It was never 'cool'. It's a barbaric totalitarian state that hides it well. It's one of the few countries I truly don't want to ever support by spending money as a tourist there.
Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
211–220 of 298 posts
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, for most part. SG has a zero tolerance policy. I do think the death penalty for drugs is reasonable. Drug dealers destroy families and communities for their own profit. The arrival card in Singapore literally states that smuggling drugs is punishable by death. If you still attempt, that sounds like a “you” problem. Also the punishment for vandalism or rape sounds reasonable. The treatment of foreign construction…
> I do think the death penalty for drugs is reasonable. Well, it's not. It's barbaric and primitive. A warning is no justification.
Executing people guilty of serious crimes is good and just. They should have a proper trial, and the crimes should be sufficiently serious, but execution is no more or less "barbaric" than the alternatives. As Adam Smith said, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
The next generation of the ownership class they raised will gleefully usher in the fascism some of their cohorts fought physically and ideologically against, and there isn't the threat of global communism to keep them in check anymore. I wish I had your optimism.
What a shame communists failed every time they gained power. Oh, and killed 145.000.000 people in the process.
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Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do think the death penalty for drugs is reasonable. Well, it's not. It's barbaric and primitive. A warning is no justification.
Executing people guilty of serious crimes is good and just. They should have a proper trial, and the crimes should be sufficiently serious, but execution is no more or less "barbaric" than the alternatives. As Adam Smith said, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
> Executing people guilty of serious crimes is good and just.
Wrong. It's barbaric and primitive.
> execution is no more or less "barbaric" than the alternatives
Yes, it is. People make mistakes. People have infinite possibility to grow, change and contribute to society. Snuffing everything someone is out because of an arbitrary society rule that ultimately does less harm than murder is indefensible.
> "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
Taken as far to defend murder it becomes nonsense.
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do think the death penalty for drugs is reasonable. Well, it's not. It's barbaric and primitive. A warning is no justification.
Executing people guilty of serious crimes is good and just. They should have a proper trial, and the crimes should be sufficiently serious, but execution is no more or less "barbaric" than the alternatives. As Adam Smith said, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
There is saying in The Culture that money is a sign of poverty.
There should also be (and probably is in a culture that has drone slapping), that death penalty is a sign of moral bankruptcy.
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s a mix of valuing education more, a strict enforcement of the law with severe punishment, a small area to maintain, electing educated politicians and demographics. Asians tend to commit less violent crimes. Markham in Canada for example has a much lower violent crime rate than most of the Canada and is predominantly Chinese.
> Asians tend to commit less violent crimes. Wealthy Asians tend to commit less violent crimes. If you go to a country with less law and order (like PNG), you’ll see more violence. America and other countries had a spike of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Chinese gangs in the 80s/90s due to a refugee influx from Vietnam. Turns out a forcibly relocated, non-wealthy population who has to readjust to live in a new country is goi…
The correlation between per-capita GDP and homicide rate is fairly weak, and if you graph it and color-code it you can clearly see that asian countries tend to have lower homicide rate at similar income levels: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc?y...
Countries like Bangladesh have fewer homicides than Canada, and less than twice as many as the U.K. or Sweden, while much richer Latin American countries have 5-20 times as many.
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw a post once from a white guy with a wife and two kids (I think also white) who was confused why he was having so much trouble getting Singaporean PR despite contributing so much to the economy. Like bro... you are the wrong race, it's that simple, shouldn't be too hard to understand. I'm not making a moral judgement on whether that's correct or not but it's just how it works
A filipino friend of mine moved to Australia after being denied PR in SG, mainly due his race. As a white person, I’d probably never get PR too but I think it’s good that they maintain the current percentages, otherwise the country would turn unrecognizable like Germany or France.
Yeah as a white guy who quite likes SG it's a shame but I completely understand, "permanent" is a long time
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's strange that you mention the religious part of UAE making you uneasy, and not the modern day slavery.
Because the religious part affects me, the slavery I don’t really notice because they do a good job hiding it?
Does hiding it well make it ok?
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes. Most Western countries just can’t compete… Why do you think New York or Chicago isn’t like this? What could western countries change?
This is obviously oversimplified but I think this is a big factor: Singapore is a business masquerading as a country. While it is technically democratic, in practice there are some barriers preventing truly free and fair elections. That being said, the leaders in Singapore are not corrupt and truly do focus on what's best for the country. As a result decisions are made quickly, for the greater good, and are not polit…
> That being said, the leaders in Singapore are not corrupt and truly do focus on what's best for the country. As a result decisions are made quickly, for the greater good, and are not politically driven.
But what makes them act this way, lol? That's what every country wants out of its leaders. Why is Singapore able to do it? I know that's a hard question to answer...
Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
#220As a German expat who lived in Singapore for 3 years, it’s still the best country I ever lived in and I’ve also worked in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan HK, and Germany. Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes. Most Western countries just can’t compete and while the UAE is pretty well run in some aspect, there…
> Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes. Most Western countries just can’t compete… Why do you think New York or Chicago isn’t like this? What could western countries change?
Chicagos biggest problems are corruption and special interests. Corruption means that labor has become very expensive for the government and most civil servant leaders tend to be incompetent. The incentives created when being in leadership is not about competence led to an environment where very few in the government are interested in improving the systems they run and those that focus on improvement generally don’t rise to obtain more power. The power of special interests means that it is impossible to make quick decisions, even if they are obvious. Everything is a long, drawn out process, so the decisions that are made tend to be the ones that benefit people who can pay lobbyists. Singapore is pretty much a benevolent dictatorship. Their government makes quick, technocratic decisions that legitimately attempt to make society as a whole better in the long run. The short term popularity of these decisions is effectively irrelevant, which allows them to do things like employing slaves and being extremely tough on crime.