i love the names for these colors. very evocative of singapore landmarks that i didn't previously realize were that strongly associated with a color. "Monsoon Grey" did get a laugh from me - i used to joke that there are basically 2 seasons in SG - wet and wetter.
the scrollytelling is also a work of art. the rescrambling towards a neighborhood palette was a wow moment for me. i feel like online data journalism is its own art form that deserves a museum.
After visiting both Malaysia and Singapore recently, I feel like many villages in Malaysia are significantly more colourful than Singapore. Building and roof colours they use are not something you would see in my part of the US
Malaysian here. Yeah some of the historical sites in Penang or Melaka come to mind. I think the Peranakan [1] culture is one of the most obvious examples in using colors and is widespread to the region, not just in Singapore.
I think one thing Singapore does that is fairly unusual is paint the HDBs a wide variety of colours. For context, Singapore builds a lot of high-rise housing and sells it to locals with huge subsidies. About three quarters of locals live in these types of buildings.
The strangest thing; I found this one interesting comment in this thread with a large subtree of comments that was somehow so downvoted that it became hidden:
Good concept, improper expression. It may be interesting to relate the visually bright aspect of Singapore to the perception of unnatural, stressful, unconvincing feeling it may give, as «if the feeling of being on antidepressants was a city» (as per the poster), but the note expressed as it was seems too disconnected from the submission.
"Barcelona, the skyline": "Organized in view of proper flow" vs "Makes you forget the traffic" vs "Ah yea but the traffic".
Discussions about "life in Singapore" can be, I concour, very interesting (some of us have this dream of the champion city) - just not anywhere and anyway. So, it is normal that some people will go "what is this here" on an imperfect post. I don't see why you call it t«he strangest thing» and what is there to «wonder».
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons but Singapore constructed to be a nationalistic/patriotic country. Children are made to sing the National anthem and recite the National pledge every morning in school, sent to participate in the National Parade at least once in their lives, constantly reminded of the fragility of the Nation from foreign influences (Total Defence), all males are conscripted into what is called National Service for a period of two years. Coupled with the lack of civil and political liberties, resulting in the infantilization of the citizens, even justified criticism of the country is often considered as an attack on the country and/or their identity. The conflation of the state with the government with the one-party authoritarian system makes that even worse. [0]
> Coupled with the lack of civil and political liberties, resulting in the infantilization of the citizens, even justified criticism of the country is often considered as an attack on the country and/or their identity.
When you write things like this, you sound like you are saying something along the lines of “stupid [Singaporeans], they are too brainwashed to understand why I’m right!”.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason why so many Singaporeans disagree with your “justified criticism” is that they actually do understand what their country is like and they want it that way?
Don't think it has worked though. People in generally don't seem to give a shit. Everyone is worried about day to day stuff - the price and availability of housing (getting kind of stupid now), inflation, job security, trouble with neighbors, ... etc.
Personally, the only good thing about Singapore is its relatively good governance - which covers a lot but it's not perfect; e.g. housing.
For me, remove that and its just an island in the Pacific.
If I'm supposed to be feeling some sort of patriotic zeal, it hasn't happened yet. But maybe that's because I'm a bitter old man living in a rented one room flat who is now really feeling the apparent temperature of 32C at 09:45pm.
A lot of good architecture there but I found Singapore the most existentially-horrifying place I've ever been. It's like if the feeling of being on antidepressants was a city.
I live in Singapore and haven't found this at all. My only real complaints are (a) it's hot, and (b) it's a small, dense, urban environment with too many cars, it often feels quite suffocating.
There is a third issue (freedom-of-speech), but I figure as a foreigner it's not my place to complain about that.
Compared to where? Singapore is probably the best example of ubiquitous public transport on earth. Owning a car in SG is more a flaunt than sensible decision from a financial or health point of view.
> There is a third issue (freedom-of-speech)
As an ang moh can relate but what exactly is stifling you from speaking your mind? Here we are talking about it. The young are rising up in the country and it's great to see, there's been windbacks on laws against gays along with other pretty stark sentiment changes in the population, there's a real fear in the ruling party about being the first to lose government and they are quick to bend to the whims of the populace.
The main outlet for an everyday person is online and here we are. No one is stopping you, no one is certainly stopping r/singaporeraw
> small, dense, urban environment
Borneo, one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth is an hour away on a plane. There's untamed jungle trails an hour across the border if you care to walk them.
Same. When I hear things like that I don’t see how it relates to Singapore at all. Maybe if you’re a tourist here for a few days and never leave the city centre, or if you’ve never visited and just read that Disneyland article that is mentioned every time Singapore comes up on Hacker News. I spent yesterday wandering around nature, saw a giant atlas moth, some snakes, and some crocodiles. The very opposite of “existentially-horrifying”.
I looked into living there almost a decade ago (doing remote work, software work is still not valued highly locally, afaik) but after a few visits and talking to tech people there I realized I probably wouldn't enjoy living there.
I think Singapore is the number one indication that the corruption indices are bogus.
Freedom of speech is obviously an issue in Singapore, and I think the government using legislation to “fact-check” the media is quite troubling, but…
I really don’t think Singapore is very corrupt. I’ve lived and worked there, and every interaction I’ve ever had with the government reinforced my perception that they would always deal with me fairly. I trust them more in that sense than I have trusted the governments in western countries that I’ve lived in (many of which have recently started to abandon the free-speech advantage they’ve previously held over places like Singapore).
Having lived and worked in a number of Asian countries, Singapore remains as one of the countries with very low levels of corruption.
I work for a FAANG in Singapore. The above statement about remote work and software work being not valued are not based on facts/reality. My manager is the least bothered if I come to work or WFH, as long as I delver results/work assigned.
Singapore isn't really corrupt, it's just that the rich are allowed to play and everyone else is allowed to suffer.
Hyperbole aside, I actually really enjoy my life here. It's just really expensive (that's the "rich are allowed to play" bit). People are very friendly and down to earth which is something I don't usually experience in the other big, dense cities I've visited (San fran, LA, NYC, DC, Paris, etc).
It's a sad state of affairs when even the corruption indexes have fallen prey to corruption. But then again, what financial center around the world isn't corrupt? Where money congregates, corruption is the rule.
It’s probably important to note that all public housing in Singapore, where ~80% of Singaporeans live, have two cameras in each lift and a couple others pointing at the entry points to the lift and staircases, all connected to the police department, “for their safety” of course.
I can leave my iPhone on the table in a food center to “chope a spot”
Not yet seen the drawbacks of the cameras - certainly prefer the situation to SF where leaving your bluetooth enabled notebook in a car trunk is “asking for it”
I can leave my door unlocked, my parcel can be dropped off at my porch without porch bandits (lol) and car theft is non existent.
One can jog at 2am in any park at night wearing an expensive phone and earbuds and feel perfectly safe.
There’s no active shooter drills in schools, no need to clutch your handbag for it to not be snatched away by an errant bike, no drug zombies inhabiting specific areas of town. We go have dinner in the red lights district because food is great there and can leave the car unlocked.
There is no “no-go” zones or ghettos. No harassment on the subway apart from the occasional phone creep who invariably gets arrested.
So pray please, why is safety in quotation marks? Singapore absolutely delivers value for the tradeoff of cameras in practical, real world fashion and people absolutely understand that - so selling them abstract concepts like “real western freedom” falls short because they see the tradeoffs in every other country when they travel.
My son lost it at 7 years of age when we went to London and he experienced the authentic subway with belligerent drunks, homeless sleeping on the ground and shouting sports fans accosting a woman all in one ride - all things he’d never seen before.
Rich Americans pay for this “freedom” by their gated communities, Lake Tahoe retreats and corporate modes of transportation. In Singapore, every resident gets it.
Having lived here for a while, it stuns me how reflexive and ideological the conversation is about these tradeoffs and how misguided people’s perceptions are.
Most think Singapore is a Capitalist wonderland, not seeing the housing market is centrally run, the majority of locals working for the government in one form or another (GIC/Temasek Crown Companies/PSD)
Singapore defies western ideological expectations, it’s not neatly divided into left and right, capitalist vs socialist, western vs eastern societies, it’s 35% immigrants, 4 major races and religions, it controls racial composition of housing blocks and the nuance required to understand the country and the outcomes it produces, for better or worse is lost in the desperate attempts to make it fit into those narrow definitions.
It’s not a paradise, it’s not an utopia, there’s crime, there’s scams, there’s human vice, it’s election districts are more like Alberta or Bavaria or Texas but it does have safety and safe housing for every resident in a way no other country has and without the immediate tradeoffs western narratives are so hard on. Sure heroin trafficking gets you killed, but on the backdrop of the Opium wars or the US drug crisis, their strategy, whether killing or not is key to that, actually works in measurable outcomes for everyone. It’s been, well forever, since an addict stole a thing from me - a regular occurrence in SF id you visit into a few times a year. It’s western perspectives that try to “frame that” - it’s clear this strategy isn’t gonna work for the US.
But that doesn’t stop either side of the western debate from framing Singapore within their ideology, a kind of constant colonial mansplaining you get here - condescending explanations and quotation marks aiming to reassure Western audiences that their societies tradeoffs are the right ones.
Questions not asked by the very people who should:
- “Why don’t the cameras work in London?”
- “Why does gun control work for every developed country but the US?”
- “How did these guys pull of country level SSO that works”
- “How were they able to switch to remote work and learning without as much as a hitch”
- and my favorite.. “how do they manage world class public service, transportation and a government employing half a million people more or less directly with a progressive tax rate where most people pay lower single digit percent and the top end is not even 25%”)
all deserve to be examined holistically for the nuanced, multi-layered background of those policies executed by what I would consider the worlds most professional public service.
But especially for former colonial powers, this is really really tough and so escapism in form of slogans like “authoritarian” and “it’s just a city” are paraded 59 avoid them.
Reading the western coverage always reads like Singapore’s mere existence and choices are an affront to the the west because they point out that ideology had limits.
But Singapore doesn’t exist to prove hard on drug crusaders or believers in technocracy or authoritarian government right - it exists purely out of its own right and the sheer will of Lee Kwan Yew to think outside the box, to not accept prevailing narratives and choose the right solutions for the unique location and situation rather than the east ones.
I happen to agree with many of your points, but I do agree with the points of your critics as well. Perhaps a way to reconcile these views is by means of an analogy, one that involves asymptotic analysis.
So suppose we have a mode of governance that is in opposition to western principles, let's call it f(n). Then through the perspective of your critics, they are focused on the worse case analysis, and going on about how the big-O of f(n) is bad. You can think of this as them making the case that if you take a mode of governance that violates western principles to its logical conclusion, it can only be <insert reason why it's bad>. I do not think they are wrong in that regard.
However, having a mode of governance that is in opposition to western principles doesn't mean that the worse case would (always) materialize. Think of it like quicksort, which in its worse case, is O(n^2). In practice however, we're more likely to get the average case, which is theta(nlogn). In this regard, you (and I) are looking at the average case of f(n), which happens to match the governance of Singapore more accurately.
Ultimately, anyone who has learnt about asymptotic analysis should know that it's a theoretical framework that aims to provide a qualitative assessment of the runtime of an algorithm. While it's useful, there are various factors in real life that could contribute to an end result that contradicts that assessment (processor speed, parallelism, being cache-oblivious etc). The dispute between the critics and their opponents is analogous to that, with critics who have never been to Singapore viewing the country as an authoritarian state (theoretical worse case analysis), while those who live there would struggle to reconcile their views (average case analysis) with that of their critics.
I hope this semi-shitty analogy does put things in perspective for various readers who are trying to make sense of the opposition between these two camps.
The short answer is: there is much more to life than safety. For example, your son will likely be the safest if you simply lock him up in the bedroom for his entire life - but that’s not a life worth living.
1) The surveillance is excessive and unnecessary in a country with extremely low crime rate.
2) Such intrusive and widespread surveillance is very problematic in an authoritarian state with a history of persecuting dissidents
3) Public funds spent on unnecessary projects means less for tackling issues such as high inequality
It might not be apparent to one, depending on the area they live in, the wealthier areas receive much less surveillance than the public housing areas. Privately developed property do not have police surveillance in their lifts or estates and have less surveillance in the general area (eg. bus stops). Vice versa, the number of surveillance cameras is much higher in the low income public rental/housing areas. There is a lot of discussion on inequality in the US but Singapore has even higher inequality/Gini coefficient. There is much more than what meets the eye, especially in a state characterized by scholars as “sophisticated authoritarianism”. [0]
I am going to use this phrase whenever someone from a Western country tries to tell me why Singapore is a 'dystopian totalitarian authoritarian shithole police state'.
Some of these posts (both here, and on Reddit) read like they took a thesaurus and looked for all the words that end with '-ian' or '-itarian'.
> London ... the authentic subway with belligerent drunks, homeless sleeping on the ground and shouting sports fans accosting a woman all in one ride
Interesting that the Economist Intelligence Unit, as I posted nearby, ranked Singapore and London as neighbouring for what regards personal safety.
Some people in HN have described native Singaporeans as remarkably warm-blooded (similarly to your sentence above, though apparently without effect): would you concour with that view?
It is also 'probably important to note' that Singapore is the safest 700 km² on this planet. One is ridiculously unlikely to get robbed, raped, catcalled at, threatened with a gun or other weapon, step on used hypodermic needles, or encounter a variety of unsavoury activities that one would otherwise see in pretty much every other world city (except maybe Tokyo and Seoul—see a pattern?).
It's also not like these cameras are pointing into private dwellings—this is illegal.
Update: There are a number of comments with the equivalent of “name me a safer country”. It is undeniable that Singapore is one of the safest country in the world. The issue here is there needs to be a balance between safety and other aspects that constitutes a good life. You’re most likely the safest if you lock yourself at home your entire life - but that’s no way to live. Such surveillance is unnecessary/excessive (Singapore has had an extremely low crime rate) and intrusive. It infringes on one’s civil and political liberties (not that the law affords Singaporeans much), which are necessary to a good life. [0]
My comment is a reminder that underneath all that color, is an oppressive one-party authoritarian (police?) state.
What a bizarre comment again. Police State? What are you smoking?
Do yourself a favor and check when the last person was choked to death, beaten to death by police over here, how many police shootings we have per capita, how many people have their property taken by police at traffic stops, what our imprisoned population ratio is, and how many policemen and three letter agencies we have to oppress us.
Find us instances where our President or Prime Minister openly fabulate about shooting protesters, cheers about kids with assault rifles doing it for him?
Continue to research if police in Singapore can claim qualified immunity, whether we have a thin blue line here, whether minorities have to fear police in Singapore. Please go on, educate us how we are oppressed and cannot have a good life as a result.
Tell us how the police in Singapore is feared by a large percentage of the population because skin color means potentially getting shot through the windshield. Maybe find some cases of systemic police violence that have gone unpunished in our country? (Did you know public servants, including police get their punishment doubled on conviction because, shockingly, they are held to a higher standard here rather than receiving immunity and protection).
By all means, educate us on the last time a Singapore SWAT team accidentally shot someone in their bed, or in fact a single case of successful murder by Police/Swatting here. Or the last time police leadership covered up for a serial killer or rapist in uniform, we are burning to hear your insights into that.
We actually, by a large margin, like our police force here. Many of them are kids doing their national service.
Oh I get it, these things are not oppression, the Economist has a statistic somewhere that they are the price of freedom.
What is it with people who feel compelled to post “just reminders” that Singapore is definitely not a pure western democracy like Texas or Alberta or Bavaria who have true one party rule on the same population scale on random threads about … checks … the color palette of Singapore?
Is it fragility? The inability to accept that there are places in the world that are comparatively thriving compared to the West?
This one list is odd, because Singapore ranks in the top five for other measures related to security, but is ranked in the second of four quadrants for personal security, "second" to cities with presumably very different policies.
Readit News
the scrollytelling is also a work of art. the rescrambling towards a neighborhood palette was a wow moment for me. i feel like online data journalism is its own art form that deserves a museum.
I would call it already quite colourful from the aerial view.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peranakans
https://www.timeout.com/singapore/things-to-do/the-most-inst...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37356809
I wonder what caused that.
"Barcelona, the skyline": "Organized in view of proper flow" vs "Makes you forget the traffic" vs "Ah yea but the traffic".
Discussions about "life in Singapore" can be, I concour, very interesting (some of us have this dream of the champion city) - just not anywhere and anyway. So, it is normal that some people will go "what is this here" on an imperfect post. I don't see why you call it t«he strangest thing» and what is there to «wonder».
Update: downvoter explain yourself.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/politi...
When you write things like this, you sound like you are saying something along the lines of “stupid [Singaporeans], they are too brainwashed to understand why I’m right!”.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason why so many Singaporeans disagree with your “justified criticism” is that they actually do understand what their country is like and they want it that way?
Personally, the only good thing about Singapore is its relatively good governance - which covers a lot but it's not perfect; e.g. housing.
For me, remove that and its just an island in the Pacific.
If I'm supposed to be feeling some sort of patriotic zeal, it hasn't happened yet. But maybe that's because I'm a bitter old man living in a rented one room flat who is now really feeling the apparent temperature of 32C at 09:45pm.
but I doubt that post got primarily downvoted by nationalists :)
It's nice if youre there for a week on vacation or on are an executive on an expat package but theres a rot underneath.
HN is far more censored and moderated than it appears.
There is a third issue (freedom-of-speech), but I figure as a foreigner it's not my place to complain about that.
Compared to where? Singapore is probably the best example of ubiquitous public transport on earth. Owning a car in SG is more a flaunt than sensible decision from a financial or health point of view.
> There is a third issue (freedom-of-speech)
As an ang moh can relate but what exactly is stifling you from speaking your mind? Here we are talking about it. The young are rising up in the country and it's great to see, there's been windbacks on laws against gays along with other pretty stark sentiment changes in the population, there's a real fear in the ruling party about being the first to lose government and they are quick to bend to the whims of the populace.
The main outlet for an everyday person is online and here we are. No one is stopping you, no one is certainly stopping r/singaporeraw
> small, dense, urban environment
Borneo, one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth is an hour away on a plane. There's untamed jungle trails an hour across the border if you care to walk them.
> it's hot
For the first few months, then you adapt.
As someone who's lived here for more than 20 years, I really don't know what you mean.
I think Singapore is the number one indication that the corruption indices are bogus.
I really don’t think Singapore is very corrupt. I’ve lived and worked there, and every interaction I’ve ever had with the government reinforced my perception that they would always deal with me fairly. I trust them more in that sense than I have trusted the governments in western countries that I’ve lived in (many of which have recently started to abandon the free-speech advantage they’ve previously held over places like Singapore).
I work for a FAANG in Singapore. The above statement about remote work and software work being not valued are not based on facts/reality. My manager is the least bothered if I come to work or WFH, as long as I delver results/work assigned.
Hyperbole aside, I actually really enjoy my life here. It's just really expensive (that's the "rich are allowed to play" bit). People are very friendly and down to earth which is something I don't usually experience in the other big, dense cities I've visited (San fran, LA, NYC, DC, Paris, etc).
Not yet seen the drawbacks of the cameras - certainly prefer the situation to SF where leaving your bluetooth enabled notebook in a car trunk is “asking for it”
I can leave my door unlocked, my parcel can be dropped off at my porch without porch bandits (lol) and car theft is non existent.
One can jog at 2am in any park at night wearing an expensive phone and earbuds and feel perfectly safe.
There’s no active shooter drills in schools, no need to clutch your handbag for it to not be snatched away by an errant bike, no drug zombies inhabiting specific areas of town. We go have dinner in the red lights district because food is great there and can leave the car unlocked.
There is no “no-go” zones or ghettos. No harassment on the subway apart from the occasional phone creep who invariably gets arrested.
So pray please, why is safety in quotation marks? Singapore absolutely delivers value for the tradeoff of cameras in practical, real world fashion and people absolutely understand that - so selling them abstract concepts like “real western freedom” falls short because they see the tradeoffs in every other country when they travel.
My son lost it at 7 years of age when we went to London and he experienced the authentic subway with belligerent drunks, homeless sleeping on the ground and shouting sports fans accosting a woman all in one ride - all things he’d never seen before.
Rich Americans pay for this “freedom” by their gated communities, Lake Tahoe retreats and corporate modes of transportation. In Singapore, every resident gets it.
Having lived here for a while, it stuns me how reflexive and ideological the conversation is about these tradeoffs and how misguided people’s perceptions are.
Most think Singapore is a Capitalist wonderland, not seeing the housing market is centrally run, the majority of locals working for the government in one form or another (GIC/Temasek Crown Companies/PSD)
Singapore defies western ideological expectations, it’s not neatly divided into left and right, capitalist vs socialist, western vs eastern societies, it’s 35% immigrants, 4 major races and religions, it controls racial composition of housing blocks and the nuance required to understand the country and the outcomes it produces, for better or worse is lost in the desperate attempts to make it fit into those narrow definitions.
It’s not a paradise, it’s not an utopia, there’s crime, there’s scams, there’s human vice, it’s election districts are more like Alberta or Bavaria or Texas but it does have safety and safe housing for every resident in a way no other country has and without the immediate tradeoffs western narratives are so hard on. Sure heroin trafficking gets you killed, but on the backdrop of the Opium wars or the US drug crisis, their strategy, whether killing or not is key to that, actually works in measurable outcomes for everyone. It’s been, well forever, since an addict stole a thing from me - a regular occurrence in SF id you visit into a few times a year. It’s western perspectives that try to “frame that” - it’s clear this strategy isn’t gonna work for the US.
But that doesn’t stop either side of the western debate from framing Singapore within their ideology, a kind of constant colonial mansplaining you get here - condescending explanations and quotation marks aiming to reassure Western audiences that their societies tradeoffs are the right ones.
Questions not asked by the very people who should:
- “Why don’t the cameras work in London?”
- “Why does gun control work for every developed country but the US?”
- “How did these guys pull of country level SSO that works”
- “How were they able to switch to remote work and learning without as much as a hitch”
- and my favorite.. “how do they manage world class public service, transportation and a government employing half a million people more or less directly with a progressive tax rate where most people pay lower single digit percent and the top end is not even 25%”)
all deserve to be examined holistically for the nuanced, multi-layered background of those policies executed by what I would consider the worlds most professional public service.
But especially for former colonial powers, this is really really tough and so escapism in form of slogans like “authoritarian” and “it’s just a city” are paraded 59 avoid them.
Reading the western coverage always reads like Singapore’s mere existence and choices are an affront to the the west because they point out that ideology had limits.
But Singapore doesn’t exist to prove hard on drug crusaders or believers in technocracy or authoritarian government right - it exists purely out of its own right and the sheer will of Lee Kwan Yew to think outside the box, to not accept prevailing narratives and choose the right solutions for the unique location and situation rather than the east ones.
So suppose we have a mode of governance that is in opposition to western principles, let's call it f(n). Then through the perspective of your critics, they are focused on the worse case analysis, and going on about how the big-O of f(n) is bad. You can think of this as them making the case that if you take a mode of governance that violates western principles to its logical conclusion, it can only be <insert reason why it's bad>. I do not think they are wrong in that regard.
However, having a mode of governance that is in opposition to western principles doesn't mean that the worse case would (always) materialize. Think of it like quicksort, which in its worse case, is O(n^2). In practice however, we're more likely to get the average case, which is theta(nlogn). In this regard, you (and I) are looking at the average case of f(n), which happens to match the governance of Singapore more accurately.
Ultimately, anyone who has learnt about asymptotic analysis should know that it's a theoretical framework that aims to provide a qualitative assessment of the runtime of an algorithm. While it's useful, there are various factors in real life that could contribute to an end result that contradicts that assessment (processor speed, parallelism, being cache-oblivious etc). The dispute between the critics and their opponents is analogous to that, with critics who have never been to Singapore viewing the country as an authoritarian state (theoretical worse case analysis), while those who live there would struggle to reconcile their views (average case analysis) with that of their critics.
I hope this semi-shitty analogy does put things in perspective for various readers who are trying to make sense of the opposition between these two camps.
1) The surveillance is excessive and unnecessary in a country with extremely low crime rate. 2) Such intrusive and widespread surveillance is very problematic in an authoritarian state with a history of persecuting dissidents 3) Public funds spent on unnecessary projects means less for tackling issues such as high inequality
It might not be apparent to one, depending on the area they live in, the wealthier areas receive much less surveillance than the public housing areas. Privately developed property do not have police surveillance in their lifts or estates and have less surveillance in the general area (eg. bus stops). Vice versa, the number of surveillance cameras is much higher in the low income public rental/housing areas. There is a lot of discussion on inequality in the US but Singapore has even higher inequality/Gini coefficient. There is much more than what meets the eye, especially in a state characterized by scholars as “sophisticated authoritarianism”. [0]
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/politi...
I am going to use this phrase whenever someone from a Western country tries to tell me why Singapore is a 'dystopian totalitarian authoritarian shithole police state'.
Some of these posts (both here, and on Reddit) read like they took a thesaurus and looked for all the words that end with '-ian' or '-itarian'.
Interesting that the Economist Intelligence Unit, as I posted nearby, ranked Singapore and London as neighbouring for what regards personal safety.
Some people in HN have described native Singaporeans as remarkably warm-blooded (similarly to your sentence above, though apparently without effect): would you concour with that view?
It's also not like these cameras are pointing into private dwellings—this is illegal.
Please specify the source. Evaluations vary.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civi...
Do yourself a favor and check when the last person was choked to death, beaten to death by police over here, how many police shootings we have per capita, how many people have their property taken by police at traffic stops, what our imprisoned population ratio is, and how many policemen and three letter agencies we have to oppress us.
Find us instances where our President or Prime Minister openly fabulate about shooting protesters, cheers about kids with assault rifles doing it for him?
Continue to research if police in Singapore can claim qualified immunity, whether we have a thin blue line here, whether minorities have to fear police in Singapore. Please go on, educate us how we are oppressed and cannot have a good life as a result.
Tell us how the police in Singapore is feared by a large percentage of the population because skin color means potentially getting shot through the windshield. Maybe find some cases of systemic police violence that have gone unpunished in our country? (Did you know public servants, including police get their punishment doubled on conviction because, shockingly, they are held to a higher standard here rather than receiving immunity and protection).
By all means, educate us on the last time a Singapore SWAT team accidentally shot someone in their bed, or in fact a single case of successful murder by Police/Swatting here. Or the last time police leadership covered up for a serial killer or rapist in uniform, we are burning to hear your insights into that.
We actually, by a large margin, like our police force here. Many of them are kids doing their national service.
Oh I get it, these things are not oppression, the Economist has a statistic somewhere that they are the price of freedom.
What is it with people who feel compelled to post “just reminders” that Singapore is definitely not a pure western democracy like Texas or Alberta or Bavaria who have true one party rule on the same population scale on random threads about … checks … the color palette of Singapore?
Is it fragility? The inability to accept that there are places in the world that are comparatively thriving compared to the West?
Further Reading: https://thekopi.co/2020/06/12/how-did-singapore-avoid-the-po...
Where do you suggest is a safer place to live?
Personal security («crime, violence, terrorist threats, natural disasters and economic vulnerabilities»), 2021:
> 1 Copenhagen; 2 Amsterdam; 3 Frankfurt; 4 Stockholm; 5 Brussels; 6 Paris; 7 Wellington; 8 Toronto; 9 Lisbon; 10 Madrid; 11 Sydney; 12 Barcelona; 13 Singapore; 14 London; 15 Zurich; 16 Tokyo; 17 Osaka; 18 Melbourne; 19 Taipei; 20 Santiago
Other lists will be available.
This one list is odd, because Singapore ranks in the top five for other measures related to security, but is ranked in the second of four quadrants for personal security, "second" to cities with presumably very different policies.