The Tao of Toilet Paper
Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Now that I have your attention with that rather silly subject line... I've been reading some journalism comparing the responses of different political systems to the COVID-19 global crisis, and so adducing the superiority of one system to another. Much of this journalism strikes me as lacking in facts, context, and nuance. It reads much more like instant ideology rather than patient analysis. It caricatures complex ways of life to score cheap points. It is the chattering class's equivalent of street-level xenophobia. We can't tell from this pandemic which political system is better for three reasons: 1. The crisis is not over yet. The results are not in. 2. Even when the crisis is over, the results will be evaluated according to different sets of social values. The raw numbers of infections and deaths, though tragic, are only a part of the picture. What have we gained or lost by m...