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Comment by tom_ | Hacker News Reader

If you live in Singapore: don't ask us! If you disagree, vote against the government, and/or get out on the streets and protest!

If you don't live in Singapore: it's not your problem.

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It’s practically a one party state, no? And I’ve heard lots of stories of protesters getting disappeared after the police arrest them. Easy to say these things.

They are a one party state, but not for lack of trying. It just turns out that turning a country from a fishing village to a world-class economy in a couple decades buys you a lot of good will from the voters.

a one party state is not the problem. you don't need multiple parties to allow multiple opinions and dissent. all they would need to do is to allow dissenting votes within the party (which, as another commenter noted, the don't, so that's hardly lack of trying), and allow everyone to join the party without requiring any allegiance to party rules that go beyond allegiance to the country itself.

china could do the same btw. china also, as far as i heard, does allow dissent within the party.

I did indeed have exactly these sorts of things in mind - but I should have spent more time iterating on my comment, the end result possibly being not to post any comment at all, because it didn't end up coming out as intended. I'll refer you to my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818568

The erosion of freedom is everyone's problem. Normalizing government control over personal bank accounts is a dangerous precedent. Today it's scam prevention, tomorrow it's freezing accounts of political opponents.

> tomorrow it's freezing accounts of political opponents

Except that this already happened[0], and not in "authoritarian" Singapore but in "liberal" Canada.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385

Human rights are everyone's problem.

Thank you for this good response to my shit comment. It was intended to make some point along these lines, but, reading it again, it completely didn't.

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