Category Archives: Politics

Politics, Religion

Swiss ban on minaret construction

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As much as I detest militant Islam, I haven’t hesitated to defend the religion itself in the past. Similarly, I have no qualms about condemning the recent blanket ban on the construction of minarets in Switzerland. Whatever assurances the government issues, it amounts to religious discrimination plain and simple. What’s even more ridiculous is that as far as I know the existing zoning laws already make it difficult to build tall minarets in urban areas. To me, construction regulations that prohibit the demolition of recognized heritage sites or the construction of overly tall towers that spoil the existing cityscape is reasonable. This is why you can’t build huge skyscrapers in the centre of Paris, for example.

Also reasonable would be moves to restrict the noise generated by places of worship so long as such rules apply equally to all religions. But unsurprisingly, for many Europeans being roused from your sleep on Sunday morning by the tolling of church bells is perfectly okay, but the Muslim call to prayer is deemed as being offensive. To be fair, many Muslim majority countries restrict the activities of other religions as well but this doesn’t give the minaret banning any legitimacy. Framing this as a tit-for-tat bargaining move is not acceptable.

Those who don’t think this is particularly alarming should recall the familiar “First they came…” lines by Martin Niemöller. The far right parties in Europe are targeting Muslims because they’ve realized that this is an unpopular group and they can score easy populist victories off of this cause. But historically the far right parties have no love for many other minority groups as well, including Jews, homosexuals and blacks. As one poster on QT3 put it, they might be only saying, “Let’s get all the Muslims out of Europe now” but they are really thinking, “And the rest of them will follow later.”

The most worrisome thing about this is that the ban came not from a government decision but from a public vote, which makes it an example of one of the limitations of a democracy. The correct response is not that democracy is bad and authoritarian governments are good, but that democracy should be curtailed by a set of inviolable rights for all individuals. Regardless of the source of a government’s legitimacy, no government should have the power to overturn anyone’s basic rights and being able to build whatever places of worship people want is certainly one of those rights.

Politics

What was Saddam thinking?

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One of my personal habits is that I like to know how other people think. It’s not even the decision or idea itself that is necessarily interesting. What I’m constantly curious about is the chain of thought that led to a specific decision beginning from the person’s basic assumptions and observations to the step-by-step logic that they perform based on those assumptions. Most of the time, I end up being disappointed because people mostly do not make decisions through a conscious, deliberative process but act impulsively or instinctively instead.

Some of the most puzzling decisions on the world stage in recent history have been made by the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Why did he send contradictory signals over whether or not he actually possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)? Why was he so stubborn in not allowing weapons inspectors full access to Iraq when in fact he had no WMDs? Why did he even choose to invade Kuwait in the early 90s? This blog post answers some of these questions and illuminates some of the thought processes that were going on inside the dictator’s head.

For example, it turned out that he was so nonchalant about the prospect of being invaded by the U.S. because he believed that he had won against the U.S. and its allies in the First Gulf War. His reasoning was that the coalition of over 30 countries had tried to overthrow him in 1991 but he survived, therefore he had won and if the U.S. wanted to try again, history would just repeat itself. In reality, the U.S. deliberately left his regime in place because George Bush Sr. feared the chaos that deposing him would unleash.

Another example showing how out of sync with reality he was: he had WMDs in 1991 but was afraid to use them because he believed that if he did, the U.S. would unleash its own chemical weapons on Iraq. In 2003 he did not have WMDs but didn’t want to admit that because he was more afraid of an internal coup than of an invasion by foreign forces. The blog post is full of more examples of such convoluted thinking.

Once again, this shows that dictators, surrounded as they always are only by yes-men, quickly become delusional and lose all grasp of reality. But it’s also a reminder to everyone how important it is to constantly reassess your fundamental assumptions and beliefs to ensure that what you believe is indeed the truth.

Politics

Media censorship in Singapore

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Working through my backlog of issues of The Economist, I’ve been amused by the spate in its pages between the government of Singapore and the press concerning the storied history of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) in the country. To chronicle the story, the whole thing began when the newish Banyan column in The Economist published a piece on the recent demise of the FEER. It included a paragraph on the magazine’s legal troubles in Singapore and referred to bans imposed against the publication by the Singaporean government.

I’ve been a regular reader of The Economist long enough to know that the Singaporean government never misses an opportunity to rise to the bait whenever its name is disparaged in the press, so predictably enough a letter from the High Commissioner of Singapore in London was duly published in the next issue. In it, the High Commissioner claimed that the FEER has never been banned by the government. Instead, publication of the FEER in Singapore ceased because the magazine voluntarily declined to comply with local rules.

A week after that, The Economist published a letter by Philip Bowring, a former editor of the FEER. He claimed that while the Singaporean government never actually used the word “ban”, what happened was effectively the same thing. The usual circulation of about 10,000 copies a week was cut to only 500 copies to be circulated according to directions from government officials. The FEER declined to publish at all under such restrictions but the Singaporean government chose to create an advertisement-free pirate edition anyway to circulate as it saw fit.

Once again, the Singaporean government had to respond. This time, the High Commissioner claimed that the government acted to restrict the circulation of the FEER in the country because it had interfered with its domestic politics. The implication is that by allowing a limited circulation anyway, the government was extending a favour to the publication. He also claimed that there were further discussions about regularly circulating an advertisement-free edition of the FEER but as the government was only willing to approve a circulation of 2,000 copies a week, the FEER declined and voluntarily ceased publication in Singapore.

What’s more interesting is that at the same time, The Economist also published a letter from a reader who correctly pointed out that as the Singapore government demands a right of reply to criticism against it, The Economist would be forced to give it the last word or else have the argument drag on interminably. This however would have the unfortunate implication that The Economist agreed with the Singaporean government’s version of events. The reader therefore suggested that the newspaper publish his own letter alongside the reply from the Singaporean government to indicate that this was not so, which as can be seen, The Economist indeed did.

The reason I chose to relay all this is because I think it is a timely reminder that Singapore isn’t quite the clean-cut boy scout it likes to portray itself as being. Malaysians in particular seem too ready to hold up Singapore as an example of a country that gets it right. While the Singaporean government is unquestionably more competent at what it does, I believe it’s worth keeping in mind that they’re not necessarily any nobler or cleaner. Of course, Malaysians shouldn’t be too complacent as well. In 1999, the Malaysian government jailed Murray Hiebert, a correspondent of the FEER for criticizing the judiciary, becoming the first country in the Commonwealth to jail a journalist for what he wrote in more than 50 years. I have a particularly vivid memory of that episode because I was working as an intern for the New Straits Times when Hiebert was first charged.

News & Politics, Politics

Thoughts on the 2010 Malaysian Budget

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Before I go into my views on the budget, I’d like to express my disappointment with the poor quality of the discourse that I’ve read on the topic over on the LYN forums. Most people over there, including at least one moderator, seem to be basing their evaluation of it entirely on how it benefits or harms them personally, completely discounting its effects on a wider scale. While this is somewhat predictable, I’ve also known LYN to offer intelligent and knowledgeable commentary on important issues in the past which is why this particular disappointment is so galling.

To me the most interesting aspect of the new budget is the re-introduction of the property gains tax. The original announcement of a 30% tax on gains made from the disposal of a property purchased within the first two years of acquisition  and dropping down in subsequent years seemed bold and promising to me. Since I’ve long been an advocate of capital gains taxes in Malaysia, I felt that this was overdue even though as someone with someone with significant investments in REITs, this would personally hurt me. I see today however that this has been toned down to a mere 5% tax regardless of length of tenure, which seems pitiful to me.

The other major move that most people are talking about is imposing a RM50 service charge on each credit card issued. Currently, it’s not clear whether this is going to take the form of an explicit tax or a mandatory minimum annual fee but the intent is clearly to rein in the preposterous pace of credit cards issuings in the country. Ordinarily, I abhor government-led social engineering even when I agree with the intent, but in this case I believe that the intervention is mild enough to give it a pass. However, I doubt that this will have any major effect as it will be easy enough for the banks to issue rebates to offset the cost.

The various tax breaks including the increase of personal relief from income tax are obviously designed to win some popularity with the voting public but was it really necessary to also throw in a 1% decrease in the tax rate for the highest income bracket? This looks like a particularly unwise move when the government deficit is expected to rise to record levels. Even if the government insisted on keeping the fiscal taps open for stimulus purposes, it would have a better idea to spend the money on a negative income tax on the poorest Malaysians rather than giving a tax break to the richest. A negative tax would effectively be a subsidy for cheap Malaysian labour which should also help to reduce the incentive for employers to hire foreign labour which so many Malaysians seem to be upset about.

Finally, I think that completely opening the financial sector to foreign equity is a great move. In fact, to those who argue that reducing the top rate of income tax would be useful in attracting top tier talent to the country, I’d argue that levelling the playing field is a far greater incentive. It would be even better if the government had the political capital to do away with silly NEP quotas and restrictions, but this is still a good start.

Overall, I favor an economic policy that concentrates on building the fundamentals for consistent and reliable growth rather than trying to jump start the economy for quick spurts of growth. For this reason, I disagree with the tax exemptions for the Iskandar project and believe that it will only open the door to more cronyism and corruption. A good budget should be fiscally responsible and while I agree that turning the taps completely off at this time would be unwise, I believe that the government has not made enough of a commitment to reduce the deficit in the future and I fear that this could lead to increased inflation expectations in the future.

Politics, Science

Anti-vaccination nutjobs

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As a skeptic, I’ve never been a fan of alternative medicine or even herbal remedies. I prefer that any medical treatments that I take be experimentally controlled, peer reviewed and statistically compared for efficacy against competing treatments. It feels however that I’m in the minority on this and even people who have a reasonably sound education in the sciences often just state that alternative medicine, while not necessarily being more effective than a placebo, is at least harmless and could provide some psychological reassurance to patients.

Frankly, I feel that this is conceding too much. Even if alternative medical treatments are physiologically harmless, admitting them into the mainstream dangerously blurs the line between truth and falseness. It means conceding authority to snake oil salesmen who claim to not only know better than trained doctors but that doctors aren’t to be trusted because they are in collusion with drug companies who poison patients. More importantly in the long run, it feeds the general perception that scientific truth is not objective and that you don’t actually need any academic qualifications in order to be a respected authority on scientific matters.

Currently the best example of how much damage the anti-intellectual crowd can do is the ridiculous argument against vaccinations. This profile of Paul Offit, a prominent scientist in the development and study of vaccines, in Wired should be required reading for anyone who isn’t convinced that the rise of alternative medicine is actively harmful. It is truly frightening how quickly the fad of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated has grown and how much damage it is already doing. Furthermore, it’s one thing if the parents are harming their own children by not getting them vaccinated, but it’s another thing when you consider that they’re endangering everyone else around them because a good vaccination program depends on everyone being vaccinated to work.

As the article explains, the fears about the risks posed by vaccines are completely groundless and even now diseases that were previously thought to have been vanquished are making a comeback because vaccination rates are dropping. The saddest part is that all this has happened before. In England and Wales in the late 19th century, an anti-smallpox vaccine movement got started causing the disease to flare up even though the vaccine had been invented in 1793. I guess this is what you get when people look to celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey and Oprah Winfrey for scientific advice instead of actual scientists.

News & Politics, Politics

Saudi Arabia seeks compensation for reduced oil consumption

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In a move so outlandish that one would expect to see it only in an Onion article, Saudi Arabia has demanded that if the rest of the world reduces oil consumption due to efforts to combat global warming, it and other oil producing countries should be compensated for the corresponding loss of revenue. That’s about as heinous as drug pushers telling government authorities that they should be compensated if addiction treatment programmes successfully reduce their customer numbers.

While this is the first time I’ve heard of it, it appears that this has been the position of the Saudis ever since the first global climate talks in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This time however they’re claiming that this is a “make or break” position for them, meaning that other countries must agree to pay compensation for reduced oil consumption or they’re going to walk out of any talks. Of course, Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries need to diversify away from an economy that’s almost a hundred percent dependent on oil sales, but it’s not clear to me at all why other countries need to pay up to help them achieve that.

The wealth that the oil producing nations have earned from their black gold is already the stuff of legend, so what have they been spending it on if not preparing for a day when oil is no longer king? Furthermore, it’s not as if the oil is an infinite resource. In fact, if anti-global warming initiatives fail to reduce oil consumption, their oil would just be depleted all that much faster. Do they expect the world to compensate them for the loss of that oil then? It’s like asking their customers to pay for the same product twice.

Politics

Malaysian libertarian lambasts Western environmentalists

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I’m one of the (probably) few Malaysians who’s actually signed up for and read Wan Saiful Wan Jan’s Waubebas.org site on a regular basis. It’s the official website for the Malaysian Think Tank which seems to be a group of Ayn Rand-inspired Malaysian libertarians. I have no idea how big or how influential they are, but apparently Datuk Zaid Ibrahim is a member of their advisory board, so it’s seems like a serious operation.

I pretty much agree with most of the editorials their director general writes, but I take issue with this one that appeared on The Malaysian Insider. Now, I’m a libertarian and I do admit to generally being a skeptic on environmental issues. In particular, I believe that the movement relies too much on general feel-good and not enough on rational cost-benefit analysis. On the issue of global warming, I now believe that a preponderance of scientific evidence indicates the phenomenon is real and is indeed man-made. The only debate is how much damage it would cause, how much it would cost to mitigate the effects and whether that exchange is ultimately worth it.

However, what really annoys me about this particular editorial is that he falls back on the old “let’s bash the Western imperialists” clarion call when he should really know better. Granted, it may well be true that some parties that are in government in certain Western governments may have the intention of using environmental regulations as a backdoor to impose protectionist restrictions on Asian countries, but we shouldn’t allow this side issue to dominate what is ultimately a very important debate.

Wan Saiful Wan Jan implies that all local environmentalists have been brainwashed by their Western compatriots who actually do not have their best interests in mind. Why isn’t it possible that there might be Asians who genuinely want a better environment for themselves and their children, even at the cost of some economic growth? This is surely a choice that Asians must make for themselves, all the while being conscious of the arguments on both sides of the aisle. Equally galling is the implication that since the Western countries achieved their present prosperity in part by despoiling the environment, therefore Asian countries have the “right” to do the same. Why not also say that since the United States built its country on the back of slave labour, Asian countries should be free to do the same?

Make no mistake. I’m as outraged as he is when lefties scoff at the importance of economic growth even while enjoying the material fruits of that growth. But I also do not believe in growth at all costs. As Asians countries continue to industrialize and expand their economics, their people need to do some serious soul searching about the relative weights of their different priorities. It’s not just environmentalism either. There are also important debates to be had about how unequal a society they’re willing to tolerate to achieve higher growth rates, how important social mobility is to them, how much they value free time and myriad other issues.

Blaming it all on Western imperialism is just a cheap trick to short circuit the debate and achieve your objectives without having to directly address the arguments both for and against the issue. If Wan Saiful Wan Jan thinks that global warming is a hoax, then let him marshal the scientific sources to back up his claim. If he thinks that economic growth is important enough in the short-term to justify some damage to environment, let him spell out exactly how much damage he’s willing to tolerate and how much growth he thinks we can achieve in exchange. Then let the Malaysian public decide what to go for.