New Standards for Buses

Haven't been posting much social commentary lately. But this is my response to a post at Mollymeek regarding the proposed new standards for buses. By the way, I've just discovered how to hyperlink my texts to the URLs...(so much for my Communications Degree)
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The problem here isn't the proposed changes, but rather, the use of statistics to provide a ambiguous facade of imagined change. More interestingly, I would like to know the base rate of these statistics before the new amendments were proposed. This will give commuters a more meaningful basis for comparison (at least quantitatively).

Let's take a couple of examples:

1. "Bus service reliability - for example, at least 85 percent of bus services should not deviate more than 5 minutes from the scheduled frequency".

The above statement says nothing at all. While Molly has rightly pointed out the "problem of the other 15 per cent", I would extend the argument further to question "so what 85 per cent of bus services do not exceed more than 5 minutes from the scheduled time"...

The simple answer (which most folks would be satisfied with) would be "higher frequency means less over-crowding" or something like that...What this statement fails to provide is the current base rate of percentage of buses leaving xx minutes from the scheduled time. So unless we know, for instance, that currently only 70 per cent of buses leave the interchange punctually, therefore causing the human traffic jam, the above statement is pretty useless.

2. Loading - for example, weekday peak period bus loading shouldn't exceed 95 percent.

Again, the above statement is a devilishly deceptive one because the problem here isn't the bus load (let's assume that safety requirements are met), but the bus routes that are the bane of many commuters.

Granted that it is impossible to please all commuters all of the time, but what I would like see SBS do is to reduce the number of intermediate stops for lengthy bus trips.

Take for instance, if I would to travel from Tampines to Clementi (Bus Service No. 10), the trip would take me almost two hours (during peak hours) because the bus travels through Bedok, Siglap, Mountbatten, Shenton Way, Pasir Panjang then Clementi...maximising profits for themselves and maximising stress for the commuter (who lives, say somewhere in the suburbs of Siglap and is caught between taking the train - which he has to take 20 minutes to reach - and the bus, which does not move).

In short, I think most people would not mind standing in a slightly over-crowded bus that cuts short travel time then sitting in a stationary bus (watching 20 repeats of TV Mobile advertisements)...

Sport and Technology

The recently concluded FIFA World Cup will be remembered by many where decisions made by referees were increasingly scrutinized - by billions around the world - through the use of technology.

Now most people tend to think that technology is "neutral" (it all depends on how one uses it). Nothing can be further from the truth - if the game of football is any indication. Technology in fact, shapes the structure of human society and its accompanying discourse. Let's examine why:

To take football as an example,

Before television became a universal medium, football games were generally localized. Earlier editions of the World Cup (before the television revolution) were not usually met with the amount of pomp and fanfare of recent ones. Sure, the sport was popular, but the stakes (culturally or economically) weren't high. To take an example, England (whose history of football stretches over a century), decided to opt out of the first three editions of the tournament (1930, 1934 and 1938); football a matter of life and death, nah...

Fast forward to June 2006. The acknowledgment of football being a global game was, in large part, due to the use of satellite television to broadcast football matches all over the world. With the added use of video technology, the entire dynamics (not the rules) of the game have changed.

Previously, a referee makes a mistake (for instance: awarding a penalty kick incorrectly, failing to spot a offside player), such errors were generally confined to limited spheres of discussion; after all, to err is human, as the saying goes...

Today, its a whole new ball game. Expert power no longer lies with the people on the field, but those off it (fans, football pundits, tuxedo-suit officials). Actions made on the field are now open to examination (to the nth degree) off-field. Players and referees are held accountable - blamed or praised - by the verdict of the masses, whose opinions now constitute as "truth". Split-second decisions made in the heat of the moment reverberate in electronic archives long after the game is over.

So what does all these mean? Is the game better off or worse off? I think the answer is probably a mixture of both. The fact of the matter is, as Ellul noted, technique (or technology) is ambivalent and that no matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences.

I am sure folks like Wayne Rooney and Zinedine Zidane would agree with me.

Human - All too Human

An interesting letter to the Straits Times forum which goes into a discussion of what it means to be human and whether human nature is extrinsic or intrinsic.

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I refer to the letter, 'Stop cruelty to animals, stop the apathy as well' (ST, July 3) from Ms Chin Chiu Ngo.

Ms Chin goes on the assumption that to be human is to be kind and from this, two fundamental values come to mind, where the words humane and humanity are derived from the word human.

The point she makes is that humane and humanity in zeitgeist terms became antithetic to what they originally meant because of our behaviour.

It is an error to believe the trait humane is characteristic of being human. It may originate from the word human but here the similarity ends and remains only an idiosyncrasy.

The early English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), made a trenchant statement that men (humans) needed a leviathan to curb the savage instincts inherent in them. Every man, he said, by nature, is enemy to every man, where force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues.

The life of man, he added, follows the pattern of attack for personal gain; a war where notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place. A leviathan in the form of the state was necessary to check these natural instincts, if there was to be any true freedom in society at all.

The pages of human history are soaked in the blood of battlefield carnage. The rhetoric is dichotomous and speaks of war as abhorrent while the human species per se marches inexorably toward its own funeral.

It was estimated that in the last 5,000 years, only 292 were without war. There were almost 15,000 wars resulting in the deaths of 3.6 billion human beings (Bobrakov, 1973). If we add in the extension time to 2006, the wars and carnage increase dramatically, in this relatively short space.

There was mention, by Ms Chin, of killing animals for food, which was deemed acceptable. This may be so because in nature one animal must die so that another can live.

It is the law of survival - a natural process between predator and prey. It is interesting to note that man is the only animal which kills not only for food but for sport.

The fisherman who goes sport fishing is not hungry or starving. He seeks the prey and kills for the pleasure the death of another species (he considers inferior) brings. It is the same with deer or wild boar hunting. It is the same in fox hunting which has become a traditional event in England. It is the same in grouse or pheasant shooting.

This is the instinct to kill which Hobbes spoke off and which peregrinated logically to the killing of man as well, on the pretext of protecting some ideology or to gain access to some gain.
The 'duty' of animals to feed us has led to a 'duty' of animals, in various forms, to die to entertain us. Many bloody animal sports bear testimony to this. Millions die every day to please our palates which we justify as food.

How do we justify the millions which die horribly in suffering in the attempt to find a cure for human diseases?

How do we justify others which die in excruciating pain as 'guinea pigs' for beauty products, for the vanity of human beings?

It has been said, and truthfully, that on this planet man (humans) is the ultimate predator who has brought many animals to extinction and many others to the threshold of extinction, by destruction of the ecosystem and the addiction to kill, not for food, but for sport and for gain.

Gain is a strong motivating factor and the slogan for animal welfare makes this clear in: When the buying stops so can the killing.

In the beauty or cosmetic field, the vast majority of products entering the market are new formulations or duplications of existing drugs. The crux lies in commercial return rather than therapeutic consideration. The point is knowledge gained, from studies on animals, is often misleading owing to differences in the responses to drugs by animals and man.

The LD50 test, for example, represents the lethal dose necessary to kill 50 per cent of the animals tested. It is an acute toxicity test of which 484,849 were carried out in England during 1980. It is used in cosmetics, pesticides, food additives and household products.
The LD50 does not give direct indication of the short term toxicity of a compound but only of its lethal potential. For the recognition of the symptomatology of the acute poisoning in man and for the determination of the human lethal dose, the LD50 in animals is of very little value (Zbinden and Flury-Roversi).

While there seems to be little scientific justification for the test, it was acknowledged that the LD50 caused appreciable pain to a proportion of the animals subjected to it.

The Draize ocular- and skin-irritation tests consist of introducing a fixed dose of a chemical (0.1 millilitre of a liquid or 0.1 gram of a solid) in one of the rabbit's eyes. The other eye serves as a control. The pain, if the chemical is toxic, is excruciating and the rabbit often goes blind.

The skin test is made with a shaved area of the rabbit's hide. The irritation and inflammation are recorded. It goes without saying that the intentionally induced irritation and inflammation are anything but pleasurable and cannot by any stretch of imagination be called humane.

While Ms Chin's call for a stop to cruelty to animals is commendable, her perceptual set of humaneness, as a trait belonging to humans is misleading.

By and large, nothing can be further from the truth if we are to believe recorded history, and the cruelty perpetrated by man against man, and a fortiori, against species considered inferior to man.

Nicholas Copernicus knew of this cruelty inherent in his fellow men, which kept him, for a time, from speaking the truth about his observations of the behaviour of the planets, until Galileo's concurrence - discretion being the better part of valour.

Dudley Au

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The main gist of the article - if I understand correctly - can be summarized in the following words, "Human nature is by nature violent and unkind and therefore we should not delude ourselves into thinking otherwise".

In order to understand the central idea of the author's claims, a short introduction to the thoughts and ideas of Thomas Hobbes (which the author attributes his central premise to) is necessary.

Most folks today - including this author - would remember Hobbes for his comments on human nature, upon which he depicts the human life in its natural state as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan). His pessimistic view of human nature can be, in part, be traced to his materialist view of human nature, in contrast to the older prescriptive view of moral law (i.e. what ought to be done should be done because there was some intrinsic ethical obligation).

Essentially, Hobbes argument was that it made no sense to talk about the soul as some kind of separate entity. What this meant was that human being were just living bodies, and death was simply the cessation of bodily functions. It was no surprise then, that Hobbes rejected the idea of the divine right of kings to rule (after all, what is a divine right?)

Now, it is interesting to see how the author brings in the fact that man kills, not just for food, but for sport. Such an argument - correct me if I am wrong - does not fit in squarely with the assumptions of the Hobbesian view of human nature. Sure, man is cruel, but his cruelity stems from his propensity for self-preservation. Now unless one can make the argument that tigers are a threat to humanity, or that hunting deer somehow prolongs one's lifespan, it is fallacious to think that game hunting is a proof of man's self-preservatory nature.

Back to the author's main point as to whether there is such thing as a "humaneness that characterizes human nature".

Well, my personal take is that the term humaneness is a term loaded with pictures and scenes of human kindness, personal altruism and agape love, which - as the author rightly points out - seem to contradict human experience and practice.

Furthermore, the claims made by animal rights advocates - a group that the author is arguing his case against - are not terribly impressive; in fact, some even smack of pure hypocrisy - kicking a dog is wrong, but abortion of a foetus is permissive? Come on...

To use a Schaefferian term then, I would argue for the "mannishness of man" - that man is created in the image and likeness of God and therefore he is man - dignified but fallen; noble, yet shamed; equally capable of performing great works or committing heinous crimes.

Last but not least, if we agree with this author's view of human nature, then nothing - and I reiterate again - nothing can stop us from condemning 20th century tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. After all, as the Fuhrer once said, "I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature".

Paradigm Shifts and Political Revolutions

I have been reading this fascinating book by Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - considered one of the 100 most influential books since the second world war.

Kuhn's basic premise is to sketch a theory upon which revolutions (in this case, scientific) take place and how the paradigm otherwise known as normal science can be altered under certain circumstances giving way to a new paradigm (or a change in worldview).

Now most of Kuhn's examples are predominantly scientific; his ideas however, echo far and wide into other spheres of social activity.

In Singapore, recent cases of bloggers getting into trouble with the Government are indicative of certain tensions at work. While I wouldn't jump the gun by overplaying the significance and relevance of bloggers (however much I would like to), clearly the blogosphere (particularly political bloggers) are an anomaly of sorts - as far as the challenge to normal science (otherwise known as the political status quo) is concerned.

Why is this so?

Several reasons:-

1. Ease of setting up blogs (now anyone with Internet access can set up a blog within 10 minutes). As such, the potential for civic and political participation is increased - at least quantitatively.

2. Network phenomena of blogs. Bloggers with common interest can bunch together and form e-communities. Among some of the renowned ones in Singapore include www.singabloodypore.blogspot.com and www.singaporeangle.com.

3. Ability of bloggers to identify and frame breaking news. Now this may not be so common in SIngapore, as the size and scope of local news renders the blogosphere little comparative advantages. Nevertheless, recent examples have indicated that bloggers here may not be that impotent (think: Yawning Bread's GE2006 Workers' Party rally pics)

4. Communication of personality. Well, this is something I would really hope our political leaders (read: PAP folks) can start tapping upon. So far, the men-in-white have seemed to adopt a rather adverse reponse towards new media, preferring to rely on traditional print and broadcast media to communicate their personalities (and that, only in rare instances) thus creating an impression of bureaucratic aloofness.

5. Ability of blogs to foster a community of writers. Unlike newspaper pieces (where the journalist is perceived to be writing for an organization), the primary relationship [in blogs] is always with respect to the writer. No surprise then that the recent suspension of Mr Brown was met with much criticism from hundreds (and possibly thousands) of bloggers.

Which brings me back to my original point.

As Kuhn argues, "the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequsite to revolution". Now, a term like revolution is extremely loaded (if one uses the history of the 20th century as a basis for comparison); however, what Kuhn suggests isn't of the guns and gut spilling sort.

Instead, he argues that when such revolutions (or paradigm shifts) take place, a shift in worldview happens. In his words, "What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards".

Now, within the blogosphere, this seems to be happening (or maybe it's just a figment of my imagination). Nevertheless, if my hunch is correct, then how the authorities here deal with bloggers (and their propagated ideas) will be an indication of how Singapore is perceived within the greater international community. Ducks and rabbits may be trivial stuff to begin with, but insisting that rabbits are ducks when the rest of the world thinks otherwise may be a triviality carried too far - especially if the joke's on us.

The Dissatisfaction of Francis A. Schaeffer

To folks who know me, this man, Francis A. Schaeffer - one of the greatest Christian intellectuals of the 20th century - his thoughts and his works have greatly shaped the foundations of my Christian faith.

A good friend of mine introduced his works to me several years ago. Back then, I was familiar with the Reformed faith and its central tenets, but articulating a worldview (weltenschaung) of what it means to be a Christian, ah, that was a different matter... Politics, economics, social theories, philosophy, anthropology (all these subjects were foreign stuff to me). Worse, it didn't occur to me that such diverse subject matters were of any particular relevance to the Christian faith. Only salvation mattered.

But bit by bit - partly due to my dissatisfaction with the quality of my faith as well as the intellectual challenges that were arising from my university program - I knew that I had to dig deeper into the essence of my faith, in order to really know what I believed.

Schaeffer's works were a watershed. I bought his Complete Works and started reading them. After completing The God who is there and Escape from Reason, I was awestruck with the magnitude of this man's thinking and his ability to integrate diverse spheres of knowledge into a coherent Christian worldview. More importantly, his writings were not simply academic dissertations - detached and aloof from the pangs of a broken world, but works upon which you could sense his compassion for humanity, demonstrated through his outreach to people from all walks of life. His starting point was that, all men - whether saved or unsaved - are created in the image and likeness of God and possess intrinsic value to life.

The following links will provide a deeper insight into the man, his ideas and his life:

http://www.markheard.net/heardtribute/archive/schaeffer1_c_today1997.html http://www.markheard.net/heardtribute/archive/schaeffer2_c_today1997.html