The media in Singapore: Zip It
economist.com
economist.com
It is well-known that Singapore has quite the dictatorial side to it, but it is a fantastic country when you look at where it was only 40 years ago. A country with the total area of a city with absolutely no natural resources, no official language, and a large variety of ethnicities i.e. not homogenous like say SK. It took a lot of sacrifice to get it where it is today.
The submitted title ("'Modern' Singapore to 're-educate' blogger") was badly in violation of HN's rules. Accounts that do that kind of thing eventually lose story submission privileges.
The port was considerably more valuable than any natural resources they could have had, and was tapped as the 'seed capital' used to build the country.
Without it, they probably would still be as poor as they were in 1950.
The 'we built this with nothing but our bare hands' canard is useful, though, for domestic propaganda.
>It took a lot of sacrifice to get it where it is today.
It mainly just took sensible economic planning and a willingness to share the wealth on the part of the leadership from the 1960s onward.
The economic planning part - currency suppression via the purchase of US treasuries, investment in education and subsidies of key industries has been played out by other Asian tigers - Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China.
The interesting part is where the willingness to share the wealth came from in the 60s.
In the 50s and 60s there was a sense of threat verging on outright panic among the country's elite about certain domestic political opponents. A threat which, not coincidentally, the elite of the United States also felt very strongly in the 1950s-60s from similar domestic opponents.
Thanks for your other points. It's always great to learn new things about Singapore. I'm hoping to somehow use their experience to help bring my country (Tunisia) to the forefront of the region.
taiwan, south korea, china, and japan are bad examples to compare to singapore, though Japan in the meiji restoration was at least somewhat comparable except that all of the countries you mentioned relied on heavy industry to get to where they were, where as singapore had no land for such heavy investment in industry - let alone the materials.
singapore had to make a long series of specific-successful long term investments which played out very well, and that had little to do with wealth sharing. one of the things that made everything play out so well is the singaporean's culture of kiasu - afraid to lose. singaporeans are very determined and trying to get ahead rather than sharing wealth.
it was always easy for singapore to guide the ship with everyone in the same direction because people obeyed so much to economic incentives. the only thing it really failed at was getting singaporeans to have kids recently.
It really isn't. The port gave the city a much greater head-start than PAP have ever given it credit for.
This intentional misdirection is used to give credence to the idea that it was Lee Kuan Yew's genius and the sweat and tears of ordinary Singaporeans that grew the country out of nothing.
Which isn't to say that the country wasn't reasonably well run. It's just saying that it just wasn't sheer genius or some kind of cultural superiority that pulled them out of poverty. The truth is much more mundane than that.
- The laws against insulting religions are part of a wider system to allow for smooth integration in a region that has known genocide and riots as the traditional means of resolving racial and religious differences. They have been relatively successful in my experience, especially compared to some neighbours who have overtly racist government policies; amongst other things, Singapore has not known a race riot since the 1960s.
- The laws against obscenity are a holdover from the British period which (like 377A, which is almost never enforced today - edit, seems Section 377 was repealed in 2007 according to Singapore Law Watch, as per link below! I never heard of this before) will probably gradually disappear as the country becomes a little less socially conservative and people stop putting pressure on their representative not to strike them off (as happened in the USA, where it took until 2015 for gay marriage to become legal).
Both were, nevertheless, the law, and he broke both repeatedly, including breaking bail. This is kind of like being a Colorado resident (where weed is legal afaik) and bringing a large bag of legally bought weed over to any number of particularly harsh penalty countries (Singapore included), then complaining when you're put in jail or even on death row due to local law, arguing that weed is a victimless crime and the punishment is disproportionate. Also worth noting that it was his own mother who first brought him to the Institute of Mental Health, not the authorities, but this is of course not mentioned by the Economist which is happy to resume the long standing feud it has with Singaporean authorities by diluting the quality of its usually high journalistic standards.
The charge against insulting LKY has been deferred to a later trial once the other two charges have been resolved. I suspect it was put on because the nation was grieving and the insult was particularly badly timed. Remember about a quarter of the population turned up for the funeral (and I lonely expat here for three years also did), because most have seen the country literally go "from third world to first" in the space of a couple generations. It is impossible for foreigners - particularly those whose country's independence and economic success is centuries old, or whose founders did not have quite the same results - to understand the esteem (and frankly, love) in which LKY is held locally. I would reserve judgement until the court decision.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Yee appears quite detailed and well written. Some background on Section 292: http://www.singaporelawwatch.sg/slw/attachments/64631/Penal%...
I'm not taking sides, frankly I couldn't care less about the case. But wanted to add some perspective before the sharks circle. By the way, congratulations on the first HN Singapore thread that does not mention chewing gum!
This is why we can't have nice things.
It has more to do with controlling public discourse than ensuring racial harmony. Despite Singapore's best efforts to forcibly integrate immigrants (i.e. racial quotas on public housing blocks) Sg has a race problem. They had their first race riot since the 60s last year. It was incited by a Chinese truck driver injuring an Indian laborer in the relatively impoverished Indian district of the city. The coverage from the Strait Times might be interesting to you: http://www.straitstimes.com/little-india-riot
>Both were, nevertheless, the law, and he broke both repeatedly, including breaking bail. No one is disputing whether Amos broke the law. It's more of a question of whether the laws are intended to keep people safe or control public opinion. Everyone knows about the libel prosecution of political threats, but the PAP's crusade of information control goes far beyond that. Protests are essentially illegal. Dissent is illegal. When I studied at NUS for a semester, I was forced to sign a waiver going through customs that stated, along with many other conditions, that I wouldn't criticize the government in any way, online or off. Singapore is an extremely thoroughly policed country, and riots are just not an acceptable excuse for draconian policy.
>By the way, congratulations on the first HN Singapore thread that does not mention chewing gum! inb4 someone excuses the human rights violations by fawning over how excellent their metro system is. weev went into my Twitter mentions to do this once.
After examining the situation, the government decided to make street drinking illegal in the area during the hours where further flash mobs were likely, and restricted alcohol sales island-wide during night hours (10.30pm - 7.30am).
Now, the suspects happened to be one race and the driver another, but people weren't protesting for racial reasons, it was a drunk crowd flashing up after it got sparked that happened to be mostly from a couple countries.
This is in stark contrast to, say, the 1964 race riots and similar riots around the region at that time against the Straits Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, or more recently, Ferguson in the US, which were explicitly about race. I suspect that the context of the Singapore riots was then lost on journalists who couldn't resist fitting them into their more common narrative of race or class based protest.
The riot isn't important in the context of the Amos Yee story except as an example of an event where Singapore was portrayed in a negative light in int'l press. The first instance of public violence in the nation for over 40 years made a great headline.
I wasn't posting that article for the coverage of that event so much as to show how journalism in Sg. The Strait Times will literally never publish anything remotely critical of the dominant political coalition.
It's hard to find a parallel with any Western country, because no Western country has as free an immigration policy for low income workers as Singapore does (the US has a large illegal immigrant population to meet demand, but the dynamics of that are very different) - around 12% of residents are on Work Permits (i.e. construction workers or domestic help) [1].
The Straits Time did not publish the event as a race-motivated riot because it wasn't - it was more about a bunch of drunk angry people burning a few cars - and that it wasn't was immediately obvious to the readers of the Straits Time (which include many non-Singaporeans; not to mention the ST has had its own feuds with the Singaporean government).
Singapore is lucky enough to be close to a tremendous supply of inexpensive human capital - even more so than the US/Mexico. Their immigration policy allows low-paying marine/construction jobs to be filled quickly, but workers' rights are essentially nonexistent.
Those 12% of foreign workers are almost all guaranteed to be earning enough to support themselves and their families back home - and that's without the benefit of a minimum wage or membership in an effective union. This sort of public policy may attract foreign investment, but it's unfair to the workers that have made Sg rich and it's unlike anything seen in the rest of the developed world.
>not to mention the ST has had its own feuds with the Singaporean government Are you referring to the long-standing tradition of the PAP suing print journalists for libel?
I was browsing the front page of their site after I looked up coverage of the riots. The biggest story currently is about a marine trade union leader and MP resigning in disgrace after embezzling funds. Nowhere in the story does it mention his involvement in the PAP. There's a reason they have the worst press freedom rating of developed countries.
It is one stop away from Dhoby Ghaut, the MRT station with the most connections to anywhere in the island, and three from Orchard, the one with arguably the highest commercial rents.
My point about it being relatively impoverished was that the majority of the Indian immigrant laborers live there. Relative to the average Sg citizen, they are living in poverty.
The lowest class by salary of any society lives, by definition, in poverty compared to the others.
Please don't be gratuitously provocative in comments here. Nothing good can come of it, and it goes against the values of this site, civility and substantiveness.
I don't doubt you, but readers can't know that, and there have been flamewars in the past about this. Typically the "slightly humorous" gets lost and the provocation (e.g. "sharks") remains.
> It is a trope that any article on Singapore must automatically include
I assume most everyone knows this. But it doesn't seem fair to criticize others for "tropes" when you were the one bringing them up.
Most are more likely to be hurt by employers that exploit the heck out of them. I commonly hear about people working long shifts for next to no pay with overtime expected. Labor violations go overlooked by authorities too often. Kind of like the American situation pre-regulations and lawsuits. Hope their situation gets a bit better overtime as it did in some countries.
Typo in title: should be Singapore.
2-26% of Americans thinks gay people should not be allowed to speak
3-36% of Americans think that atheists like me (& 79.2% of LW) are better seen than heard
7-49% think militarists should shut up
16-48% of Americans disagree with free speech for racists
16-75% claim Muslims should not be permitted to preach against America
(also "16-75%"? Seriously?)
The 16-75 is because the blog author groups the answers based on the score in the Wordsum test by the responder. People with higher scores are less keen on censoring others.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/09/intelligence-...