First, some prolegomenal remarks on the blogosphere’s response. Most bloggers prefer to indulge in lampoonery, although they oblige by way of ‘logical analysis’ by pulling out a number of well-worn arrows from their quiver of “logical fallacies”, the old chestnuts like “strawman”, “false dichotomy”, “hasty generalization”, and so on. I’m afraid, however, that these labels don’t mean a thing if not backed by substantive arguments which rebut her arguments.

Interlude: Lawyers’ Fees and the Affordability of Legal Services

I admit I’m surprised that TOC linked me for a post which was more of a personal reflective exercise. Now that so many people have read Part 1, I’m obliged to follow this through all the way. But it’s a taxing endeavour, so I’ll have to leave Part 2 to the weekend.

As an interlude, let me talk a little about legal costs, a topic I’ve been meaning to deal with for some time.

First up, some stuff from round the Net:

To reign supreme in every sphere (whether professional, or otherwise?)

Ah, so Mr. Otto Fong of my alma mater (I recognize the name and face, but little else) has come out about his sexual orientation on his blog, and then has rather abruptly deleted that post.

• Hear ye! Hear ye!: “A salute to Otto Fong”
• theonlinecitizen: “Gay teacher deletes his ‘coming out’ article”

It’s a pity, but hardly a surprise really. I posted yesterday about long-standing, elite school traditions, and how they effectively constrict the range of one’s life experiences (see here). Well, if I may say so, the RI tradition strikes me as in-your-face, swaggering male heterosexuality. Take a historic school tradition with the patriarchal overtones of a bygone colonial era, and add to that a bunch of testosterone-ravaged male teenagers eager to prove themselves as “sons of Singapore”, and you begin to see the picture.

Predictable then that a gay teacher will not easily fit in within such an environment, and may be ostracized, even.