Workers Party - The secret behind being oh-so-"conciliatory" towards the PAP

In 2007, on the eve of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the major US automakers Ford and General Motors were in trouble. They would soon approach the US government for a bailout.

In contrast, Toyota was on the ascendant. The New York Times ran an article on the contrasting fortunes of the Japanese automaker vis-a-vis its US competitors.

The money quote came from James P. Womack, founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute:

“The last thing Toyota wants is for any of those guys to collapse.” For one thing, it could be politically disastrous for the Japanese company if it were considered responsible for the death of a grand American institution. “But it’s also completely worthless to Toyota in the market,” Womack adds. “They’re selling all the vehicles they can make already. What they actually want is just continuous, slow decline — decline at the same rate that they have the ability to organically expand. That’s the ideal world for them.”

Let me parse that for you with a few substitutions in case the parallel I have drawn is not clear enough.

“The last thing the Workers Party wants is for any of those guys to collapse.” For one thing, it could be politically disastrous for the opposition party if it were considered responsible for the death of a grand Singaporean institution. “But it’s also completely worthless to the Workers Party in the political landscape,” mjuse adds. “They’re winning all the seats they can win already. What they actually want is just continuous, slow decline — decline at the same rate that they have the ability to organically expand. That’s the ideal world for them.”

The general Singapore population is not ready for a government that is not majority PAP. As Yawning Bread has frequently put it, the average Singaporean is not desirous of a complete change in government; they just want the social compact of old renewed: surrender of civil rights, liberties and a robust democracy in exchange for economic growth and the good life.

The average Singaporean wants a bigger, more equitable slice of the pie. They don't have a problem with the baker who bakes the pie (other than his miserly ways) or the taste of the pie itself.

[As an aside, some very intelligent people have postulated that in today's consumerist, capitalist society, the pie is in fact rotten in toto. I am sympathetic to this argument. But then again, I'm a greenie. You can read more here.]

I don't buy the argument about Workers Party wanting to be a "co-driver" to keep the PAP on its toes. Politics is ultimately about power, and the Workers Party eventually wants to be in the driver's seat. So, why mess with something that has worked? Given the realities of our population's sentiments, PAP-lite is the way to go if a political party wants to eventually come to power in Singapore. Low Thia Khiang obviously understands this. Anything more radical than that is a path to political marginalization.

I know educated urbane professionals who, while they have problems with the PAP's arrogance and high-handedness, have difficulty imagining a post-PAP Singapore. These are the middle class folks who decide the shape of our political landscape.

So, when the WP says that they will work with the PAP going forward, I keep getting that creepy tingly feeling like a brush of cold fingers across the back of the neck. And I'm not even a PAP flunky.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. *Shudder*.

One further thing. You might think that I'm referring only to the PAP in the above paragraph when I state that the Workers Party wants a slow decline. Really, that applies equally to all the other opposition parties. The WP is cannibalizing the opposition vote where they can.

Ironically, the beneficiary of the decline in the vote share of the other opposition parties could well be the PAP, if voting tactically is no longer something to consider as the WP becomes more significant in Singapore politics and less differentiated from the PAP.

As one last aside, differentiating themselves further by casting themselves more left or right of the PAP/WP, or carving out a niche issue in which they enjoy strong support could be a viable strategy in the future for an opposition party to play kingmaker, in the event coalition government ever comes to Singapore.

Facebook’s Graph Search

Have you heard of Facebook’s Graph Search? You should. The buzz has been everywhere these few days. Wired Magazine has an article on it, but it’s a little too much of a cheerleader for Facebook for me. Still it gives a good overview of Graph Search.

Forbes had a more nuanced article, found here. The Forbes article references a short Gizmodo article, also worth reading, linked here. Techcrunch has a decidedly negative take on Graph Search. Their article can be read here.

I am not a heavy user of Facebook, despite being an early adopter (I joined in 2005, when I was a senior at a university on the East Coast.)  I am what you might call an “unenthused” poster of links, videos, photos and (god forbid) status updates. No Timeline for me, thanks.

[As an aside, I am also a smartphone holdout, despite being a bit of a geek. I carry a super basic Nokia phone without even a camera. I've long maintained that the deficit today is not of technology or connectivity, but rather of attention. Everyone's attention is spread way too thin these days.] 

Now, with the unprecedented “discoverability” of personal data enabled by Graph Search, I think I will be even less inclined to post stuff online. This is George Costanza’s fear of worlds colliding, writ even larger than what people have already experienced. Any user of Facebook will be able to query the database of user-generated data stored on Facebook and interpret that data in ways that you probably didn’t anticipate when you ‘liked’ something, posted a comment, or were tagged at an event.

I’m not even sure if Graph Search will be a useful feature for most users. I certainly don’t think I would use it, except perhaps for cyberstalking (there, I’ve said it. Not that that’s considered deviant behavior these days; all of us online have PhDs in cyberstalking).

The reason why I don’t think Graph Search will be useful to me is because I rarely have the habit of asking my friends’ opinions when I need to buy something, hire a service, watch a movie, read a book, play a computer game etc, all hooks that Facebook can use to monetize its database of personal information. This is because I search for information independently, and I have a very good idea of what I like and what to look for.

Even for people who value their friends’ opinions and would want Facebook to give them the results of an instant poll of their friends (based on friends’ past ‘likes’ and behavior), most people wouldn’t base their decision making on the opinions of ALL of their friends. I certainly wouldn’t trust the opinion of my friends on certain matters.

You wouldn’t ask a non-foodie about her favorite makan places, would you? And you would probably have zero use for another friend’s tastes in music and books, if for example, you privately think that he’s a Neanderthal (but you love him anyway).

And this is assuming Facebook users religiously post all of their opinions and ‘likes’ which are immutable and unchanging and completely context-independent. We are not even going to go into the thorny thicket of problems that have to do with users being facetious, or ironic or just plain obfuscating.

Or the related problem that even for someone who assiduously prunes his Friends List, and who resists adding new Friends unless he has known them a while, one third of the people on my list are people I don’t actually know…and another one third are people I have not spoken to in years.

To put it simply, Facebook data on is not clean. The signal to noise ratio is abominable, and careful interpretation is needed to make sense of the data to generate actionable insights. That sounds like an awful lot of work to get a restaurant recommendation near Ion Orchard on a Friday night, one that you agree with at the end of your dinner and that you could not have just as easily pulled from hungrygowhere.

More likely than not, the results of Graph Search are going to be dominated by the people on your Friends’ List that are perpetually online, post status updates incessantly, and have the attention span of hamsters. On steroids…and coffee.

The PAP AIM Saga

Predictably, with the PAP finding it increasingly difficult to explain why Aljunied Town Council sold their computer system to a PAP-owned company when Aljunied was controlled by the PAP, the PM decided on the nuclear option of lawyering up. A lawyer's letter was sent to Yawning Bread demanding an apology, which Yawning Bread complied with.

Separately, Tan Chuan Jin did the same to Vincent Wijeysingha over comments he made in relation to the SMRT strike fiasco.

This is what you do when you realize that you are losing control of the conversation. Send in the lawyers and shut down the entire conversation.

[Oh, and put in a few nice articles of the PM patting the shoulders of students and Chan Chun Sing reading to kids at the library -- see today's Straits Times (6 January 2013) in the pages following the articles on the apologies.

I am reminded of George W. Bush reading "The Pet Goat" during the events of 9/11. Note to Straits Times editors: anodyne pictures do nothing to dispel citizens' disquietude with what the hell is going on with AIM. If anything, they only serve to reinforce the perception that our ministers are completely disconnected from the ground. Straits Times editors, you need to go back to propaganda school.]

Frankly, I am bemused by this whole turn of affairs. For the two activists under legal injunction to retract their words, there is no shame attached to apologizing over a defamation charge from the PAP. Everyone knows the PAP doesn't fight fair. Apologizing is easy and the better part of valor. In fact, being served with a defamation letter is a sign that you're being taken seriously.

It is not, however, the PAP's cheap tactics which I find distasteful; politics is inherently dirty. What is particularly odious is the hypocrisy. Despite what Goh Chok Tong once said about the PAP being a party of 'junzi', the PAP really is a party from the 'hood. Lee Kuan Yew himself said that famous quote about putting on knuckledusters and ambushing his opponents in a cul-de-sac.

There may not have been very many palatable options other than lawyering up and putting a stop to this particular AIM conversation, unlike that time-waster of a national conversation. Still, by doing so, the PAP has opened several cans of worms.

The first is the ineffectiveness of such a move. The words "Pyrrhic victory" come to mind. This is the information age. What's online stays online, as anyone who has ever been tagged in some particularly mortifying picture on Facebook would have found out.

If someone was so inclined, setting up several mirror sites to mirror the content of objectionable (to the PAP that is) sites would be a cinch. Heck, your average content scraper or forummer copying and pasting articles wholesale onto forums alone would ensure the longevity of any web content. And Google's PageRank algorithm guarantees that should enough people access the link, it will automatically float to the top of the search rankings.

And everyone's connected to the Internet these days, to judge from the number of iPhones I am surrounded with each time I board the MRT. Get with the program already. A gag order, particularly on Internet content, is no longer effective in the information age. It just shows that you're...out of touch. Then again, perhaps the party from the 'hood hasn't heard of smartphones.

The second thing to note is that by lawyering up, the mainstream media has to report on the controversy. Cue Striesand Effect. As terse as the Straits Times would prefer to be, and they were indeed very tight-lipped, they still had to explain why exactly the PM found Yawning Bread's articles defamatory, and that just puts front and center the raison d'etre behind the whole AIM Saga: why was a town council system developed with public funds sold to a company controlled by a political party by the politicians then in charge of the town council?

The last time I remember the mainstream media having to twist a story into such unnatural contortions was during the floods of yesteryear, when they hastened to explain what the government was doing before describing how f***ed up bad the flooding situation was on one particular weekend. Remember putting the cart before the horse?

The third can of worms is that employing a defamatory charge as a first and last resort is inherently a self-liquidating power. Self-liquidating because each time you use it, it becomes far less convincing. The PAP has resorted to defamation charges countless times. So much so that it has become predictable and boring (which in my mind, is the bigger crime. I hate boring. That includes people and things.).

See above my point on defamation no longer carrying any stigma whatsoever for the defendants. It truly begs the question of whether PAP politicians are really being defamed each time they cry foul, or do they in fact have malfeasance to hide. I am reminded of City Harvest's strenuous protestations of innocence on the part of its high priests. Apparently, the party from the 'hood is not so different from a cult either.

A completely separate point about self-liquidating powers is that they're often so effective at first that their users quickly stop thinking of alternatives. Strategies and tactics work...until they don't. The PAP's key strategy of using the threat of defamation lawsuits to shut down criticism is looked about as dated as penicillin, and about as effective.

My fourth and last point is that more than any other incident from recent memory, the AIM saga erases any doubt in my mind of what I have conjectured before: that the PAP is more than willing to put party above country, and as a result, a smoking ruin is what will result prior to any transition of power.

You have been warned. Everyone needs a plan B.

An eventful few months

This is a personal post, meant to update the people who actually read my blog whom I may not have met in some time.

[Yes, as odd as it may seem to the people who read my blog for my insights into current affairs, this blog still does serve the purpose of a journal of my thoughts and experiences =)]

I ended a brief relationship a few months ago. It was my first real relationship. I learnt a little about myself, but more importantly, I learnt with certainty that I need not be in a relationship to be happy. It would be nice to have someone of course, but to be with someone with whom things are not working out should not be a goal to aspire to in itself.

M., if you are reading this, I do treasure the moments we spent together. It is rare for me to put into words in the public domain an intensely private experience, but here it is. I should not allow the moment to pass before the desire leaves me.

It means something to me that you touched my life in a positive way. If nothing else, being with you gave me a push to move forward in my life. When things ended between us, I told you that I did not learn much about myself that I did not know already, and that is true, but I did grow from our time together.

Perhaps it is true that we prepare our previous partners for better relationships ahead of them in the future. If so, I hope that I left you with something that will enrich the relationship with whomever you will be (or are) with.

___


I passed another one of the actuarial exams which I had taken in October 2012. Results were released less than two weeks ago. Another step to qualification as a Fellow in my plan to complete a career transition from research engineer to actuary.

The result was not unexpected; I generally know once I see the exam paper on test day itself whether a pass is in the offing or not.

___


I found a new job. Surprisingly enough, it was the job with the very selective requirements that I blogged about in a previous post.

Turns out one interview (albeit a very long one at two hours) was enough to cement their confidence in me.

After a number of career setbacks, it was a strangely affirming experience to have someone else validate my view of my own abilities. It also didn't hurt that the new job came with a large pay rise that exceeded what I used to draw as an engineer.

Then again, perhaps it was because my new bosses are American and new to Singapore. Unlike other hiring managers in the industry, they did not have the convenient fallback of hiring only from a pool of people of known quality that they already knew, as I blogged about previously.

___


I'm currently in progress on a personal project that may or may not help in my new job. Learning Python and the Django framework to allow me to build database driven websites.

This was related to a project proposal that I had submitted which unfortunately did not get funded. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the project will die.

In time to come, with the skills that I intend to acquire, I may embark on the project on my own anyway.

___


After a hiatus of a few years, I returned to the Pokhara valley in Nepal for two weeks of advanced paragliding lessons. Sarangkot beckoned.

I was originally signed up for an SIV course (Simulation d'Incidents de Vol -- french for Simulated Incidents in the Air).

For a good idea of SIV, see this video. It's not a course for the faint of heart; it involves simulating adverse incidents in the air and learning to recover from them under radio instruction. Basically, doing all the things you are NOT supposed to do while in the air. Ironically, this makes you a much a safer and more confident pilot, now that you know the limits of your glider.

For safety reasons, SIV is almost always done over a large water body, like a lake.

Well, I bailed on the two friends of mine who were also doing the SIV course. Instead, I found out about and switched to a concurrently running thermalling course which I thought would be better for my development as a pilot.

As it turned out, the thermalling course involved learning some SIV maneuvers as well. Looks like I would get plenty of opportunity to scare myself as well.

Only the SIV pilots got to do the really scary stuff: spins/SAT, full stall/backfly and reserve parachute deployment.

However, I had the same opportunities to do frontal collapses, asymmetric collapses, B-stall, dynamic turns and wingovers.

Bottom line: Amusement theme park rides now hold absolutely zero appeal. My adrenaline threshold just got raised again.

Wearing Abercrombie and Fitch in Singapore - How declasse

One of the things I've written about in the past is on how as mass immigration has enlarged our working and spending population in Singapore, international brands are increasingly finding it attractive to locate flagship stores here to capitalize on a lucrative market.

Hence, Singaporeans no longer need to venture out of the country for their togs from the likes of say,  Topshop, Gap, Banana Republic, H&M and Abercrombie and Fitch.

The irony is that now that the clothes are widely and easily available here, they've noticeably lost their edginess and exclusivity. It was one thing to wear Gap when it was not available here, it's quite another when it is now easily available and no longer exclusive.

[Sidenote: Up until several years ago, Gap in fact manufactured some of its clothes in Singapore. This was before it started distributing its clothes here.]

Worse, unbeknownst to many, some brands have become totally uncool in their home countries, like Abercrombie and Fitch for instance.

Disclaimer: I am not a fashionista. I hate shopping for clothes. In fact, I hate shopping period. So, don't take what I write as fashion criticism, cuz it's not. This post is a meditation on how ironic it is that the people who think that they're being fashionable wearing A&F are in fact the height of uncool.

Frankly, I'm amazed every time I see an otherwise well-groomed person on the street wear Abercrombie and Fitch (or Hollister). If I meet someone new for the first time, and they're wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, I automatically dial down my impression of that person.

Don't these people know what the brand stands for?

Abercrombie has carefully cultivated the youthful preppy WASPish look, and coupled it with its racy catalogs adorned with half-dressed models. I have nothing against the latter, except that it's boring and unremarkable in today's increasingly porned world (see The Porning of America in my reading list), but the former is certainly something I reject completely.

This is a company that has been subject to lawsuits for racial and sexual discrimination. A simple Google search would throw up the results for anyone curious enough to find out more.

Just a few months ago, controversy struck in South Korea over the bad behavior of its models at a store opening.

For most Singaporeans who are ethnic Asians, to aspire to wear the vaguely white supremacist label of A&F is, in a word, bizarre. And if you're a straight male, a little weird too, seeing as how the advertising for the brand is famously homoerotic.

But all this is probably intellectual claptrap for the trendy wannabe fashionista in Singapore still wearing A&F.

Problem is...the brand itself is rapidly losing cachet among its target demographic in the United States, as well as among youth fashion tastemakers. It's "passe", according to a group of high school students in the US, who were unanimous in their dismissal. That's the true fashion death sentence.

The sex-soaked marketing campaigns are looking dated, and it's not just me saying that. One article here and one article here for reference. The money quote from the second article, from Bloomberg Businessweek:

“Abercrombie is still running an offense which is a huge banner of a bare-chested guy with a cute girl who’s not wearing enough clothing,” says David Maddocks, a former chief marketing officer for Nike’s Converse label who now runs a brand consulting firm. “It’s vacuous, there’s no core idea there anymore.”

A&F is an object lesson in how NOT to market to Millenials. They're dropping the ball on reaching out to this key demographic. And the final flourish at the end of the article:

So far, Abercrombie’s woes at home haven’t hurt its popularity in untapped markets. Its Hong Kong flagship, which opened in August, logged more than $1 million in sales in its first five days. Abercrombie is considering more locations in China and the Middle East. Still, in a hyperconnected world, it won’t take long for the brand’s fading cool to catch up with shoppers in Dubai and Shanghai, says Lindstrom.

"Vacuous" is an accurate description of the brand's adherents. The really cool fashionable people in Singapore wouldn't be caught dead in A&F, and that it takes an unfashionable person like me to point that out to the wannabes, well, that's just the patina on their rapidly fading cool.

PS: No moose (meese?) were harmed in writing this post.

"It is only when you fall that you learn whether you can fly."

Earthbound, but practice makes perfect.

Ground handling at Woodlands Drive 17. Light winds, overcast.

Credit to J. for the pic.

SMRT Strike - Breaking the sacred chain of command

Yawningbread had a post on the recent SMRT bus strike. In his post, he commented on the ineffectiveness of official channels for dispute resolution. Here’s the pertinent section:

The government has also said, repeatedly, that workers should have “discussed” their issues with management. Knowing Chinese workers, I am sure they have, many times and loudly. It’s in their nature. The problem is that the system is stacked against them. It’s a very Singaporean system: where lower-rank people don’t have rights to justice, but can only plead for better treatment. It’s a microcosm of the political system this government has created. Citizens have no substantive rights; they can only plead for their wishes to be taken into account. There’s a term for this: The petitionary state.

My first reaction to this was: but the Chinese workers came from *the* original petition state (see here for instance), so surely they should comprehend the Singapore system perfectly. 

But I digress. Snarky humor aside, I have another insight to share. But first, let me tell you a story.

I used to work in a division of a quasi-government company headed by a former SAF general. He had a pet peeve, and here when I use the word “peeve”, I really mean (from the perspective of the general) reprehensible, egregiously bad behavior that deserves to be excoriated in the strongest possible terms.

You get the idea.

This pet peeve was what the general called “breaking the chain of command”.

He would expound on the importance of the chain of command every time a complaint surfaced from the staff at the ground level, bypassing him to reach the ears of human resource, other senior management, or the CEO himself.

In simple terms, he hated it every time a problem in his division cropped up without coming up through the official channels, namely through him. He probably thought it made him look bad, which to be fair, is a pretty logical deduction to make.

His take was that even if a problem required the CEO’s intervention, the request should be escalated through him rather than brought up directly by the individual.

It never occurred to him that part of the problem was with him, that some staff were either not comfortable coming to him with their grievances or that they felt their concerns would not be properly addressed.

The uncharitable would add that most people avoided coming to him because they expected (correctly, as was unfortunately often the case) that his initial reaction would be to stonewall them.

In my experience, the expectation of the general that all staff adhere to the chain of command was really not that unique of a trait among SAF personnel, both former and current. I clearly remember the commanding officer of my NSF battalion espousing a similar sentiment.

The point of the foregoing story is this:

Our government is stuffed to the gills with people who think this way, from former fulltime professional soldier officers like the recently anointed Chan Chung Sing and Tan Chuan Jin, to our Prime Minister who formerly held the illustrious rank of Brigadier General.

It should hardly come as a surprise that the government likes to stress the importance of working through official channels when it comes to resolving disputes.

There are lots of issues worth exploring here.

One issue is whether recourse can truly be found through official channels in Singapore. Whether you think so or not depends on how cynical you are, and whether you have had firsthand experience navigating the system.

Yawning Bread has brought another issue into his post: namely the lamentable state of our petitionary state. That sounds quite anodyne really. I prefer to call it the PAP’s dictum to Singaporeans to “Be silent and be governed.” Citizens’ opinions don’t matter until seats in Parliament are suddenly up for grabs. The recent national conversation is really just a grand exercise in perception management.

My preferred issue to focus on is what this strong aversion to anything that doesn't originate from official channels tells us about the decision-making processes in the higher echelons of the Singapore government.

That the government constantly stresses that labor relations (and other matters by extension) can only be negotiated only within the ambit of official channels indicates that the government:

1. Cannot handle uncertainty. Our officials are world champions at planning, but are frequently caught flatfooted whenever a situation develops that they failed to anticipate. That’s not to say that other governments do better all the time in unscripted situations, but a tendency to over-plan typically means less of an ability to adapt to a changing situation. The fact that even elections are carefully choreographed affairs is not complimentary of our cabinet ministers. For supposed consummate actors in the rough and tumble world of politics, our ministers are in a word, coddled.
2. Cannot handle negative media attention. This has to do with point (1) above. Our officials are bad at adapting to dynamic situations. When was the last time we had a minister answer unscripted questions posed to them by an independent journalist or interviewer who had not been warned implicitly or explicitly to go easy on the minister?
3. Has an attitude that no news is good news.
4. And that what isn’t surfaced through official channels doesn’t exist and is hence officially NOT A PROBLEM. In other words, the PAP likes to operate within its own personal reality distortion field. Too bad they don’t have the charisma of Steve Jobs as well cuz they sure as hell need it.

Point number 4 above is the most important point. But the other points are related in that the PAP has been so effective at building a safe, controlled political environment for itself that it has started believing in its own propaganda and hence frames its governing decisions accordingly. That's a dangerous place to be, drinking your own Kool-aid.

The upshot of seeing things surfaced only through official channels means tunnel vision, and all the associated bad decision-making that goes with it. And we haven't even brought in the stonewalling that all too often blocks what you can see of the information that floats up through official channels.

Case in point is the recent SMRT strike where unhappiness had in fact been simmering on the ground for months.

The remarkable thing is that considering Singapore is so small, so tightly controlled and with such a precisely defined and controlled government machinery (including the media), that the government still cannot get reliable information and act on it is a severe indictment of its ability to sense-make and come to effective and appropriate decisions.

Who knows what other problems are out there just waiting to explode? All thanks to the reality distortion field associated with the chain of command.

But again, I come to the stupid or evil hypothesis for the PAP, which I can never decide between. Are they really that dense, or are they just plain evil and actually prefer the status quo, which while detrimental to the resilience of our society, benefits themselves and the entrenched power elite.

See Jon Stewart for a more elaborate explanation of the stupid-evil dichotomy.

I am personally more inclined toward the evil hypothesis, but I am also reminded of Hanlon's Razor.