21–30 of 245 posts
There’s much to love about Singapore if you understand, or are willing to learn, Asian culture. It’s more collectivist than individualistic and while that certainly comes with trade offs, it has many benefits. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and it feels like living in the future. No where is perfect but the quality of life here is amazing. The people I know who don’t like it are almost always white folks who don’…
I had a friend in school who had a t-shirt that said "Singapore - It's a Fine City" on the front, and on the back was a list of fines for various offenses.
Gosh, I wonder why that would be a hard reputation to get rid of?
There’s much to love about Singapore if you understand, or are willing to learn, Asian culture. It’s more collectivist than individualistic and while that certainly comes with trade offs, it has many benefits. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and it feels like living in the future. No where is perfect but the quality of life here is amazing. The people I know who don’t like it are almost always white folks who don’…
Can you give some examples of Asian norms?
There’s much to love about Singapore if you understand, or are willing to learn, Asian culture. It’s more collectivist than individualistic and while that certainly comes with trade offs, it has many benefits. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and it feels like living in the future. No where is perfect but the quality of life here is amazing. The people I know who don’t like it are almost always white folks who don’…
There was an excessive deference towards authority (derived from confucianism, i think) that rubbed me up the wrong way and a definite streak of selfishness/uncaringness that permeated the culture. Also that shallow vapid wealth-worshipping thing that "crazy rich asians" captured so accurately.
I remember the way foreign workers were treated was just brutal, too. I was there for the bus driver strikes and the little india riot and i was appalled by how thuggish the authorities acted in both cases while everyone else just shrugged.
Plenty of casual racism lurking under the surface too, although white people are probably more of a beneficiary of that than a victim. This is perhaps partly why so many love the place.
Fareed Zakaria's interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the country's modern founder, is required reading for pretty much anyone hoping to understand the developing world, multiculturalism, etc. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923
I remember reading that, when he wrote it.
I miss magazines. I rarely read them now, but there was something exciting about browsing through a new issue - the ads were as interesting as the editorial material. In the best magazines, each page flip was a masterpiece of graphic design. In our collective transition to online content, we definitely lost a lot in terms of the visual language developed for print. Though we have high resolution screens now, it doesn't seem to be returning. The visual innovations seems to have complete moved to video now, and "pages" are now just scrolling text.
Amusingly, I signed up for ACM recently to get access to a research paper, and they unexpectedly mailed me their monthly magazine. An actual physical printed periodical? Wow. As I was reading it, I realized I've become so used to digital screens, it felt weird to read. You have to move your eyes up and down columns! They don't just scroll into my line of vision. Figures and images are numbered and you have to look around for them, they're not just embedded in a carousel in line with the text. Took me a minute or two to adjust for real.
There’s much to love about Singapore if you understand, or are willing to learn, Asian culture. It’s more collectivist than individualistic and while that certainly comes with trade offs, it has many benefits. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and it feels like living in the future. No where is perfect but the quality of life here is amazing. The people I know who don’t like it are almost always white folks who don’…
Can you give some examples of Asian norms?
There’s much to love about Singapore if you understand, or are willing to learn, Asian culture. It’s more collectivist than individualistic and while that certainly comes with trade offs, it has many benefits. I’ve lived here for almost 3 years and it feels like living in the future. No where is perfect but the quality of life here is amazing. The people I know who don’t like it are almost always white folks who don’…