91–100 of 245 posts
As someone from Bangladesh, I read this and think "who cares?" In 1960 Singapore was a poor third world country. Today it's as rich as the US. You cannot understand how significant such a change is to the people of the country unless you've lived in a third world country and really seen what it's like. Whatever draconian measures it took to get there, they were worth it. Fareed Zakaria's interview with Lee Kuan Yew,…
These kinds of places are way too creepy/cringey for me. Grew up in such a culture, putting authority on a pedestal and doing as you're told is childish behavior and frankly boring. It also leads to people having tons of pent up/stored ego that makes it impossible to rationally deal with them when they just expect you to do as you're told or accept their bad ideas. I much prefer being somewhere that has everything- g…
As someone from Bangladesh, I read this and think "who cares?" In 1960 Singapore was a poor third world country. Today it's as rich as the US. You cannot understand how significant such a change is to the people of the country unless you've lived in a third world country and really seen what it's like. Whatever draconian measures it took to get there, they were worth it. Fareed Zakaria's interview with Lee Kuan Yew,…
>Whatever draconian measures it took to get there, they were worth it.
I feel as though most lovers of liberty would disagree with this statement, whether it comes from the right wing or the left wing; it could justify literally any horror to humanity, and at worst justifies waiting out decades of repression and poor quality of life for anticipated gains for two generations of people down the line. I'm reminded that a similar argument is used to justify the maintenance of sweatshops.
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I always found phrases like “Food is better in X city than Y”, just silly.
So I take it you've never been to Boston. A friend of a friend often quips that the best way to get good Mexican in Boston is to go to Logan and fly almost anywhere else.
Mediocre place with such an inflated sense of relevance. I feel like nobody would notice or care if so many aspects of Boston and people from there didn't think people cared.
As someone from Bangladesh, I read this and think "who cares?" In 1960 Singapore was a poor third world country. Today it's as rich as the US. You cannot understand how significant such a change is to the people of the country unless you've lived in a third world country and really seen what it's like. Whatever draconian measures it took to get there, they were worth it. Fareed Zakaria's interview with Lee Kuan Yew,…
Of course there are quite literally thousands of reasons that explain Singapore's economic growth. Attributing everything to only one of them, to the influence of an enlightened dictator, is silly.
Want an opposite anecdote? In my country we experienced our greatest transformation in centuries in our first ~20 years of democracy. The country is radically different now from what it was 50 years ago, and it only happened when democracy and civil liberties suddenly and unexpectedly came into the picture.
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Technically, yeah. But not really. In the last 30 years, Singapore has executed more than 400 people (Wikipedia has stats for 470, but is also missing the counts for many years.) Most for drug offenses. In the same time-frame, California has executed 13 people. And none in the last 16 years, and none for drug offenses.
California also has 7 times the population of Singapore. None of which invalidates the fact that California does, in fact, have the death penalty, in marked contrast to most of the Western world.
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>multiculturalism unfortunately that word more and more means "your universal human rights don't apply here". Many cultures across the world are decades and even centuries behind when it comes to human rights. The naturally authoritarian regimes there are usually don't care that much about the culture and only using that word to protect their power as the societal move forward to progress threatens that power. Among…
It’s quite remarkable to me that the concept of “universal human rights” has made the jump from its Judeo-Christian origin—where there is a universal God to which to ascribe these universal rights—to secular thought. I don’t expect “universal human rights” are anything that would show up in an autopsy or other empirical investigation? Where do these “universal human rights” come from? Who decides what they are? It’s…
Further, large numbers of people with at least some theistic leanings were/are nevertheless adherents to legal positivism, which explains how you can have Catholics or Lutherans that were okay with the Nuremberg Laws, for example.
As someone from Bangladesh, I read this and think "who cares?" In 1960 Singapore was a poor third world country. Today it's as rich as the US. You cannot understand how significant such a change is to the people of the country unless you've lived in a third world country and really seen what it's like. Whatever draconian measures it took to get there, they were worth it. Fareed Zakaria's interview with Lee Kuan Yew,…
The key features that made it fantastically rich were sitting on one of the world's most strategically located ports, building a lot of soviet style housing and a leader with nowhere to run. Being a city state means it's hard to hide when things get ugly. Having capitals far away from citizenry, on the other hand - like in myanmar or brazil, makes it easy to be corrupt. This is a well studied phenomenon. Lee Kuan Yew…
Fascinating, I'd never really thought of this. Do you have a link to any studies about this phenomenon?
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I always found phrases like “Food is better in X city than Y”, just silly.
So I take it you've never been to Boston. A friend of a friend often quips that the best way to get good Mexican in Boston is to go to Logan and fly almost anywhere else.