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nemo44x

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Singapore literally suppresses critical free speech

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/13/singapore-tightening-scr...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/fake-news-law-sin...

The impression one gets by being there is that it’s a plasticised city inhabited by consumer drones. They also cane people for misdemeanours. Oh, and the migrant workers (on which their whole economy relies) routinely work 18h/day.

> Reportedly some of the happiest people on earth

They seem pretty far from the Scandinavian countries.

Besides, I'd find it hard to trust any results from a totalitarian country.

> It sounds insane to you because you’re used to the filth we live in and don’t even see the decay that’s all around us anymore. Crime and violence are normal in our world and a government that won’t tolerate it is a foreign concept.

There are plenty of civilized countries with low crime rates that are not totalitarian.

Singapore is a parliamentary democracy with elected members of parliament and president. It is certainly not a "totalitarian country", although it could be considered authoritarian compared to western democracies.

People sometimes conflate being a single-party state with being a dictatorship/totalitarianism. Japan is considered a model democracy and has been run by the same party for over 70 years! It's just another way of doing democracy, there's no one size fits all approach to it.

Er, who considers Japan a model democracy outside of Japan?

And yes, democracy can be authoritarian as well. The problem is that if the government controls public discourse to a sufficient extent, any democracy becomes a sham no matter how fair elections themselves are.

You're right, I used the wrong term. I'd say Singapore is still authoritarian in a vacuum though, western democracies aside.

> Reportedly some of the happiest people on earth.

People who live in countries were you get executed on a whim tend to say that.

So it's basically a homeowners association, just scaled up to a whole country?

I have always slightly suspected that Singapore keeps its laws tighter than they would otherwise prefer specifically to prevent half of Asia from trying to move there.

Nice authoritarian dystopia bro...

Is every drug that Singapore bans an example of "filth"?

Is an authoritarian Brave New World ok as long as people living in it are reportedly happy?

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