e pur si muove

There has been a LOT written on this topic in the few hours that I’ve been living my offline life, plus the (practically mandatory) logging in watching the Colts take on the Bears.

Rather than duplicate the effort taken on by the tireless human aggregators, I will acknowledge their efforts in collating notable responses from across the Singapore blogosphere:

1. Intelligent Singaporean, PAP Invades Cyberspace, And More Feb 04
2. Intelligent Singaporean, Daily Reads Feb 04 - Welcome to our playground, PAP
3. Heng-Cheong Leong, SingaporeSurf: Life in the City. Feb 3 and Feb 4 editions.

A few interesting points of consensus have begun to emerge:

1. The publication of this announcement by the Straits Times was most likely planted deliberately, either by someone in the loop who acted in the public interest, or by. Several comparisons have already been drawn (see, e.g. Xenoboy’s post) between the ST informant and Deep Throat, the famous secret source who unleashed the Watergate scandal.
2. The PAP is practicing blatant hypocrisy, plain and simple. As mrbrown said, “Waitaminute. I thought being anonymous is a bad thing and affects credibility? I mean, that is the reason why we are constantly told that the internet is less credible than mainstream media, right?” Nobody with a shred of honor would expect that anonymously posted comments would deserve any kind of attention whatsoever. This is why MP Boey’s (by now) famous quote “The identity is not important. It is the message that is important” couldn’t be more wrong. As someone said, it’s Animal Farm all over again: just redefine the rules when it’s convenient.
3. The rationale of the PAP New Media Capabilities Group (NMCG), as reported in the media so far, appears to be logically flawed. Here are two of the most egregious:
   1. The fallacy of the false dichotomy: the Establishment sees very few pro-establishment blogs. Therefore all the other blogs are anti-establishment. A classic example of this logic is George W. Bush’s “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror” quote, made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Why is this wrong? Let me cite a simple example: I claim all real numbers are either positive or negative. Seems reasonable, since the opposite of positive is negative, no? The answer is no. Zero is a number that is neither positive nor negative. The mistake lies in identifying “negative” with the opposite of “positive”: in mathematics, there is a precise distinction between being negative and being non-positive. In this context, as Bernard Leong nicely explains, this effectively ignores the plethora of centrist, party-neutral blogs out there. It also explains the choice of otherwise bizarre terminology of “counter-insurgency”: They are acting out of genuine belief that the entire blogosphere is out to get them.
   2. The fallacy of ignoratio elenchi: although mrbiao doesn’t say so in so many words, but he does point out that MP Boey’s claim that the NMCG’s actions are not the same as spreading propaganda is false: propaganda doesn’t care whether it is covert or overt. There’s even a special name for this kind of propaganda: astroturf.
4. The motivation for the NMCG’s actions appears to be clear: acting in response to what they perceive as a hostile blogosphere, they are out to proselytize their point of view. As samaryn put it: “It is not a dialogue that they seek. It is a monopoly of their views that they wish to impose on others.”
5. Unresolved questions: who is the informant? Who is deepthroat.sg? Why did the Straits Times journalist and editorial board choose to run the story? Why has there been no follow-up of this news since?¹

1. To say more would be delving into conspiracy-theory land, e.g. whether the actions of this informant hint of internal strife within the PAP, so I will stop here.↩

I woke up this morning and heard the radio proclaim that it was an incredible -6°F out. That’s -21°C to you metric peeps.

I mean, seriously, if our planet is going to warm up, can’t we at least have saner temperatures in the dead of winter? My wallet will thank you for not having to turn on the heater so much.

Stupid El Niño. Make your presence felt already.

I miss KnightOfPentacles. I could always count on him to commiserate on cold weather, and how he would never, ever want to live somewhere so ridiculously frosty.

[Ed: It's been a long, long, long time since I had a good, long, hard, rant about anything in particular. This post is one of them. I expect the vast majority of readers to not get the point at all, but I hope you will be one of those who will. You are hence forewarned.]

One reason why pragmatic Singaporeans upset me is the total void of exposure to philosophy. If you are lucky you will come across the rare maverick who has a copy of Sophie’s World, and once in a blue moon you will discover someone who has even read the book.

The thing that really gets me about this is not that the typical Singaporean cannot rattle off Nietzsche¹, but that they cannot distinguish between normative and constantive (descriptive) statements². Read just about any blog considered part of the Singapore blogosphere and you will find³ that the discussion of factual evidence and rhetoric is intermingled with homilies and “should have”s and “ought to have”s of the most exasperating order. This is why there are some bloggers I prefer not to engage. I find it offensive and their arguments tend to be sloppy anyway. Picking through their writings to glean useful statements is quite firmly on the wrong side of the diminishing returns curve.⁴

Of course, this phenomenon is by no means limited to Singapore bloggers. The mainstream media is full of this kind of sycophantic garbage, interspersing opinions of how Singaporeans ought to behave with reports of how Singaporeans are actually behaving. The printed equivalent of “Did you see the murderer on trial! Ee-yur!” that passes for news is completely unacceptable. Why? Because we (supposedly) believe that accused persons are innocent until proven guilty. Until the judges pronounce their sentences, murderers are not murderers, they are merely alleged murderers. Ministers peppering their meaningless rhetoric with normative statements only succeed in making it more meaningless and increasingly soporific. And of course, since our society has a tendency to absorb blanket beliefs from our country’s leaders and presses, the entire society becomes polluted via some kind of perverse trickle-down effect.

Admittedly the failure to distinguish normative from constantive statements can be useful, since it permits an unusually facile reading between the lines in the Singapore media that is harder to glean from a more professional news source such as Reuters. But when I try I often get criticised for reading too much into things. Not all postmodernist ideas are complete garbage, you know.⁵ But the kind of sloppy rhetoric in our media outlets is quite unprofessional.

That we have to put up with this kind of sopping communiqués printed on fish-wrap is one of consequences of espousing pragmatism as political ideology, which is just as ridiculous as choosing agnosticism as a state religion⁶ or immobility as the preferred mode of public transportation.

It seems then that lack of exposure to philosophy is a key stumbling block to educating a population to think critically. We need critical thinkers in our workforce - long gone are the days of entry level jobs in Singapore - so why don’t we ? For crying out loud, what’s wrong with reading Hume in class?⁷ Aren’t we supposed to be living in the Enlightenment era? So why aren’t we as a society trying to understand and practice Enlightenment concepts?

It’s no accident that book-burning is associated with the very worst of repressive, authoritarian régimes. The 焚书坑儒 policy⁸ of the Qin dynasty was one of the most severe crimes against humanity. Systematically ignoring an entire canon of literature isn’t that far down the list of heinous crimes against the enlightened mind. The trap of ignorance is the most insidious, since the condition of ignorance is self-perpetuating and costs very little for the trapper to operate.

“Full of infantile sub-intelligentsia nonsense” was the phrase used by one S. McDermott to describe our infantile blogosphere. Even among the “non-infantile” blogs, we as a community could benefit greatly from an appreciation of the distinction between opinion and fact.

P.S. Bonus points to whoever can figure out where I’ve indulged in normative reasoning in the above.

1. Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher, by the way. His brand of nihilism somehow appeals to me.↩
2. H’okay, so what am I talking about? If you’re too lazy to look up Wikipedia yourself, you may content yourself with the non-expert’s (i.e. my) understanding of these terms. A constantive statement is a factual statement about reality which can later be demonstrated to be true or false through logical arguments. A normative statement expresses an opinion about what reality should be like.↩
3. There are notable exceptions, of course, to this statement. One counterexample is Agagooga, when he’s not being farcical.↩
4. I aim for a clean separation of opinion and fact in my posts. Sometimes I fail; I’m merely human. But I try. Sometimes I even end up doing it deliberately, but I don’t know if anyone notices.↩
5. Po-mo isn’t all John Cage and lesbian worship and wearing plastic wrap for clothes and nihilistic rants on the meaninglessness of urban life.↩
6. For individuals at certain times to be in a state of agnosticism is not intrinsically a bad thing. But I would expect that the agnostic to be actively resolving the question and evaluating arguments for and against the existence of a Higher Being. I’m referring to the fact that while there are secular states, Roman Catholic states, Buddhist states and Islamic states, there are no Agnostic states.↩
7. Arguably my entire article is about how few Singaporeans are consciously aware of the distinction between “is” and “ought”, a point that has become known as Hume’s Guillotine. All this is a prelude to skepticism and the question of whether normative statements can be derived from constantive ones, but that is irrelevant here.↩
8. 焚书坑儒: fén shū kēng rú, literally burning books and burying philosophers↩