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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

>It's a pretty nice fishbowl life as long as you don't want to carry a gun, or do drugs.

Or look "kind of Bangladeshi".

Or challenge any kind of social order.

Or get involved in domestic politics at all (as a foreigner).

Fwiw, I've been here longer than you. I enjoy the low crime rate, weather, transit system (excluding the erratic bus arrival times) and the privileges a white face affords me too.

I'm careful of what I say online though, because I know that they are listening closely and are likely to respond accordingly (probably listening even closer than the US monitors its citizens).

>And they've taken religious and social harmony to a whole new level.

A whole new level where the possibility of a race riot in Little India is non-existent?

Or a while new level where race riots in Little India happen, but they manage to put a nice enough spin on it to satisfy you?

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It is not just you. As a native Singaporean, I had to turn on my VPN to read this article and post this comment. I don't feel free here. It's not a nice feeling, despite the "superficial goodness" foreigners love to talk about.

As a Singaporean who is now in the US, it is the same thing over here (with a bit more secrecy pre-Snowden).

I will be very surprised if Comcast (my ISP) doesn't have fiber splitters along their backbones feeding my (and other people's) internet traffic to the NSA.

edit: Also, with the recent revelation that NSA targets Tor users, I would not be surprised if by virtue of using a VPN, you are automatically deemed more suspicious.

The thing is, in the US it's a fairly recent development, whereas in Singapore it's intrinsic to how the government works.

Yes, the US have periodic bouts of widespread semi-fascist repression (McCarthy, GWB etc), but they traditionally subside after a few years. TIA eventually generated Snowden, for instance, and in 20 years time it's very much possible that we'll look back at early 2000's paranoia as a dark age of sort. There is no indication of this ever happening in Singapore.

It might be due to issues of scale (repressing 3m people is much easier than doing the same to 400m) or culture (the whole Constitution / Freedom mindset in the US is very different from the "community first" approach more typical of Asian countries), but that's how it is.

You're overstating : I'm sitting in Holland Village (Singapore) reading HN just fine.

See my above post. Most Singaporean's don't care that the big G collects everything about you.

With due respect, "I had to turn on my VPN to read this article and post this comment" is overstating. I understand that you may feel like you should only read/post with the aid of a VPN : However, having lived in the US for quite a while before arriving in SG, I think you're overestimating the reality of American's Freedom of Speech (for non-US persons). Both of us are foreign nationals w.r.t. the USA NSA. So they're legally free (under US law, as I understand it) to monitor, store and correlate all our communications (particularly since we're meeting at an end-point in the USA).

+1, reading this fine on my home Starhub connection.

m1 fiber works too

The riot in Little India was almost unique in this country's history (which says a lot), and, it's important to note, happened after someone was run over by a bus, was predominantly not involving singaporeans (mostly foreign workers), and involved a lot of alcohol.

They've had (multiple) Riots in Vancouver (though, usually involving Hockey, but also alcohol). I don't find that an indictment on Vancouver.

But, yes, I do agree, it's pretty clear that you don't want to discuss politics, and certainly don't want to get involved in them if you are a foreigner.

>The riot in Little India was almost unique in this country's history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_race_riots_in_Singapore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_race_riots_of_Singapore

You do realize that one of the core reasons the country EXISTS as a separate entity (kicked out of Malaysia) was because of race riots, don't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_singapore#Racial_te...

I don't even know of any other countries where race riots have played a greater role in the country's history.

Unique indeed.

>it's important to note, happened after someone was run over by a bus, was predominantly not involving singaporeans (mostly foreign workers), and involved a lot of alcohol.

It's important to note that the itinerant foreign workers are treated like shit and the reason they rioted was because the ambulance took forever and the guy who was ran over was dead by the time it came.

Alcohol was simply the fuel for the anger created by that.

But yea, racial harmony and all that.

They promote harmony heavily in china (racial but mostly class-based), to the point that it has become somewhat of a joke: are you a harmonious river crab (和谐, 河鞋) or rebellious grass mud horse (...)?

Singapore is famous for the extreme of this, and the scary thing is it is China's main role model.

Grass mud horse - I went to Wikipedia, thought I was going to see an animal: The Grass Mud Horse or Cǎonímǎ (草泥马), is a Chinese Internet meme widely used as a form of symbolic defiance of the widespread Internet censorship in China. It is a play on the Mandarin language words cào nǐ mā (肏你妈), literally, "fuck your mother"

The fact that you had to go back to the 60s to find a similar incident helps the GP's point, not yours.

And do you have any supporting evidence for your claim that migrant labourers are any worse off in SG than they would be elsewhere, including their home countries? I had believed they were pretty well treated.

> the ambulance took forever and the guy who was ran over was dead by the time it came

Wonder how long it would have taken in India.

>The fact that you had to go back to the 60s to find a similar incident helps the GP's point, not yours.

Not especially. Those riots were huge, vastly influential in the country's history and, according to the GP, non-existent.

They are the reason why the government hyperfocused on "racial harmony" ever since.

>And do you have any supporting evidence for your claim that migrant labourers are any worse off in SG than they would be elsewhere

Are you saying that because they would be killed by horrendously unsafe working conditions in Qatar that they should consider themselves lucky?

>I had believed they were pretty well treated.

No, they are explicitly third class citizens - kept in dormitories, bussed around on the back of trucks, banned from public places when their appearances there becomes 'unsightly'.

They are only treated well compared to Middle Eastern hellholes like Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

>Wonder how long it would have taken in India.

This is disturbingly similar to the rhetoric made during segregation in 1950s America: "the blacks have it better here than they would back home in Africa. Shut up.".

> The fact that you had to go back to the 60s to find a similar incident helps the GP's point, not yours.

The other fact that one of the examples was in 1964 - Singapore only became an independent country in 1965 - probably didn't help either.

It is unique because it is caused by cheap labour who are not integrated, imported by the big G.

singapore's idea of '$harmony' is 'lets not go there..' -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OB_marker

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