The Nine Days is a socialservice.sg podcast covering the 2020 general election in Singapore (#GE2020), through daily five-minute news summaries, conversations with young voters, and interviews with academics and experts.
Tag: Politics
MOM versus SDP on PMET retrenchments: Using statistics to make arguments, “with less heat and more light”
Shannon Ang, a sociology graduate student at the University of Michigan, penned a case study on the number of PMET (professionals, managers, executives, and technicians) retrenchments in Singapore, which was at the centre of the legal case between the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP). Ang’s piece is not focused on the court’s decision or on taking sides, but is instead premised upon the better use of statistics to make arguments.
Conversations / forums / panel discussions / seminars / talks / workshops (on socio-politics) are overdue for a disruption
Discursive events on socio-politics in Singapore are often well-intentioned – to increase civic engagement and awareness of issues – yet given their proliferation the quality and value of these events cannot be taken for granted. As someone who has organised and has been involved in these endeavours (and been critical of dialogues and forums and large-scale seminars), highlighting these seven opportunities for disruption stems from the desire to challenge ourselves and the sector to do even better.
“Reluctant Editor”: More answers, but even more questions
Whereas Cheong Yip Seng’s “OB Markers: My Straits Times Story” was a more extensive account of “The Straits Times” (ST) – from the perspective of its former editor-in-chief – P. N. Balji offers a more succinct account of his stints as chief editor of “The New Paper” (TNP) and “TODAY”. His interesting editorial, journalistic, and political nuggets which shed light on the five different newspaper newsrooms of which he was a part were made even more readable by the fact that “Reluctant Editor” is explicitly not a self-aggrandising memoir.
“Singapore, Disrupted”: All the questions, but not the answers
Although “Singapore, Disrupted” (2018) by political columnist and ST Opinion editor Chua Mui Hoong – a collection of her essays and published articles – offers an interesting primer of the ostensibly most pressing socio-political issues in Singapore, its effectiveness as a call to action on these issues is less clear. By drawing primarily upon past pieces, even with the fresh inclusion of four introductions to each of the four parts of the book, a vision of or roadmap to the future appears absent. Moreover, the book’s most substantive part on the class divide is not necessarily followed by equally insightful parts on disruption, on politics in Singapore, as well as on founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, and their family.
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