It's also known as being one of the very few countries actually capable of using state capacity to overcome serious social and economic problems. Godspeed.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
All true, but consider that most democracies today aren't really functional anymore. They impose more and more draconical surveillance and speech laws while failing to at providing livable economic condition to the next generations.
From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.
So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector
Ford was the only major mass produced car company of its day. The global economy of today is way different than the one Heny Fordo operated in.
Also doesn't help that the people who most want power are those least deserving of it. See many CEOs, and many politicians in general.
Does Singapore work well so far? Sure, by some definitions of working well. Same with China.
But it definitely feels like they're rolling the dice with their systems of governance, and hoping the next leader is someone that actually cares about the health of society rather than a would be authoritarian ruler.
Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing
It's literally the antithesis of "cool", whatever your definition. The most square people on earth.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
This is currently not empirically sustained. I hope it will be, in the long run. But if Americans and Europeans keep voting for far-right and -left wing idiots, and China and its similars take the mantle of technological and scientific development, there is a real argument that Enlightenment values don’t apply perfectly in a world with social media and AI.
which societies, which failures, which "every" are you referring to, exactly?
I'd argue American society is currently failing. We're losing wars. We're racking up debt. We're destroying our institutions. A decent fraction of the population not only expects civil war, but cheers it on.
Meanwhile, in Europe, a similar vein is consistently emerging across the continent. It's done better at resisting. But in part through policing speech.
They're racking up debt too, with worse means to pay it back, they've destroyed both their institutions and their culture via mass migration of unskilled and dissimilar peoples, and they couldn't even fight a war because they can't field the firepower of one US state's national guard base (much less "lose" it, in the ways that people mischaracterize the US's recent conflicts).
Europe is a distant third in an increasingly multipolar world that will be shaped by the US and China, reliant on the US's increasingly fickle protection from Russia; aging, fading, and losing identity. Their core industries like automotive have already lost to China, their power costs are skyrocketing, their technology (outside of some gifts from the US like ASML) lags the US across the frontiers, and there are deep divides across the continent.
But hey, at least they are protected from misgendering a "woman" with a beard or mentioning the identity of a criminal.
- Hervé Eon Sarkozy fine
- Éric Zemmour 3000 fine
- bardot degenerates 20000
- Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly fine
None of these were threats or incitement to violence. Just insults.
And you talk about a constitutional right to free speech since the 18th century, but mocking Catholicism could be prosecuted until 1881 (i.e. in the 19th century).
If someone in France is not free to hold a sign that says "Get lost, you sad jerk" then France does not have free speech. That sign contains only words. It does not create any threat. It does not incite anyone to take illegal and/or violent actions.
Regarding the Bardot case you say "I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote" but:
- that's not the only case I cited, and
- even in the Bardot case, what's the rationale for suppressing speech expressing an opinion? it seems she was prosecuted because her expression of an opinion might cause others to adopt that same opinion. She wasn't inciting violence or illegal acts.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
Singapore started from an unusually favorable, but still genuinely troubled, Asian starting position. Their government then proceeded to get a remarkable number of important things right, and turned it into one of the richest countries in the world. That achievement does not require pretending Singapore was a fishing village in a swamp in 1965. The more accurate story is impressive enough on its own: plenty of countries and cities with comparable or better initial advantages failed to achieve anything close to Singapore's subsequent trajectory. Look at how Western former great powers are doing, or even closer countries like Japan.
I'd argue the way Singapore uses state capacity deserves substantial credit for that.