Pornography

Pornography, as described by Wikipedia the un-scholarly paper, "is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer."

I feel that pornography is a very sensitive topic, and since it is able to cause both positive and negative impacts on the public, I find it very difficult to decide whether pornography is "entirely right" or "entirely wrong". Thus, I can only say that pornography is like a coin: it has both the rights and the wrongs, depending on the target that it is affecting.

Most people view pornography as a very delicate question of human psychology, in which it carefully skipped or lightly touched. However, a great percentage of the human population would view pornography as something bad, as firstly they feel that pornography is demeaning towards the female gender. This is due to the fact that a great portion of pornography "features" females, in different suggestive positions and strange sexual behaviours (e.g. bondage). Many people who objected pornography feel that by featuring females on porn magazines and other forms of visual entertainment, it gives the feeling that the female is being dominated and humiliated by the male, and consider it both as a sexist type of behaviour and (sometimes) also violence towards the females.

Also, most parents that opposed pornography give the reason that pornography distorted the true meaning of sex and love and when other people, especially teenager who are still developing both mentally and physically, will be greatly affected by pornography. This may result in cases such as the recent one, in which a 13-years old girl was pregnant after having sex with a boy of the same age. Pornography is especially disastrous to teenagers nowadays, who are literally unstable concoctions ready to explode at any time. This, when combined with pornography as the catalyst, would often result in teenagers practising premarital sex and other behaviours due to the fact that they are "curious". Thus, I feel that pornography is as dangerous a material as drug itself when the target audience is the teenagers, as they do not know the true dangers of pornography.

However, on the other hand, when the target audience of pornography became the more mature adults, it appears that pornography helps reduce rape cases, as it can be seen in Japan, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world.

Hence, I feel that pornography affects different people of different age differently, thus its level of harmful-ness also varies. Thus, I feel that the best way is simply teach teenagers about the bad effects of pornography, as they are the age group which is the most easily affected.

President’s Star Charity Show- is there a need for artistes to perform stunts to milk the public’s compassion for more generous donations?

As anyone in Singapore would know, somehow every year, there will be more than one charity show that asks people to donate money to the needy and all those, while an artiste will be doing some kind of dangerous stunt. Then while been crushed between two blocks of ice, or walking on shattered glass, or climbing a building, or walking the ropes, they will be saying something like, "the pain/hardship/feeling I am feeling now is nothing compared to the pain/hardship/feeling those people in need will be having, so please donate money for them to help them." sounds cliched doesn't it?
So now the main issue that comes up is: is there such a need for the artiste to perform this kind of stunts in order to receive more donations from the public? I feel it quite unnecessary for these types of dangerous actions.
As my parents had said after one night of debate, the artistes’ performance of all the dangerous stunts is a double negative issue. On one side, if the artistes were really in danger when they performed such stunts, they were playing with their own lives, and of course this kind of playing-with-your-own-life stunts should not be encouraged, so people should not donate more, since donating would mean the public wanted more of such stunts to be performed. On the other side, if the artistes were not in real danger, then by making them look as though they are in real danger would be considered as acting in order to gain the public's sympathy, and of course nobody would donate to these type of stunts as its "scamming". So in the end whether or not the artistes were in danger when performing the stunts, they were still in their wrong.
Also, to put it very simply and BLATANTLY, the audience no longer donates because they sympathize with the needy. Instead, they donate because the artistes are performing a show for them to see. So in the end the whole point of donation became “paying to watch a performance” instead, and this completely changed the purpose of the Charity Show, which is to make the audience donate BY making them sympathize with the NEEDY, not the ARTISTES.
To begin off, why would the artistes do such dangerous stunts? to milk the audience's sympathy. why would they milk the audience's sympathy? to get more donations. why get more donations? because the donation is not enough. why not enough? because the public does not want to donate. why does the public not want to donate? because they were afraid that the money they donated would be used for some other purposes that has nothing to do with the purpose of the donations. Ahah, here is the main problem that came up!
Then comes the issue of transparency. Ever since the issue brought up with NKF, where the donations were used for other purposes apart from helping the needy, a lot of people in Singapore became suspicious of where their donations would go to. This often results in people not wanting to donate to any organisation in case the money went to the wrong place and resulted in "massive wastage" of the people sympathy. If different organisations would like the public to donate, they should make it clear what the money is used for, or even make a report once per year on how the donations have helped the needy in various ways. This improves the transparency of the whole donation issue, as when the public knows that the money is indeed used to help the people it is intended to help, they would surely donate more.

Regulation of political commentary on the Internet in Singapore

There has indeed many issues brought up on the matter of freedom of speech in Singapore. Singapore’s government had strict guidelines for the discussion of such matters. Sensitive topics about politics could land the person right into a fine or sometimes direct prison admission. Such examples could be seen from websites such as talkingcock.com, Mr Brown Shows, where many political issues were brought up often in a satirical manner. Although Singapore’s government does allow comments on Singapore’s politics to be published online, such as in blogs and websites, or even made into videos, they were strictly controlled, especially during the election period, in which such ways of “expressing” yourself is BANNED.
I feel that the main reason behind the strict control of such political podcasts is that the Internet is a very powerful tool that can be used to spread a lot of information around rapidly. Even if the information is only partially true or even stories that were spun up, the Internet can make thousands of people see these “tales”, and people tends to believe what the Internet says, as they feel that “if it is wrong, why would it still exist?” This could often lead to chaos as it is nearly impossible to completely get rid of the stories, and even by succeeding in doing so would often lead to more stories being written.
{
X: eh, you know why that blog was being banned anot?
Y: huh? why hah?
X: cuz what it says is true what! Otherwise why the government wan ban it for? of course is they guilty then go remove lo!
Y: eh possible leh! I go tell my friends.
}
Such simple dialogs can create another brand new story, which is worse if either X or Y post it onto his/her blog, then the story will spread…
Also, there’s the issue of “edit and pass”, in which what one passed to another, may not be completely “copied and pasted” from the source, as everyone knows if a simple sentence if passed from one person to another, the end “product” will often be completely different from the beginning sentence. For example:
{
A: I have a pen.
B: I have a pen.
.
.
.
Z: ‘I’ has a pen.
}
The above example is when somebody in the row understood the “I have a pen” wrongly and took it as the person ‘I’ has a pen and passed it down. So the simplest result would be someone saying someone else has a pen when the original sentence is “I have a pen”. Just imagine somebody passing around chunks of rumour around and the whole thing just “screwed up” to give something even more “rumourous”, which maybe went back to the person who passed the rumour, who took it as a new rumour and passed it on, only turning it into even newer rumours. GET CONFUSED MUAHAHAH.
However, I feel that the government should not be that strict on such issues. The most basic saying is if you have done nothing wrong, why fear about anything at all? All the government has to do is to be “nice and sweet” to its people and tada, nobody complains.
That of course only happens in a Utopian society, every government has its rights and wrongs. Even so, the government should take these bunch of “mixed up crap” as suggestions for improvements and criticizes from the public could help the government to be a better one. If the citizens are not satisfied with a certain political plan, most of them will leave a commentary to criticize it. Thus, the leaders can find out what is wrong with the plan and try to improve it. In fact, most people will choose to tell their actual thought on the Internet since they feel safer in the virtual world, until they realised that their IP address could be checked that is…
Hence, I feel that political podcasts should not really be restricted so tightly, since this is a good way for the government to learn about any flaws in their plans or any “mistakes” made in which the public is not happy with.