> All I can do is look at Singapore from the outside and be in awe (look at their neigbhours.. then look at Poland's or USA's neighbours and compare the amount of fear).
I look at Singapore on the Press Freedom Index (rank 155 out of 180) and am not in awe at all. It scares me that people who grew up in liberal democracies find something to admire about its model.
Perhaps it's just that our life experiences are different.
I grew up in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. My mother's family fled East Germany shortly after WW2. My father's home was within a couple of miles of the inner German border. I got to visit East Berlin before the Wall came down. My memories of explicitly government-regulated speech are negative, through and through.
All I can say is that I never want a government to have that much control over speech. The hypothetical use of that power for good does not offset the damage it can cause in the wrong hands, and in an authoritarian country, there is no way to peacefully remove the government from power if it chooses to abuse that power.
> Freedom of speech has really come to mean outright lies, slander, fear mongering, FUD, bullshit, conspiracies and so on. What value does speech have if the only defense is "it's not illegal" and not "it's right".
There are a number of fallacies here.
* One is the assumption that in order to restrict harmful speech, it has to be ordered from above. (Seriously, Hobbes's idea that you need an authoritarian ruler to protect liberties is a bit dated.)
* Another is that having an authoritarian government would fix this. The worst offenders when it comes to speech aimed at undermining liberties are people already in power. An authoritarian government would exacerbate that issue. Whatever side "won" would also get the power to suppress any speech they don't like.
* We don't protect potentially harmful speech because we like it, but because of the dangers if we open up speech to government censorship. While one can argue that maybe Brandenburg v. Ohio went a bit too far, the underlying idea – to keep the government at a safe distance from regulating individual expression, even expression that you strongly dislike – is sound ("freedom is always the freedom of dissenters"). If there's a role for government, it would be to ensure that valid opinions aren't squeezed out (Fairness Doctrine and such), not to ban harmful speech.