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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
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August
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- The Good News Times strikes again
- Religious affiliation of MPs
- Teacher's termination still unaccounted for
- CPF and its creaky assumptions
- Cinema: Jesus camp
- Singapore second last in Asia democracy index
- Race, religion and Negarakuku
- 2 by 6
- Police declare joggers an "illegal assembly"
- Time travel via our roads
- Spirits from our past
- Pity the heliconias
- Death by numbers, part 2
- Death by numbers
- Picking on a picnic
- Public transport model needs a rethink
- Bark and crumble
- Letter to the people of Singapore
- My kissing project, part 4
- Lee Low Tar
- Where to draw the line on marriage?
- My kissing project, part 3
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August
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Posts
6 comments:
"2.5 External interference is a significant problem in our political process."
Yes this question is worded the other way from the rest of the questions. However reverse scoring may have been applied to it, meaning Strongly Diagree now is 4 points and Strongly Agree is 0 point and so on.
this is preaching to the converted; most singaporeans wont understand the survey nor make the effort to understand it, while the government would find methodological loopholes easily (assuming it bothers to make the effort at all)
I guess opposition here have a strange idea of "opposition"; if they want the people to take notice, they need to come up with alternative policy ideas, before the government finds it necessary to adopt them, e.g., casinos, 4th university, etc
sgsociety.com
Emigrate mate!
For an example of the kind of "beef" politicians ought to spend their effort on: the government wants to make annuities compulsory in the future; in fact
I am somewhat intrigued by the government's steadfast refusal to introduce a simple old age pension scheme, for citizens aged 85 onward; the annual cost would be well within the ability of the budget to absorb; by making CPF contributors pay for the cost, you are bound to generate arguments about those not surviving beyond 85 losing out, those dying soon afterwards not getting back enough, etc
sgsociety.com
A doctor commenting on a terminally ill cancer patient would most likely say that the condtion of the patient was "stable." Of course this does not mean "healthy" or "normal" but it does mean that within the context of the condition, the patient is doing well.
The Asia Democracy Index was designed so that the patient could diagnose her own condition. ADI 2005 is the first survey of its kind that was carried out by local NGO's and not outside experts. Its purpose was to evaluate the democratic space of politically active and aware people.
The questions asked were phrased in a very personal and direct way.
At the onset, one most not assume that ADI was meant to be comparative, after all, the range of governments stretching from Palistan to Japan to Indonesia is immense.
The results do show that there are common threads throughout the region and that the threats ands challenges to democracts are real.
Methodology and scoring are full of loopholes. If ADI had changed the scoring of the "I do not know" answers then the ranking would have been drastically altered. Also, if polling could have been done in a free and open climate then there could have been a larger statistical base.
As the Director of the ADI Project,
I stroingly feel the project demonstrated that democracy as concept, ideology, metaphor, and practice needs to be refined and defined.
Certainly the Government of Singapore should undertake its own survey about how the citizens perceive transperancy, accountability, and governance. sadly, if this were done, the government would suppress the results.
ADI Director
>one most not assume that ADI was meant to be comparative
in that case, rank has no meaning
obviously, SG government prefers to be measured in other ways, like "SIA is the best airline" "NUS is among world's top 20"; these are meant to be comparative...
sgsociety.com
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