Category Archives: Politics

Politics

Dong Jiao Zong threatens to strike over language issue

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I know I’ve defended vernacular schools in Malaysia earlier, but this latest move by Dong Jiao Zong puts me in a bit of a quandary. My libertarian instincts tell me that the schools should be free to teach whatever subjects in whatever languages they feel like and parents should be free to choose which schools their children should attend accordingly. Threatening to mount a nationwide strike over the issue however strikes me as a tad heavy-handed especially since there are already independent Chinese schools which have voluntarily switched over to teaching science and mathematics in English with good results.

The organization justifies its actions, as always, mainly based on the fundamental right of Chinese Malaysians to be educated in Chinese if they so wish but I can’t help but wonder if the real reason might not be a more pragmatic one. After all, I seriously doubt that many of the teachers currently teaching the two subjects in Chinese are able to competently switch over to teaching them in English. Even if the schools were able to recruit enough replacement teachers, that would result in a huge number of unemployed or underemployed teachers, something that Dong Jiao Zong would understandably find unacceptable.

This isn’t a frivolous point by the way. If Malaysia doesn’t have enough teachers who can teach in English competently, then it doesn’t make any sense to force everyone to teach in English, as this blog post highlighted earlier this year. Trying to retrain teachers who used to teach the subjects in either Bahasa Malaysia or Mandarin to switch to teaching in English doesn’t work very well. On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see that moving to teaching the subjects in English should be the the way forwards and unless the schools are given some pressure to move in that direction, they’ll just hope that this is just a fad that will hopefully blow over and won’t give serious thought and effort into switching over.

Politics, Science

Fighting crime one broken window at a time

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With crime in the spotlight in Malaysia (again), I thought I should highlight this article from The Economist. It’s about a series of experiments performed by Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen to determine the truth of an old idea: that physical disorder in the environment can lead people to commit crimes more readily. This is the same line of thinking that inspired New York’s efforts to fight more serious crimes by cracking down on minor offenses like graffiti, breaking windows and other forms of vandalism.

One such experiment took place in an alley in which people frequently parked their bicycles. To create a disorderly state, they covered the walls of the alley with graffiti while the walls were freshly painted in the orderly state. Under both conditions, a prominent “No Littering” sign was displayed in the alley. Once bicycles had been parked, the experimenters quickly moved in to put a fake advertisement flyer on the bike in such a way that it would have to be removed in order to ride the bike. When the owners came back, they had to choose either to remove the flyer and keep it on their person somehow, throw it onto the ground, or put it on another bike. The experimenters secretly observed and recorded these reactions and considered putting the flyer on another bike as an act of littering.

The final result was that when the walls were clean, only 33% of bicyclists littered, but if the walls were covered with graffiti, the figure increased to 69%. Other experiments in the same vein showed similar results. If the environment was clean and orderly, people were less likely to commit crimes or break the rules, but in a disorderly environment, people seemed to think that breaking the rules was no big deal.

I point this out because I think that it’s particularly relevant for Malaysia. This is after all the country where putting a prominent “Dilarang Buang Sampah” sign up anywhere guarantees that a pile of rubbish will show up at the spot. One of my pet peeves about Malaysians is that everyone thinks rules and laws are meant to be bent. Just look at the money-lender advertisements everywhere in places where they plainly don’t belong or traffic violations like double-parking. But as these experiments indicate, if you want to live in a safe and orderly environment, you need people to perceive the environment to be safe and orderly, and the only way to achieve that is by cracking down on all crimes, especially the small but highly visible ones, and enforcing the law to its strictest extent.

Politics

Segregation and the net generation

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In a recent review of a book published in The Economist, I noted something that I had suspected all along. In Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, author Don Tapscott argues that not only are the children now growing up in a world of networked computers more intelligent and well-informed than any previous generation, they are also more tolerant of diversity and more concerned with social justice.

This is an argument that makes a lot of sense to me. After all, it doesn’t matter what skin colour you are when you’re interacting with each other on all sorts of forums, using instant messaging software, in multiplayer games, on social networking sites and even using old-fashioned e-mail. What does matter are the quality and content of your posts, messages and other forms of communications and it is by those standards that participants are judged by the communities they choose to be a part of. What could be fairer than that?

In a previous post, I addressed some concerns about racial segregation in Malaysia. I argued that the existence of vernacular schools had little impact on whether or not Malaysians of different races would cooperate and coexist peacefully in society and that the divisions between the races are the result of government policies, and not prejudices learned as children. I reiterate that stand here. The largest Malaysian forum on the internet, LYN, is full of Malaysians of all races, of all religions and many different types of schools. Yet, none of that matters on the net.

Folks are segregated on that forum, but they are segregated not by race but by the choices they make: what hobbies they take up, what shows they like, what games they play, how outgoing they choose to be and so on. It’s hard to argue there isn’t a great deal of tension between the different races in Malaysia now, but again, I say that this is due to politicians playing up the issue and instituting policies that are expressly designed to create divisions. Here’s to the hope that the net generation will prove wiser and more resistant to such divide and conquer tactics.

Politics

Explaining Libertarianism using the Nolan Chart

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I thought I’d post a Nolan Chart today to demonstrate what being a libertarian means. This particular version is from The Proceedings of the Friesian School by Kelley L. Ross, one of my favorite sites on philosophy. Other versions exist, for example, the one used on Wikipedia to illustrate its article on the subject. You’d do well to read Ross’ article on the subject, but to summarize, the Nolan Chart appears to have been inspired by Ayn Rand’s observation that the political right and the political left both allow individual freedom in the areas that they think aren’t important but invoke government intervention in areas that they think are important.

To the political right in the U.S. who are often strongly religious, the area that is important is personal morality. After all, to the religious, material wealth isn’t something that you can take with you to the afterlife and anyway, God helps those who help themselves, so it makes perfect sense that those who work hard are materially rewarded. Sin however is seen as a permanent stain on the soul and perhaps even a corrupting influence that can spread unless it is stamped out, and is therefore much too important to be left to the individual.

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Politics, Religion

Should atheists organize?

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Should they? The Wall Street Journal has a report on the attempts of various atheist organizations in the U.S. to make atheism more acceptable to the general public. Atheists are in many ways the least represented and most reviled minority in the U.S. with opinion polls consistently rating atheists as the least trustworthy group, below homosexuals and Muslims. The Economist noted in an article last year that only one U.S. congressman out of 535 would publicly admit to be an atheist, making him the highest-ranking politician to do so.

At the same time, atheists represent a fairly significant proportion of the population, though the exact figures depend on whom you count as an atheist. According to Adherents.com, if you count the people who put themselves in the secular, non-religious, agnostic or atheist categories as a single group, they would form the world’s third largest religious group. This is admittedly not entirely fair. The site takes pains to note that plenty of people in this category are theistic or spiritual but do not profess affiliation with any religious denomination. For many others, it would be more accurate to say that they are indifferent to religion rather than being non-believers and would not be interested in organized atheism anyway.

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Fun, Politics

China should buy Malaysia, jokes The Economist

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The Economist, one of the most influential and respected news outlets in the world, is well known for its concise and informative writing style. Regular readers however will note that there’s often an element of dry wit as well, and at times even a touch of whimsy.

One recent article presents an excellent example of this sense of humour at work. Inspired by the new president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed’s public musing that his country should set aside a portion of its revenues from tourism to buy a new homeland to replace its islands that are expected to be engulfed by rising sea levels, The Economist has extended the idea as a solution for all kinds of problems. Note the following line:

China could stop making aggressive gestures towards Taiwan and buy Malaysia instead. It’s already run by Chinese, so they’d hardly notice the difference.

I would imagine that the Malays would be none too amused to read that but you really have to credit those crazy editors at The Economist for their imagination and creativity in coming up with this wild scheme.

Politics

Malaysian libertarians

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On a whim I googled the phrase “Malaysian libertarians” the other day and was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is indeed a body in Malaysia dedicated to advancing and propagating libertarian thought. The group is called the “Malaysia Think Tank” and seems to be associated in some way with the U.S.-based Cato Institute. The website, WauBebas.org, appears to be the main platform used to disseminate and publish their views.

I’ve signed up for the site and commented on a couple of articles, but things seem pretty quiet over there. I have no illusions about the group having any significant influence over policy or even the public mindset, but it’s heartening nonetheless to read about Malaysian political and social issues written from a libertarian perspective.

In Malaysia, where there is no significant political base familiar with libertarianism, I’ve found it frustrating sometimes when trying to communicate my views. People often miscontrue my opposition to government intervention in a matter as my personal views on the matter. For example, as an individual, I find gambling to be distateful and to bring out the worst in people, and would think less of people if I knew that they indulged in it frequently. But as a libertarian, I would oppose any government sanctioned ban on gambling because I believe it to be a personal choice. This means that libertarians often have conflicting opinions amongst themselves on a wide variety of matters, but what unites them is the belief that government has no business interfering in the private lives of its citizens, so long as they do not harm anyone else.

The famous phrase attributed to Voltaire about defending to the death the right of people to say even the things that you disagree with is widely accepted now, with different caveats depending on where you live in. Libertarians would just like to extend it to include the right of people to live in the way that they please.