This isn't an attack on free speach. This has the hallmarks of regulatory capture. If you're a news organisation whose readership is being undermined by no moat blots (anyone can set one up and they cost nothing to run) then your profits are in grave danger. Structurally your business is suspect unless you can find a way to arbitrarily limit competition.
This license is both arbitrary and expensive. Media sites no longer need to fear competition from small time blotters or new news upstarted.
the license also undermines the legitimacy of the ruling party without reducing the spread of information and propaganda that goes against the ruling party - these tend to arise from smaller (individual) publications which are not governed by the license.
the motive of free speech restriction just doesn't fit the consequence (grant originators the benefit of intelligence).
"It is an international embarrassment when governments around the world are working to deregulate the Internet, and Singapore, one of the wealthiest nations per capita, is going in the opposite direction," the activist told AFP.
I am not sure which governments he speaks about. America? China? Russia? Middle-Eastern countries with their blasphemy laws?
Japan, another quite homogenous country (demographically speaking), makes it quite difficult to immigrate there.
Contrast with the USA, where one of Americas greatest strengths is in welcoming immigrants. E.g. people like Andy Grove and Sergey Brin and countless others.
It doesn't anymore. Brin entered in 1979, and Grove in 1957.
Some extremely talented people (for example, one worked with Anders Hejlsberg developing C#) are still stuck in the extremely long green card process. And, other than H1B, I don't know of a decent way to get a work visa in the U.S. (forget about actually inmigrating).
Compare to Canada, where I know there's a sane system for entering, it's still bureaucratic, but at least it's clear.
Australia is even more open. And while Europe is heterogeneous in its inmigration policies, it's far better than the U.S.
Good point. Even by the time Brin entered in 1979, the rules of immigration had changed. Brin got in easily because we had special rules for Jewish families trying to get out of the Soviet Union. More recently (in the 2000's) we did the same thing for certain persecuted people from Africa (a colleague helped sponsor a family of these; sadly I don't remember the exact nationality).
But what happened to the "traditional" method of high tech immigration? I.e. come here for grad school, then stay. Is that all H1B stuff? I know quite a few people who came here for grad school and then stayed to work in high tech. They are now citizens. Their children are native born Americans.
I wasn't clear about what I meant. I'll accept your assertion that it's easy to get a work visa in Japan. It's certainly easy for Japanese expats to work in the USA for subsidiaries of Japanese companies. There are special visas for that.
What I meant by immigration is the whole totality of how an immigrant would become part of Japanese society. My understanding is that's more difficult in Japan than here in the USA.
E.g. this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_Japanese makes the perhaps unsubstantiated claim that "Probably because of the difficulty in gaining citizenship and because of cultural difference, foreign-born Japanese people account for a very small percentage of the population in Japan."
Contrast with USA where, as Butch in Pulp Fiction puts it: "I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit." And, by the time you get to children of immigrants, national origin "don't mean shit" either. Except, doubtlessly, to a small minority of WASPs who trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.
Hardly anyone will emigrate to homogenous Japan if it's really hard to be accepted by the natives. I was interested in whether homogenous Iceland was similar.
I agree that the one of the USA's greatest strengths is in how it welcomes immigrants.
However, when it comes to actually welcoming immigrants, there are many (Western) countries where it's easier to immigrate to these days than the US if you take the route from work permit to permanent residence to citizenship.
The EU has been trying to push privacy laws or a while (mainly because they can't control servers in America), while the US has pushed for non-censorship-stuff on the internet (mainly because it'd undermine de facto US control of the internet)
Reading the article slowly, it's a lot less than it is suggested. To qualify one must be covering Singapore news and have 50000 unique visitors from Singapore per month.
I think it is a pretty catastrophic law, but it is not the same as saying all blogs must be licensed.
The definition of news according to this regulation is "any news, intelligence, report or occurrence or any matter of public interest about any social, economic, political, cultural, artistic, sporting scientific or any other aspect of Singapore in any language". That covers a lot of ground.
50,000 unique IP addresses (not visitors, as in the article) isn't too hard to hit either.
Its basically any site they decide they want covered. Current list is 1. asiaone.com
2. businesstimes.com.sg
3. channelnewsasia.com
4. omy.sg
5. sg.news.yahoo.com
6. stomp.com.sg
7. straitstimes.com
8. tnp.sg
9. todayonline.com
10. zaobao.com
Wouldn't it be incredibly easy for a government or major news organization to spam a news blog, causing them to rise over the 50,000-visitor threshold, thus forcing them to apply for the license?
I think the genius here is twofold. If a blog under that threshold seems threatening, they can do as you say. But the likelihood of that is kept low by the fact that people won't advertise their blog. Once a blog hits Twitter, Reddit or maybe even here and reaches a viral mass, that information spreads way too fast for a government to control - but who wants that to happen if they'll have to buy a license?
You might not like Singapore's govrnment, but calling it "evil" is a bit of a stretch. I don't think Singapore has ever had legal slavery, massacred its indigenous population, or used weapons of mass destruction on foreign cities. But hey, we can talk about it, right?
Yes. Kim Jong-il had personal slaves. Plus thousands of North Koreans work to death in concentration camps.
And comparing Singapore to North Korea is just absurd. You might as well just reference the Nazi's and be done with Godwin's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law)
straight_talk isn't comparing Singapore to North Korea; they're arguing that Tloewald's definition of evil is too strict because it wouldn't include North Korea.
I'm not providing a definition of evil, i'm pointing out that Singapore's achievements on the Evil Checklist don't measure up to the United States'. I don't think the US is evil either, it sets a high bar for other contenders though.
Take a look at the Roman Empire which, despite everything, made the lot of ordinary people better.
North Korea probably meets my definition of evil, but I really don't know enough. Nazi Germany, Stalin and his apparatus. Pol Pot.
Edit: among millions worldwide, I marched in protest against the massacre at Tien an men square. My mother, who has far better cred in this area than I do (having been imprisoned and tortured as a political prisoner) argued in favor of the Chinese government — she said China wasn't ready for democracy and far more people would suffer in a chaotic transition than if the government were allowed to reform at its own pace. It's imponderabe — we can only try to do what we think is right.
Except it does include North Korea. As I stated in my previous post.
Plus Tloewald's post was satire, pointing out that many countries that are not considered evil (namely USA - in his example) have committed far worse atrocities under their government than Singapore ever has has. Thus it's a bit of a stretch to call Singapore's government evil over this news item. Tloewald's point wasn't meant to be taken as a literal checklist for what constitutes as an "evil government".
No but they had 2 out of 3 of those things down to them in the last century. Still, it's probably they're own fault they're as screwed up as they are right?
None of those things mean that rigging elections, removing even the most peaceful statement of opposition to the government, ensuring that remotely popular articles get their publishers fined are somehow not evil.
"Evil" is a loaded term. The government does things it considers right. I don't like the government of Singapore but I don't think it's "evil".
In the US we have election rigging (almost all states are gerrymandered, both sides try to encourage their supporters to vote and prevent the other side's supporters from voting, and both support an antiquated electoral system that prevents third parties from being viable), peaceful (well, non-violent) organizations have been put on lists of terrorist organizations, we're running a prison in conquered territory in Cuba specifically to avoid legal jurisdiction, we've got a government surveillance system that issues requests to service providers which they cannot report (the digital equivalent of being allowed to breaking in to people's hoses without showing them the warrant). Is this "evil"? I'm sure everyone thinks they were doing the right thing.
Yeap. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Singapore elite already has enormous, ever increasing power. Everything is done to destroy all opposition. You must be very naive to think that once a small group achieves a complete control over a country, they will use it for everybody's good.
An absolutely corrupt elite that made their tiny city state one of the most prosperous and stable countries in south-east Asia. Lee Kuan Yew is probably one of my favourite political figures - studying Asian leaders like him, or China's Deng Xiaoping, can be perception-shattering.
I still think democracy is important, but the order of priorities for a country should go something like stability -> rule of law -> economic prosperity -> democracy. If you mix up the order, you're gonna have a bad time.
As for this case in particular, it sounds more like lobbying by the newspaper industry than any campaign to suppress free speech.
That order can sometimes work, but there are a lot of examples of it failing. That was the goal of Portugal's authoritarian "Estado Novo", for example: a strong government that would guarantee stability and the rule of law, and on that basis carefully lead a corporatist economy, together with industry partners, towards a controlled but prosperous society. But in practice it didn't work that well economically, and Portugal's economy benefited from the 1974 overthrow of the regime, i.e. democracy -> economic prosperity.
>You must be very naive to think that once a small group achieves a complete control over a country, they will use it for everybody's good.
Yeah you're right. Singapore's dictator totally didn't bring the country from third world to first world, currently ranking top 5 in the world for academic grades, lowest child mortality and GDP per capita PPP, without the help of foreign aid or natural oil resources, in less than 40 years.
Come visit sometime. Those who live here do not seem to think anything is being "destroyed" or even corrupted, and that includes people from America and many other places. We have experienced the alternatives, and Singapore is not worse.
Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".
I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London. That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.
Reminds me of the old joke of many years ago. An American journalist and a Soviet journalist are talking about press freedom. The American says something like "America is great. We have freedom of the press. I can freely criticize Richard Nixon and explain how bad and corrupt he is". The Soviet journalist says something like "We have the same freedom. I can freely criticize Richard Nixon and explain how bad and corrupt he is".
> Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".
What does that have to do with the story of the article? Either the story is true or not, this has nothing to do with the source.
> I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London. That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.
False dichotomy. Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by something that's even more awful.
That's precisely why I said that this is no false dichotomy here. False dichotomy is something completely different. False dichotomies are things like "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "The new research shows that one part of the theory of evolution is wrong, therefore creationism is right". There's nothing like this here; his was a simple statement of the form "X is not bad, because Y is even worse". See the difference? False dichotomy means (falsely) asserting that when you disprove the factuality of one alternative, only one other alternative remains and therefore it's automatically true. (Whereas apeeal to worse problems is not about factual truths but about the weights of problems to be solved.)
> Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by something that's even more awful.
Well, if you believe the article, "personal blogs" will not be affected. The claim is that only "ten websites" are affected. So that means big media companies like Yahoo.
In reality this policy is nothing new. The Singapore government has for many years reacted harshly against stories they didn't like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Singapore
They have required a S$200,000 (US $158,000) "security deposit" from foreign publications.
I think RT is great. They're certainly an alternative to American "mainstream media".
Our media (mostly) give Obama a pass about everything they were foaming at the mouth about when Bush did it. RT offers a much different perspective to our media that had a "thrill going up my leg" at the prospect of an Obama presidency.
But we shouldn't give Russian state funded media a free pass to run photos with signs that say "INTERNET CENSORSHIP WORST IDEA EVER" when Russian censorship and reaction to dissent is harsher than that in Singapore or most other countries.
There's a word for stories like that. The word is not "journalism". The word is "propaganda". In this case, state funded propaganda.
RT is much like the Pravda of yesteryear. I saved a quip about the NY Times and Pravda: "My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think."
Keep in mind that you read RT to learn what Russia wants you to think. Then it's great. That's the point I was trying to make.
You may be interested to read this, then: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/05/14/russia-foreign-agents-law... - it's an article from Human Rights Watch, whose representative was quoted in the OP, about a somewhat similar programme recently instated in Russia requiring some journalistic agencies to register as "foreign agents" or face penalties. Funny how it's all the same actors, much the same plot, just on a different set.
This is more relevant in the context (i.e. RT broadcasts for foreign audiences):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC
"Though sharing some of the facilities of the domestic services, particularly for news and current affairs output, the World Service has a separate Managing Director, and its operating costs have historically been funded mainly by direct grants from the British government."
Even the TV license fee is just a tax collected and redistributed by the government.
Yeah, it's really ironic considering wordpress.com is censored here. And a bunch of other blog platforms. RT is disgusting propaganda and shouldn't ever be used as a source for anything.
It's not about total enforcement, it's about chilling the desire for anyone to start a blog, to the point that the effect is the same as if they were able to enforce it.
Singapore has had strong defamation laws in effect for awhile now, which have been able to make a mark on public discourse with a few select enforcement actions:
> But in recent weeks, lawyers acting on behalf of key Singapore leaders have delivered sharp legal warnings to dissenting blogs, saying the blogs published untruths and defamatory comments. Although editors of the blogs have retracted the posts and in some cases apologized, academics have said the cases nevertheless could have a chilling effect on writers at a time when they’re just beginning to enjoy new freedoms following years of restrictions defended by the government as necessary for maintaining social stability.
>
>In one case, lawyers acting on behalf of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong issued a five-page letter to prominent public affairs blog Temasek Review Emeritus, accusing it of posting a “defamatory” opinion piece that contained comments related to the appointment of Mr. Lee’s wife, Madam Ho Ching, as the head of Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings. The piece had asserted she received the appointment because of political connections, which the government says is untrue.
>
> The letter asked the website to retract the post and issue an apology, both of which it did days later.
One blog at a time. It's not difficult to imagine there are a few government people looking for unauthorized blogs, or the ability to report an unauthorized blogger.
Singapore was one of the earliest adopters of a national firewall (back in the late 90s). I am sure this will be the primary tool in monitoring any 'misuse' of the Internet by the powers that be.
Bo
Singapore has only recently relaxed (read: suspended) the imposition of mandatory capital punishment for drug trafficking charges.
While Western governments and media have long criticized Singapore's draconian laws and its low tolerance for all crime, it has to be said that the prosperous city-state has been highly effective at warding off the ill effects of lax criminal jurisprudence and enforcement that typify, with the exception of an absurdly oil-rich Norway or two, almost all developed Western societies.
It pays to give our approach to crime and sentencing another look before we blissfully laud ourselves for 'upholding' some imaginary ethos governing human dignity at the cost of rampant societal maladies that continue to plague us, while in reality, doing a sloppy job at both.
Case in point:
Number of deaths in Iraq over the period of 2003-11 : 4,422
Number of murders in Chicago,Ill. over the same period : 4,265
There is absolutely no way that the total death count in Iraq from 2003, at the start of the US invasion, to 2011 is only 4,422. Bush's own estimate, which was heavily sandbagged, was 30,000.
Totalitarian states (e.g. USSR, East Germany, North Korea) are extremely effective at dealing with small crime. Growing in a small town in East Germany we didn't have a key for our house small door. There were literally zero people to use or sell illegal drugs.
The most recent estimates for Iraq War casualties involve around five thousand from the Coalition Forces, around twenty five thousand Iraqi insurgents/defenders/combatants, around fifteen hundred contractors, and around seventeen thousand Iraqi Security Forces.
This license is both arbitrary and expensive. Media sites no longer need to fear competition from small time blotters or new news upstarted.