Logical Fallacy

DPM Wong Kan Seng believes that the residents in the Bishan-Toa Payoh area will still support PAP. He believes since the residents do not comment on his shortcomings, like the case of Mas Selamat, and also the incident where a father got past ICA with his son's passport to be stopped only in America where they rejected the passport(when he was Home Affairs Minister). The most major case was the Mas Selamat case, where he even managed to get pass the causeway and escape to Malaysia, this showed a major flaw in his governing of home affairs and security. This is a major logical fallacy, DPM Wong has commited the flaw of "Burden Of Proof" He states that since nobody raises the incident, it must be ok. To a greater extent, he even said that Mr Chiam See Tong only asked one question about the Mas Selamat incident. Mr Chiam replied: "The one question I asked, which is whether heads will roll over the issues with Mas Selamat, still has not been answered. Personally, I feel that the only head rolling will be that of the escaped terrorist: Mas Selamat.

Can students be given the autonomy to develop their own curriculum?

My answer is no. There are several reasons as to why I disagree with this, primarily because of the limitation of resources and also due to a lack of dicipline.

Firstly, there will be a severe lack of teaching staff and resources. If students were given the freedom of choice, then lessons become a popularity contest. While the easier or more favored subjects may be overwhelmed with students, the harder or unpopular subjects may be left without participants, leading to teachers having to wait for students to join their classes. Also, the students will then be able to practise favouritism towards teachers. Thus, such a system would cause needless wasting of resources and teaching staff. This, coupled with a lack of dicipline will lower the standards of the school.

Secondly, the lack of dicipline such a system would cause may eventually lead to students lacking basic skills simply because the classes that teach these skills are too hard, leading to students not choosing these subjects, thus making this system detrimental to the students well being.

Therefore, I believe that the students would not benifit from autonomy and thus do not support it

Arguementative essay

Why care about other countries far away from us?

An earthquake occurs in Japan. This leads to a nuclear incident that may leak radioactive waste, polluting food and water sources, affecting our world's food and water.

The sheer magnitude of events in other countries is undeniable. From economic recessions to air pollution, time and time again the world proves the flaw in globalisation: No country can stand alone. It is precisely because of this that it is of utmost importance that we care about foreign countries.

Some may argue against being concern about foreign situations; there are three main reasons for this:

• Their economy is strong, surviving economic recessions is not a problem.
• They are in a large country, the sheer land mass and people will survive even if isolated from the world.
• Incidents like nuclear accidents will not affect them significantly.

In actual fact, these views are very much nieve, and survivability of countries depend on the rest of the world. A good example would be the 2008 sub-prime crisis, countless established banks all over the world closed down. This is because the U.S. is a large country and its actions affect the rest of the world. Its a known fact that economic situations affect other countries. For example, the E.U. was badly affected because of Greece's sudden economic collapse. Currency value is basically your money versus the money of other countries. With bonds of companies being sold all over the world, we will all go down together. The effects of globalisation has made the boundaries between sucess and disaster spread well beyond the borders of one's country.

Regardless of how large your country is, or how rich it is, survivability is very much dependent on other countries. In the modern world like ours, to isolate oneself in hopes of preventing the problems caused by globalisation will only lead to a backward civilisation that heavilly lacks in resourcesother that its own. In our globalised world new technology is constantly being shared around the world and, what is produced in one country is needed in the other; That is how countries like Singapore make profit. Thus, it is impossible to be on par with the rest of the world when it comes to isolation.

Finally, nuclear incidents and pollution cases do affect the rest of the world. Looking at the Chernobyl incident, we can see how a nuclear power point can cause the nuclear remnants to pollute the world. Even nuclear detectors in America also detected the radioactive presence. Using a more local example, when Indonesia burns their trees, Malaysia and Singapore get the haze. This shows how the world is affected by foreign disasters, which brings me to the point that in disasters such as Japan's current quake/tsunami/nuclear crisis, all the countries stand by, ready to help.

Even so, there is only this much we can do to care about the welfare of other countries. Whether our effort is of use or wasted, ultimately still depends on the country itself. The Myanmar cyclone, for example, shows how the government is reluctant to accept foreign help, thus wasting our care and concern for the victims.