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Comment by oxymoran | Hacker News Reader

Nearly all of their public spaces are under constant surveillance. Since Covid, hey are now using robot dogs in public places to snitch on people and they use the dogs to keep migrant workers confined to their quarters during lockdown. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-52619568

Oh and a tiny bit of pot will get you a lengthy sentence, up to life in prison.

No thanks.

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I've heard Singaporeans say: it's not a country, its a company. This regarding the way it is managed.

As the PAP party has been ruling the place since its sovereignty and demonstrations are forbidden, it is quite authoritarian. Every time a other political party grows in strength they find some dirt on the main guy and put him in prison.

The migrant worker thing is disgustingly Dubai-esque.

The robot dogs are a gimmick, and Singapore's police force is far less prone to violence than American police. Singapore is heavily surveilled, but so are New York, London and Paris. Locking down migrant workers for an extended period of time is pretty unconscionable though.

Picking a few anecdotes about any city invariably paints it in a reductive way. I'm not sure what the solution for this is other than actually visiting or living in a place.

They also have 40x less homicides, which might explain the difference in police violence.

Well maybe that's why it's safe and clean.

It is. The question is how much freedom and liberty should a society give up in exchange for it? I don’t think there is any one right answer… but no chewing gum is a bit extreme in my opinion.

What’s the point of gum?

What’s the point of flavored water?

There isn’t one.

I have some respect for the gum ban. The tile surfaces outside Wimbledon Station are ruined by gum stains, and it lowers the feel of the area. Each time I notice it, I admire the Singapore ban.

I also admire how clean some places in North Korea are.

clean is not a bad thing, and urine in public spaces is certainly dispicable. Generic discussion about control is pointless without taking accounts of specific measures and situations.

You don't really give up anything in Singapore.

the entire idea of 'giving up' freedom isn't right. Abstract freedoms are always embedded in a social context. The reason you have the individually free ability to walk across the road is because everyone else follows the rules. If everyone drove through traffic randomly, you wouldn't even have the capacity to exercise any meaningful freedom. Part of having a proper understanding of liberty is that recognition of authority is a precondition for it and not an obstacle.

Personal freedom does not stand in contrast to, but is embedded in social order, and that's why Singaporean's aren't giving anything up. Ask a woman whether she's more free to walk through town in Singapore at 1 am or a bad part of any typically 'free' city. It's not without irony that people in China basically faced barely any covid restrictions over a year while here in Europe everyone was locked into their apartments for months by government mandate, complaining about the lack of freedoms in other parts of the world.

Your formulation leads to "freedom is obedience," which is absurd. Freedom is about being able to do what you want. It's one thing to say that absolute freedom is not ideal, it's another to say that restriction of choice increases freedom.

Singapore and China gain something but they're also giving something up. People can disagree over whether that trade if justified but not over whether there's a trade.

It may sound absurd, but it really isn't. Hedonistic choice, i.e. to "do what you want" is not perceived as freedom but as anxiety. Someone who lives alone in his flat and works 20 different gig jobs and shoots heroin whenever he wants is in that superficial sense 'free', but in reality the opposite is the case, he's subject to basically just instinct, which is the worst form of oppression, ask any addict.

Freedom or liberty in a more authentic, humanistic sense, also in the same way religious people understand it (no coincidence that Islam literally translates to 'submission' (to god)) grounds you in reason, reality and requires that understanding what legitimate authority is like. Only from that point can you actually start to make genuinely free decisions, you need to be set free from(!) a whole bunch of things first.

It's also btw why so many young people today, less coerced than ever before, don't feel free at all, just disoriented, and why they flock to political authoritarianism. The sort of relativism invited in by not properly understanding the relationship between authority and freedom has the ironical result of creating demand for some of the very worst forms of oppression.

You gotta serve somebody but the whole point of libertarian freedom is that you choose when and how to give it up. You can join the army, marry, adopt a religion, start a job, have children, or simply make moral judgements about the world and attempt to live by them (note that many of those things are not "hedonistic").

Libertarian freedom was hard won, it works, and it would be a damn shame to give it up due to the anxiety experienced by 20-somethings. Relativism is in no way the certain outcome of liberal societies. To the extent that there is a problem, it's non-judgmentalism, the trendy idea that it is suspect to render judgements and live by them.

I am from India, and the freedom we won wasn't libertarian freedom. In fact, most independence movements were driven by reversing colonization and racist governance, not seeking libertarian freedoms. Most nations that achieved independence would laugh at this concept.

I disagree. Banning chewing gum is closest to banning open urination. Restrictions on "freedom" such as not being allowed to dump toxic waste into lakes etc, stem from preventing tragedy of the commons - not from demanding obedience. The same goes for vaccine mandates.

In fact, one of the primary responsibilities of the government is to prevent tragedy of the commons. Everything else can be driven privately.

I'm not arguing that people should be able to piss in the street or dump toxic waste. Restrictions on freedom are often justified. My point is that they are restrictions; the fact that a restriction may be good does not magically make it something other than a restriction.

I'm aware that most places in the world are not liberal. Fine with me. There's no need for every country or culture to share the same values. But in countries where libertarian freedom is a value, e.g. the US and UK, it should be defended.

There is a difference between liberal and libertarian. Libertarianism has a fairly narrow support even in the US. Those who argue for less regulation also want to ban abortion. The most libertarian representation in US politics was Greenspan and he seemed to walk back on it in 2008. It's a niche point of view in the United states.

Moreover, if libertarianism has value, it should be defensible without appeal to the support or lack of support in popular culture.

I'm not talking about libertarianism in the context of American politics. Liberal and libertarian have similar (or even the same) meaning in political philosophy. The basic idea is that they view freedom as non interference.

> but no chewing gum is a bit extreme in my opinion.

People, especially the ones who have never travelled to Singapore, need to stop rehashing this story of old.

Chewing gum can be freely purchased in Singapore from a pharmacy. No, one won't be searched at the airport and/or canned for bringing their own chewing gum into the city.

Can only be purchased with a letter from a doctor or dentist, your National ID number is recorded and you can only buy small amounts.

You won’t go to jail for a pack of gum in your luggage but you will be punished if caught bribing in large quantities (likely a fine or if a foreigner, banned from coming to SG).

that and cheap migrant labor

It’s not worth it. That being said I don’t know if Singapore is all that bad.

I don't think surveillance is the real necessary part to keep a place safe and clean, but a culture that cares about being safe and clean and legal system that cares about enforcing against acting that way.

Singapore was like that before cheap mass digital surveillance was possible. Even before VHS taped security cameras were affordable. And back in the VHS era, there was way less CCTV.

You can cherry pick bad sounding facts about every place. That's not a serious analysis.

But those facts can still say a lot about a place, without providing a serious analysis.

Cherry picked facts can say pretty much anything you want about a place.

Singapore is very well known for being somewhat authoritarian. It’s not really something that needs to be analyzed.

I live in Singapore. That robot dog is a gimmick, there's maybe 2 of them in the entire country, and they're not used for enforcement at all.

You're right about the surveillance and tough stance on drugs. This results in crime being virtually non-existent.

Crime is absolutely not non-existent. Plenty of crime gets reported in the media and the Singapore Police deal with plenty more that never gets reported in the press.

There's a mentaly impaired guy on the death row for smuggling 47 grams of diamorphine in order to fund his dad's life saving medical procedure.

William Gibson labelled it Disneyland with the death penalty which is not entirely accurate but it's close.

AKA heroin. Heroin smugglers in east Asia tend to get executed.

Not in Japan. Not in South Korea (the law is still on the books, but no one has been executed for drug offences since 1997). Not in Taiwan (like SK, no one has been executed for drug offences since 2002). Developed democratic East Asian countries have phased out death penalty for drug offences.

And it should go without saying that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have not been overrun with addiction epidemic or withered and burned to the ground as a result of not having death penalty for drug offences. The cruelty of death penalty is unnecessary. It makes politicians look good to a certain audience, but beyond that, it doesn't do much.

Japan and Taiwan are islands. South Korea has a strict border (DMV) with North Korea. All three countries don’t need to worry about neighbouring countries smuggling drugs into theirs. That is not the case with Singapore. Both Thailand and Burma produce a lot of drugs that end up in their city.

I find it hard to believe that Japan—with its well-known and historically powerful organized crime—is somehow immune from the possibility of drug manufacturing within its borders or smuggling from abroad. Yakuza's Wikipedia page confirms my suspicion that organized crime groups do both of those things in Japan.

This account introduces how criminals import drugs. (ja) https://twitter.com/Custom_kun

And how much do you think it costs to ship those drugs compare to a land border? And in what quantity? It’s basic economics.

The Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention how much they earn from it and some gangs even outright ban it. That already tells you it ain’t mainstream.

Is there any for me to win this argument? I don't know what the status of the drug trade is in Japan. But I imagine that if it is mainstream, you would argue it's all because they've eliminated death penalty and has nothing to do with Japan being an island; and if it is not mainstream, you would say it has nothing to do with not having death penalty, but with Japan being an island. In no case, no matter what information we get from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, would you be convinced that death penalty is cruel and pointless.

> you would argue it's all because they've eliminated death penalty and has nothing to do with Japan being an island

I am not advocating for death penalty. I am simply pointing out your arguments are incorrect.

> In no case, no matter what information we get from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, would you be convinced that death penalty is cruel and pointless.

I personally have no opinion on death penalty. I would prefer it did not exists (not that it is any of your business).

It seems like you are trying to win the argument simply based on your beliefs rather than on reasoning. You assumed I was pro death penalty and did a quick google search to justify your opinion. This says enough about your reasoning, don't you think? Making this a very boring argument.

Actually Japan is a very lucrative market for Asian drug dealers, because the price of drugs is so high there and they're pushing mainly synthetic drugs which are are quite cheap to produce compared to heroin, so they can afford losing some shipments.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meth-syn...

"The wholesale price of a kilo of crystal meth produced in northeastern Myanmar is as little as $1,800, according to a UNODC report citing the China National Narcotics Control Commission. Average retail prices for crystal meth, according to the UN agency, are equivalent to $70,500 per kilo in Thailand, $298,000 per kilo in Australia and $588,000 in Japan. For the Japanese market, that’s more than a three-hundred-fold mark-up."

>There's a mentaly impaired guy on the death row for smuggling 47 grams of diamorphine in order to fund his dad's life saving medical procedure.

Is that an indictment of Singapore's justice system, or of America's health care system?

It has nothing to do with the US. The guy is Indonesian.

47g of heroin on the streets of New York or London looks to be worth about $5000, that won't get you far in a US hospital, and that's assuming 100% of the value went to the trafficker.

Nothing Disneyland about it though. Mostly just super boring...

I mean this is obviously reductionist but let's cherry pick some examples from the UK, bastion of the free.

It's run by an apparently corrupt government [0]

The NHS falls over every Winter, even without the help of a pandemic [1]

Backlogs on the NHS are now getting so severe that doctors are institutionally negligent - I know of two personal cancer cases missed for no good reason and GPs I know are confess to giving poor care due to being understaffed [2]

Knife crime is so much of a problem it gets its own page for statistics [3]. (Spoilers: there were over 3000+ knife related injuries in London in the last year)

And so, only when an MP gets stabbed to death is it newsworthy [4][5]

Police can barely keep street violence from breaking out, and for the rest of the country it's just bants [6]

They can't even keep their force from kidnapping innocent women off the streets at 9pm [7] and so now you their own advice is to not trust them [8]

For all the talk about democracy and freedom, it really seems like freedom is about the freedom for the strong to harm and extort others.

No thanks.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johns...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winte...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-...

[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox

[6] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashe...

[7] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58745581

[8] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58753857

People complain a lot about the amount of surveillance and petty authoritarianism of the UK also, so I don't know what your trying to achieve. From what I've seen in reality, most of the time it isn't about how much surveillance a place has, but how much the police force works on preventing it, the culture of people itself and poverty.

Migrant workers? Or people who aren't vaccinated?

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