People are down-voting you. But to them, I'd like to say, how can you read this and not be shocked? > To illustrate how Better.sg tries to diffuse tensions, Ke

People are down-voting you. But to them, I'd like to say, how can you read this and not be shocked? > To illustrate how Better.sg tries to diffuse tensions, Keerthi recounted how a dark-skinned, ethnically South Asian member of the group had proposed a project after an interaction that she considered racist. She’d gone to an ethnically Chinese doctor with a dermatological complaint, but he refused to accept her as a patient, saying he couldn’t confidently diagnose conditions on dark skin. She wanted to build a map that collated reports of similar incidents with medical professionals. Keerthi said that he suggested an alternative product: why not build an image library of how skin conditions present on different skin tones, to help doctors out? It feels like they're unwilling to accept, at a very fundamental level, that the issue wasn't that the doctor "can't diagnose X", but rather that they would prefer not to diagnose X. > A digital education plan for the pandemic assumed that all children had access to devices, and that all households had one parent spare to supervise them, he added. That simply wasn’t the case, and lower income families suffered disproportionately. “You can map these dysfunctions and asymmetries onto certain socioeconomic statuses,” Kuah said. This is again one of the more paternalistic aspects of the system at play, they're unwilling to accept anything that falls outside of their "norm," where they — a small subset of powerful people — get to define what is the norm — not the people who live there. > In a country that’s notoriously obsessed with safety, where jaywalking and failing to wear a seatbelt can be punished with jail time, migrant workers can be transported on the expressways in the back of goods vehicles. Calls for change after a series of fatal accidents this year were rejected, on the grounds it would be too expensive for their employers. I find this to be insanely inhuman, anyone who falls outside their preferred norm is the subhuman, or the untermensch. Their existence does not matter. Their concerns don't matter. > The coronavirus burned through the close-packed migrant dormitories. By the end of 2020, more than 150,000 migrant workers, nearly half of them, had been infected, compared to just 4,000 in the general population. > Inside the dorms, the systems seemed calibrated to trigger near-constant lockdowns; each time a positive case is found in a dormitory, its residents are isolated. Eighteen months on, migrants are still largely shut in. They’re only allowed to leave their dormitories to work, or, once a week, for a few hours at a designated recreation centre. > That time [went] very fast… but on the other hand, very slow,” he told Rest of World. “All day we stay in the dormitory, [in the] same room. We cannot go out, [we were] only allowed to go to the toilet and shower. Even cannot go [into the] corridor.” Nights were the worst. Having spent most of the day sitting on his bed, watching movies on his phone, he found it hard to sleep. “This was a very, very bad time,” he said. They've put a group of people, whom they consider to be the untermensch, within group housing where their movement is restricted and they are locked in. There will be some who will make the parallel to lockdowns in the US and the rest of the developed world, but fundamentally, those lockdowns were about sheltering in place at home, applied equally across the population, and gave people autonomy to go out for essential needs etc. This targets a specific sub-population. They are forced to live together in dorms. And they can only access recreation for a few hours every week. That's a prison in all but name. > People have to trust that there are limits to this organizing principle. If the government changed its mind about enforcing the law on homosexuality, for example, “it would be able to subpoena the location data of every queer person in Singapore to see who they’re meeting,” Rajeswari said. “There are jokes in our community about the government having files on us… but they’re morbid jokes.” > In 2020, he was jailed for 10 days for hosting a live discussion via Skype with the Hong Kong pro-democracy figurehead Joshua Wong. It's a "utopia" for sociopaths.