Right now Ben is speaking. He says he used to work 14/15-hour days, & was the main caregiver of his ill single mother while living in a one-room rental flat. Many of his colleagues were using & he began too.
Dec 11, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
We should be very careful about drawing conclusions from this MSF study. The so-called "penalty" may arise due to policies, stigma and other circumstances that make divorce difficult, expensive & stressful rather than divorce itself. msf.gov.sg/media-room/Pag…
e.g. housing, single biggest ticket economic item for most families. Rules which penalise divorced parents & cause housing instability (sometimes serious financial debt) will of course hurt children's social & economic fortunes. See @awarenews 2016 report: aware.org.sg/wp-content/upl…
Jul 12, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
The myth of Tharman. A thread.
I understand the allure of this myth. I've probably contributed to it myself.
Clever, has gravitas, well-informed. People who've worked with him rave about him. He's personable in the face of disagreement (rather sadly, that's more than you can say about some of his colleagues).
May 25, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
"No one is testing their migrant workers like SG is testing ours." Keep seeing this claim, presumably meant to indicate our unusually humane and generous standards; in reality revealing a very baffling failure to understand how comparatively awful the system is. Thread.
I get the impression that people saying this don't realise that in most countries, "migrant workers" don't live as a discrete population under state-enforced segregation, with state-approved and officially supported discrimination in almost all areas of life.
Mar 30, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Singapore claims to value families but there is ample evidence that not all families are created equal. If you look at transnational families, it is particularly clear that the value of the family ties are officially determined by socioeconomic class. A thread.
The wonky version: policy-focused 3-pager from 2018. I worked on this at @awarenewsaware.org.sg/wp-content/upl… tl;dr whether a spouse of a citizens gets to stay, access to work, support for healthcare & housing are all inflected by class. Richer & more educated --> more support.
Jan 10, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
While we should respect the grief of those with personal memories of Yong Pung How, it's worth pushing back against uncritical media celebration of his legacy. Like his lifelong buddy LKY, Yong was a deeply punitive authoritarian and the legal system he oversaw reflected that.
His famous hostility towards criminal appeals was not a good thing (especially when it seemed to come at expense of rule of law, e.g. attempting to exceed statutory maximum sentences). Appeals are an important mechanism against miscarriages of justice todayonline.com/singapore/yong…
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