Politics

Mugabe: Cholera epidemic? What cholera epidemic?

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I’m sorry but I just can’t stop myself from posting bad news from Zimbabwe because it’s so sad that it’s comical. Anyway, in response to growing pressure from the rest of the world to send in outside troops to bring relief to the Zimbabwean people, President Robert Mugabe has announced that there is no cholera epidemic in his country, and hence no reason for any other country to mount any kind of intervention. As he says:

“I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others and WHO (the World Health Organisation)… so now that there is no cholera,” he said in a nationally televised speech.

That’s not what everyone else is saying, of course. Take this example from ReliefWeb:

The U.N. aid agencies report the outbreak is worsening amidst growing criminality in the country. They say security is bad and looting is on the increase, as are attacks and robberies of humanitarian aid workers.

Cholera is having a devastating impact, as 43 out of Zimbabwe’s 62 districts are reporting cases. In addition, the United Nations reports cholera is spreading to South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique.

That’s some serious chutzpah right there, comparable to the Iraqi Information Minister’s bombastic claims that there were no American troops in Baghdad on live television in 2003 even while American tanks were rolling in behind him. Let’s hope that the world will see the back of Mugabe in fairly short order so that the real work of rebuilding Zimbabwe can begin.

UPDATE: The Zimbabwean government is now saying that the cholera epidemic is still going on but claims that it is caused by a biological weapon attack orchestrated by the United States.

News & Politics, Politics

Newsflash: immigrants are good for us

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Today’s copy of The Star has an article rather naughtily entitled “Night market hides a foreign secret”. It’s about a market in Sungai Buloh New Village that is operated mainly by traders of Bangladeshi origin and caters mostly to other immigrants. Even though the reporters note that the traders sell pretty much the same things that you might expect to find in a typical Malaysian market and they manage to do it at a lower price than comparable Malaysian traders, the idea that it needs to be hidden implies that this is something wrong or shameful. The article even chose to highlight only comments from those locals who happen to know about the market that put it in a bad light, complaining about how the traders there have stolen business from them, how it has become a gathering place for Bangladeshis and how it’s illegal and protected by thugs.

As often is the case, the article showed up as a discussion thread on LYN, I was pleasantly surprised to read the rational and economically literate reactions from the posters there. One posted that the government should issue them with permits and that they should be allowed to operate as they wish so long as they obeyed the country’s laws and paid their taxes. Another noted that having the local council maintain them as illegal businesses simply meant that the police and other local authorities would be able to extract regular bribes from them. Yet another posted that at least these people were willing to work hard for their money instead of posting silly rants online.

So it seems that there are moderate Malaysians who recognize that this market isn’t only harmless but actually contributes to our national economy. Which makes it doubly sad that a national newspaper like The Star would choose to skip this higher and nobler road of educating the public that immigrants are ultimately a net good for us and instead pander to populist, economically illiterate and racist anti-immigrant sentiment.

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.

Games

Rockstar gives PC gamers the finger

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I’ve been waiting for the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV for a very, very long time now, but after reading everyone’s complaints about it, it’s looking more and more likely that I’ll be skipping it, at least until it gets a decent patch. Where to start with the litany of complaints?

How about the extremely lengthy and tedious installation process that requires you to sign up for and be logged into both Microsoft’s Windows Live network and Rockstar’s own Social Club network? If you’d bought this via Steam, you’d naturally need to be logged into that as well, though Steam won’t sell GTA4 to customers outside North America. If you’re a Vista 64 user, you’ll be upset to learn that you’ll have a hard time getting it to run due to a Windows Live incompatibility, despite the fact that according to Microsoft, compatibility with Vista 64 is a requirement for the Games for Windows label.

Next, if you actually manage to get the thing running but were hoping to play it using a gamepad, you’ll soon discover that the only gamepads that will work with it are the Xbox ones. PC-only gamepads, such as the ones manufactured by Saitek that I’ve been looking at buying, simply won’t work with the game.

Finally, the one that’s really big for me, is the realization that no current computer on Earth can run this game at max settings. Even IGN had performance issues running the game on a beefy system (Core 2 Quad 2.40 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX with Vista 32) after turning the settings down. I think my poor 512 MB 8800GT will choke on it. Yes, the game looks good, but not that good. As many others have observed, it’s likely that Rockstar didn’t put much effort into porting the game over and optimizing it for PCs. And if you have an ATI card instead, be warned that there has been massive complaints about graphical glitches that Rockstar has said it is aware of and are looking at finding solutions for.

Fortunately for us, the PC port of GTA4’s main competitor, Saint’s Row 2, is due out in January next year. While it’s not as technically impressive as GTA4, plenty of reviewers have named it as the better game. Unless Rockstar cleans up its act and fast, that’s what I’ll be spending my time and money on.

Games

Given up on the Americas

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Okay, I’ve officially given up on finishing the Americas campaign of the Kingdoms expansion for Medieval 2. Mainly because I’ve just discovered that as New Spain, you really have only one option when conquering a native city: exterminate them all. Sure, the game presents you with the additional options of either conquering the city (relatively) peacefully or looting it for all it’s worth, but if you actually choose any of those two options you’ll just end up with a huge city full of enraged native Americans that you’d need a full stack of troops to garrison just to keep the rioting under control.

Normally, having a large population should at least confer advantages in the form of a larger tax base, making a populous city a more valuable source of income. In this campaign, however, I haven’t been able to see any noticeable increase in revenue due to a larger population, which makes exterminating them all the only viable option. Since games are all about having multiple choices and options, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, a choice that is really no choice at all is a cardinal sin.

In my game, I’ve been mostly looting the cities I’ve captured, which has caused my offensive campaign to be bogged down by the need to allocate the majority of my troops to police duty. I could “cheat” by completely abandoning the cities to the rioters so that they rebel and then move back in with my troops to conquer them all over again, only this time choosing to kill everyone, but just thinking about playing that way just takes the wind out of my sails.

So I’m done with the Americas campaign. I might come back to the other campaigns in the expansion, but after this, it’s likely to be later rather than sooner. In the meantime, I have plenty of other games to play.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living