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Four Score posted:I wonder if I posted this on Freep or Facebook and claimed this is what Obama wanted to change the U.S. flag to, how many would fall for it. Try Sodahead. No account purges, and hordes of credulous wingnuts.
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Apr 4, 2015 18:06
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Shbobdb posted:FTFY "A thing that works for a small city state will definitely also work for a continent-spanning superpower."
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Apr 4, 2015 18:29
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Shbobdb posted:FTFY To be honest, treating all drug users sounds like a really amazing drug treatment program. So the guy who probably met fifteen Hispanic people in his whole life has some kooky ideas about them. It sounds like he had a fantastic drug treatment program and I imagine it helped an awful lot of people. Every drug user needs help, helping them all is the perfect outcome, helping as many as you possibly can is the best.
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Apr 4, 2015 19:57
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I love the parochialism of the Amerigun self-loathing on display in this OP. The world turns out to pay final respects to LKY, and somehow it's all about "Americas [sic] elites eulogizing a tyrant". Even the most parochial of US publications, Time Magazine, was less parochial than the OP. Chinese Foreign Minister spokesperson Hong Lei described Lee as the bedrock of the Sino-Singaporean relationship and a visionary on the continent. [ ... ] India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Lee was both a “far-sighted statesman” and “a lion among leaders.” [ ... ] President Joko Widodo of Indonesia called Lee “a close friend of Indonesia and renowned as the founding father of modern Singapore.” http://time.com/3753703/lee-kuan-yew-death-global-reaction/ Guess what, bucko? This is what they call diplomacy. Typically, leaders refrain from graveshitting at the funerals of other leaders. Sometimes, they even say things they don't entirely mean.
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Apr 4, 2015 20:19
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hakimashou posted:To be honest, treating all drug users sounds like a really amazing drug treatment program. Really? "Someone is acting suspicious, so let's have the police urine test them and if they test positive send them to jail forever. Oh, and if they have any drugs on them, execute them." Because that is the "treatment" LKY recommends. Granted, that is pretty standard in that part of the world. But it's not a "shining city on a hill" moment.
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Apr 4, 2015 20:45
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His real legacy was thousands of badly bruised asses.
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Apr 5, 2015 02:59
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etalian posted:His real legacy was thousands of badly bruised asses. Thanks for the Tom of Finland eulogy.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:07
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Shbobdb posted:Really? "Someone is acting suspicious, so let's have the police urine test them and if they test positive send them to jail forever. Oh, and if they have any drugs on them, execute them." Sounds like a good way to suppress degeneracy in the population.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:36
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I'd make a comment, but Singapore is doing a better job being a multiracial/ethnic country than the US right now, so I don't really have a leg to stand on. Their war on drugs looks like it is actually a war on drugs. Radical methods, sure, but at least they are going after what they say they are.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:40
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Shbobdb posted:I'd make a comment, but Singapore is doing a better job being a multiracial/ethnic country than the US right now, so I don't really have a leg to stand on. The drug mules?
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Apr 5, 2015 03:55
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He does have a point, America really does try and have a trademark on FREEDOM™ when in actual fact it's really just personal freedom, as long as that doesn't get in the way of money or cops or whatnot. The drugs is a poo poo example because Singapore still execute for that right? But for example many Americans would be horrified at the level of gun control seen in other countries, seeing it as a huge infringement on your rights and freedom. That said I'm happy to live in a country with huge gun control as I have the freedom to not get shot in the huge amounts of massacres and gun crimes in the USA. Neither is really right or wrong? Well I think one is right and one is wrong but I'm not trying to pretend my opinion is the correct one. Americans seem to have a tendency to talk about freedoms like the own them though.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:04
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Drug mules and people who do drugs. Those are not the targets of the war on drugs in the US.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:06
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Being a fairly small country with an easily defensible border, their drug control strategy is pretty effective, if perhaps harsh. Not Singapore, but a friend of mine spoke with a Malaysian judge who'd handled capital cases, including drug smugglers. I don't know how he felt about possibly executing someone who was innocent, but he certainly didn't regret putting a single drug smuggler to death. The view in that part of the world is that drug smugglers are guilty of bringing a horrible blight to their country, one that can and does kill on its own, and one that promotes other form of crime, so it's only fitting that they be executed for the harm they're doing. It's not a viewpoint I particularly agree with, but having lost a cousin to a heroin overdose and having seen multiple people gently caress up their lives with drugs, it's one that I can at least understand.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:15
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Except the drug mules are rarely above the poo poo kicker junky with a big debt level of criminal. So really has no effect on supply/demand and stopping people from doing it.
EvilElmo fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Apr 5, 2015 |
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Apr 5, 2015 04:21
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A theory I've put forth before: Singapore is the only Westernized country where the old left triumphed utterly over the new left. This is what it looks like, half a century and global neoliberalization onwards - unlike social democracies elsewhere, the consensus of public involvement and planning in healthcare, housing, education, wages, etc. still holds strong, and the details in the delivery of public services and five-year plans is given a heavy emphasis. The state sells itself in its propaganda in the number of acres of new public parks, the number of kilometers in new bicycle trails. But radical identity politics is still weak. Social democratic parties retreated from radical culture war itself - the radical PvdA (Dutch Labour Party) that so embarrassed the PAP in the 1970s is hardly the neoliberal PvdA of today - but they still established a legacy of identity politics and anti-authoritarianism.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:49
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EvilElmo posted:Except the drug mules are rarely above the poo poo kicker junky with a big debt level of criminal. So really has no effect on supply/demand and stopping people from doing it. I think it does in a geographically small nation like Singapore, at least to some extent. Still, I don't think it's entirely about stopping the drug trade; it's also about pure and simple punishment for helping to gently caress up society. If you do a contract killing because you really need the money, it's still first-degree murder. Personally, I don't support the death penalty for any offences, but I recognize that other people and other cultures feel differently about it.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:56
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I recall flipping through an autiobiography by one of the early chief justices at a bookstore (autobiographies by the Founding Fathers is all the rage these days) and he asserted that there was once quiet discussion toward ending the death penalty in Singapore. Singapore could now afford to just lock all of them up, it was pointed out. And - as the sort of thing that really grabbed policymaker ears - the death penalty was proving problematic in trade negotiations. American NGOs were lobbying about the death penalty in the US itself at the time, it was occupying politician attentions. So there was backroom discussion, consultation, etc., the sort of thing that makes for policy deliberation in a democratic-centralist state. And then Michael P. Fay happened and the criminal-justice-reform NGOs, forever tainted as American puppets, went away and never came back.
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Apr 5, 2015 05:06
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teacup posted:He does have a point, America really does try and have a trademark on FREEDOM™ when in actual fact it's really just personal freedom, as long as that doesn't get in the way of money or cops or whatnot. my right hand trembles on my hip, ready to draw down on an unsavory element at any moment at the U.S. of A truely one can not walk outside without the threat of a show down a la once upon a time in the west, a film by Sergio leone
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Apr 5, 2015 05:19
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PT6A posted:I think it does in a geographically small nation like Singapore, at least to some extent. If you kill someone because someone is going to kill you if you don't kill them, that would be a more accurate strawman to come up with. You can still find drugs in Singapore, cheaper than Australia as well. So I'd hardly say it is a rounding success in stopping the drug trade. Sure they kill some poor fucker who has been set up to fail on occasion to show that it works. quote:A theory I've put forth before: Singapore is the only Westernized country where the old left triumphed utterly over the new left. The old left? I can't spot many left things he did once he took control and booted the socialists from the PAP. Gutted unions, almost no progressive social policies, minimal social support for the elderly and unemployed and no universal healthcare or tertiary education. He implemented a good 2 tier public primary and secondary education system though. What is your definition of the 'old left'? To me LKY realised the path to power was to use the unions and socialists, then got rid of them when he no longer needed their support. Not the first time a dictator has done that.
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Apr 5, 2015 05:35
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For a lot of people "left" just means "government does stuff". Mostly americans, but they view the political "spectrum" as a spectrum going from heavy government involvement in society to to light to no government involvement. It' the spectrum of statism to libertarianism. It doesn't matter what or why the government is involved in society, if it's actively doing stuff or telling people what to do that's "left".
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Apr 5, 2015 06:04
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EvilElmo posted:The old left? I can't spot many left things he did once he took control and booted the socialists from the PAP. Gutted unions, almost no progressive social policies, minimal social support for the elderly and unemployed and no universal healthcare or tertiary education. He implemented a good 2 tier public primary and secondary education system though. Five/ten/twenty year plans, a party and political philosophy placing a heavy emphasis on democratic centralism, centralized government arbitration of a state-entrenched and party-linked trade union congress and a state-disciplined employer federation? The democratic-socialist heritage is pretty self-evident. It's not just "the government does stuff". I should point out that Singapore does have universal (highly means-tested) healthcare, as a propaganda point the Ministry of Health seems to have realized to have value since it began appearing in American media. What it lacks is healthcare free at the point of use. The twenty-year 1982 National Health Plan put an emphasis on the mass delivery of healthcare, on the creation and operation of the infrastructure and bureaucracies that will do so, not on the safety net having smaller holes or a less exacting test on means. Likewise, the success of NUS over the University of Malaya stems entirely from the energy of the state. At the same time, Toh Chin Chye also personally ended independent campus politics in Singapore with equal energy. You can dispute the politics of doing so, but asserting that tertiary education doesn't exist is silly. "Progressive social policies" are exactly what distinguished the new left from the old left. The old left spoke in terms of vanguards and class structures, entrenchment of labour organizations in government, and nationalization or at least control of the means of production toward ends determined by the party/state. It measured success through aggregated statistics, which evolved over time from reductions in working hours, increases in average hourly labour wages, etc to include more complex statistics like unemployment, inflation, demand, and so forth. The new left placed a premium on anti-authoritarianism and the progress of fluid social identities according to their own priorities rather than a centrally-agreed one. Look, this is John Kenneth Galbraith, the intellectual titan of mid-20th-century American liberalism, expounding on moral decay: quote:The issue of social balance can be identified in many other current problems.Thus an aspect of increasing private production is the appearance of an extraordinary number of things which lay claim to the interest of the young. Motion pictures, television, automobiles and the vast opportunities which go with the mobility they provide, together with such less enchanting merchandise as narcotics, comic books, and pornographia, are all included in an advancing Gross Domestic Product. The child of a less opulent as well as a technologically more primitive age had far fewer such diversions. The red schoolhouse is remembered mainly because it had a paramount position in the lives of those who attended it that no modern school can hope to obtain. The Affluent Society, 1958, five years before the Port Huron Statement in 1962. It's the source of the famous phrase "private opulence and public squalor", but that phrase is usually divorced from JKG railing against narcotics and pornography like a standard-issue bible thumper. This was the old left! Very alien in a modern context. But I think it's fair to say that this moral conservatism survived in Singapore's establishment. In his autobio LKY talked about arriving in postwar London and seeing newspapers being sold on an honour system, with people leaving coins on an unattended table - that's the kind of society this generation of leftists idealized. The obsession with the cleanliness of public housing and public infrastructure - that is, a governing philosophy that realized public opulence - comes hand in hand with the contempt toward counterculture and disregard for "social policies".
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Apr 5, 2015 08:30
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Blue Raider posted:my right hand trembles on my hip, ready to draw down on an unsavory element at any moment at the U.S. of A Likewise, I can't catch a train in Singapore without being caned and executed by the tyrant god himself, LKY!
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Apr 5, 2015 08:35
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"You know this dictator had some good ideas" is a quote that never ends well no matter who the subject is.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:21
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Lee Kuan Yew was really cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcKkPflmT8
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Apr 6, 2015 06:25
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Fojar38 posted:"You know this dictator had some good ideas" is a quote that never ends well no matter who the subject is. Julius Caesar had some really good ideas.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:28
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Jack of Hearts posted:Julius Caesar had some really good ideas. Better than his opponents. Neither side in that civil war was going to get anything even vaguely resembling a democracy, so it was far better the competent side won.
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Apr 6, 2015 13:01
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Nonsense posted:I knew a Muslim-Chinese woman who hailed from Singapore, and she was quite saddened by Yew's death, and spoke of him, the way one talks about George Washington. Park Chung-hee, one of South Korea's more successful and longer-lived military dictators, retains enough popularity today that his daughter is the current democratically* elected president of South Korea. Apparently, memories of fierce suppression of press and political opposition fade away a lot faster than the memories of relative economic prosperity, something which isn't unique to Asian countries either. "Sure, the old government carried out all sorts of political repression, but the economy was better then" seems pretty common among the elderly - or at least the ones who weren't jailed, beaten, or executed on trumped-up charges for political dissidence. I guess it's pretty easy for your memory to be associated only with a great economy when people stopped putting up with your reign as soon the economic luck dried up, though - Park was assassinated in the midst of a wave of riots that kicked off as soon as South Korea fell into economic downturn, so his successor got to be the one who had to deal with economic problems. *No smoking guns have been found pointing to outright manipulation of votes, but when both the country's secret intelligence agency and police force were proven to have carried out misconduct in order to influence the election in a certain direction, it sure doesn't look good for democracy!
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Apr 6, 2015 17:04
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Main Paineframe posted:Apparently, memories of fierce suppression of press and political opposition fade away a lot faster than the memories of relative economic prosperity, something which isn't unique to Asian countries either. "Sure, the old government carried out all sorts of political repression, but the economy was better then" This is also happening in the Philippines with regards to Marcos, but with only the perception that the economy was doing better, even.
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Apr 6, 2015 17:17
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Main Paineframe posted:Park Chung-hee, one of South Korea's more successful and longer-lived military dictators, retains enough popularity today that his daughter is the current democratically* elected president of South Korea. Apparently, memories of fierce suppression of press and political opposition fade away a lot faster than the memories of relative economic prosperity, something which isn't unique to Asian countries either. "Sure, the old government carried out all sorts of political repression, but the economy was better then" seems pretty common among the elderly - or at least the ones who weren't jailed, beaten, or executed on trumped-up charges for political dissidence. I guess it's pretty easy for your memory to be associated only with a great economy when people stopped putting up with your reign as soon the economic luck dried up, though - Park was assassinated in the midst of a wave of riots that kicked off as soon as South Korea fell into economic downturn, so his successor got to be the one who had to deal with economic problems. Dictator X made motherland strong is a really appealing argument when enough decades has passed so that the memory of his repression has passed away, and his/her policies has limited relevance in contemporary political discourse. See also: Stalin, Peter the Great, and to some extent: Mao in China today.
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Apr 6, 2015 18:21
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ronya posted:A theory I've put forth before: Singapore is the only Westernized country where the old left triumphed utterly over the new left. I don't know if being one of the centers of global finance and global capital due to having low corporate tax rates was one of the core platforms of old socialism.
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Apr 6, 2015 18:25
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Typo posted:Dictator X made motherland strong is a really appealing argument when enough decades has passed so that the memory of his repression has passed away, and his/her policies has limited relevance in contemporary political discourse. The Dictator X can even be still alive and ruling! I was just in Uzbekistan and everyone I spoke to couldn't shut up about how they're totally going to re-elect their dear leader because he keeps everything calm and safe, never mind the spectacular corruption, horrible economy, arbitrary "law" enforcement, censorship and general police-stateness.
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Apr 6, 2015 19:15
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It's probably because in reality people don't care about democracy so long as their views are represented.
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Apr 6, 2015 21:57
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Typo posted:I don't know if being one of the centers of global finance and global capital due to having low corporate tax rates was one of the core platforms of old socialism. Of course not. There's a fair bit of subtlety here, actually. In the 1950s and 1960s itself the Singaporean state - like many other Afro-Asian postcolonial states, revolutionary, self-governing, or independent - did not tend toward any clearly macroeconomic ideology. Instead, it shared a vaguely nationalist/anticolonialist idea of a national hinterland, which was heretofore oppressed by the colonial power but now would form the bedrock upon which the economy, morality, and identity of the nation would be built (in the 50s itself Raul Prebisch would be busy formalizing this intuition into the Keynesian framework import-substitution-industrialization but again, remember there was no Keynesian/non-Keynesian identity as such). It is for this reason that Singapore initially placed so much emphasis on a Malaysian identity, a common Malaysian language to substitute English (i.e., Malay), and, in particular, the Malaysian common market and the end of intra-Malaysian tariffs. Now, as you know, in 1965 this idea collapsed. At the time Malaysia-Singapore relations were particularly sour and Malaysia did not, as it has today, largely accepted Singapore being a major finishing port for its goods - at the time, its intention was to substitute Port Klang (Swettenham) near Kuala Lumpur. Both sides rapidly built tariff barriers that were maintained and were not discarded until the 1970s. Now official state narratives in Singapore tend to imply that, through the wisdom of Albert Winsemius (their relatively private-sector-oriented United Nations Development Programme advisor), Singapore immediately settled upon a vision of FDI-oriented export-led industrialization. Personally I am skeptical. Rather, in the two years between 1965 to 1967 there was an abrupt shift from a pro-Russian Afro-Asian orientation towards ensuring that Japan, Western Europe, and the US had "vested interests" in Singapore. That is to say, investment and growth policy was subordinated to foreign policy, which was dominated by an (imaginary or otherwise) fear of annexation or conquest by regional nationalists or communists. Now it turns out that, with the benefit of hindsight, this was a really great economic policy turned Singapore's labour problem from unemployment in 1967 to labour shortages by 1977. But I don't think that was really foreseen. There's some discussion here, which you may find interesting. There are two other elements in this. One is that the other Old Left achievement wrt global capital was Bretton Woods. However, Singapore entered only in Bretton Wood's dying days and its main experience of its benefits was facing severe losses when the Labour government of Harold Wilson devalued the sterling in 1967. Along with the failure of Malaysia, Afro-Asianism, etc. to deliver on lowering tariff barriers, arranging for investment, etc., Singapore entered the 1970s deeply skeptical of the prospects for international cooperation between left-wing governments, which exacerbated its conflict with the nascent New Left movement that placed a great deal of emphasis on precisely that international cooperation. The other is that, separated from Malaysia over ethnic tensions, Singapore was gripped by an intense mistrust of Chinese organizations, including local small industry controlled by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce. This is reflected in Lee favouring the Japanese over SCCC demands for war reparations in 1967. Hence the frantic pursuit of Western-aligned FDI as opposed to (as in Hong Kong or South Korea) an attempt to co-opt and favour local entrepreneurs.
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Apr 7, 2015 07:04
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