"“The law says that any event which is open to the public, and is ’cause related’, requires a permit when a foreigner speaks."
There was a foreign speaker participating over Skype. As idiotic as the law seems to be, I do believe the case is rather clear. The foreigner did indeed speak at the conference, which was public. The fact that Skype was used as a medium to facilitate that doesn't really change anything.
He did not. Some electrons were converted into photons of different frequencies mostly in the human visual spectrum, and some electrons were converted into other frequences in the spectrum that can be converted into a meaning by a human.
If I rant against Disney land with the dealt penalty, and the video is later played there, I have not given a speech there.
> Some electrons were converted into photons of different frequencies mostly in the human visual spectrum, and some electrons were converted into other frequences in the spectrum that can be converted into a meaning by a human.
If someone live-streams a keynote and a Q/A session as a part of an event, then the person speaking is obviously participating.
Please note, that I have no problems with remote participation of events. It just happens that our favourite south-east asian police state requires a permit for such events. Our opinions on whether that law is a good one or not has nothing to do with the medium chosen for the event.
He had a gathering on private property in a mall, where 100 people showed up and listened to a Hong King Activist talk for 2 hours. Sounds quite like a conference IMO.
The right to free assembly isn't a thing in Singapore apparently.
No modern democracy has Singapore-type restrictions on speech, unless you take the loosest possible definition of democracy (ie one expansive enough to encompass Singapore).
At least some western european nations have anti-hate speech laws, though I consider a country to have "free speech" if individuals are free to criticize the government. What are you referring to?
It's a pro-corporate one-party rule. With the enshrinement of Lee Hsien Loong as the PM, Singapore is headed the dynastic route that ruined other Asian democracies like India.
Rich does not equate to equitable. Dubai and Qatar are other examples.
I suppose that organizing or participating in a public assembly without a police permit is illegal more or less everywhere in the world.
The question is whether "the Internet" is a public place or not.
Case in point: Italy.
A) According to article 18 of the consolidated act on public security (TULPS) it is mandatory to inform the police whenever a gathering is organized in a "public place" [1].
B) the Corte di cassazione (the Italian supreme court) has repeatedly stated that public websites are equivalent to public places [2].
Exercise for the reader: draw the consequences of combining A and B.
[1] «I promotori di una riunione in luogo pubblico o aperto al pubblico devono darne avviso, almeno tre giorni prima, al Questore. E’ considerata pubblica anche una riunione, che, sebbene indetta in forma privata, tuttavia per il luogo in cui sarà tenuta, o per il numero delle persone che dovranno intervenirvi, o per lo scopo o l'oggetto di essa, ha carattere di riunione non privata.» http://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:regio.de...
> A) According to article 18 of the consolidated act on public security (TULPS) it is mandatory to inform the police whenever a gathering is organized in a "public place" [1].
I suppose that organizing or participating in a public assembly without a police permit is illegal more or less everywhere in the world.
In Germany, per the Versammlungsgesetz'e of the federal states as well as the federal Versammlungsgesetz that applies to all states without one, you do not need a permit for an assembly, you only have to notify the police or Ordnungsamt (part of city government) 48h in advance of public announcement. This is actually meant as a direct departure from the Third Reich policy where permits were required.
If the police deems your assembly a danger to the public or unable to be held as notified (e.g. when you want to hold an assembly on an Autobahn or other major street, or in security zones during foreign state visits) they can either forbid the assembly in its entirety (which is very rare) or modify the time/location (e.g. not on the Autobahn but on a parking lot, or directly outside the security zone). In this case the assembly initiator can go to the courts and initiate emergency hearings, which sometimes (e.g. with the G20 Hamburg protests) can go up to the Bundesverfassungsgericht (our Supreme Court equivalent).
That's a regulatory reality in the vast majority of "developed countries", Germany has similar regulations in place where any public assembly can be deemed illegal if it wasn't properly registered, afaik even in the US it ain't as simple as some people often make it out to be [0].
I see people in this thread surprised that this is happening in Singapore, a “modern” country. Singapore is certainly wealthy, the population is highly educated, institutions aren’t corrupt, all of which is great. However, the political system resembles a democracy only superficially. Every election since 1965 has been won by the same party. It is inconceivable that the People’s Action Party wouldn’t win an election either now or in the future.
Some find this surprising. Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn’t be so wealthy and successful. Turns out Lee Kuan Yew is that one Dictator in a million who managed to do pretty much everything right. Almost every decision he took turned out to be the right one for Singapore, including rigging it’s politics so he could stay in power throughout his lifetime. But he’s gone now, so it remains to be seen if his successors can carry on his legacy.
For example, they both want to dismantle social security, move away from anything resembling universal health care, shut down immigration from non-white countries, cut taxes, and jack up military spending.
Open borders / illegal immigration from poor / brown countries is a Republican position. They've pushed it since before Reagan's amnesty to benefit corporate special interests. [1] Democrats are late to that game, but now both parties agree: more cheap immigrants for their corporate masters. The Republican party vehemently opposed Donald Trump during the elections of 2015/6 and throughout his first year in office in large part due to his ambivalence toward immigration. There are some opposed to mass immigration among the elected officials of both parties (growing among the Republicans, shrinking among the Democrats), but they remain a minority. Never mind that large majorities of both Republican and Democrat electorates want less immigration [2]... the corporate sponsors want more, thus so do the representatives.
This is how politics works in the United States. The Parties put on a puff show of differing over hot button social issues that whip the electorate into a frenzy. Meanwhile the elected representatives of both parties go to great lengths to satisfy their corporate and international donors, who are the same for the representatives of both parties.
The plebes fight over the kabuki theater of climate change and transsexual bathrooms while the rulers work together on issues of substance without the interference or awareness of the common man.
Perhaps it's better that way? Edward Bernays certainly thought so. [3]
“Which is great” is an understatement. Looking at the other southeast Asian all the countries in ASEAN one starts to realize that Singapore could have been a lot worse off. Instead the GDP per capita is comparable to the United States, and crime is much lower.
> Looking at the other southeast Asian all the countries in ASEAN one starts to realize that Singapore could have been a lot worse off.
I find this very funny in reality because as someone from the US living in SE asia for nearly 4 years, I pretty much prefer everywhere else in SE asia than Singapore, though I guess if you look at from a monetary standpoint I can understand.
Over regulated daily life (though very well run) combined with being very culturally bland automaton like outside of very few pockets, mixed with Israeli militarism applied to its own people, just doesn't feel very welcoming compared to say Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia.
Some of my wife's family has lived there and Indonesia for a while, and it is agreed that out of all the places in SE asia, it is a good place to make money and potentially for schooling when young, they plan on moving when retiring.
Well I live in South Jakarta, in a pretty nice area in a 2br apt with alot of amenities that I would never want to pay for in the US or SG, so I'm biased because I probably have a very high quality of life compared to say most Indonesians (or even what I had compared to living in Boston paying the same for a room in an apt with 3 other grown men), but Indonesian's seem to be much more welcoming/laid back/hospitiable than Singaporean's (at least to me as a Black American). Plenty to complain about here (as anywhere), but progress is being made here without whole jack boot feel to it, albeit at a slower pace.
Do you have to go to an office daily? How convenient is that? Do you go out socially a lot? How are the restaurants and bars?
Jakarta is the city in SEA i know the least. I spent 3 days there as a cheap backpacker 10 years ago. I remember spending a substantial amount of time in traffic.
No I worked remote for companies in the US, which was my main willingness to live in SE asia in the first place because salaries here are crap.
Some places are better than others, if you lived in SCBD or Pondok Indah (where I am), and your office is close, it kind of feels like some parts of tokyo, but with a little more green space. Traffic is pretty crap though (morning and eveing when people are coming from work), but go-jek or grab biking doesn't make it too bad. Pollution is still bad during the work week, and if you do it alot best to get one of those face masks people tend to wear a lot in Asia anyways. MRT is coming online soon (alot of test runs on the tracks now), so that will make it alot easier geting around esp from south to central jkt.
Plenty of restaurants, bars, and clubs, I manage to have a good time when I out (pretty introverted though, so I tend to not go a lot in general, maybe a couple of times every month, but I tend to order food via gojek at least like every other day), though I try to avoid places that allow smoking indoors. I also tend to avoid eating any street food unless I have something I can take that my stomach can handle (but I'm like that in the US as well ha). It's also nice to be able to take a quick flight to some of the Islands and relax (Bali is ok, but super crowded with tourists compared to other places).
Never was really interested in backpacking unless it was hiking in mountains purely, so I don't really know what would appeal to that perspective.
> No I worked remote for companies in the US, which was my main willingness to live in SE asia in the first place because salaries here are crap.
You can make decent money in Singapore as an expat. But the range of salaries i've seen here is quite a bit larger than in most of the west.
As for the rest of your comment - interesting. Thank you for taking the time to write that up. I am no longer a backpacker and i travel and look at places differently nowadays. I have to check out Jakarta again.
I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.
> But the range of salaries i've seen here is quite a bit larger than in most of the west.
I noticed this as well, do you have a college degree? I've noticed companies over here place even more emphasis on having such (even despite paying less than in the US, at least regarding work relating to writing software).
> I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.
Do you go back and visit fairly often? I found that friend's and family were more likely to want to come to me or meet me somewhere outside than the US so I haven't really found the urge to go back to at least visit.
I have a bachelor’s degree but i know people without a degree making 130-140k USD anually in software related roles. Not quite SF/Valley rates but it goes a long way here with the low tax rates. And these are relatively young people. (Early thirties)
> Some of my wife's family has lived there and Indonesia for a while, and it is agreed that out of all the places in SE asia, it is a good place to make money and potentially for schooling when young, they plan on moving when retiring.
Not having to shoulder the cost of an aging population would work very well for SG.
I've never ever seen signs in the MRT about anything to do with pregnancy... (been here 7 years, catch the MRT to work every day, yellow and green lines)
This was sometime between Feb 27 and early march 2017 passing through some station on coming from somerset station on the red line, coming off one of the trains and on the walking tram, there was a huge billboard for it.
> Not having to shoulder the cost of an aging population would work very well for SG.
One (surprising) way Singapore addresses the cost of caring for an aging population is Singapore's "Maintenance of Parents Act"[1] which basically permits parents to sue their adult children for alimony.
I lived in Singapore for 2.5 years. I mostly remembered him for his psychomumbling of later part of his life.
Calling him "doing all things right" is a big stretch. The biggest error of him was to cling to power long after his mind went going.
Singapore's economic success was pretty much a meme too. The median income is only ~20000 USD a year, less than half of the economic product per capita.
There were three epochs in Singapore's economy:
First - everybody sat in their campungs and chewed paan. Pretty much nothing was happening till seventies. The only exception to that was that there was pretty much a small scale communist insurgency going on.
Second - reformation and industrialisation. This is the fabled Singaporean miracle. They built MDB flats, and everybody got so happy. A small industrial sector appeared, but it was quickly overshadowed by another kind of activity.
Singapore exploited Western reprehension dealing with Asia, and marketed itself as a "Western outpost" in the middle of barbarian lands. Singaporean companies used Singapore's GATT membership to run trade agencies that bought cheap goods from Asia, and stamp "made in Singapore" on them. That brought the country a big part of its current wealth.
Third - wind down and stagnation. China accessed to WTO, and Singapore's WTO membership no longer meant anything anymore. Singapore got into the middle income trap. People began to feel that Sing's economy was a one trick pony. It tried, but failed to upgrade its economy towards advanced economic activities. From that era, we got the fabulous Nanyang University, excellent primary education, and, back then, liberal immigration policy.
But there was blessing in a curse - China's WTO accession brought tons of money from China's first generation of billionaires to the country. From then on, Singapore fully took on its current identity of the "Luxembourg of Asia."
>The median income is only ~20000 USD a year, less than half of the economic product per capita.
This[0] publication puts median household income at $108k SGD or 79.5k USD (and that would actually be higher if adjusted for PPP). The median household income for the US is 59k USD.
It's also my understanding that almost everyone in Singapore lives in some sort of government-subsidized housing. The system is structured such that it's difficult to get an apartment or buy a house unless you're married so many typical Singaporean households have several adults earning an income under the same roof.[1]
Clarification - Singaporeans live in these flats (HDB housing) - not expatriates. Expat families live in different neighborhoods, different apartments, go to different schools and eat in different places than the locals. No part of an expat life is subsidized. It is therefore unfair to say that almost everyone in Singapore lives in subsidized housing - almost all of the Singaporeans do.
Nobody prohibits a privatised HDB flat tenant from subletting it.
It's a big stretch to say that every expat lives in a landed property.
My first place in Sing was a room that I shared with 3 Indian labourers, and no aircon.
Then, when I moved to a more upscale place thanks to hefty sales commissions, I think everybody was bedazzled "how such a pipsqueak can rent a place for $1800 by himself." Only then, I realised that only top few percents of Singaporeans can afford to live in non-HDB condominiums.
As pointed out elsewhere -- That's the median resident income. There's a huge class of workers that are never given residency that are purposefully ignored by the official stats. Roughly 1/3 of the inhabitants of SG are non-residents who typically work low wage jobs (nearly all domestic help in this category) and they have very limited rights.
Also called an enlightened despot; In the Eastern -Chinese Legalism tradition- a 明君 "míngjūn". There have been instances of them throughout history. But like you said, the problem is usually what happens once the ruler is gone. It's never a (long-term) good idea to have the success of a group dependant on a single person. A political system that produces mediocre-but-stable success (over several generations) seems preferable to one that produces a superior-but-brief success.
Oh my, can I ask you where did you pick that up? It feels to me that an average Western person nowadays has been taught more of that stuff than a well studied Chinese.
Not the poster you're replying to, but an examination of Legalism was presented in both law schools I attended. Additionally, I know it is also addressed in East Asian studies faculties (with additional historical context above the legal philosophy aspect of it, albeit with less emphasis on the functional qualities).
Picked it up long ago in a class on Eastern Philosophy. Given the vastness, variety, and history of Asia it barely covered 1% of it all, of course, so I only have a rough overview of the main traditions.
Well, in the case of Singapore, his son takes over [1]. Interestingly (for the HN crowd) he knows C++ and iirc from an old thread about the current PM, Haskell.
From the linked sources: "One of [my children] browsed a book and said, 'Here, read this.'" It was a textbook on the Haskell programming language, Lee recounted. "One day that will be my retirement reading."
He did get a CS master at Cambridge (UK) though, so the C++ bit is likely true.
Not surprised, William Gibson dubbed Singapore as "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" in his seminal article [1] on wired. That was true in 1993, that is still true now (can also relate since a lot of friends and family are living there).
> Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn’t be so wealthy and successful[...]
It's also worth noting that the entirety of Singapore just barely exceeds the area enclosed by Washington DC's beltway.
Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.
The better comparison for the nation should be Luxembourg, and Andorra, not other Asian countries.
> Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.
Recently, I also heard the opinion that another country that can be compared to Sing is Kazakhstan... wait?
The comparison is not so ridiculous if you go through with it:
... it is not a city state, but you can say that it is a "two city state." Besides Astana, and Almaty, the nation is effectively a post-soviet wasteland.
... LKY, just as Kazakh president was a socialist and nationalist early on, and of a very radical kind.
... LKY, just as Kazakh president purged every socialist and nationalist the moment he got a nation for himself.
... aside from elites living in ghettos for the rich, the ordinary population is pressed against the wall by low median income.
... to a very big extend, the state gives just enough of handouts to the masses to prevent them from rioting. This way, both Kazakhstan and Singapore can be called a de-facto, but not de-jure socialist states.
... both countries' economies are one trick ponies, despite of decades of dramatic efforts to change that.
... both countries spend lavishly on clearing up their image abroad, but the general populace of both countries can't disagree more with their respective countries popular image.
The biggest noticeable difference is of course that Singapore is cosy with the West, and Kazakhstan isn't.
What is Singapore's trick? Their economy looks moderately diversified to me - GDP comes 13.3% from finance, 19.2% from manufacturing, 17.6% from wholesale and retail trade, 14.8% from "Business Services", and 35% from other stuff:
There is very little genuine manufacturing left in Singapore. Back in nineties, there was big industry for trade agencies which imported random cheap stuff, and resold it to the West after stamping things with "Made in Singapore."
I assume, the big portion of manufacturing other than output of chip fabs, is the remnant from those years. Add it to that double digits of trade and services will also relate to the same activity.
And a big portion of services labelled as other and business services will relate to offshore banking.
And yeah, both countries run humongous sovereign funds, or better to say, both countries are ran by them.
I can’t say about Kazakhstan, but anecdotally, a lot of Singaporeans I know (not terribly many) are quite satisfied with, even proud of their country, the government, and the Lee family. The activists are the minority, by a wide margin.
Like Singapore: Norway, Finland, and Denmark all are around a population of 5 million, are well run, and don’t appear feudal. HN knows well, scaling is hard.
In fact, many argue that modern globalization is better suited to smaller forms of government than the XVIII century typical Nation-State on the French model. The concept of "Europe of Cities", on the model of federal Germany, is actually pretty compelling: most citizens of, say, London, have more in common with the citizens of Milan or Prague than they share with home-county backwaters; and the instances of the British countryside are closer to the ones of French countryside than of post-industrial cities like Manchester. Having London-sized macro-regions meet at European level to coordinate might be more effective and representative than the current "deep" model. It would also neutralize a whole set of issues with regional "independence" movements: Catalunya, Scotland or the Milan hinterland would be peers in Europe, rather than subjects in Milan, London and Rome.
Historically, nation-states have been mostly defined by culture, which is defined by language, which was mostly defined by communication speed, which was mostly defined by actual transportation speed. That's not an element anymore because all culture can be everywhere at any time. A new approach is required.
Not really, most of my knowledge is from the '90s and in Italian - when I was studying international relations and European institutions were in heavy flux. Policymakers back then floated all sorts of ideas, it was a very "creative" time in retrospect.
Since then, most of the attention has been on tribulations resulting from the common currency, 2008, and migrations, so there is a general unwillingness to rock more boats.
City-states have historically lead to far more numerous wars.
I won't argue the fact that Cyrus was enormously influential to the course of fertile crescent civilizations. That said, really he was just one of the first Fertile Crescent leaders to see not only the weaknesses of the city-state, but the means by which to exploit those weaknesses. (It's just that what he did to exploit those weaknesses was so radically orthogonal to the way things were done at the time that even today we're still calling the guy Cyrus the Great.)
Once the Nation-State idea was out of the bag, city-states just couldn't compete. Even the Greek city states fell to Macedon because by the end of the Theban hegemony, they were all so weak that even Macedon, effectively a baby nation-state at the time, was able to take them out. City-states wouldn't be able to compete today either. You'd always have to have some great power around to back them. Even Federations of city-states have faired poorly historically.
It's like continuing to rely on bronze swords once people got the hang of making iron ones. It no longer mattered all of the reasons that bronze was better for you, because iron was better when it counted. The cat was out of the bag, you could try to put it back in the bag, but everyone's already seen it.
You reason in industrial terms, though: nation-states "won" because they were bigger and more resorceful. In a situation where this is not necessaily advantageous, or even disadvantageous (because of centrifugal forces), those considerations are somewhat irrelevant. The URSS had the bigger army (and in some areas, the bigger industrial capacity) and lost the cold war. Turkey has the biggest army in NATO and still struggles to stay together.
In a world where everyone sorta-speaks English and the power is in know-how and transnational market access, it counts very little that you can mobilise this or that amount of tanks. It counts even less if those tanks are coordinated at a higher level anyway.
> This sounds like an argument for smaller nations?
It is sometimes used as one, thought it is also sometimes argued that the advantages of city-states are offset by problems (among others, international instability) unless the city-states are relatively rare and economically engaged with (and buffered from each other by) larger polities.
India has a similar situation. All the south Indian states are demanding to be declared as separate nation. One of the Singapore's official language is Tamil whose origin is an south Indian state TamilNadu. Singapore is taken as a motivation to demand a separate nation.
While it has problems, Liechtenstein is much closer to a normal democracy than Singapore (At least these days). Currently, four parties have seats, with no party having an absolute majority.
Didn’t the prince win a referendum to give him real monarchical powers though? The BBC summary from 2003 says “The people of Liechtenstein have voted to make their prince an absolute monarch again.” Although this description may be a bit exaggerated.
I assume the parent comment is in reference to the prince, not the parliament.
> Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn’t be so wealthy and successful. Turns out Lee Kuan Yew is that one Dictator in a million who managed to do pretty much everything right.
This made me think of some scripture.
> Nevertheless, if it were possible that ye could always have just men to be your kings it would be well for you to have a king. (Mosiah 23:8)
The preceding verse talks about how everyone should be equal ("one man shall not think himself above another") and the following verse talks about the effects of a bad king ("But remember the ainiquity of king Noah and his priests;")
It constantly shocks me how many hackers worship Singapore. I know many.
I mean it's not anywhere close to the worst place. It has a good economy and better rule of (incredibly strict) law than many. But I just find it shocking to see it held up as a near utopia and see hacker friends of mine sharing glitzy Singapore propaganda videos on Facebook.
To the type of person that dreams of living in a small space with little more than a laptop and a remote job, with all the necessary infrastructure for life externalized, Singapore looks pretty appealing for basically all the reasons you stated.
Good economy, but also good food which matters when you don’t plan to cook for yourself. Good transit infrastructure going anywhere you need or desire to go, so you don’t have to have a car. One level of government, so reduced complexity dealing with all those annoying things that hackers think are stupid and dumb, like taxes. Only thing it is really missing is the kind of critical mass of hackers that would make it into Y Combinator in City-State form.
I don't think the issue is that 'good' dictators are so rare (one in a million), but that they are rare enough that two back to back is extremely rare and three back to back is beyond hope, even if each dictator tries their best to train up their replacement. As such the real test of these systems is how they fair after the original dictator is gone. Singapore is currently in the middle of their test and the grade won't be seen for a while.
Even consecutive good dictators aren't that rare--Rome had the "Five Good Emperors" after all--but a single bad one can be enough to wreck the polity. Rome did recover from Nero... but it never really did from Commodus.
It's not just that it's wealthy, the people are pretty free there. I visited recently and there's nothing there that indicates it's anything other than a first-world democracy. Media and internet are not censored. It's socially conservative compared to Western Europe or the US, but not draconian at all. The authoritarian streak is there, but it's not pervasive like China.
What I meant is that they don't firewall the entire internet the way China does. You can read any international news or social media. Their censorship regime is purely domestic.
This is a good point. Free societies don’t arise from education and wealth, but rather peoples’ culture. US GDP per capita in 1870 was about $3,000 in today’s dollars, comparable to Syria. Most African countries have a higher ratio of primary school enrollment today than the US did then.
There is a very odd conceit among Americans. We believe our culture is universal, which causes us to devalue it and asset culture doesn’t matter. We assume the natural outcome of education and economic development worldwide will be western-style individualist free societies, so there is no need to protect western culture from globalism.
It clearly wasn't right for the guy doing a skype call. Stalin also substantially grew the economy of the USSR. US economy grew with the slave trade. Maybe using economic gains as an argument for what is "good" is a poor argument.
Singapore and Hong Kong have a unique position in that they have an established bureaucracy, trade law, and international banking infrastructure - thanks to the British. Because they are tiny islands of stability and 'rule of commercial law' in a sea of political and economic instability ... they essentially have a powerful export industry, one that also relies on political stability.
Without that wealth, I think the leaders would be goners.
People are willing to put up with a lot so long as they are gaining wealth, the rules are not so harsh, and there is the perception of rule of law (i.e. no bribery).
Not to inflame the anti-Imperialists :) but I wonder where Singapore would be were they to have a (elected?) Governor from the UK instead of a 'Dictator'. Especially since there is no such thing really as a 'native Singaporean' (i.e. when the British took over it was almost an empty plot) and this is more like a trading post than a colony, it really does question the classical late 20th century narrative views of Imperialism.
I suggest that at very least, this guy could be having his little Skype meeting. But maybe the streets wouldn't be quite so clean?
Fun Fact. Lee Kuan Yew was a computer scientist before becoming politican and coded solving sudoku and shared his code over github also mentioned he wanted to learn haskell. Looks like computer scientists would make great politican's once elected but getting elected requires a different set of skills, luckily for Lee Kuan his father paved the way before him.
> Fun Fact. Lee Kuan Yew was a computer scientist before becoming politican
No, he wasn't. He was a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in economics. The closest that gets to being true is that his son, Lee Hsien Long, got a B.A. in Mathematics and Diploma (essentially an M.S.) in Computer Science before getting a Master of Public Administration. His work history immediately after getting the CS degree was as a military officer with a meteoric career path which appears to have been in field command and operations and general staff positions; he does not appear to ever have been a working computer scientist.
> Looks like computer scientists would make great politican's once elected but getting elected
That generalization goes far beyond what the single example you seem to rely on would support even if it were accurately described.
TL;DR - Speaker was on Skype. 121 people gathered together to listen to him. Police had told the organizer to get a permit, which he didn't. Location was inside a public mall.
>>>
On November 26, 2016, Wham organized an indoor forum called “Civil Disobedience and Social Movements” at a small event space inside a shopping mall in Singapore. The event featured prominent Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong who addressed the audience remotely via a Skype video call.
The event’s Facebook Page indicates that 355 people were interested and 121 went. The Skype discussion, which lasted around two hours, was also live streamed on Facebook by The Online Citizen SG, a social media platform focused on political activism, and garnered 5,700 views.
Despite being advised by the police prior to the event to obtain a permit, Wham proceeded without said consent, according to a statement by the Singapore Police Force. Wham faced similar charges of organizing public assemblies without police permits and refusing to sign statements under the Penal Code.
The main proponents of doing this are a guy who bought a water cannon to use on protestors in London, a man so Catholic he'd vote down abortion, and a bunch of people who are mostly OK with letting people who are fleeing war drown in the Mediterranean.
They use water cannon in the rest of Europe, and even tear gas. What's the problem? They should have had a water cannon for the London Riots in 2012 - and that is why they purchased some. Which the current mayor has selfishly used for political points by selling them off for barely 10k. He will be praying they aren't ever needed.
Theresa May believed that escalating to water cannon with their potential risks would further damage relations between the police and the public in mainland Britain.
Theresa May, a political opponent of Boris Johnson, specifically chose not to authorise their use after they had been purchased, as an attack on Johnson.
As a foreigner, the UK police is widely admired for their restraint. Tactics like kettling, for all their drawbacks, are absolutely preferable to the alternatives seen elsewhere in Europe. It’s one of those things, like the lack of ID cards and centuries-long administrative continuity, that really set the UK apart from most other places and made it a beacon of pragmatic liberalism. Wish for “normalization” at your peril.
Yes, people don't seem to realise that we have a policing model that is probably among the best in the world. Better to kettle people occasionally than blind them with watercannon and tear gas - or as the Americans seem to prefer, shoot them in the back while they run away.
In the UK we do policing by consent. We aren't interested in attacking our own people. Some other countries could learn by our example.
The reason he "selfishly" sold them, by the way, was because they were in poor condition, cost more to keep than to sell, and were actually illegal to use.
It is clear to me where you get your news from, based on what you say. It is not encouraging.
> In the UK we do policing by consent. We aren't interested in attacking our own people.
Are we interested in letting our own people be attacked? If people can loot and burn without repercussion, do you think they'll be overly concerned with bashing you or your loved ones to steal your phone?
How close was your home to the riots?
> It is clear to me where you get your news from, based on what you say. It is not encouraging.
This was unnecessarily personal and essentially meaningless - the other poster could say the same thing about you.
> Meeting riots with escalation sounds good on the night
You are assuming meeting riots in any way is escalating them. The riots escalated precisely because they were not met with a response.
(as a side note, although I'm not disputing anything specific in the link, The Guardian is not an objective source for riot related information - The Guardian was found to have misled the public and forced to apologise by the PCC for the misleading 'Unarmed' Duggan headline)
> We aren't interested in attacking our own people.
There's a lot of backslapping going on here that isn't really warranted; the Met are very far from perfect when we're talking about public order policing.
And that's before we get onto the subject of how policing was done in living memory in Northern Ireland.
Far from perfect, but we don't water cannon, gas, or shoot our own for the most part. That is done out of principle. To suggest that the flaws of the Met mean people should get treated the way they do in America or even Europe is absurd.
Northern Ireland was a war zone and pretty much still is. Think of it as occupation rather than policing and you'll grasp it better.
> They should have had a water cannon for the London Riots in 2012
What? The whole deal with the riots [1] is that they were like flashmobs, they'd pop up at random. Unless you have a water cannon on every street corner, they'd spend all their time chasing round after the villains.
> Which the current mayor has selfishly used for political points by selling them off for barely 10k.
That is a truly bizarre - and, let's be honest, entirely partisan - way to lay the blame.
> The main proponents of doing this are a guy who bought a water cannon to use on protesters in London
Boris Johnson purchased a cannon to use on rioters - the vast majority of which had no concern about the police killing the armed drug dealer in question. Water cannons are effective for use in riots, as we've seen recently in Paris. My main concern is Sadiq Kahn who sold them, leaving us again vulnerable in a repeat incident.
> a bunch of people who are mostly OK with letting people who are fleeing war drown in the Mediterranean
Who is that? The vast majority of people entering the UK without visas do so via Calais, and the vast majority of those are economic migrants.
Given that Theresa May specifically did not give permission to use them, what would you rather Khan did with them? Given that they can't be deployed against rioters.
I understand they required work to be done on them anyway, and would have incurred ongoing maintenance and storage costs; spending more money on weapons that specifically cannot be used seems like a poor choice.
Or were you hoping that Khan would ask again and be told that he could use them after all?
I'd rather May gave permission to use them. Kahn should have kept them regardless and assumed authorisation would come when the next major event occurs - rather than praying it doesn't.
Singapore does have many positives (ease of forming a business, low crime, low corruption, a cost-effective single-payer healthcare system, good urban planning, taxing car ownership as an externality). I don't see how these go hand-in-hand with authoritarian government.
I'd rather be in a country where I get a meaningful vote.
The downvotes I'm receiving are indicative that there is a contingent of unpleasant faux-libertarians, populists, and other assorted anti-democratic trolls and scumbags on HN.
Edit: also, the EU has done a better job of modernising some of the biggest and oldest states the world has ever known over the last 50 years, and has done so at the behest of democracy.
I have snarked before the best way to get rid of dictatorship brigades with a minimum of effort is to start posting references to their Tiananmen Squares - very awkward facts they don't want disseminated and may have auto-blocked.
Why does everyone assume democracy is good? It clearly wasn’t necessary for Singapore. A well run “dictatorship” is much better than your average democracy. I would concede that a democracy filled with the right people is the best but in reality it is very rare to come upon a population that is actually ready to govern itself. People generally have extremely reductionist and incorrect opinions about such things in my experience.
Democracy is awful in all sorts of ways. Its one major advantage is non-violent succession, something other systems really struggle with.
Dictatorships can be great for a whole, but eventually you get a mad dictator or two people who both think they should be the dictator and it all falls apart.
This is how the Romans thought of dictators, yes. The dictator was elected by nomination and then given supreme authority over state affairs, although usually only in a specific area of governance and with severe term limits.
The last guy who said "screw term limits" was ol' Julius Caesar, but he was iced not long after on the Ides of March and the office of dictator was abolished.
The title of dictator has taken on a negative connotation in the recent past for obvious reasons, but the idea of a competent or even brilliant man being given total control in order to accomplish a specific task for the good of a country is certainly something to consider regarding governance.
That can work, until the dictator decides he doesn’t want to give up power and changes the rules. You need a system that makes it really hard to change the fundamental shape of the system itself, which isn’t compatible with dictators.
Robust democracies are the best defenders of people's rights over time. They're the best self righting mechanism that is available for a nation-state when its economy, civil liberties, and living standards get out of whack. It is also the only way to reconcile a society with large numbers of powerful competing interest groups. It is certainly not perfect but it is, as the old saying goes, better than anything else.
Why are you assuming Singapore is truly well run? Dictators lie their asses off about quality of life and paper over problems with violence. Just wealth isn't a reason - Saudi Arabia is wealthy but sure as hell not well run.
Singapore is exceptionally well run. I'm posting this from the sofa in a HDB (government built housing). Sure it has its problems as this story identifies but it is the safest most well built city I've ever been in and I've been all over the world.
Having lived in Singapore for 10 years, I can attest to the high quality of life there, much higher than I have experienced anywhere else in the world.
A benevolent (and in some cases not even benevolent) dictatorship has historically accomplished more for a country in a shorter amount of time than a democracy, but it requires the right combination of exceedingly rare qualities in a leader and everybody dies eventually.
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”
Democracy isn't good, but the alternative isn't to have a dictatorship; it is to not make peoples rights subject to a vote and thus have no need of a government*
My main interest in this article was not about Singapore, but at what point does an online gathering cross the boundary to the physical world where limits are placed on the size of the gathering, or if and when it crosses countries' borders.
What's not to say the HKer was the host and the Singaporeans were individually the guests? Obviously that isn't what the court decided in this instance but perhaps that is what could happen next time.
Was it the physical location of the Singaporeans that made the difference? What if they had attend a Skype concall at home, would the court be looking at who sent the meeting invitation?
Why is everyone focusing on the fact that someone spoke via Skype?
The fact is that
1. Jolovan Wham did organise a physical gathering of people
2. The gathering/assembly meets the definition as in the Public Order Act[1]
3. The venue, The Agora, meets the definition of a public place as in the Public Order Act
I'm not sure that a recorded video would have been the same. The source for the techcrunch article says:
> The Singapore Police Force in an earlier statement, said that Wham had organised an indoor public assembly featuring a foreign speaker, which required a Police permit.
Although given that political films are also banned, maybe a prerecorded video would have been illegal under a different law.
If you don't like a law, change it, don't break it and get yourself in trouble.
This is basically the difference between East Asian cultures and Western/American culture. We value a balance of order and individual rights, you guys value individual rights over all.
It is funny how in these kinds of discusions it is always "you guys have excesive amount of A and not enought of B, whilst we have a perfect balace of A and B" instead of "you value A more than we do, but we like B more".
For a bit of historical perspective, this was the same criticism made of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Good thing MLK didn't try to follow your advice.
Individual rights are just that -- not rights, not privileges and thus not subject to debate, thought they are of course frequently violated by totalitarian states to a greater or a somewhat lesser degree.
I know this is controversial, because the current rule is that you are not supposed to say that your moral system is right and the other guys system is wrong, but A is A and Freedom is not slavery, no matter how much that is yelled from the tops of mountains.
Old but good essay by William Gibson on his trip to Singapore in the 90s. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". An interesting read and relevant to this.
You need a permit for a public assembly for most places in the USA. Granted there are a lot of differences between the two countries, but this could happen here.
You need a permit for assembly in public in the USA because it could cause traffic or other congestion issues that can create hazardous conditions, and need to be planned around. I'm sure this reasoning has been abused to prevent freedom of speech, but I don't see how it could be used online.
In all fairness I'd be hesitant to live in Singapore on account of its high cost of living and poor work-life balance. However, there is a method to the madness as far as the legal system goes, which makes it tame to visit compare with other large cities in SE Asia or even western europe.
> In all fairness I'd be hesitant to live in Singapore on account of its high cost of living and poor work-life balance.
As an expat, that would likely not affect you much. Lots of MNCs have fairly nice working hours, decent pay and 20-25 days/year paid leave (on top of the numerous public holidays)
Cost of living depends on whether you need a big apartment in a posh location and a car. Sending kids to international school is also pricey.
186 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadThere was a foreign speaker participating over Skype. As idiotic as the law seems to be, I do believe the case is rather clear. The foreigner did indeed speak at the conference, which was public. The fact that Skype was used as a medium to facilitate that doesn't really change anything.
If I rant against Disney land with the dealt penalty, and the video is later played there, I have not given a speech there.
If someone live-streams a keynote and a Q/A session as a part of an event, then the person speaking is obviously participating.
Please note, that I have no problems with remote participation of events. It just happens that our favourite south-east asian police state requires a permit for such events. Our opinions on whether that law is a good one or not has nothing to do with the medium chosen for the event.
The right to free assembly isn't a thing in Singapore apparently.
Rich does not equate to equitable. Dubai and Qatar are other examples.
:(
The question is whether "the Internet" is a public place or not.
Case in point: Italy.
A) According to article 18 of the consolidated act on public security (TULPS) it is mandatory to inform the police whenever a gathering is organized in a "public place" [1].
B) the Corte di cassazione (the Italian supreme court) has repeatedly stated that public websites are equivalent to public places [2].
Exercise for the reader: draw the consequences of combining A and B.
[1] «I promotori di una riunione in luogo pubblico o aperto al pubblico devono darne avviso, almeno tre giorni prima, al Questore. E’ considerata pubblica anche una riunione, che, sebbene indetta in forma privata, tuttavia per il luogo in cui sarà tenuta, o per il numero delle persone che dovranno intervenirvi, o per lo scopo o l'oggetto di essa, ha carattere di riunione non privata.» http://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:regio.de...
[2] https://www.lastampa.it/2014/11/17/italia/molestie-cosa-rien...
That says nothing about a permit being required.
If the police deems your assembly a danger to the public or unable to be held as notified (e.g. when you want to hold an assembly on an Autobahn or other major street, or in security zones during foreign state visits) they can either forbid the assembly in its entirety (which is very rare) or modify the time/location (e.g. not on the Autobahn but on a parking lot, or directly outside the security zone). In this case the assembly initiator can go to the courts and initiate emergency hearings, which sometimes (e.g. with the G20 Hamburg protests) can go up to the Bundesverfassungsgericht (our Supreme Court equivalent).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Some find this surprising. Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn’t be so wealthy and successful. Turns out Lee Kuan Yew is that one Dictator in a million who managed to do pretty much everything right. Almost every decision he took turned out to be the right one for Singapore, including rigging it’s politics so he could stay in power throughout his lifetime. But he’s gone now, so it remains to be seen if his successors can carry on his legacy.
Source -
1. A glowing obituary in The Economist, a publication harassed in Singapore for criticising the PAP - https://www.economist.com/obituary/2015/03/22/lee-kuan-yew
2. The Dictator’s Handbook
Not true, it looks so from where you're sitting. But politics change a lot over time.
It's slow moving and in a two party system, you are unlikely to see big differences between either side.
That said, the world would have looked differently had Hilary won in 2016.
Wait a minute....
This is how politics works in the United States. The Parties put on a puff show of differing over hot button social issues that whip the electorate into a frenzy. Meanwhile the elected representatives of both parties go to great lengths to satisfy their corporate and international donors, who are the same for the representatives of both parties.
The plebes fight over the kabuki theater of climate change and transsexual bathrooms while the rulers work together on issues of substance without the interference or awareness of the common man.
Perhaps it's better that way? Edward Bernays certainly thought so. [3]
[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-left-case-aga...
[2] http://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Fina...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
LKY strikes me as both highly intelligent and pragmatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8GwmsLXOx8
But I guess only time will tell if the system is as good as the man himself. If I had to guess, I’m skeptical.
I find this very funny in reality because as someone from the US living in SE asia for nearly 4 years, I pretty much prefer everywhere else in SE asia than Singapore, though I guess if you look at from a monetary standpoint I can understand.
Some of my wife's family has lived there and Indonesia for a while, and it is agreed that out of all the places in SE asia, it is a good place to make money and potentially for schooling when young, they plan on moving when retiring.
Jakarta is the city in SEA i know the least. I spent 3 days there as a cheap backpacker 10 years ago. I remember spending a substantial amount of time in traffic.
Some places are better than others, if you lived in SCBD or Pondok Indah (where I am), and your office is close, it kind of feels like some parts of tokyo, but with a little more green space. Traffic is pretty crap though (morning and eveing when people are coming from work), but go-jek or grab biking doesn't make it too bad. Pollution is still bad during the work week, and if you do it alot best to get one of those face masks people tend to wear a lot in Asia anyways. MRT is coming online soon (alot of test runs on the tracks now), so that will make it alot easier geting around esp from south to central jkt.
Plenty of restaurants, bars, and clubs, I manage to have a good time when I out (pretty introverted though, so I tend to not go a lot in general, maybe a couple of times every month, but I tend to order food via gojek at least like every other day), though I try to avoid places that allow smoking indoors. I also tend to avoid eating any street food unless I have something I can take that my stomach can handle (but I'm like that in the US as well ha). It's also nice to be able to take a quick flight to some of the Islands and relax (Bali is ok, but super crowded with tourists compared to other places).
Never was really interested in backpacking unless it was hiking in mountains purely, so I don't really know what would appeal to that perspective.
You can make decent money in Singapore as an expat. But the range of salaries i've seen here is quite a bit larger than in most of the west.
As for the rest of your comment - interesting. Thank you for taking the time to write that up. I am no longer a backpacker and i travel and look at places differently nowadays. I have to check out Jakarta again.
I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.
I noticed this as well, do you have a college degree? I've noticed companies over here place even more emphasis on having such (even despite paying less than in the US, at least regarding work relating to writing software).
> I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.
Do you go back and visit fairly often? I found that friend's and family were more likely to want to come to me or meet me somewhere outside than the US so I haven't really found the urge to go back to at least visit.
I visit home about once a year.
Not having to shoulder the cost of an aging population would work very well for SG.
"Pool of citizens aged 65 and older grew to 14.4% this year, from 9.4% in 2007, as lifespans increase and births stay low"[0]
[0] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/spore-ageing-at-faste...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxU89x78ac
One (surprising) way Singapore addresses the cost of caring for an aging population is Singapore's "Maintenance of Parents Act"[1] which basically permits parents to sue their adult children for alimony.
[1]http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1614_200...
Calling him "doing all things right" is a big stretch. The biggest error of him was to cling to power long after his mind went going.
Singapore's economic success was pretty much a meme too. The median income is only ~20000 USD a year, less than half of the economic product per capita.
There were three epochs in Singapore's economy:
First - everybody sat in their campungs and chewed paan. Pretty much nothing was happening till seventies. The only exception to that was that there was pretty much a small scale communist insurgency going on.
Second - reformation and industrialisation. This is the fabled Singaporean miracle. They built MDB flats, and everybody got so happy. A small industrial sector appeared, but it was quickly overshadowed by another kind of activity.
Singapore exploited Western reprehension dealing with Asia, and marketed itself as a "Western outpost" in the middle of barbarian lands. Singaporean companies used Singapore's GATT membership to run trade agencies that bought cheap goods from Asia, and stamp "made in Singapore" on them. That brought the country a big part of its current wealth.
Third - wind down and stagnation. China accessed to WTO, and Singapore's WTO membership no longer meant anything anymore. Singapore got into the middle income trap. People began to feel that Sing's economy was a one trick pony. It tried, but failed to upgrade its economy towards advanced economic activities. From that era, we got the fabulous Nanyang University, excellent primary education, and, back then, liberal immigration policy.
But there was blessing in a curse - China's WTO accession brought tons of money from China's first generation of billionaires to the country. From then on, Singapore fully took on its current identity of the "Luxembourg of Asia."
This[0] publication puts median household income at $108k SGD or 79.5k USD (and that would actually be higher if adjusted for PPP). The median household income for the US is 59k USD.
[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/house...
Not median per person for the whole population including non-residents in the country.
[1]https://www.economist.com/asia/2017/07/06/why-80-of-singapor...
It's a big stretch to say that every expat lives in a landed property.
My first place in Sing was a room that I shared with 3 Indian labourers, and no aircon.
Then, when I moved to a more upscale place thanks to hefty sales commissions, I think everybody was bedazzled "how such a pipsqueak can rent a place for $1800 by himself." Only then, I realised that only top few percents of Singaporeans can afford to live in non-HDB condominiums.
Also called an enlightened despot; In the Eastern -Chinese Legalism tradition- a 明君 "míngjūn". There have been instances of them throughout history. But like you said, the problem is usually what happens once the ruler is gone. It's never a (long-term) good idea to have the success of a group dependant on a single person. A political system that produces mediocre-but-stable success (over several generations) seems preferable to one that produces a superior-but-brief success.
Oh my, can I ask you where did you pick that up? It feels to me that an average Western person nowadays has been taught more of that stuff than a well studied Chinese.
Well, in the case of Singapore, his son takes over [1]. Interestingly (for the HN crowd) he knows C++ and iirc from an old thread about the current PM, Haskell.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong
He did get a CS master at Cambridge (UK) though, so the C++ bit is likely true.
Or, even worse, when they get old and start losing their faculties.
[1] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/
edit: corrected spelling mistake
It's also worth noting that the entirety of Singapore just barely exceeds the area enclosed by Washington DC's beltway.
Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.
> Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.
Recently, I also heard the opinion that another country that can be compared to Sing is Kazakhstan... wait?
The comparison is not so ridiculous if you go through with it:
... it is not a city state, but you can say that it is a "two city state." Besides Astana, and Almaty, the nation is effectively a post-soviet wasteland.
... LKY, just as Kazakh president was a socialist and nationalist early on, and of a very radical kind.
... LKY, just as Kazakh president purged every socialist and nationalist the moment he got a nation for himself.
... aside from elites living in ghettos for the rich, the ordinary population is pressed against the wall by low median income.
... to a very big extend, the state gives just enough of handouts to the masses to prevent them from rioting. This way, both Kazakhstan and Singapore can be called a de-facto, but not de-jure socialist states.
... both countries' economies are one trick ponies, despite of decades of dramatic efforts to change that.
... both countries spend lavishly on clearing up their image abroad, but the general populace of both countries can't disagree more with their respective countries popular image.
The biggest noticeable difference is of course that Singapore is cosy with the West, and Kazakhstan isn't.
What is Singapore's trick? Their economy looks moderately diversified to me - GDP comes 13.3% from finance, 19.2% from manufacturing, 17.6% from wholesale and retail trade, 14.8% from "Business Services", and 35% from other stuff:
https://www.tablebuilder.singstat.gov.sg/publicfacing/create...
I assume, the big portion of manufacturing other than output of chip fabs, is the remnant from those years. Add it to that double digits of trade and services will also relate to the same activity.
And a big portion of services labelled as other and business services will relate to offshore banking.
And yeah, both countries run humongous sovereign funds, or better to say, both countries are ran by them.
Historically, nation-states have been mostly defined by culture, which is defined by language, which was mostly defined by communication speed, which was mostly defined by actual transportation speed. That's not an element anymore because all culture can be everywhere at any time. A new approach is required.
Since then, most of the attention has been on tribulations resulting from the common currency, 2008, and migrations, so there is a general unwillingness to rock more boats.
I won't argue the fact that Cyrus was enormously influential to the course of fertile crescent civilizations. That said, really he was just one of the first Fertile Crescent leaders to see not only the weaknesses of the city-state, but the means by which to exploit those weaknesses. (It's just that what he did to exploit those weaknesses was so radically orthogonal to the way things were done at the time that even today we're still calling the guy Cyrus the Great.)
Once the Nation-State idea was out of the bag, city-states just couldn't compete. Even the Greek city states fell to Macedon because by the end of the Theban hegemony, they were all so weak that even Macedon, effectively a baby nation-state at the time, was able to take them out. City-states wouldn't be able to compete today either. You'd always have to have some great power around to back them. Even Federations of city-states have faired poorly historically.
It's like continuing to rely on bronze swords once people got the hang of making iron ones. It no longer mattered all of the reasons that bronze was better for you, because iron was better when it counted. The cat was out of the bag, you could try to put it back in the bag, but everyone's already seen it.
In a world where everyone sorta-speaks English and the power is in know-how and transnational market access, it counts very little that you can mobilise this or that amount of tanks. It counts even less if those tanks are coordinated at a higher level anyway.
The other thing is that a place like Singapore is exceptional. It’s a strategic chokepoont established by a colonial power.
It is sometimes used as one, thought it is also sometimes argued that the advantages of city-states are offset by problems (among others, international instability) unless the city-states are relatively rare and economically engaged with (and buffered from each other by) larger polities.
I assume the parent comment is in reference to the prince, not the parliament.
This made me think of some scripture.
> Nevertheless, if it were possible that ye could always have just men to be your kings it would be well for you to have a king. (Mosiah 23:8)
The preceding verse talks about how everyone should be equal ("one man shall not think himself above another") and the following verse talks about the effects of a bad king ("But remember the ainiquity of king Noah and his priests;")
I mean it's not anywhere close to the worst place. It has a good economy and better rule of (incredibly strict) law than many. But I just find it shocking to see it held up as a near utopia and see hacker friends of mine sharing glitzy Singapore propaganda videos on Facebook.
Good economy, but also good food which matters when you don’t plan to cook for yourself. Good transit infrastructure going anywhere you need or desire to go, so you don’t have to have a car. One level of government, so reduced complexity dealing with all those annoying things that hackers think are stupid and dumb, like taxes. Only thing it is really missing is the kind of critical mass of hackers that would make it into Y Combinator in City-State form.
Singapore has strong censorship mechanisms for the media and Internet. It ranks 151 on the Freedom of Press Index [0].
[0] https://rsf.org/en/singapore
They block:
-pornography
-ashley madison
-an admittedly very questionable "news" site targeted at Singapore but operated from the outside
Further, the sale of malaysian newspapers is banned, as is private ownership of satellite TV equipment.
There is a very odd conceit among Americans. We believe our culture is universal, which causes us to devalue it and asset culture doesn’t matter. We assume the natural outcome of education and economic development worldwide will be western-style individualist free societies, so there is no need to protect western culture from globalism.
hence "de facto dictatorship"
It could alternatively be that the people are reasonably happy with their levels of peace and prosperity and see no need to change the government.
Without that wealth, I think the leaders would be goners.
People are willing to put up with a lot so long as they are gaining wealth, the rules are not so harsh, and there is the perception of rule of law (i.e. no bribery).
Not to inflame the anti-Imperialists :) but I wonder where Singapore would be were they to have a (elected?) Governor from the UK instead of a 'Dictator'. Especially since there is no such thing really as a 'native Singaporean' (i.e. when the British took over it was almost an empty plot) and this is more like a trading post than a colony, it really does question the classical late 20th century narrative views of Imperialism.
I suggest that at very least, this guy could be having his little Skype meeting. But maybe the streets wouldn't be quite so clean?
No, he wasn't. He was a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in economics. The closest that gets to being true is that his son, Lee Hsien Long, got a B.A. in Mathematics and Diploma (essentially an M.S.) in Computer Science before getting a Master of Public Administration. His work history immediately after getting the CS degree was as a military officer with a meteoric career path which appears to have been in field command and operations and general staff positions; he does not appear to ever have been a working computer scientist.
> Looks like computer scientists would make great politican's once elected but getting elected
That generalization goes far beyond what the single example you seem to rely on would support even if it were accurately described.
TL;DR - Speaker was on Skype. 121 people gathered together to listen to him. Police had told the organizer to get a permit, which he didn't. Location was inside a public mall.
>>> On November 26, 2016, Wham organized an indoor forum called “Civil Disobedience and Social Movements” at a small event space inside a shopping mall in Singapore. The event featured prominent Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong who addressed the audience remotely via a Skype video call.
The event’s Facebook Page indicates that 355 people were interested and 121 went. The Skype discussion, which lasted around two hours, was also live streamed on Facebook by The Online Citizen SG, a social media platform focused on political activism, and garnered 5,700 views.
Despite being advised by the police prior to the event to obtain a permit, Wham proceeded without said consent, according to a statement by the Singapore Police Force. Wham faced similar charges of organizing public assemblies without police permits and refusing to sign statements under the Penal Code.
I do not hold out much hope.
Theresa May believed that escalating to water cannon with their potential risks would further damage relations between the police and the public in mainland Britain.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-oral-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The reason he "selfishly" sold them, by the way, was because they were in poor condition, cost more to keep than to sell, and were actually illegal to use.
It is clear to me where you get your news from, based on what you say. It is not encouraging.
Are we interested in letting our own people be attacked? If people can loot and burn without repercussion, do you think they'll be overly concerned with bashing you or your loved ones to steal your phone?
How close was your home to the riots?
> It is clear to me where you get your news from, based on what you say. It is not encouraging.
This was unnecessarily personal and essentially meaningless - the other poster could say the same thing about you.
(The policing by consent issue is very real, though. Meeting riots with escalation sounds good on the night but has long consequences.)
You are assuming meeting riots in any way is escalating them. The riots escalated precisely because they were not met with a response.
(as a side note, although I'm not disputing anything specific in the link, The Guardian is not an objective source for riot related information - The Guardian was found to have misled the public and forced to apologise by the PCC for the misleading 'Unarmed' Duggan headline)
There's a lot of backslapping going on here that isn't really warranted; the Met are very far from perfect when we're talking about public order policing.
And that's before we get onto the subject of how policing was done in living memory in Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland was a war zone and pretty much still is. Think of it as occupation rather than policing and you'll grasp it better.
What? The whole deal with the riots [1] is that they were like flashmobs, they'd pop up at random. Unless you have a water cannon on every street corner, they'd spend all their time chasing round after the villains.
> Which the current mayor has selfishly used for political points by selling them off for barely 10k.
That is a truly bizarre - and, let's be honest, entirely partisan - way to lay the blame.
[1] lootings really
Boris Johnson purchased a cannon to use on rioters - the vast majority of which had no concern about the police killing the armed drug dealer in question. Water cannons are effective for use in riots, as we've seen recently in Paris. My main concern is Sadiq Kahn who sold them, leaving us again vulnerable in a repeat incident.
> a bunch of people who are mostly OK with letting people who are fleeing war drown in the Mediterranean
Who is that? The vast majority of people entering the UK without visas do so via Calais, and the vast majority of those are economic migrants.
I understand they required work to be done on them anyway, and would have incurred ongoing maintenance and storage costs; spending more money on weapons that specifically cannot be used seems like a poor choice.
Or were you hoping that Khan would ask again and be told that he could use them after all?
The downvotes I'm receiving are indicative that there is a contingent of unpleasant faux-libertarians, populists, and other assorted anti-democratic trolls and scumbags on HN.
Edit: also, the EU has done a better job of modernising some of the biggest and oldest states the world has ever known over the last 50 years, and has done so at the behest of democracy.
They don't. As long as it has existed, people have pointed out its flaws.
https://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was...
Dictatorships can be great for a whole, but eventually you get a mad dictator or two people who both think they should be the dictator and it all falls apart.
The last guy who said "screw term limits" was ol' Julius Caesar, but he was iced not long after on the Ides of March and the office of dictator was abolished.
The title of dictator has taken on a negative connotation in the recent past for obvious reasons, but the idea of a competent or even brilliant man being given total control in order to accomplish a specific task for the good of a country is certainly something to consider regarding governance.
Robust democracies are the best defenders of people's rights over time. They're the best self righting mechanism that is available for a nation-state when its economy, civil liberties, and living standards get out of whack. It is also the only way to reconcile a society with large numbers of powerful competing interest groups. It is certainly not perfect but it is, as the old saying goes, better than anything else.
— Winston Churchill
Until the benevolent dictator dies and is replaced with a 'less principled dictator'.
*courts, etc yes. Government no.
That's like saying “Red, etc., yes, but no colors.”
What's not to say the HKer was the host and the Singaporeans were individually the guests? Obviously that isn't what the court decided in this instance but perhaps that is what could happen next time.
Was it the physical location of the Singaporeans that made the difference? What if they had attend a Skype concall at home, would the court be looking at who sent the meeting invitation?
The fact is that
1. Jolovan Wham did organise a physical gathering of people 2. The gathering/assembly meets the definition as in the Public Order Act[1] 3. The venue, The Agora, meets the definition of a public place as in the Public Order Act
[1]: https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/POA2009
They could have been watching a recorded video and it would have been the same.
> The Singapore Police Force in an earlier statement, said that Wham had organised an indoor public assembly featuring a foreign speaker, which required a Police permit.
Although given that political films are also banned, maybe a prerecorded video would have been illegal under a different law.
This is basically the difference between East Asian cultures and Western/American culture. We value a balance of order and individual rights, you guys value individual rights over all.
I know this is controversial, because the current rule is that you are not supposed to say that your moral system is right and the other guys system is wrong, but A is A and Freedom is not slavery, no matter how much that is yelled from the tops of mountains.
Old but good essay by William Gibson on his trip to Singapore in the 90s. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". An interesting read and relevant to this.
They'd probably end up whipping me a hundred times for something I did without even being aware of it. [1]
IMHO that whole country should serve as a counterexample to all the rest.
Humans really are good at making life miserable for each other aren't they?
[1] Maybe farting in public, or wearing my shoes on the wrong feet or whatever.
As an expat, that would likely not affect you much. Lots of MNCs have fairly nice working hours, decent pay and 20-25 days/year paid leave (on top of the numerous public holidays)
Cost of living depends on whether you need a big apartment in a posh location and a car. Sending kids to international school is also pricey.