Hamelin: Études

Hamelin: Études

Marc-André Hamelin

Hyperion CDA67789

Referring to one of his own compositions on this disc, Marc-André Hamelin writes:

Although Toccata grottesca fortunately ended up having a personality of its own, it is actually modeled closely after a preexisting piece by another composer. This was a pure experiment on my part, and I am quite surprised at how I was able to adhere to the model without making the derivation obvious (at least I don’t think it’s obvious!), considering how similar the texture and form ended up being. Understandably, I don’t wish to reveal the identity of the original, and I am interested to know how skilful I was in masking the source of my inspiration. (Who is it that once said ‘originality is the art of concealing one’s source’?) It is not a terribly well-known work, although someone with a sufficiently broad knowledge of the piano literature might recognize it.

I'm not going to guess what this "preexisting piece by another composer" is, but the Twinkle, twinkle little star theme is unmistakeable in this work of Hamelin's (though I'm pretty sure he wasn't intending for us to actually guess this, since it is obvious). I also hear a few bars that sound like something out of the finale of Hindemith's Suite "1922".

That gives you a pretty good impression of this new recording of Hamelin's own compositions: it is a haze in which little snippets and fingerprints of various other composers mesh and dissolve, forming something of a scrapbook of pianophiliac memories. As a listener, you're always thinking, "Hey, haven't I heard that somewhere before?" Among the influences Hamelin credits explicitly are Alkan, Bach, Beethoven, Busoni, Chopin, Godowsky, Liszt, Paganini, Pergolesi, Rossini, Domenico Scarlatti, Tchaikovsky and a French folksong.

Even in the compositions for which Hamelin doesn't credit influences, suggesting that they are entirely original, one does hear influences both in terms of style and actual musical material. In the Music Box from the Con intimissimo sentimento set, for example, I hear the style of a Prokofiev Vision fugitive or a Shostakovich Prelude from the Op. 34 set. And in the Minuetto (the 11th Étude), I hear bits of the theme from the Chopin segment of Schumann's Carnaval. It's hard to tell how much of this is a figment of my imagination and how much isn't. But it is a pleasant and somewhat nostalgic feeling to be in this "Is it really there or is it not?" sort of semi-conscious state.

At some point, the question that doggedly gnaws at those who clamour for new music inevitably rears its head: given that Western classical music is based only on 12 notes, will we ever run out of new music to write? Will we then forever be condemned to hear the same motifs, over and over again? Indeed, Hamelin's own programme notes allude to such a nightmare. Writing about his 12th Étude, the Prelude and Fugue, he says:

I experienced a rather uneasy moment when, some time after completing the piece, I came across Sergei Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor, Op 29. I was alarmed to see that there were some startling similarities between the two fugues: same metre, same key (enharmonically), same pianistic terrains, and a very similar fugue subject. Please be assured that if this were other than mere coincidence, I would be honest enough to admit it!

Thankfully, there is enough new material (or what sounds like it) on this disc to convince one that the nightmare is just that. And that even if we ever run out of new music to write, rewriting it, à la Hamelin, will always give us new and stimulating things to listen to.

Shopping for Chopin

It's been a long time since I've been to a live classical music performance. Back when I was in school and could get concession tickets, I watched a shitload of stuff because at $5 to $15 a concert, I could afford to. Nowadays, I can rarely get tickets for anything less than $25. CD's cost about $25. There is the occasional live performance that's darned good, but more often than not you're better off listening to a CD. What's more, for the same price (or less), you can hear it over and over again. And with the ultra-conservative programming that passes for classical music concerts these days, you'll probably hear more stuff by collecting CDs as opposed to watching concerts.

But today, I went to watch a live classical music performance. Or should I say, a performance that included live classical music. Shopping for Chopin was done in a black-box space, with a pianist playing live Chopin, video projections and pre-recorded music and voice. Each of these elements interacted with each other to create this performance.

There was a plot to it all: a love story, about a boy and a girl who meet at a Gramophone store and who share an interest in Chopin's music. The details of this plot you had to absorb by reading the texts projected on the screens, and by listening to the pre-recorded voice. I was too lazy to really do either. So I was just in this "this is a love story" haze.

Some have labelled this "basically a piano recital", but from the pianophile's perspective, it is not. It's not easy to describe what it was, but I'll try anyway. John Cheng (from NAFA) began ordinarily enough, with a sweet rendition of the Andante spianato (without the accompanying Polonaise). After this he rested, while an orchestrated version of the Op. 28 No. 7 Prelude was piped in to accompany a video projection. Then we were taken back to the Andante, and then to the orchestrated Prelude again.

Some voiceover, and then we heard the opening section of the second Ballade, the F major bits. But the pianist stopped there. It wasn't until we'd finished hearing more voiceover that he continued into the violent A minor section, played a bit further past that section, and then stopped there. The fiery coda we did not hear.

More voiceover, before some video accompanied by bits of the second Concerto's slow movement, from a recording. Then we heard the pianist perform the first half of the Op. 53 Polonaise, stopping just before the chords that herald the descending octaves. We never heard the rest of the Polonaise.

Next we had the pianist playing the Op. 28 No. 4 Prelude, while a recording of another completely different piano piece was playing in the background (I couldn't tell what it was).

Some more voiceover, and then the Op. 27 No. 2 Nocturne. But we heard only the left-hand accompaniment, without the melody. It was not until some time later that the melody was introduced.

If you weren't familiar with Chopin's music, you may not have noticed a lot of this: that the Chopin is not Chopin per se, but Chopin edited and modified and spliced. This is a problem, I think, because this performance was billed as a theatre-ish sort of thing. It attracted theatre-goers, who may not necessarily have been familiar enough with the music to catch these details. It may have looked like 'just another piano recital', when it really was far from orthodox for a piano recital.

Theatre-goers may also seldom walk into Gramophone stores. The significance of part of the set may therefore have been lost on some, for there was a glass human head with headphones on it. If you shop at Gramophone, you'd have recognised it.

Technically, too, there were a number of problems with the performance. Firstly, if you're someone who listens attentively, you may have found the juxtaposition of the live music and the recorded music a little jarring, because the sound quality of the recordings was not up there, and did not match the clarity of the live music. This was partly because some of the recordings being used were pretty old. But there was at least one Lang Lang recording (the second Concerto), which was probably pretty new but still sounded botched through the speakers.

Also, the piano wasn't perfectly tuned. They'd probably tuned it once before the first performance, and then left it to languish for the next few days while the air-conditioning came on and off. You might get away with this if your performance is in a large concert hall and the pianist is on stage and everyone else is not, but in a small space where the listener is within 10 metres of the piano, the flaw is noticeable.

The pianist wasn't perfect either. He took the F major section of the Ballade too fast for my taste, while the A minor section, comparatively, was too slow. He was clearly having technical difficulties with the Polonaise, even though he didn't have to do the octaves. I've always loved the Op. 28 No. 4 Prelude, which is so tragic in its simplicity. But because of the other piano recording playing simultaneously, we couldn't really appreciate this piece properly. He was best in the concluding Nocturne, I think, where his tone was nicely rounded and he was able to make the melodies sing. His runs here were pretty clear too.

Overall, I liked the concept. It's something that would have been worth paying $25 for. For one thing, it was interesting, which is more than can be said for most of the classical music calendar nowadays. I hope there will be more.

Shopping for Chopin is presented by Play Den Productions and runs till 31 August 2010. For details, click here.

Responding to the Minister's comments on the mandatory death penalty

The Court of Appeal's decision in the Yong Vui Kong case still isn't out yet, but the Law Minister has made some comments defending the mandatory death penalty.

Here's one of the things he said:

People assume you can have this safety and security without this framework of the law; that you can change it, and yet your safety and security will not be affected... But there are always trade-offs. The difficulty the Government has sometimes in explaining this is that the trade-offs are not apparent. The damage to a large number of others is not obvious... You save one life here, but 10 other lives will be gone. What will your choice be?

There are two arguments buried here:

1. Having the mandatory death penalty improves safety and security. 
2. The mandatory death penalty is justified because drug trafficking causes "damage".

Let's try and flesh out the first argument. How does having the mandatory death penalty improve safety and security? The argument probably flows like this: the mandatory death penalty deters people from trafficking in drugs, so drug-related crime is reduced.

What about the second argument? Fleshed out, it probably flows similarly: drug trafficking causes increased drug addiction and associated social fall-out (the "damage"); a mandatory death penalty would deter drug trafficking and thereby reduce drug addiction and social fall-out.

What do these two arguments have in common? They are both premised on one proposition: that having a mandatory death penalty deters drug trafficking. But does it really? This is a proposition that can be empirically tested (statisticians and criminologists will tell you how). But this kind of testing has not been done in Singapore. The Government, which has the capability to carry out such testing, has not done so. Instead, it continually asserts that the mandatory death penalty has deterrent effect, without ever citing any empirical evidence. Merely asserting something over and over again does not make it true.

You might say it is common sense that a mandatory death penalty will deter drug trafficking. But research in this area has shown that we should not be so quick to trust what some people claim is common sense. While no study has been done on the death penalty for drug trafficking in Singapore, at least one study has been done on the death penalty for murder. The study suggests that in Singapore, the mandatory death penalty does not have a deterrent effect on murder. In other parts of the world, too, scholars are agreed that the death penalty has no deterrent effect on murder. One cannot extrapolate from these studies about murder and conclude that the mandatory death penalty has no deterrent effect on drug trafficking, but these studies do give us reason to doubt that conclusion. Add to this the fact that mandatory sentencing itself, regardless of the type of punishment involved, has been shown to have no deterrent effect. Are we so sure of 'common sense' now?

The first two arguments, therefore, stand on shaky ground. I wouldn't take someone's life if I knew I stood on shaky ground. I don't think I am unique in this respect, either.

The Minister also said:

If we say, we'll let you go, what is the signal we're sending? We're sending a signal to all the drug barons out there, just make sure you choose a victim who's young, or who's preferably a mother of a young child and use them as the people to carry the drugs into Singapore. And then there can be a lot of sympathy generated if they do get caught. This poor lady, she's a mother of three young children, she only did it because she had to save her children. Or this young boy, he didn't know what he was doing. Then you will get 10 more. You will get a whole unstoppable stream of such people coming through.

First, we need to get past the rhetoric. Doing away with the mandatory nature of the death penalty does not mean 'letting people go'. They will not get off scot-free just because the death penalty is not mandatory. What will happen is that judges will decide how these criminals should be punished. If the judges think that these criminals were particularly blameworthy, they may be sentenced to death. If the judges think that they weren't that blameworthy, they may be given long terms of imprisonment. Neither of these amounts to 'letting people go'. Don't fall for the rhetoric.

Next, consider how drug barons would choose their mules. If I were a drug baron, I'd choose as mules those people who're less likely to get caught, so that I can use them more often, before they eventually get caught. For this purpose, it would not matter to me whether the person I choose is likely to get hanged or not. After all, once the mule gets caught, she's either going to be hanged, or jailed for a long, long time. Either way, I won't be able to use her as a mule anymore, at least not for the next 15-20 years or so. So what matters to me is her ability to avoid detection, and not whether she is young or has children. The Minister's fear—that abolishing the mandatory death penalty will lead to drug barons choosing more young people and mothers to be drug mules—is therefore likely to be unfounded.

Finally, notice the implicit admission in the Minister's comments: the people we hang are always the mules. We never get the barons. If you really wanted to reduce drug trafficking and its social ills, you'd go for the barons, not the mules. Even if the mandatory death penalty had deterrent effects, these are going to be merely minimal if the penalty is only awarded to mules. Perhaps what is truly crucial in the fight against drugs is not the mandatory death penalty, but better investigative capabilities, which allow us to capture the barons instead. Perhaps, the mandatory death penalty, which has no demonstrated deterrent effect and is always applied to mules only, just isn't such an indispensable part of the anti-drug strategy after all, and we should stop pretending that abolishing it is going to plunge Singapore into utter chaos.

Related posts:

• Shanmugam's Slippery Slope (Benjamin Cheah)
• Fuzzy Logic on the death penalty (Groundnotes)
• Capital punishment in Singapore for drug-related offences (SpotlightOnSingapore)
• Judgement on Yong Vui Kong’s appeal this Friday (The Online Citizen)
• Death Penalty – Are we trading off justice for real deterrence? (Mathia Lee)
• Against The “Trade-Off” (Ambiguity) 
• Shanmugam's misleading defense of the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking (Trapper's Swamp) 
• Singapore official and media claim liberal cities are hotspots for drugs and crimes (Political Duo-ble) 
• Drug lords may gain from death penalty (Tan Chin Aik)
• The slippery slope, the greasy pole (Andrew Loh)
• The death penalty myopia (Kirsten Han)

Tweet this!

New Acquisitions!

Baltic Exchange

Uģis Prauliņš, Maija Einfelde, Urmas Sisask & Vytautas Miškinis

Trinity College Choir Cambridge, Stephen Layton

Hyperion CDA67747

Got this for $23 at HMV. It's weird how the price of Hyperion releases has changed over the years. When I first started collecting, they were about $25. At one point, they became $28, then $30. Now, $23. Exchange rate fluctuations? Anyway, bought this one mainly because I love Urmas Sisask, who wrote a most beautiful Gloria Patri (check out the excerpts in Baltic Voices 2, and other excerpts from a now out-of-print complete recording on Finlandia). But, like his Starry Sky Cycle, the Sisask piece on this disc, Benedictio, is nothing to shout about. What really stands out on this disc is the stuff from Vytautas Miškinis, especially the opening of the Pater noster. The choir is up to par, aside from sounding a little too English at times.

Le Sacre du printemps / L'Oiseau de feu

Igor Stravinsky

Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez

Deutsche Grammophon

Okay, I don't have the same edition pictured here. I couldn't find a picture online of the exact one I bought, but it looks like something that was issued by DG in conjunction with Le Monde. The recordings are probably the same ones though, and they are legendary, as is the sound quality. Wasn't planning to buy this at first, but at $14.95, I couldn't pass. Didn't realise, though, that the booklet would be entirely in French! Haha oh well. At least it's not in German.

Do you support the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking?

How does the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking work?

Under Singapore law, if it's been proven that you've been trafficking in a controlled drug, and the amount of drugs involved crosses a certain threshold, you will be sentenced to death. The threshold varies according to the drug, and these thresholds are all set out in the Second Schedule to the Misuse of Drugs Act. The threshold for diamorphine, for example, is 15 grammes. If you've been trafficking in more than 15 grammes of diamorphine, you will be sentenced to death.

The word “mandatory” means that the judge has no discretion to award you a lesser sentence. Even if your case has extenuating circumstances and the judge rightly takes pity on you, the judge has no choice but to sentence you to death. This is unlike most other criminal law provisions, which allow the judge to award more calibrated sentences, taking into account the moral culpability of the offender, his age, social background, whether he has prior convictions, etc.

Do you support the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking?

Here are some things you should consider in making your decision:

1. Crimes are all serious. Does the punishment fit the crime?

You may think that drugs are a serious social evil, and that drug trafficking should therefore be punished severely. But this does not mean we we must necessarily use the most severe punishment available. We can, for example, imprison drug traffickers for life instead. If we really want to impose the death penalty, we must ask if drug trafficking really such a heinous crime. Is it as serious as murder? Does the punishment fit the crime? Or, is our response blown out of all proportion?

2. Does the death penalty “work”?

You may think that imposing the most severe penalty we have will deter people from trafficking in drugs. But there is no evidence that imposing the death penalty actually deters people from trafficking in drugs. Following the introduction of the death penalty for drugs in 1975, drug offences did indeed decrease in frequency. But around the time there was also an increase in the amount of resources put into catching drug offenders. So, which strategy worked — the death penalty, or better policing? We can't be sure. In the 1990's and 2000's, while the death penalty was firmly in place, figures for drug offences have just see-sawed up and down, revealing no discernible trend. Bottom-line: we really don't know if the death penalty works in deterring people from committing drug offences in Singapore.

While we don't have proper statistics for drug trafficking in Singapore, we do have statistics for murder. The available evidence shows us that the death penalty probably does not have any significant effect on reducing rates of murder in Singapore. Studies done in other parts of the world also say the same thing. If the death penalty doesn't work to deter murder, is it likely that it would deter drug trafficking? Are we justified in hanging people when we're so unsure of all these things?

3. Is the trial process fair? Are the people we hang really guilty?

Consider also the presumptions in the Misuse of Drugs Act that affect the trial process. Earlier I wrote about the prosecutor “proving” you were trafficking, but this is often unnecessary. Trafficking can often be proved indirectly, by means of a series of presumptions.

For example, if you hold the keys to a cupboard containing drugs, you are presumed to have been in possession of the drugs, even if, let's say, somebody put them there without you knowing (section 18(1)). The onus is now on you to prove your own innocence.

You are also presumed to have known that the drugs were indeed drugs (section 18(2)). Say for example that you hold the keys to a cupboard with some white powder inside. You are presumed to have known that the white powder was diamorphine, and the onus is on you to prove that you didn't really know.

If the drugs you were in possession of cross the threshold amount, you will be presumed to have been trafficking (section 17). For example, if you hold the keys to a cupboard containing 15 grammes of diamorphine, you will be presumed to have been trafficking in the drug. The onus is now on you to prove your own innocence.

This is just a sampling of the problems in the trial process. There are others, which are not specific to the Misuse of Drugs Act. For example, in all criminal cases, the police can rough you up and make you write a statement confessing to something you might not have done, and that statement can be admitted in court as evidence. The onus will then be on you to prove that you made the statement under police pressure, and that you didn't really do what you had confessed to doing.

With all these problems, the trial process shifts further away from the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ end of the spectrum and closer toward the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ end of the spectrum, so that at the end of the day, we can't say with much confidence that the person we hanged was really guilty of drug trafficking. We might just have hung some people for no rhyme or reason. In this sense, the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking could be little more than a scheme for arbitrarily murdering some random people every once in a while.

4. Can't we be merciful when it is called for?

Many of the drug traffickers sentenced to death have so little money that they can't afford to pay for lawyers to defend them (the lawyers usually do it for free). This means that the drug traffickers we're hanging aren't making big bucks from their trafficking, and were probably forced into doing it for other reasons, just like how prostitutes are often forced into prostitution. We can't really say that the people we hang are monsters. In fact, it looks like we hang the small fry, while the big fish who really make money from the drug trade get off scot-free. This being the case, shouldn't judges have the discretion to be a little bit more merciful in deserving cases?

Also, don't people deserve a second chance? Instead of hanging people, wouldn't it be better if we locked them up for 20 years, following which they could come out and, having realised the error of their ways, become contributing members of society?

What can you do about it?

Ultimately, we as citizens bear responsibility for the people we hang. When they are hanged, it is in your name and mine. My purpose here is not to convince you that the mandatory death penalty is or is not a good idea. All I want you to do is think about whether your stand on the matter is a defensible one. If you support the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, and you can sleep peacefully at night, good for you. If you can't, maybe it's time you spoke out against the injustice being perpetrated in your name. You could join a Facebook group, sign a petition, tell your MP how you feel or just discuss the issue with your friends and family. Whatever you need to do, to clear your conscience.

For more information on the death penalty in Singapore, click here.

Tweet this!

Better statistics for the 377A debate?

During the public debate on 377A some years ago, there were no proper statistics on what public opinion on the issue actually looked like. Many participants, for example, cited the study done by Benjamin H. Detenber, which found that Singaporeans generally have negative attitudes towards gay people (see "Singaporeans’ Attitudes toward Lesbians and Gay Men and their Tolerance of Media Portrayals of Homosexuality"). But the fact that someone has a negative attitude towards a particular practice does not always indicate that he/she also wishes that practice to be made the subject of a criminal offence. The Detenber study did not set out to gauge public opinion on the latter question, and those who cited it in support of their (usually anti-repeal) stance were really taking no more than a stab in the dark on that question.

Recently, however, Tan Seow Hon has published the results of a survey which could provide a more reliable indicator of public opinion on the issue (see "Law School and the Making of the Student into a Lawyer: Transformation of First Year Law Students in the National University of Singapore"). She asked about 200 first-year students who were reading law at NUS whether "sexual acts... between consenting adults of the same gender should continue to be a criminal offence". 20.1% said yes, and in a follow-up survey done a year later, on the same group of students, the figure went down to 15.8%.

The data is not entirely without problems. First, the question was prefaced by quoting section 377 of the Penal Code, and her actual question was "Do you think sexual acts of this nature between consenting adults of the same gender should continue to be a criminal offence" [emphasis mine]. The phrase "of this nature" could have had some bearing on the participants' interpretation of the question and on their answers, since the phrase refers to the conduct proscribed by 377, which at that time included intercourse with animals and used the words "against the order of nature".

A second potential problem is that university students, and those reading law in particular, are often said to be much more liberal in their political views as compared to the general public. Whether there is actual empirical evidence for this, I do not know. If it is true that university/law students are more liberal, my hunch is that it is not the case that people with more liberal views are more likely to apply to or get into university/law school. Rather, the connection is probably that university/legal education makes one more liberal. If the latter is true, its effect can only account for the 4.3% drop in anti-repeal responses between the first and second surveys. It cannot account for the initial low figure of 20.1%, which was obtained within the first week of the first year of law school, when almost zero university/legal education had taken place.

In any case, Tan's statistics are probably the most relevant and reliable ones that we have on the issue, at the moment. And, they are telling, aren't they?

Tweet this!

Statements on the Mandatory Death Penalty

The serious opposition parties have both released pretty good statements on the mandatory death penalty:

• SDP repeats call to abolish mandatory death penalty


• The Reform Party Calls For Abolition of Death Penalty for Drug Trafficking

If you haven't been following the Yong Vui Kong case, read about it here.

Scholar Bias in Public Service

PSC Chairman Eddie Teo said [PDF]:

They will get a good university education in NUS, NTU and SMU and their degrees will not hold them back if they perform well in their career, in or outside the Public Service. In all my years in Public Service, I have never witnessed anyone being promoted or not promoted on account of his university background.

Strictly speaking, this might be true: which university you went to does not have a direct impact on your career advancement in the civil service. But the concern that many people have is that it has an indirect impact: if you went to NUS, NTU or SMU, this means you weren't an overseas PSC scholar, and your career advancement will automatically be slower than the scholars' career advancement.

When I was interning at the AG's Chambers in 2008, I made it a point to ask the people there if this policy indeed existed. I didn't get any straight answers at all. Everyone I asked either gave ambiguous replies or just dodged the question entirely.

People say things are changing, etc. But nobody seems to know for sure. For many of the top minds at local universities, this uncertainty is great enough to make joining public service an unwise option, at least in the early stages of their careers.

Bridging the Gaps: Approaches to Hate Speech in the US, Canada and Singapore

Abstract: When it comes to hate speech prohibitions, the US and Canada are often seen as being on opposite sides of a great divide. This paper attempts to cast that dichotomy as a blurred one, by showing that the discourse on hate speech regulation in both jurisdictions is guided by the same two principles of human dignity: (1) all lives have equal inherent value, and (2) each individual must be allowed to pursue his own conception of a successful life. This paper also blurs the US-Canada dichotomy by showing that while both jurisdictions have seemingly different legal rules, their actual operation is likely to yield similar results in similar cases. Lastly, the paper turns to Singapore. It argues that the discourse on hate speech prohibition in Singapore is driven primarily by public order considerations that are overblown, and that this has negative effects. An attempt is made to locate the two principles of human dignity in Singapore’s constitutional documents, and it is argued that these principles should form the basis of a new approach to hate speech prohibition in Singapore.

Click to read paper [PDF].

Killing the dream alive

The controversy surrounding Ris Low, which has culminated in her resignation from the Miss World pageant, centers around two issues: her prior criminal conviction and her poor English. I am not so sure that these two grounds provide sufficient reason for arguing that she should not be allowed to represent Singapore.

Why is her prior criminal conviction even an issue? Is an ex-criminal who has realised the error of her ways always necessarily a bad role model? If her conduct has already been condemned by the courts and she has already been meted out punishment, do we really need to condemn and punish her for the very same act, all over again, outside the courtroom?

Why do we also object to her poor English? It cannot be that we think her standard of English is unrepresentative of Singaporeans: I find instead that the median standard of English in Singapore is roughly that of Ms Low's. If all we want to do is fool the international community that Singaporean English standards are higher than that, then we are just being hypocrites.

Are our criticisms based on nothing rational? Are they driven purely by our feeling that she embarrasses us? That is nothing short of animus.

Ris Low had a dream: a dream for herself, and a dream for Singapore. Have we mercilessly killed that dream with our unadulterated animus?

New Anti-Gay News Portal

A group of Christians is spearheading a new online news portal whose agenda is avowedly anti-gay: it is to be guided by "mainstream family values", which means "a man, his wife, with a view to procreation". They already have S$90,000 in funding, the source of which remains secret.

Read all about it here.

Time to think about anti-discrimination law?

This is the second letter I've ever written to the ST forum, and the second to get rejected also. haha. So my rejection rate is still 100%. Unlike my first letter, I didn't spend much time on this one. I typed most of it, except the citation, on my phone while waiting for a friend who was 20 minutes late. That also makes this my tech-iest post ever. haha. Anyway, posting this here so I don't lose it in the labyrinthine depths of my computer.

Time to think about anti-discrimination law?

9 July 2009

Recent comments by Mr K Shanmugam have initiated an important debate about affirmative action for Malays in Singapore.

I would like to add to this debate by pointing out a possible alternative solution for Singaporeans to consider: anti-discrimination law.

Essentially, anti-discrimination law makes discrimination by private parties illegal in certain situations. In the US, for example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for employers to refuse to hire applicants simply because of their race, religion or other irrelevant classification. An aggrieved applicant can therefore sue the errant employer for compensation.

Most developed countries, including Australia, Canada and the UK, have laws of this type. Singapore, however, does not. We do have some guidelines, such as the Tripartite Guidelines on Non-Discriminatory Job Advertisements, but these do not carry any legal sanction and are therefore often disregarded by employers.

How is anti-discrimination law different from affirmative action? While anti-discrimination law ensures that the process of competing for jobs remains on a level playing field, affirmative action is more suited to achieving particular results that are unlikely to be achieved even if the playing field is level. In this way, anti-discrimination law seeks to solve a more basic problem.

And an acute problem it is, too. In a 2006 survey of 1,500 local job applicants, 19% reported having experienced discrimination on the basis of their race (see "When black and white doesn't help", TODAY, 29 December 2006). Given that minorities make up about 25% of our population, and that race discrimination is likely to target them more than majorities, the figure is a significant one.

Aside from solving these problems, another significant advantage of anti-discrimination law is that it is less of a political hot potato than affirmative action. While affirmative action may be necessary in the long run, it is probably better to exhaust our less controversial options first.

Also, anti-discrimination law could potentially be a broad-based solution to problems other than the Malay dilemma. It could, for example, deal with the myriad other types of discrimination that job applicants complain about, such as discrimination on the basis of age, nationality or even national service status.

All in, the introduction of anti-discrimination law will, I think, push us closer to an ideal Singapore in which everyone is treated as an equal.

Mohan Gopalan

Is there a right to privacy after death?

I am quite irked that the contents of David Widjaja's computer are being spilled out in the press. How many of you would approve of your computer files being made public after your death? Should people be allowed to know who you sent emails to, what you googled, what you said to who on MSN, whom you stalked on Facebook, what kind of porn you surfed? And how many of you would want to have your suicide note, meant for a handful of loved ones, read by half the nation?

I don't know.

Racial and Religious Hate Speech in Singapore: Reclaiming the Victim's Perspective

(With great pleasure, I announce:) New on SSRN: Racial and Religious Hate Speech in Singapore: Reclaiming the Victim's Perspective, by Zhong Zewei.

Abstract:

In this essay, I argue that the rationales offered by the Singapore Government for restricting racial and religious hate speech are not only constitutionally unsound, but also not without serious moral and social costs. I start off identifying two main rationales offered for the existing restrictions, namely (1) the maintenance of public order, and (2) the promotion of an ethic of intercultural tolerance. These twin rationales are buttressed by a literalist (and flawed) judicial interpretation of the right of free speech under Article 14 of the Singapore Constitution. Drawing on hate speech decisions from the U.S., Canada and Europe, I advance a more faithful reading of Article 14 which affords greater constitutional protection for hate speech as 'political speech'. I next trace how the Singapore Government's regulation of hate speech is rooted in its avowedly Asian-style 'communitarianism'. The 'public order' and 'tolerance' rationales, however, fail to recognize that race and religion are constitutive aspects of our individual flourishing and self-respect, which hate speech attacks. The present legislative regime is therefore guilty of self-contradiction. Lastly, I sketch a different, victim-centred justification for Singapore's hate speech laws which is responsive to the profound injury inflicted upon individuals targeted by racial and religious vilification. This victim-centred perspective, it is suggested, finds a comfortable textual home in Article 152(1) of the Singapore Constitution, which requires the Government to care for the interests of racial and religious minorities in Singapore.

More OMG again