7 ms·

Nearly all of their public spaces are under constant surveillance. Since Covid, hey are now using robot dogs in public places to snitch on people and they use

Nearly all of their public spaces are under constant surveillance. Since Covid, hey are now using robot dogs in public places to snitch on people and they use the dogs to keep migrant workers confined to their quarters during lockdown. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-52619568 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-52619568 Oh and a tiny bit of pot will get you a lengthy sentence, up to life in prison. No thanks.

cies 5y ago
I've heard Singaporeans say: it's not a country, its a company. This regarding the way it is managed. As the PAP party has been ruling the place since its sovereignty and demonstrations are forbidden, it is quite authoritarian. Every time a other political party grows in strength they find some dirt on the main guy and put him in prison. The migrant worker thing is disgustingly Dubai-esque.
idkwhoiam 5y ago
Well maybe that's why it's safe and clean.
- cainxinth 5y ago
  It is. The question is how much freedom and liberty should a society give up in exchange for it? I don’t think there is any one right answer… but no chewing gum is a bit extreme in my opinion.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    What’s the point of gum?
    - bradlys 5y ago
      What’s the point of flavored water?
      - rayiner 5y ago
        There isn’t one.
  - cturner 5y ago
    I have some respect for the gum ban. The tile surfaces outside Wimbledon Station are ruined by gum stains, and it lowers the feel of the area. Each time I notice it, I admire the Singapore ban.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I also admire how clean some places in North Korea are.
      - beaunative 5y ago
        clean is not a bad thing, and urine in public spaces is certainly dispicable. Generic discussion about control is pointless without taking accounts of specific measures and situations.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    You don't really give up anything in Singapore.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    the entire idea of 'giving up' freedom isn't right. Abstract freedoms are always embedded in a social context. The reason you have the individually free ability to walk across the road is because everyone else follows the rules. If everyone drove through traffic randomly, you wouldn't even have the capacity to exercise any meaningful freedom. Part of having a proper understanding of liberty is that recognition of authority is a precondition for it and not an obstacle. Personal freedom does not stand in contrast to, but is embedded in social order, and that's why Singaporean's aren't giving anything up. Ask a woman whether she's more free to walk through town in Singapore at 1 am or a bad part of any typically 'free' city. It's not without irony that people in China basically faced barely any covid restrictions over a year while here in Europe everyone was locked into their apartments for months by government mandate, complaining about the lack of freedoms in other parts of the world.
    - slibhb 5y ago
      Your formulation leads to "freedom is obedience," which is absurd. Freedom is about being able to do what you want. It's one thing to say that absolute freedom is not ideal, it's another to say that restriction of choice increases freedom. Singapore and China gain something but they're also giving something up. People can disagree over whether that trade if justified but not over whether there's a trade.
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        It may sound absurd, but it really isn't. Hedonistic choice, i.e. to "do what you want" is not perceived as freedom but as anxiety. Someone who lives alone in his flat and works 20 different gig jobs and shoots heroin whenever he wants is in that superficial sense 'free', but in reality the opposite is the case, he's subject to basically just instinct, which is the worst form of oppression, ask any addict. Freedom or liberty in a more authentic, humanistic sense, also in the same way religious people understand it (no coincidence that Islam literally translates to 'submission' (to god)) grounds you in reason, reality and requires that understanding what legitimate authority is like. Only from that point can you actually start to make genuinely free decisions, you need to be set free from(!) a whole bunch of things first. It's also btw why so many young people today, less coerced than ever before, don't feel free at all, just disoriented, and why they flock to political authoritarianism. The sort of relativism invited in by not properly understanding the relationship between authority and freedom has the ironical result of creating demand for some of the very worst forms of oppression.
  - inkyoto 5y ago
    > but no chewing gum is a bit extreme in my opinion. People, especially the ones who have never travelled to Singapore, need to stop rehashing this story of old. Chewing gum can be freely purchased in Singapore from a pharmacy. No, one won't be searched at the airport and/or canned for bringing their own chewing gum into the city.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Can only be purchased with a letter from a doctor or dentist, your National ID number is recorded and you can only buy small amounts. You won’t go to jail for a pack of gum in your luggage but you will be punished if caught bribing in large quantities (likely a fine or if a foreigner, banned from coming to SG).
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  that and cheap migrant labor
- gremloni 5y ago
  It’s not worth it. That being said I don’t know if Singapore is all that bad.
- novok 5y ago
  I don't think surveillance is the real necessary part to keep a place safe and clean, but a culture that cares about being safe and clean and legal system that cares about enforcing against acting that way. Singapore was like that before cheap mass digital surveillance was possible. Even before VHS taped security cameras were affordable. And back in the VHS era, there was way less CCTV.
diveanon 5y ago
Not to mention racist as hell. Singapore is a paradise for privileged expats who want a nanny state to enforce their special status.
BurningFrog 5y ago
You can cherry pick bad sounding facts about every place. That's not a serious analysis.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  But those facts can still say a lot about a place, without providing a serious analysis.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Cherry picked facts can say pretty much anything you want about a place.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Singapore is very well known for being somewhat authoritarian. It’s not really something that needs to be analyzed.
petre 5y ago
There's a mentaly impaired guy on the death row for smuggling 47 grams of diamorphine in order to fund his dad's life saving medical procedure. William Gibson labelled it Disneyland with the death penalty which is not entirely accurate but it's close.
- multjoy 5y ago
  AKA heroin. Heroin smugglers in east Asia tend to get executed.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    Not in Japan. Not in South Korea (the law is still on the books, but no one has been executed for drug offences since 1997). Not in Taiwan (like SK, no one has been executed for drug offences since 2002). Developed democratic East Asian countries have phased out death penalty for drug offences. And it should go without saying that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have not been overrun with addiction epidemic or withered and burned to the ground as a result of not having death penalty for drug offences. The cruelty of death penalty is unnecessary. It makes politicians look good to a certain audience, but beyond that, it doesn't do much.
    - nowherebeen 5y ago
      Japan and Taiwan are islands. South Korea has a strict border (DMV) with North Korea. All three countries don’t need to worry about neighbouring countries smuggling drugs into theirs. That is not the case with Singapore. Both Thailand and Burma produce a lot of drugs that end up in their city.
      - smnrchrds 5y ago
        I find it hard to believe that Japan—with its well-known and historically powerful organized crime—is somehow immune from the possibility of drug manufacturing within its borders or smuggling from abroad. Yakuza's Wikipedia page confirms my suspicion that organized crime groups do both of those things in Japan.
finolex1 5y ago
The robot dogs are a gimmick, and Singapore's police force is far less prone to violence than American police. Singapore is heavily surveilled, but so are New York, London and Paris. Locking down migrant workers for an extended period of time is pretty unconscionable though. Picking a few anecdotes about any city invariably paints it in a reductive way. I'm not sure what the solution for this is other than actually visiting or living in a place.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  They also have 40x less homicides, which might explain the difference in police violence.
hereforphone 5y ago
Migrant workers? Or people who aren't vaccinated?
yomly 5y ago
I mean this is obviously reductionist but let's cherry pick some examples from the UK, bastion of the free. It's run by an apparently corrupt government [0] The NHS falls over every Winter, even without the help of a pandemic [1] Backlogs on the NHS are now getting so severe that doctors are institutionally negligent - I know of two personal cancer cases missed for no good reason and GPs I know are confess to giving poor care due to being understaffed [2] Knife crime is so much of a problem it gets its own page for statistics [3]. (Spoilers: there were over 3000+ knife related injuries in London in the last year) And so, only when an MP gets stabbed to death is it newsworthy [4][5] Police can barely keep street violence from breaking out, and for the rest of the country it's just bants [6] They can't even keep their force from kidnapping innocent women off the streets at 9pm [7] and so now you their own advice is to not trust them [8] For all the talk about democracy and freedom, it really seems like freedom is about the freedom for the strong to harm and extort others. No thanks. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johnson-says-the-uk-is-not-remotely-a-corrupt-country-is-it https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johns... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winter-crisis-is-nothing-new https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winte... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-disproportionately-affecting-england-most-deprived https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-... [3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04304/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04... [4] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox [6] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashes-bottle-mans-head-row-dogs-Greenwich-hottest-day-year.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashe... [7] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58745581 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58745581 [8] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58753857 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58753857
- novok 5y ago
  People complain a lot about the amount of surveillance and petty authoritarianism of the UK also, so I don't know what your trying to achieve. From what I've seen in reality, most of the time it isn't about how much surveillance a place has, but how much the police force works on preventing it, the culture of people itself and poverty.
SRTP 5y ago
I live in Singapore. That robot dog is a gimmick, there's maybe 2 of them in the entire country, and they're not used for enforcement at all. You're right about the surveillance and tough stance on drugs. This results in crime being virtually non-existent.
- refurb 5y ago
  Crime is absolutely not non-existent. Plenty of crime gets reported in the media and the Singapore Police deal with plenty more that never gets reported in the press.

cies 5y ago

I've heard Singaporeans say: it's not a country, its a company. This regarding the way it is managed. As the PAP party has been ruling the place since its sovereignty and demonstrations are forbidden, it is quite authoritarian. Every time a other political party grows in strength they find some dirt on the main guy and put him in prison. The migrant worker thing is disgustingly Dubai-esque.

idkwhoiam 5y ago

Well maybe that's why it's safe and clean.

cainxinth 5y ago
It is. The question is how much freedom and liberty should a society give up in exchange for it? I don’t think there is any one right answer… but no chewing gum is a bit extreme in my opinion.
- rayiner 5y ago
  What’s the point of gum?
  - bradlys 5y ago
    What’s the point of flavored water?
    - rayiner 5y ago
      There isn’t one.
- cturner 5y ago
  I have some respect for the gum ban. The tile surfaces outside Wimbledon Station are ruined by gum stains, and it lowers the feel of the area. Each time I notice it, I admire the Singapore ban.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I also admire how clean some places in North Korea are.
    - beaunative 5y ago
      clean is not a bad thing, and urine in public spaces is certainly dispicable. Generic discussion about control is pointless without taking accounts of specific measures and situations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  You don't really give up anything in Singapore.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  the entire idea of 'giving up' freedom isn't right. Abstract freedoms are always embedded in a social context. The reason you have the individually free ability to walk across the road is because everyone else follows the rules. If everyone drove through traffic randomly, you wouldn't even have the capacity to exercise any meaningful freedom. Part of having a proper understanding of liberty is that recognition of authority is a precondition for it and not an obstacle. Personal freedom does not stand in contrast to, but is embedded in social order, and that's why Singaporean's aren't giving anything up. Ask a woman whether she's more free to walk through town in Singapore at 1 am or a bad part of any typically 'free' city. It's not without irony that people in China basically faced barely any covid restrictions over a year while here in Europe everyone was locked into their apartments for months by government mandate, complaining about the lack of freedoms in other parts of the world.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    Your formulation leads to "freedom is obedience," which is absurd. Freedom is about being able to do what you want. It's one thing to say that absolute freedom is not ideal, it's another to say that restriction of choice increases freedom. Singapore and China gain something but they're also giving something up. People can disagree over whether that trade if justified but not over whether there's a trade.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      It may sound absurd, but it really isn't. Hedonistic choice, i.e. to "do what you want" is not perceived as freedom but as anxiety. Someone who lives alone in his flat and works 20 different gig jobs and shoots heroin whenever he wants is in that superficial sense 'free', but in reality the opposite is the case, he's subject to basically just instinct, which is the worst form of oppression, ask any addict. Freedom or liberty in a more authentic, humanistic sense, also in the same way religious people understand it (no coincidence that Islam literally translates to 'submission' (to god)) grounds you in reason, reality and requires that understanding what legitimate authority is like. Only from that point can you actually start to make genuinely free decisions, you need to be set free from(!) a whole bunch of things first. It's also btw why so many young people today, less coerced than ever before, don't feel free at all, just disoriented, and why they flock to political authoritarianism. The sort of relativism invited in by not properly understanding the relationship between authority and freedom has the ironical result of creating demand for some of the very worst forms of oppression.
- inkyoto 5y ago
  > but no chewing gum is a bit extreme in my opinion. People, especially the ones who have never travelled to Singapore, need to stop rehashing this story of old. Chewing gum can be freely purchased in Singapore from a pharmacy. No, one won't be searched at the airport and/or canned for bringing their own chewing gum into the city.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Can only be purchased with a letter from a doctor or dentist, your National ID number is recorded and you can only buy small amounts. You won’t go to jail for a pack of gum in your luggage but you will be punished if caught bribing in large quantities (likely a fine or if a foreigner, banned from coming to SG).
micromacrofoot 5y ago
that and cheap migrant labor
gremloni 5y ago
It’s not worth it. That being said I don’t know if Singapore is all that bad.
novok 5y ago
I don't think surveillance is the real necessary part to keep a place safe and clean, but a culture that cares about being safe and clean and legal system that cares about enforcing against acting that way. Singapore was like that before cheap mass digital surveillance was possible. Even before VHS taped security cameras were affordable. And back in the VHS era, there was way less CCTV.

diveanon 5y ago

Not to mention racist as hell. Singapore is a paradise for privileged expats who want a nanny state to enforce their special status.

BurningFrog 5y ago

You can cherry pick bad sounding facts about every place. That's not a serious analysis.

hutzlibu 5y ago
But those facts can still say a lot about a place, without providing a serious analysis.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Cherry picked facts can say pretty much anything you want about a place.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
Singapore is very well known for being somewhat authoritarian. It’s not really something that needs to be analyzed.

petre 5y ago

There's a mentaly impaired guy on the death row for smuggling 47 grams of diamorphine in order to fund his dad's life saving medical procedure. William Gibson labelled it Disneyland with the death penalty which is not entirely accurate but it's close.

multjoy 5y ago
AKA heroin. Heroin smugglers in east Asia tend to get executed.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  Not in Japan. Not in South Korea (the law is still on the books, but no one has been executed for drug offences since 1997). Not in Taiwan (like SK, no one has been executed for drug offences since 2002). Developed democratic East Asian countries have phased out death penalty for drug offences. And it should go without saying that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have not been overrun with addiction epidemic or withered and burned to the ground as a result of not having death penalty for drug offences. The cruelty of death penalty is unnecessary. It makes politicians look good to a certain audience, but beyond that, it doesn't do much.
  - nowherebeen 5y ago
    Japan and Taiwan are islands. South Korea has a strict border (DMV) with North Korea. All three countries don’t need to worry about neighbouring countries smuggling drugs into theirs. That is not the case with Singapore. Both Thailand and Burma produce a lot of drugs that end up in their city.
    - smnrchrds 5y ago
      I find it hard to believe that Japan—with its well-known and historically powerful organized crime—is somehow immune from the possibility of drug manufacturing within its borders or smuggling from abroad. Yakuza's Wikipedia page confirms my suspicion that organized crime groups do both of those things in Japan.

finolex1 5y ago

The robot dogs are a gimmick, and Singapore's police force is far less prone to violence than American police. Singapore is heavily surveilled, but so are New York, London and Paris. Locking down migrant workers for an extended period of time is pretty unconscionable though. Picking a few anecdotes about any city invariably paints it in a reductive way. I'm not sure what the solution for this is other than actually visiting or living in a place.

JamesBarney 5y ago
They also have 40x less homicides, which might explain the difference in police violence.

hereforphone 5y ago

Migrant workers? Or people who aren't vaccinated?

yomly 5y ago

I mean this is obviously reductionist but let's cherry pick some examples from the UK, bastion of the free. It's run by an apparently corrupt government [0] The NHS falls over every Winter, even without the help of a pandemic [1] Backlogs on the NHS are now getting so severe that doctors are institutionally negligent - I know of two personal cancer cases missed for no good reason and GPs I know are confess to giving poor care due to being understaffed [2] Knife crime is so much of a problem it gets its own page for statistics [3]. (Spoilers: there were over 3000+ knife related injuries in London in the last year) And so, only when an MP gets stabbed to death is it newsworthy [4][5] Police can barely keep street violence from breaking out, and for the rest of the country it's just bants [6] They can't even keep their force from kidnapping innocent women off the streets at 9pm [7] and so now you their own advice is to not trust them [8] For all the talk about democracy and freedom, it really seems like freedom is about the freedom for the strong to harm and extort others. No thanks. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johnson-says-the-uk-is-not-remotely-a-corrupt-country-is-it https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johns... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winter-crisis-is-nothing-new https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winte... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-disproportionately-affecting-england-most-deprived https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-... [3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04304/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04... [4] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox [6] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashes-bottle-mans-head-row-dogs-Greenwich-hottest-day-year.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashe... [7] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58745581 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58745581 [8] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58753857 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58753857

novok 5y ago
People complain a lot about the amount of surveillance and petty authoritarianism of the UK also, so I don't know what your trying to achieve. From what I've seen in reality, most of the time it isn't about how much surveillance a place has, but how much the police force works on preventing it, the culture of people itself and poverty.

SRTP 5y ago

I live in Singapore. That robot dog is a gimmick, there's maybe 2 of them in the entire country, and they're not used for enforcement at all. You're right about the surveillance and tough stance on drugs. This results in crime being virtually non-existent.

refurb 5y ago
Crime is absolutely not non-existent. Plenty of crime gets reported in the media and the Singapore Police deal with plenty more that never gets reported in the press.