It is a kind of workers paradise. If you're well behaved and don't shout you get a good education, health system and housing. 95% owner occupied is pretty damn good.
Huge dependence on south Malaysia migrant workers shuttling over the bridge every day, so it's "homes for us but not for thee" however he did cry when the greater Malaysian dream fell apart.
The arguments over his house and garden post death sum up the legacy well: he did not seek ulogising or mythologised shrine status, the apparatchiks can't resist the temptation.
I see parallels to Britain's Enoch Powell. Super smart, highly educated, disinterested in what others think, Not afraid to be contrarian and not particularly interested in performative democracy but also a bit one eyed on his hobby horse. If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was.
Trivialising Singapore-for-foreigners as "no long hair, gays, gum or spitting" misses the point. Singapore welcomes all kinds of people if they have money, contribute to society and are useful or rich. Modern Singapore has gays and lesbians and tattoos and long hair a-plenty. They're just in a "don't ask don't tell" demi-monde netherworld.
Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
Governance is more important than one’s history when it come to success of a country.
Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.
But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.
Of all the things wrong with the USA, when picking just two, it seems strange for one of them to be graffiti. I have lived in the USA all my life, in some more and some less urban areas, and even from the people most afraid of cities I have never heard graffiti mentioned as a serious worry or complaint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Chin_Siong?wprov=sfla1
Operation Spectrum untracing the conspiracy' https://share.google/2mRpZk3RGaYUKCRXS
Very democratic country.
That being said, I would assume that a one party state isn't very democratic. It'd be an unstable democracy.
There are severe restrictions on speech, assembly, press and important legal and political barriers for the opposition parties. It is very easy to land in front of a tribunal for defamation or similar for expressing dissent or accusing the government of corruption.
The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.
Lee Kuan Yew has been an astonishing nation builder and an extremely brilliant man with a huge sensibility for politics and understanding the world.
But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".
This is why the abolished jury in trials.
White people treat people the most equal when trialing other races, but other races always give their own race an unjust preference, hence unfair trials.
This is one of the greatest lies ever told, that Singapore was an obscure fishing village when the colonial powers came to "modernise" Singapore.
Read the history books, Singapore is bang in the middle of ancient super powers of India and China. It's has been and always has been for mostbof its history a successful entreport for several thousand years before the colonials and the later Chinese immigrants settled in Singapore.
The founder of Malacca, where the Strait of Malacca name originated from, was himself a prince from Singapore and at the better known as Temasek.
The people who settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers. Their later descendents discovered and migrated to wider Austronesia including Madagascar in the west including New Zealand and Hawaii to the east several thousand years before the colonial powers.
I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.
But where I am from, there are two kinds of graffity:
- Cool elaborate pictures, usually in "legal zones" walls city dedicated to it. They take time to create, hence preference for legal place and are made by artists.
- Less cool stuff created by skinny "edgy" teenagers, who are jerks to the owners, but also completely harmless.
If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
andrewstuart•1h ago
"I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through instalments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents.”
https://sgmatters.sg/i-could-not-ask-their-sons-to-fight-and...