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Chen Guo Lim

Censorship exacerbates stereotypes. - 15 views

Perhaps, censorship does make stereotypes more obvious. What about in the event that censorships maybe employed by governmental regulations, which is almost always the case, if you exclude self ce...

censorship sterotypes

started by Valerie Oon on 01 Sep 09 4 follow-ups, last by Chen Guo Lim on 02 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

An insider's view of academic censorship in Singapore | Asian Correspondent - 0 views

uk.asiancorrespondent.com/...ademic-censorship-in-singapore

Censorship Academia Academic Freedom

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Mark, who is now assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, talks candidly about the censorship, both self-imposed and external, that guided his research and writing.
  • During my 6 years in the city, I definitely became ever more acutely aware of "political sensitivities". Thus, there were comments that came up in interviews with some of Singapore's former political detainees (interviews which are cited in the book) that were not included because they would have possibly resulted in libel actions. There were other things, such as the deviousness of LKY's political negotiations with the British in the late 50s and early 60s, which we could have gone into further (the details have been published) rather than just pointing to them in the footnotes. Was this the result of a subconscious self-censorship or a desire to move the story on? I'm still thinking about that one. But I do recall that, as a foreign academic working at the National Univ. of Singapore, you inevitably became careful about what sort of public criticism you directed at your paymasters. No doubt, this carefulness ultimately seeps into you (though I think good work can be done in Singapore, nevertheless, and many people in academia there continue to do it).
  • The decision to halt Singapore: a Biography in 1965, and in that sense narrow the narrative, was a very conscious one. I am still not comfortable tackling Singapore's political history after 1965, given the current political constraints in the Republic, and the official control of the archive. I have told publishers who have enquired about us extending the story or writing a sequel that this would involve a narrative far more critical of the ruling party. Repressive political measures that might have garnered a degree of popular support in the turbulent early-60s became, I believe, for many Singaporeans, less justifiable and more reprehensible in the 70s and 80s (culminating with the disgust that many people felt over the treatment of Catholic agitators involved in the so-called "Marxist conspiracy" of 1987).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As for the rise of the PAP, my personal view is that in the late 1950s the PAP was the only viable alternative to colonial rule, once Marshall had bailed - that is, in terms of getting Singapore out of its postwar social and economic predicament. As much as my heart is with the idealists who founded the Barisan, I'm not sure they would have achieved the same practical results as the PAP did in its first 5 years, had they got into power. There were already rifts in the Barisan prior to Operation Cold Store in 1963, and the more one looks into the party at this time, the more chaotic it appears. (Undoubtedly, this chaos was also a result of the pressures exerted upon it by the PAP.)
  • when the Barisan was systematically destroyed, hopeless though its leaders might have proved as technocrats, Singapore turned a corner. From 1963, economic success and political stability were won at the expense of freedom of expression and 'responsible dissent', generating a conformity, an intellectual sterility and a deep loss of historical identity that I hope the Epilogue to the book conveys. That's basically my take on the rise of the PAP. The party became something very different from 1963.
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Aug 10
     
    An insider's view of academic censorship in Singapore
Weiye Loh

UN report: "three strikes" Internet laws violate human rights - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...blasts-three-strikes-rules.ars

Internet Censorship

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Governments of all kinds are compelling ISPs and website operators to help with their censorship efforts. In Turkey, ISPs are required to assist in blocking several categories of content, including “insulting” the long-decesased founding father of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And even nominally advanced countries have gotten into the act. In Italy, Google executives faced criminal liability for hosting an insensitive YouTube video despite the fact that Google complied promptly to the takedown request. "Holding intermediaries liable for the content disseminated or created by their users severely undermines the enjoyment of the right to freedom of opinion and expression," La Rue writes. "It leads to self-protective and over-broad private censorship, often without transparency and the due process of the law."
  • La Rue saved some of his strongest criticism for the "three strikes" laws recently enacted by France and the UK. He writes that he is "deeply concerned" about proposals to create a centralized system for cutting people off from Internet access as a punishment for copyright infringement. France has such a system, which was approved by the courts in 2009 and is reportedly getting 25,000 complaints a day. The United Kingdom passed a Digital Economy Act in 2010 that contained similar provisions. The Special Rapporteur is "alarmed" by these regulations, writing that cutting off Internet access as a response to copyright infringement is "disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." He notes that Internet disconnection language has been removed from recent drafts of the ACTA treaty, but writes that he "remains watchful about the treaty’s eventual implications for intermediary liability and the right to freedom of expression."
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Jun 11
     
    An official appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council has released a new report on the state of online free speech around the world. In addition to calling attention to long-standing censorship problems in China, Iran, and other oppressive regimes, the report devotes a surprising amount of attention to speech restrictions in the developed world-and it singles out recently enacted "three strikes" laws in France and the United Kingdom that boot users off the Internet for repeated copyright infringement.
Ang Yao Zong

Must CUT! - 15 views

Before I start, I should first say that this is coming from my previous experience as a non-professional film-maker hahaha...... I feel that film producers and directors should have the freedom to...

Censorship Accountability Ethics

started by Weiye Loh on 30 Aug 09 2 follow-ups, last by Ang Yao Zong on 01 Sep 09
Chong Yi Ting

Self-regulation or self-censorship? - 6 views

shttp://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking+News/Singapore/Story/STIStory_334426.html Summary: The article centres on the Senior Minister of State (Information, Communications and the Arts) Lui Tuck ...

started by Chong Yi Ting on 02 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Wk 4 Online censorship & digital access: Mormon Church Attacks Wikileaks - 6 views

WIKILEAK RELEASES SECRET CHURCH DOCUMENTS! The First Link is an article regarding Wikileaks releasing a 'copyrighted' and confidential Church document of the Mormons (also known as the Church of J...

Mormons Scientology Wikileaks Copyright Censorship

started by guanyou chen on 31 Aug 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 31 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

Asia Times Online :: Southeast Asia news and business from Indonesia, Philippines, Thai... - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...MC25Ae02.html

Media Politics Singapore

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • rather than being forced to wait for parliament to meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's political debate
  • Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP)-dominated politics are increasingly being contested online and over social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Pushed by the perceived pro-PAP bias of the mainstream media, Singapore's opposition parties are using various new media to communicate with voters and express dissenting views. Alternative news websites, including The Online Citizen and Temasek Review, have won strong followings by presenting more opposition views in their news mix.
  • Despite its democratic veneer, Singapore rates poorly in global press freedom rankings due to a deeply entrenched culture of self-censorship and a pro-state bias in the mainstream media. Reporters Without Borders, a France-based press freedom advocacy group, recently ranked Singapore 136th in its global press freedom rankings, scoring below repressive countries like Iraq and Zimbabwe. The country's main media publishing house, Singapore Press Holdings, is owned by the state and its board of directors is made up largely of PAP members or other government-linked executives. Senior newspaper editors, including at the Straits Times, must be vetted and approved by the PAP-led government.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The local papers have a long record of publicly endorsing the PAP-led government's position, according to Tan Tarn How, a research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and himself a former journalist. In his research paper "Singapore's print media policy - a national success?" published last year he quoted Leslie Fong, a former editor of the Straits Times, saying that the press "should resist the temptation to arrogate itself the role of a watchdog, or permanent critic, of the government of the day".
  • With regularly briefed and supportive editors, there is no need for pre-publication censorship, according to Tan. When the editors are perceived to get things "wrong", the government frequently takes to task, either publicly or privately, the newspaper's editors or individual journalists, he said.
  • The country's main newspaper, the Straits Times, has consistently stood by its editorial decision-making. Editor Han Fook Kwang said last year: "Our circulation is 380,000 and we have a readership of 1.4 million - these are people who buy the paper every day. We're aware people say we're a government mouthpiece or that we are biased but the test is if our readers believe in the paper and continue to buy it."
Weiye Loh

Response to Guardian's Article on Singapore Elections | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=11639

Orientalism News media bias Ethnocentrism Singapore Post-Colonialism

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 May 11 - No Cached
  • The first reductive move made by the writer occurs here: “Singapore is known worldwide for censorship and corporal punishment.” This is the Western media’s favourite trope of our island-nation. A whole political context and dynamic society gets reduced to these two ‘dirty’ words, at least for a ‘Western’ world that prides itself on ‘freedom’ and believes itself to be on a moral high ground because of this veritable self-image. (One could argue that censorship in the ‘West’ exists but in a different form – there, capitalist hegemons control media companies which quite effectively draw the boundaries of public debate.)
  • The writer first makes the observation that lots of people have started to speak up and speak out against the “clan” that has ruled Singapore for almost 50 years. The People’s Action Party, is for Ms Hodal, not a political party, but a “clan” – which harks back to tribal societies, to tribalism.
  • Out of all these unsuitable candidates, the writer chose the Arab Spring as the comparative situation of choice for Singapore, despite the fact that the Arab Spring movements did not occur at a time of elections, that much of the physical ‘protesting’ in Singapore was witnessed at political rallies, that there was no bottom-up movement of ‘revolt’. It is the time of the elections; it is a nationally-licensed period of political behaviour and action, for society to perform a cathartic release, for the Bakhtinian carnavalesque to unfold.
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  • The reductive move is completed in this next sentence: “Parallels with the Arab spring are striking, even if revolution is not just around the corner.”
  • She writes, “Most murmurs of discontent can be found online: fears of reprisal are diminished for anonymous bloggers. On internet forums, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, grumblings about high housing prices, the widening gap between rich and poor, immigration laws and the salaries of government ministers (among the highest in the world) are hot topics.” The most popular online newspapers, barring the Temasek Review, are The Online Citizen, mr. brown, Mr. Wang Says So, Yawningbread, etc. All these are run by people who publicly reveal their names, which increases the credibility of these sites and also instills a sense of responsibility in their writings. This is part of the reason for their enduring popularity.
Weiye Loh

POrn is Good! - 20 views

"Also, I do not believe that people are born knowing how to engage in sexual activity. " From a Socratic perspective, knowledge is inherent in us. You just need to ask the right question at the ri...

pornography

started by Chen Guo Lim on 01 Sep 09 4 follow-ups, last by Weiye Loh on 03 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

Schoolgirl arrested for refusing to study with non-English pupils | Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...-study-non-English-pupils.html

Racism Ethics Pragmatism

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 09 - Cached
  • A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English.
  • The teenager had not been in school the day before due to a hospital appointment and had missed the start of a project, so the teacher allocated her a group to sit with. "She said I had to sit there with five Asian pupils," said Codie yesterday. "Only one could speak English, so she had to tell that one what to do so she could explain in their language. Then she sat me with them and said 'Discuss'." According to Codie, the five - four boys and a girl - then began talking in a language she didn't understand, thought to be Urdu, so she went to speak to the teacher. "I said 'I'm not being funny, but can I change groups because I can't understand them?' But she started shouting and screaming, saying 'It's racist, you're going to get done by the police'."
  • A complaint was made to a police officer based full-time at the school, and more than a week after the incident on September 26 she was taken to Swinton police station and placed under arrest.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • After questioning on suspicion of committing a section five racial public order offence, her mother Nicola says she was placed in a bare cell for three-and-a-half hours then released without charge.
  • "Codie was not being racist." "The reaction from the school and police is totally over the top and I am furious my daughter had to go through this trauma when all she was saying was common sense. " "She'd have been better off not saying anything and getting into trouble for not being able to do the work."
  • School insiders acknowledge that at least three of the students Codie refused to sit with had recently arrived in this country and spoke little English. But they say her comments afterwards raised further concerns, for example allegedly referring to the students as "blacks" - something she denied yesterday.
  • Last night Robert Whelan, deputy director of the Civitas think-tank, said: "It's obviously common sense that pupils who don't speak English cause problems for other pupils and for teachers." "I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time, but it's a sad reflection on the school if they can't deal with it without involving the police." "A lot of these arrests don't result in prosecutions - they aim is to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say."
Weiye Loh

The App Store Moral Quandary - 0 views

gizmodo.com/#!5784923/the-app-store-moral-quandary

Apple App Mobile Morality Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • the App Store is Apple's world. They rule it, and can pull or approve whatever they want. They'll keep selling tons of apps regardless of what they remove or don't remove, or what some people find offensive. There's little consequence for Apple in the end. But as long as Apple makes itself the arbiter of App Store morality, or concerns itself with what one group finds offensive versus another, this stuff will never stop.
  • Who's to say where it ends? Everybody finds something offensive, and everything offends somebody.
  • a handful of senators are calling on Apple to pull apps that allow users to self-report DUI (and speeding and other law enforcement) checkpoints, like Trapster and FuzzAlert. Which, on the face of it, sounds almost like a no-brainer-the apps facilitate breaking the law. On the other hand, the data is entirely user reported. Somebody could tweet all of it, theoretically. Should Apple take down apps comprised entirely of user-generated data? Both of those apps are still in the app store.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Apple occasionally places itself in an awkward position. Like, for instance, when Exodus International, one of those ministries that promotes "gay cures," released an iPhone app. People complained that it was offensive (I don't like it myself), and Apple removed it, saying it violates their "developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people." Just last year, Apple repeatedly rejected the app Gay New York: 101 Can't-Miss Places-basically a gay sight-seeing app. The creator found Apple's rejection of the "PG-13" app to be "homophobic and discriminatory to the point of hostile," since, he claims, that "far racier photographic material is routinely available on other apps."
  • Apple doesn't want people to perceive the App Store as a seedy place (which the Android Market kind of seems like sometimes!), or a place where kids can get their hands on stuff they shouldn't. It's family friendly, mostly. (Apps that could lead to bad stuff, like browsers, carry 17+ warnings and can be blocked via parental controls.) And it keeps regulators and Congressmen off their back
Weiye Loh

After Egypt, now with tsunami news, CNA again a disgrace « Yawning Bread on W... - 0 views

yawningbread.wordpress.com/...nami-news-cna-again-a-disgrace

Censorship Singapore News Egypt Japan

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • icking from one channel to another, I often had to go past Channel NewsAsia (CNA). On two occasions, I stopped for a while to see for myself how they were reporting the Egyptian uprising compared to the others. It was pathetic.  Their reports were not timely, nor had they depth. Where Al Jazeera and the BBC had leading figures like Mohamed El Baradei and Amr Moussa on camera, together with regular on-scene interviews or phone interviews with the protestors themselves, and even CNN had the Facebook organiser Wael Ghonim, all CNA had was an unknown lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies from some institute or other in Singapore giving a thoroughly theoretical take, not on unfolding events, but on the background. And in a stiff studio setting.
  • This weekend, the bad news is the Richter 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Miyagi prefecture of Japan that produced a tsunami that was 10 metres high in places.
  • when I was at my father’s place, I wanted an update. All we had was CNA an so I turned to it for the eleven o’clock news. They had a reporter reporting from Tokyo about how transport systems in the capital city was paralysed last night and people walked for hours to get home. This topic was already covered on last night’s news; it is being covered again tonight. No other news agency with any self-respect is making “walking home” such a big news story (or any news story at all) when people are dying. CNA then followed that up with reports from Changi airport about flights cancelled and how passengers were inconvenienced. Thirdly, they had an earth scientist on air to explain what causes tsunamis. To soak up the time, he then had to field about four questions from the host repeatedly asking him whether tsunamis could be predicted — as if this was the burning issue at the moment.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the entire news bulletin, almost nothing was mentioned about the areas where the earthquake was most severe and the tsunami most devastating (i.e. the Sendai area). There was hardly any footage, no on-the-spot reporting, no casualty figures, nothing about how victims are putting up. OK, to be fair there were a few seconds showing people queuing up to get food and drinking water at one shop. Not a word about 10,000 people missing from Minamisanriku. Not even about rescue teams struggling to get to the worst areas. Amazingly, not a word too was said about the nuclear plants with overheating cores, or the hurried evacuations (that I learnt about online), at first 3 km radius, then 10 km, and now 20 km. . .  suggesting that the situation is probably out of control and may be becoming critical. To CNA, it is apparently not news. What was news was how horrid it was that middle-class Singaporeans were stuck at the airport unable to go on holiday.
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