My comment on the PM and his relationship with poor human rights in Singapore was flagged. It got 70 upvotes.
Seriously. :/
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Here it is:
He is obviously a smart person. I wouldn’t vote for him though. He recently sued and won a “libel” case against a blogger who reposted a link to a Malaysian web site claiming the PM is involved in the 1MDB scandal.
Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal).
So whilst it’s impressive that politician can code, I don’t like him, his views, or his political party.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Singapore-blogger-crowdfund...
Reposting flagged comments like this is doing an end run around moderation. That's abusive. Please don't do that again.
Btw, upvotes are one factor in the system here. They are not the only factor. Indignation, sensationalism, flamewar, and other bad-for-HN things routinely get tons of upvotes. It's not a reliable signal of goodness, which is why countervailing mechanisms like flags and moderation are also necessary.
Was the comment "bad" because it got the extremely homophobic response from rabite? I'm in the same boat as GP - I don't fully agree with him, but at the same time I don't see how it was any different in tone or substance to many other acceptable HN comments.
Why didn't you restore the original comment? It doesn't seem to break any rules. The most frustrating aspect of HN is that there is no easy way to have meta discussion about the rules or the actions of users.
>The most frustrating aspect of HN is that there is no easy way to have meta discussion about the rules or the actions of users.
Honestly, HN seems worlds better than any other forum in this regard. Just the fact that dang responded to this post with information about the moderation process rather than banning the guy shows far more restraint and respect than any other internet moderator.
> Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal).
Singapore is a real, functioning democracy. It’s a city-state not much bigger than Chicago. Is Chicago a “one party” state? When was the last time San Francisco voted for a Republican mayor? Singapore is an Asian country with a significant Muslim population. How they exercise their democratic self determination to structure their society is none of our business.
Frankly, bringing up individual rights in every discussion of Singapore strikes me as a very privileged take. As someone from Bangladesh, I wish Americans and others in the international community would focus more on understanding how Singapore turned itself from a poor third world country into an affluent one in a single generation. How it managed to crack down on the corruption and political instability that plagues fledging democracies. Studying those lessons would pay far greater dividends in terms of improving the human condition in Africa and Asia than imposing western notions of individual rights.
For folks who do care about this issue, reading Lee Kuan Yew’s thoughts is fascinating. https://paulbacon.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pd.... This interview, in particular, is great. The interviewer. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, is one of the most insightful observers of international politics in America.
> bringing up individual rights in every discussion of Singapore strikes me as a very privileged take. As someone from Bangladesh, I wish Americans and others in the international community would focus more on understanding how Singapore turned itself from a poor third world country into an affluent one in a single generation.
I sort of agree, but both should occur. Letting transgressions slide because economic progress is made should not occur. Letting the bad happen and excusing it as ‘growing pain’, ‘we are bringing them to the table’ etc has all occurred in the past. The next thing you know, they are big and powerful and don’t want to change.
It doesn’t take much reading about Singapore to be fairly alarmed at the state of human rights and government control. They are listening, recording and require you to register for things like public speaking. This is apart from issues like gay rights, workers rights, flogging of criminals and executions.
Government opposition parties are under active surveillance and quickly sanctioned should they push too far. I’m surprised anyone argues for it, however those I know from Singapore strongly defend it.
> I sort of agree, but both should occur. Letting transgressions slide because economic progress is made should not occur.
That assumes that these things are uncorrelated, and I don’t think you can make that assumption without proof. For example, Singapore is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society with a delicate balance between Chinese (Confucian), Malays (Muslim), and Indians (Hindu). This is a mix that in many countries could devolve into perpetual ethnic conflict. Indeed, Singapore separated from Malaysia due to conflict between the Chinese and the Malay.
Part of that grand bargain is that the culture of government is Anglo and Confucian, but the government otherwise avoids intruding on the culture of the other two groups. Homosexuality is simply not accepted in Islam and among Indians. So a push to legalize it would be seen as an attack by westernized English-speaking Chinese upon the two other cultural groups.
Lee Kuan Yew was, in fact, extremely westernized (he spoke English as his first language), and opposed the law against homosexuality. But he was not about to upset social stability and unity in the country over that issue: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-homosexuality-i...
In America, we take social stability for granted. Imposing social change without broad public consensus creates social strife and more than a little dysfunction even in America. In a developing country, such conflict could be fatal. The calculus of individual welfare versus collective welfare is simply different in a developing country. Singapore’s infant mortality dropped from 35 per 1,000 to 2.5 per 1,000 from 1960 to 2000. Anything that sets back economic development, no matter how well intentioned the goal, means literally tens of thousands of dead children. That’s the cold hard reality people in wealthy countries don’t have to deal with.
It’s hard for me to over-emphasize what “economic development” means in the context of a third world country. When my dad was growing up in a village in Bangladesh, 1 out of 4 kids would die before age 5. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the independence war due to conflict between Urdu speaking Pakistanis and Bangla speaking Bangladeshis. To this day Hindus are fleeing Bangladesh to go back to India, and the Hindu population is under 10% now (compared to 30% in 1947 before Indian independence). The founder of the country was assassinated. His successor was overthrown in a coup. We left the country in 1989 during a military dictatorship. The current prime minister has thrown the opposition party leader in jail. The 10 richest Bangladeshis include both sons of both party leaders, who are nearly billionaires from corruption.
So caning people for public disorder? Well it’s relative. If an authoritarian government is what it takes to straighten out society and get it on the right track, it is what it is.
It’s not lost on me that the predecessors of the prosperous northeastern states were extremely repressive Puritan, Dutch, and Quaker communities.
You have to be careful to distinguish between freedom for distinct communities and freedom for individuals within communities. Pluralism doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with individualism. Quaker society was quite rigid when it came to enforcing norms and social order within communities, against individuals.
Similarly, Singapore has broad freedoms for its distinct ethnic and religious groups. But it aggressively enforces social order as to individuals.
What was the most repressive aspect of being a Quaker? The Puritans were throwing people in jail, and they had that whole Rhode Island thing. (Did Rhode Island flounder?) The Dutch, I'm ignorant of.
Let's say you're a Quaker and you come over as an indentured servant in southeast Pennsylvania in the William Penn era. After your servitude is up, you get 50 acres and another 50 acres from William Penn and become a farmer. How much less repressive would your environment or your children's environment be if you weren't a Quaker? You're still a farmer, farming, who crossed the ocean to a new world to be an indentured servant. Did the non-Quakers slack off?
Singapore is a "democracy" where the system is heavily stacked against opposition parties, and where supposedly apolitical institutions funded with public money like the "grassroots" People's Association [1][2][3] are heavily biased towards the dominant People's Action Party.
So it's like in the US, where tech companies and mainstream media censors conservative views and where the FBI, universities and NGOs funded with public money are heavily biased towards the left?
Indeed; you, the comment you're responding to, and the comment it's responding to are valid points. In my opinion SG and US are both very flawed democracies for different reasons.
You can see this easily in stunted cultural production (compare Singapore with Hong Kong, for example).
Singaporeans I know are very defensive though and love their “benevolent dictatorship” and bring up homelessness in SF or dirty sidewalks or something similar.
Which is a sentiment I wouldn't dismiss. If you have visited Singapore and SF the contrast will hit you in your face hard. To US folks, Singaporeans lack political freedom. To Singaporeans, US friends lack a clean habitat, safety, healthcare, and bunch of other factors that should be a given in modern society. They see the sad wealth gap here (and hence the influence of money on democracy), the growing idiocracy, and a country once on top now sadly in fast decline. So maybe we should hear them out and learn the good parts.
The wealth gap in Singapore is immense as well, but they have different (and derogatory) terminology to refer to it.
For example, the city is built by immigrant workers often from Bangladesh. You should see the living conditions they are forced to endure. It's shameful.
During Covid, they don't even refer to these hard-working people as being members of the community, and they segregated the Covid case counts by those who were and were not a part of society, in their eyes.
How much of an impact would you say it has on the index? If it were normalized for “citizens only” do you really think US will fare much better?
If your larger point is about treatment of immigrants, how do you feel about US taxing its immigrants as citizens after 1 yr of stay, but putting them on a line to actual citizenship that could be more than multiple lifetimes long? Didn’t we fight a war about “taxation without representation”? I’m not even talking about literally tearing apart poor immigrant families while all along extracting taxes from them.
You seem to be talking about a lot of different things that are not a coherent part of this discussion. But taking one point:
> line to actual citizenship that could be more than multiple lifetimes long
I'm not sure what you are referring to: almost every immigrant I know in the U.S. who wanted to pursue citizenship got it after at most 7 years in the country, sometimes less. That's a normal time range for most Western countries.
It only appears incoherent because you might have conflated two issues in your response (wealth gap and plight of immigrants). Not saying you did it intentionally.
Regarding immigrants, you need to meet more of them to get a better idea. The situation in US is much worse than most western countries. I encourage you to read up on why it is such a massive political issue (Obama's attempted reforms and executive orders, Dreamers, Path to citizenship etc.). Here is one example: https://www.cato.org/blog/150-year-wait-indian-immigrants-ad...
I have been to Singapore and my take on this is that the Bay Area has Valley Fair and Santana Row and the US has DisneyWorld too... enforced clean, structured, sanitized places are not in short supply in the United States.
Benevolent dictatorships are great, assuming your country really has one and that the leader is competent as well as benevolent. The problem is the "transfer of power" part. That's where democracy wins. It's super hard to keep benevolent/competent dictators benevolent/competent across generations... And once you are locked into a bad one, you are screwed.
It’s a fair comparison. If San Francisco had been an impoverished third world place back in the 1950s (as Singapore was), would its open and liberal culture have been conductive to it become a wealthy city by today?
One of the most interesting parts of Lee Kuan Yew’s book for me was when he talked about all the critics he sued for libel. He justified it as “of course I sued them for libel, otherwise why would anyone believe me when I said they were lying?”
I once saw a book written by a 90s politician in Singapore that, in part, tried to explain why there is no free press in Singapore. The reason was that since all press are corrupt, the government cannot allow them. I found that amazing in its arrogance.
This probably has a lot to do with Singapore's fragile existence after founding...after being kicked out of a union with Malaysia due to racial reasons, and with communist insurgencies in vogue in the 1960s/70s. I'm not defending them, just that their history is a reason why Singapore is Singapore.
Every country has its unusual and unique histories, but most countries make progress in key cultural areas through the democratic process. Singapore has basically had just one family in power for its entire existence, which makes such progress much more unlikely, or at best, very difficult.
One this count, it does seem like the rest of the world is correct, even Canada has much stronger laws against libel and defamation and there’s no real pressure to make then weaker.
Indeed. The one that stuck out to me is when a constituency votes PAP out, PAP turns off the money. HDBs aren't "selected" for upgrades. Public works projects are delayed, etc. And LKY fully admitted this - "If you don't vote for PAP, why should you benefit from our spending?".
I was surprised it was flagged and am curious why that was. There was a lot of discussion there. I assume that quite a few folks must have flagged it for it to have disappeared as it did. Unless there was a moderator play involved for some reason (or coordinated flagging by Singapore citizens, or perhaps YC interests in Singapore). I can't think of a reason otherwise.
The difference is that China doesn’t have real elections, and Singapore does. They’re not any less real than elections in say California or New York, even though one party always wins.
> Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal).
"Being gay" is largely a western obsession. Different cultures have their attitude towards it (as they should). Polygamy is banned in the US and many western nations and accepted in many parts of the world, nobody argues it is a human rights issue.
Well, fake news are illegal there. It's a different approach to the "western" one with pros and cons. As for gay rights, I am sure Singapore will revisit policies as soon as the neighboring Muslim countries will open up for some changes.
Where? Singapore? It's not illegal per se, but public criticism (not private; I know many civil servants who'll be happy to criticise some of our government's execution in person) is highly discouraged if they value a career in the civil service or any of the many organisations the PAP has their tentacles in.
when I was doing study abroad in Singapore, there was a class on corruption in south east Asian governments. However, they were not allowed to discuss Singapore in that class.
—- Here it is: He is obviously a smart person. I wouldn’t vote for him though. He recently sued and won a “libel” case against a blogger who reposted a link to a Malaysian web site claiming the PM is involved in the 1MDB scandal. Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal). So whilst it’s impressive that politician can code, I don’t like him, his views, or his political party. https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Singapore-blogger-crowdfund...