> 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?
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore