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Criticalist wrote in a comment to Effect on election advertising amendments on non-party netizens: I can’t help but wonder why the rules have been relaxed, specifically what advantages would accrue the dominant political party? In the past, alternative media was largely the domain of opposition parties and discourse critical of the government, hence the need to impose restrictions on them.

My default mode is to assume that the liberalisation — incomplete though it is — is designed to serve the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) interest, and that it is not altruistic.

PAP rally in Tampines, 2006 general election. Photo by SunsetBay If I were the People’s Action Party (PAP), I wouldn’t even bother to hold a single rally this time around. Does one seriously believe that their poorly-attended rallies ever gained them more than a handful of extra votes? Workers' Party rally in Hougang, 2006 general election After my iconic photo from 2006 (above) broke the convention of mainstream media never to publish wide-angle pictures of rally crowds, the PAP will obviously have reconsidered the merits of holding rallies in future unless they can ensure sizeable crowds for themselves.

Peer to peer file sharing (P2P) has made media distribution free and has become the bane of media monopolies. P2P file sharing means digital files can be copied and distributed at no cost. CD's, DVD's, and other older forms of holding media are no longer necessary, nor is the cost involved in making them or distributing them along a traditional logistical supply chain. Disc burners, however, allow users the ability to create their own physical copies at a fraction of the cost of buying the media from the stores. Supply and demand is turned on its head as the more popular a certain file becomes via demand, the more of it that is available for sharing, and the easier it is to obtain. Supply and demand increase in tandem towards a lower "price" of obtaining the said file.Consumers demand more as price decreases. Producersnaturally want to produce more of something as priceincreases. Somewhere in between consumers and producers meet at the market price or "marketequilibrium."P2P technology eliminates material scarcity, thus the more afile is in demand, the more people end up downloading it, andthe easier it is for others to find it and download it. Considerthe implications this would have if technology made physicalobjects as easy to "share" as information is now.

In the end, it is not government regulations, legal contrivances, or licenses that govern information, but rather the free market mechanism commonly referred to as Adam Smith's self regulating "Invisible Hand of the Market." In other words, people selfishly seeking accurate information for their own benefit encourage producers to provide the best possible information to meet their demand. While this is not possible in a monopoly, particularly the corporate media monopoly of the "left/right paradigm" of false choice, it is inevitable in the field of real competition that now exists online due to information technology.

Compounding the establishment's troubles are cheaper cameras and cheaper, more capable software for 3D graphics, editing, mixing, and other post production tasks, allowing for the creation of an alternative publishing, audio and video industry. "Underground" counter-corporate music and film has been around for a long time but through the combination of technology and the zealous corporate lawyers disenfranchising a whole new generation that now seeks an alternative, it is truly coming of age.

Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners. But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.

It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.

But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

Letter sent by by my good friend Samuel C. Wee to ST on the 8th of March, quoting statistics from their Page One infographic: (Read this closely!) I read with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (“School system still ‘best way to move up’”; Monday). It is indeed heartwarming to learn that only 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university. I firmly agree with our Education Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, who declared that “education remains the great social leveller in Singaporean society”. His statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination. In recent years, there has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was greatly reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s great faith in our “unique, meritocratic Singapore system”, which ensures that good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students. I would like to commend Ms Rachel Chang on her outstanding article. On behalf of the financially disadvantaged students of Singapore, I thank the fine journalists of the Straits Times for their tireless work in bringing to Singaporeans accurate and objective reporting.

What was actually published last Friday, March 18th 2011 A reassuring experience of meritocratic system I READ with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (‘School system still ‘best way to move up”; March 8). It is indeed heartwarming to learn that almost 50 per cent of children from one- to three-room flats make it to university and polytechnics. I firmly agree with Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who said that education remains the great social leveller in Singapore society. His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort. There has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s own experience of the ‘unique, meritocratic Singapore system’: he grew up in a three-room flat with five other siblings, and his medical studies at the National University of Singapore were heavily subsidised; later, he trained as a cancer surgeon in the United States using a government scholarship. The system also ensures that good, able students from the middle- and high-income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.

To give me the byline would be an outrageous flattery and a gross injustice to the forum editors of ST, who took the liberty of taking my observations about the statistics and subtly replacing them with more politically correct (but significantly and essentially different) statistics.