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Abstracts of essays; news; announcements; short takes.
About Me
- Yawning Bread Sampler
- This blog carries summary abstracts of Yawning Bread essays, with space for comments.
Here too are other tidbits that are too short for the main Yawning Bread site.
To email me, go to the main site.
Blog Archive
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2007
(161)
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February
(9)
- 6.5 million will make a different Singapore
- Breeding intolerance
- Research controversy risks Singapore's credibility
- Mismeasuring the press
- Workers' Party shies away from the gay issue
- Love Airways flies nowhere, Shortbus may not arrive
- Perspectival shift and capital punishment
- Après nous, les militaires
- The republic of endless malls
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February
(9)
Posts
6 comments:
I do believe that Shortbus will be banned in Singapore. When I saw it last year (I'm working in Australia) with a couple of my friends, we concluded that the gahmen would consider it porn and it will not be allowed to be shown.
But surprise, surprise, it seems that a lot of enterprising Singaporeans have already seen it, even though they have not been out of the country.
alex you need to figure out your own stand on sexy sounding publications in singapore
first, you say the motivation to allow more of them might be to promote birth, then the two are not necessarily related, finally the publications are so tame they wont even promote sex; fine; so was it a good idea to allow them or not?
I assume you feel the censorship relaxation was phony and want to see some "real relaxation"; fine, but if it does happen, would the motivation still be to increase births? if so, is that a good idea or not? whether for the intended purpose, or for some other benefit
To anonymous 10:03
One of the problems with having a huge site (and over 700 articles) like Yawning Bread is that my stand on censorship has been articulated many times in previous articles. Thus, to avoid boring my regular readers, I do not repeat myself each time I discuss censorship.
This may then become a problem if readers stumble onto this site without the opportunity to know enough of the preceding. It's difficult to serve both constituencies.
Re the "promote birth-rate" theory, in the essay, I described it as a "widely-held theory", which does not automatically mean I subscribe to it. After the comma, I made it clear I didn't.
alex, I wasnt asking about censorship and births, but about those publications specifically, especially if some "real" relaxation occurs
I know you are for relaxation, but you have seen that the result might be neither here nor there; to ask for "real" relaxation you need to specify what "real" is, if so far what you have seen is "unreal"
To anonymous 8 Feb 10:03, who's probably the same as anonymous 9 Feb 08:41 (may I suggest you use a consistent nick?) -
"Real" relaxation must mean, in plain English, something that is substantial and not token. Love Airways is in my view, deridible as token.
My position on censorship is that there ought to be none, short of posing clear and present danger to others, as judged by an independent judiciary, not by bureaucrats. I'm quite agreeable to classification, zoning and even the licensing of outlets (e.g. certain magazines can only be sold at licensed outlets) - these issues of course should be reasonably administered.
Just because Dr Yu and the magazine have been featured in the ST and ZB and on Mediacorp doesn't mean that Love Airways has been endorsed by the govt in any way. The mainstream media does have latitude to report on what it deems is "newsworthy", and this guy just happened to be the news story du jour.
You rightly point out that the magazine's very tame. I'd like to add that it's terribly designed. This is really a matter of costs and taste though.
About Shortbus: I've seen it and I hope it'll come here too. If it does come over I suspect it'd be through Overseas and not any of the major distributors.
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