Feeding the Brain

 

If I have achieved anything in the last year, it was to lose weight. As my child often says, “I’m fat but I used to be super fat.” One of my great vanities these days is being able to pose without my top and I do it because I no longer look like I’m spilling out of whatever I happened to be wearing.

Losing weight has been miraculous for my wellbeing. My blood pressure has gone from scaring an SAF medical officer to being healthy and as the kilos have come off, I’ve found myself having energy to that bit more during the day.

There was and is no great secret to doing this. I started moving more (which meant more calories being used and not stored) and I started eating better and more regularly (no more night snacks). Alcohol was greatly reduced too.

One of the lessons from this weight loss journey is the fact diet and exercise have to work together. Unfortunately, diet is probably a more important factor. The human body was designed to survive depravations rather than excess – thus making it very good at storing stuff and very efficient using very little energy to do a lot. My dad summed it up – “A can of coke is three hours of tennis – easier to cut out the coke or playing more tennis?”

 

My nightly walks burn out my daily Kopi

I bring up the topic of my weight loss journey because it relates to a point of recent events in the government’s management of what it feeds the minds of the population with things like the efforts to reign in the online media with thins like the law suit against Online Citizen editor, Mr. Terry Xu and the introduction of the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Bill (FICB).

Think of this as the government’s efforts to keep the national brain in working order. Contrary to what the nerds might tell you, the brain is like the rest of the body. It needs plenty of exercise and it needs to be nurtured with a good diet. Unfortunately, the powers that be in Singapore don’t seem to like doing either when it comes to dealing with the brains of the local population, which is a shame, especially when we make a song and dance about how our only resource is the human variety.

In my previous postings, I’ve held up the government mollycoddling of scholars as an example of how brains are wasted. We send our best brains to be trained by the best institutions in the world and then waste those brains by putting them in positions where they will never have to face an actual challenge. In “physical training” terms, this is like building up the strongest bodies we have in the best gyms available and then getting those strong bodies to lie in on feather bed to feast on ice cream for the next decade or so. This what you could call the “exercise” part of our brain management.

Unfortunately, we don’t just fail in the “exercise” department of brain management. We also fail in the “diet” part. Think of what we try to feed the brains of our general population and it can be very frustrating.

Singapore’s mainstream media is famously shackled through laws requiring editors to be “responsible” in what they publish. One only has to think of the number of former editors who have made their name publishing books talking about the minefield that is editing in Singapore.

Then, the “alternative” media came into being and suddenly people stopped getting their news from the “responsible” press. Think of the former monopoly that used to print money and then needed to be spun off to the government when it lost the said license.

So, how has the government reacted? The old-fashioned way with law suits against editors (who, unlike the publishers of large daily papers, lack financial resources) and laws like “The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation” (POFOMA) and more recently FICBA.

Whilst no one denies that there needs to be some regulation against, say online manipulation, there’s always a clause. In the case of POFOMA, it’s a question of who decides what constitutes a falsehood, which in the case of Singapore, it’s a minister (we tend to work on the assumption that ministers are always impartial judges of the facts) and in the case of FICBA, there is a question of what constitutes “interference.” Would, I, as an independent blogger be guilty of violating FICBA if I received a few dollars from a Singaporean living in Australian, for example.

Why is there a need to cripple independent voices? Sure, we don’t want a scenario like the USA where certain media houses had a license to politicise public health (think of the media hosts who railed against common sense like vaccinations and mask). However, the other extreme isn’t healthy either.

Perhaps the UK might be a better model, where the press is for the most part free but subject to rules set by a regulator (in the case of the UK OFCOM). Hence, you have a situation where genuine opinions based, particularly the ones based on facts get expressed without fear of political consequences but at the same time you have someone who stops the media from indulging in potential falsehoods. Whilst not perfect, this is healthier scenario than either extreme.