TR EMERITUS

Many people like the ability to create fake accounts in social media. These accounts allow them to post their views without showing their true identity. They support it as a way for them to voice a view or grievance anonymously. They oppose any suggestion to ban these fake accounts. They have not considered the harm caused by these fake accounts. I refer to fake accounts where the platform owner is not able to provide the identity of the account holder, other than an email address, which may be untraceable. These accounts have been created deliberately by dishonest people to smear or make malicious comments to hurt other people. In a more extreme cause, they are used to incite hatred and violence among different races or religious groups or to engage in criminal activities. To preserve order in society, it is imperative that fake accounts should be banned. Every account should be identified to a person, who is responsible for the messages that are posted under that account. This should be made a requirement by the authority. We can allow a person to post a view under a pen name, i.e. not the real name, to protect that person from personal attacks. However, the authority should be able to demand for the true identity of the account holder, if there is any malicious or harmful posts. If a person has a genuine grievance, he or she should use other avenues to voice their issue. They should not use the social media for this purpose. The readers in social media are not the right people to address the grievance.   Tan Kin Lian      Read More →

Video clips of the Pennsylvania Republican Hearing held on November 25, 2020 are been widely circulated on social media, YouTube included. On January 30 this year, someone known as "XX121" titled & posted a 2-minute video-clip of that hearing on C-SPAN as "SG Election Fraud", showing Phil Waldron, a retired army colonel, making an allegation that our Singapore government was one of the countries involved in election fraud. However wild or baseless this may be, it still remains a very serious allegation that demands a firm and swift response from our government. C-SPAN a non-profit information platform in the US that provides "direct viewer-to-leader dialogue and discussion" of politics in the US and related developments around the world" and that particular video clip has its logo on it. In the short 2.25 minutes video, the allegation can be heard just before the 1.45-minute mark, where Waldron states in the hearing that "voting systems in the US & Pennsylvania were built to be manipulated. They been used in elections around the world and have stolen elections around the world, and that is where Italy, Argentina, Singapore, Bolivia discloses two week ago..." Our government has implemented and uses much draconic legislation to counter falsehoods and misinformation by Singaporeans but it must also be equally forceful in hauling up "foreign actors" outside of our country too. In this instance, what this allegation implies is that our present government is not constitutionally elected and that our election system is flawed and can be "stolen". Surely this cannot to (sic) true. I know we have the worst bunch of politicians in the 4G PAP but to believe that PM Lee would stoop so low as to steal an election is hard for me to believe as l don't think they will do such a deplorable act. As such, l trust that the relevant ministries will act swiftly and take legal action against Waldron and query the Pennsylvania Republicans as to why they did not rebut Waldron when Singapore was named as a country that has stolen elections in this hearing. In fact, our government should initiate a defamation claim in the US against Waldron, just as they had initiated very punitive defamation actions against fellow Singaporeans for making allegations that were much less harmful. This must be done firmly and decisively if such allegation is false, and our government must be seen as being equally forceful in protecting the integrity of our country. Merely blocking access to the content is not a solution as it gives the impression that either our government lacks the courage to act against real foreign interference propagated by powerful entities outside of Singapore or that there may be "some truth" in the allegation. It may also give the impression that our draconic legislations against online falsehood, misinformation and foreign interference are non-constitutional or lack sufficient legality to be used to prosecute foreign entities outside of Singapore. Will K. Shanmugan, the Law & Home Affairs minister, and our Foreign Minister be able to rise up to this challenge by bringing Waldron to task and the US Republican for failing to rebut such wilful allegation against Singapore in their hearing? I hope patriotic parliamentarians and our Foreign Minister will raise this issue vigorously in parliament as this allegation imply that we may have some rogue politicians in our present parliament and demand that our "whole-of-government" acts firmly & swiftly against such a wilful allegation, now and in future. Surely Indranee Rajah and Tan Chuan Jin, being Leader of the House and Speaker of Parliament respectively, must be seen to be actively championing against such a serious allegation in order to protect the integrity of our parliament, just as they had dedicated so much time and resources in their COP against the Workers’ Party, which pales in comparison with the seriousness of this latest allegation. Still l wonder as to how Singapore can, despite having spent tens of billions in Cyber-security, technology in building a Smart Nation and active monitoring of information, be clueless about such a serious & wilful allegation? So where are Josephine Teo, the minister for Communications & Information, our Cyber Security Agency and Smart Nation, and the various ministers who are sitting on these Ministerial Committees? They should have pick up this allegation ahead of any Singaporean as by staying quiet, it makes us wonder if our government is afraid to fight for our sovereign rights as a nation against heavyweights like the those politicians in the US whenever they make some wild allegations against us? It is also imperative for all of our parliamentarians to collectively & resolutely secure an explicit assurance from our Elections Department of Singapore so as to assure Singaporeans that our General Election and Elected Presidential Election are sufficiently robust against election frauds, especially when technology is used, and that our elections cannot be influence or manipulated by anyone or by any office. This is important as there is also another video that is coincidently being circulated on social media showing PM Lee talking about “having to spend much time to fix the opposition” and as the Election Department is under the office of the Prime Minister, it is equally imperative for the Elections Department to assure Singaporeans that this department cannot be manipulated by anyone, not even the Prime Minister. As Singapore cannot afford to have any undeserving or rogue politicians in our government, let us hope that our government takes this latest allegation seriously as Singaporeans clearly deserve better... ----------------------------------------------------------- For verification of the link to the video: [LINK]   Joseph Nathan      Read More →

One of the most cringeworthy things going around my social media feed concerns a headline run in the Straits Times (Singapore’s leading daily) about the Beijing Winter Olympics, which are going on at the moment: As two of the people circulating this have pointed out, the headline is not true. There are a number of countries who have hosted both the Summer and Winter versions of the Olympics. Beijing is the “first” city to have hosted both the Summer (Back in 2008) and Winter versions of the Olympics. There is, as they say, a difference between China the country and Beijing, the city. The editors have been rightly lambasted for this oversight. This is, as they say, the type of factual error you expect from a primary school kid and not a national newspaper. The layers of editors and subeditors that bring a newspaper to print should have seen this. Then, there’s the fact that the newspaper in question has now become part of a non-profit that is funded by the government. Why is the tax payer being forced to fund an editorial team that can’t get its facts right? For me, the major issue with this simple error is the fact that it reflects a troubling ignorance about the world outside Singapore. Although I’ve been living in Singapore for the last 22-years, I still get stunned by the level of ignorance of basic geography. I think someone from Saudi Aramco telling me that people had asked him “Which part of Dubai are you from” when he told them he was Saudi Arabia (Saudi Arabia being significantly larger than Dubai). Many Singaporeans still think that Punjabis (specifically the Sikhs) are from Bengal (there’s a huge distance between Punjab and Bengal) and I’m brought back to the dinner where one of the guests proudly asked, “Where is Bahrain?” There are people who talk about “Hindis” and “Indians” as if they were two different things. Contrary to what most Singaporeans might think, the national language of India is actually Hindi and you cannot gain national pride in being ignorant. In a way, the only other place where I’ve been to where this type of ignorance about the world exists, is in America. As a Singaporean, one might find oneself explaining to people that Singapore is not part of China. However, our ignorance about the world is worse than the ignorance found elsewhere. Let’s face it, America is a huge place where most people spend their lives in their home town. When my stepdad lived in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, he found that the locals had no concept of where New York was. In a way, you can’t blame them because they live in a world where everything they need is right at home. Why does a Hill Billy in the Appalachian Mountains need to know about New York when everything he needs is right at home? That’s not the case for us. We are a small island with no resources of our own. Our very existence is based on trading with the outside world. Unlike my stepdad’s former neighbours, you cannot grow your food and live in your own bubble in Singapore. At any given point in your life, you will need to deal with someone from somewhere else in order to exists. Singapore, as we’ve reminded ourselves on so many occasions, is a “Red Dot.” The outside world doesn’t need to know about us but we need to know about the word outside. If anything, we need to be smarter about the world than the world is about itself. Like with many things in Singapore, the government actually has responsibility for this state of affairs. We are, if you listen to propaganda, an exceedingly well-educated place. We reached the 100 literacy rate mark ages ago. Apparently, we build “world class” educational institutions and we are constantly building “world-class” research facilities and getting “world-class” researchers to set up shop in Singapore. Our often-repeated mantra is that “We have no resources other than our human resources,” and so we need to invest in our people. The obsession with “education” reaches out to the press. Whilst the government reminds the press that Singapore does not need a “Fourth Estate,” that it has a social responsibility to “educate” people. However, as the confusion between China the country and Beijing the city shows, we need to ask if our “educators” are themselves educated. If you go through any of our top institutions (mostly government ones), you’ll find that there are lots of people who have graduated with good degrees from “world-class” universities. Yet they remain ignorant of the world outside their own and you have to ask if they are really educated at all. One of the most worrying examples came from my stints of working with the Saudi Government, where I learnt to drop certain Arabic phrases when speaking with Arabs because it helped break the ice. However, at one Saudi function, I realized that the three phrases of Arabic I knew where three phrases more than the average person working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) knew. I remember a girl from MFA gushing about my command of Arabic after witnessing me drop my three phrases with the Saudis, a community that she was paid to build a relationship with. I’m a guy who was told by a senior civil servant at MFA that I would never get hired because MFA did not consider my “honours” from a British University to be honours at all. However, when dealing with people from elsewhere, I do try to talk to them in their context so that they can understand mine. I’ve found out that I am a weird person for doing this. Sure, I understand that you can’t know everything about everywhere but at least the curious enough to find out about the places you have to deal with. Like it or not, China, India, the Middle East and Africa are markets that we need in order to grow. We have to be interested enough to do a Google search about certain places when meeting people from different parts of the world. Ignorance about the rest of the world is not bliss when you are a small trading nation. The government needs to be put “curious” people in charge to “educate” the masses rather than robots to train more robots.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →