Asia Sentinel Blocked in Singapore
asiasentinel.com
asiasentinel.com
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/singapore-kills-chicken-scare...
The three points of contention are that the Singapore Government asserts:
* The Singapore Government did not threaten to end the business operations of Nikkei Inc. in Singapore;
* M Ravi was not suspended from practising law for criticising the Government; and
* Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Suet Fern were not threatened with Government action for warring with Lee Hsien Loong.
and the blocking is due to the Asia Sentinel's refusal to masthead the 'correction' for thirty days and alter(?) the original article to comply.
Right or wrong I side with the paper - it's relevant that they report that the Singapore Government disputes asserted factoids, it's fair that perhaps some form of this dispute goes to arbitration | court to independantly prove | disprove assertations .. but being forced to masthead a 'correction' to thirty days on pain of blocking prior to any (that I know of) independant review is extreme.
There's no "great firewall" level blocking going on and the blocks are easily circumvented using a proxy or alternative DNS.
But blocking media sites when they publish anything critical of the government is unfortunately standard in this part of the world.
While I absolutely love visiting Singapore, I could never live there.
While they technically have opposition parties, they've de facto always been a one party state.
There is an extreme level of censorship in the state as well and Media, ISPs, and Telecom Providers are almost entirely owned by the Government.
The difference from countries like Russia is the Singaporean govt doesn't shoot their opponents - they just bankrupt them via litigation instead.
P.S. Singapore's model of Illiberal Democracy is the template used across developing countries in Asia - from Thailand to China pre-Xi to India. Singaporean advisors were critical to developing China in the 1980s and 90s, as well as Gujarat in the 2000s.
Afaik porn sites are also blocked there.
The root cause article here is about openly reporting commonly known things that upset Muslim|Christian puritan values ..
On July 23, 2021, an article appeared in the Tokyo-based English-language weekly Nikkei Asia Review, calling attention to the Singapore government's handling of so-called KTV lounges, alleging that decades of institutional failures in dealing with what the article called "organized crime cartels” were running what amounted to illegal brothels, which were responsible for the widespread spread of Covid-19 among the lounges’ patrons.
... As most Singaporeans know, the KTV lounges have been an embarrassment to strait-laced Singapore for decades, ... [1]
Initially I met with individuals that owned fleets of ships and several skyscrapers (top floor, free top shelf everything) ultimately I socialised after hours with ships crew (ground floor, unsolicited lap dancing | hands on groin unless firmly pushed aside).
Officially this didn't exist, in practice it appeared to be open knowledgge.
[1] https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/singapore-kills-chicken-scare...
It also had negative impacts on Vietnamese and Thai women in Singapore due to the stereotypes that women from Vietnam and Thailand are only there as sex workers.
This was also around the time that Singapore was seeing a severe backlash against immigration (eg. The anti-CECA protests, the KTV stuff, Opposition MPs stoking the xenophobic fires, etc)
> To be clear twenty years back I was taken for business meetings to a 20+ story tower that was lounges and clubs from the basement to to the top floor .. with a strong height from ground correlation to sophistication|sleeze levels.
Orchard Towers. It's open knowledge it's all brothels there. The SG govt legalized and heavily regulates prostitution and organized crime.
The twin standards and negative stereotype issue were there in Singapore 20+ years ago .. and common enough in various forms in many countries.
I worked in geophysical remote sensing and across many years visited | worked in nearly 3/4's of the ~190+ countries and territories across the globe.
You rapidly develop a habit of identifying the best and worst aspects of variopus countries and rolling along with whatever locals you are there to liase with and suspending judgement.
My year or so of working in and out of Singapore surveying the Spratly islands region exposed me to many "contradictions" of life there - overall it's a nice city | island with a strong dash of double think surrounding issues of (say) local Singapore citizen V. expat worker expectations.
Organized crime is kind of regulated too (a lot of the tongs that would have been in the drug trade ended up in the postitution trade and construction)
The government knows if they ban it. It drives it underground. So they tolerate it and try to ensure locals don’t use it.
- You have to be between 21-35 years of age
- You cannot be Malay or Muslim
- You cannot be Male on your ID card (this includes pre-operative transgender persons)
- You have to be from a list of approved countries (i.e. China, Malaysia, Thailand, etc)
There are organizations that support sex workers in Singapore that you can find out more:
A few examples:
- There are open and free elections; the current ruling party, PAP, has ruled since the countries inception
- However, the ruling party is more than happy to "tweak" the rules to make sure they stay in power. A good example is when they turn single member constituencies (one person is elected to one seat in parliament) to a group representation constituency (GRC), where 5 or more people are "elected". The argument was that it improves minority representation, but it also puts a barrier to opposition parties running because they need to field way more candidates (each one costs money). It's not surprisingly which constituencies were turned into GRCs when you look at how many voted for PAP
- They are also quite blatant about "if you vote against PAP, we'll take money away from your constituency". Since PAP controls the purse, they "punish" constituencies that don't vote them in by deprioritizing infrastructure and public housing improvements. And they don't hide this.
- There is no freedom of information act, so the ruling party (PAP) controls all government data. Opposition can ask for it, but the response is often "what is the purpose of your question?" or "releasing that information would disrupt racial harmony". So without hard data, the opposition has can't prove there is a problem.
- The "grassroots" setup PAP has resident committees, neighborhood committees, resident's networks, etc. It's a massive group of volunteers for PAP that allows them a broad interaction with voters that the opposition can't really replicate
- One opposition member made a claim in parliament that a woman who was raped was not treated fairly by the police. Well, turns out she made statements to parliament that were false. So the entire party was put on "trial" and every statement was run through with a fine tooth comb forcing the person to leave parliament. But then when PAP does it (like when Covid tracking data was shared with police, directly against what they promised) and it's smoothed over, an apology made and the laws changed to make it legal.
So it's democracy, but set up to make it very hard for opposition to get into positions of power. It has happened, but the cards are stacked against them.
That said, the PAP works very hard to keep the voters happy. When I lived there I was amazed when problems would happen and they would be fixed within a day or two. They are incredibly responsive to complaints, use their grassroots network to quickly collect voter sentiment, then quickly respond.
So in the end, most of the voters are happy with PAP.
> They are also quite blatant about "if you vote against PAP, we'll take money away from your constituency".
Not cool!
> The "grassroots" setup PAP has resident committees, neighborhood committees, resident's networks, etc. It's a massive group of volunteers for PAP that allows them a broad interaction with voters that the opposition can't really replicate
Unpaid volunteers? Wow...
Honestly I think if they were serious about it they could create processes and entities in place that would benefit constituents without depending on the ruling party.
As an aside, it's funny how Singapore is known as a hypercapitalist utopia, but the ruling party was originally quite socialist and that's still visible in the naming.
- Most people work for the government for example. PSD (public service is the largest employer). Temasek, controlled by the Singapore Minister of Finance owns the every major local company (Singapore Airlines, Captialland, DBS, JTC, etc).
- The housing market is 80% HDB and directly government controlled
- The tax system is very progressive with foreigners paying a lot and locals collecting a lot of subsidies.
People in the US swoon about capitalist wonderland when in reality Singapore is the strongest case for government run economy you can probably find because it a actually works quite well to keep the country competitive and extract maximum value for the population.
Go ahead, verify it.
And if you measure "democracy" by representation of the population in the elected leaders, the State Senate is 33% Democratic, the House is 40% The cities are Democratic, the rural areas Republican. The state has had both Republican and Democratic Governors in it's history, with some times the Democrats controlling all three seats of power.
Seems pretty democratic to me.
lol why would Singapore block BBC? They love everything British.
Unblocking reddit in Indonesia via DNS depends on the ISP, or did as of a couple of years ago.
https://www.engadget.com/2016-01-28-malaysia-medium-block-ex...
I'm starting to think that access to porn is direct indicator of Internet freedom and freedom of speech in general. There don't seem to be many governments that has to say on tastes of beige audiovisual content but not political speeches.
Which web sites are blocked, and where?
Are they blocked for copyright reasons?
Now the second part. Singapore has some barbaric laws incompatible with modern society. Many times a year, they put to death people for drug related offenses (even cannabis), almost always poor people. It is tragic and heart breaking that such a wealthy country with a well-educated population (80% supporting death for drug offenses) gets behind execution for non-violent crimes. Most recently - 6 weeks back Tangaraju Suppiah was put to death for carrying 2 pounds of cannabis [1].
It's a well manicured garden, but I'd stay away from that place. Especially if you're raising kids.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/25/asia/singapore-cannabis-e...
Nothing to do with people being poor. Majority of those executed are foreigners coming into the country.
You can argue cannabis is harmless but that’s simply not true. Most studies that look at long term usage conclude it affects the brain.
Let's assume this is true. Nobody is saying they needn't be punished, but put them to death?
> https://youtu.be/-PXAOZwvv04
LKY says in the video: "In America they're changing their minds and sending people back to the death row." Yeah, but not for this.
There’s warning before you get off the plane. Warnings when you get off the plane. Warnings when you go through customs.
But there's a very specific reason here, and it's easy to avoid.
I personally don't believe in death penalty and I hope it's abolished entirely. But facts needs to be stated with clarity.
Also Lee Kwan Yew is a legend. An absolute hero for bringing this country to where it is today. This is just my personal opinion, probably unpopular, but let me be free to state what I feel.
And to add - as of 2013 - laws have changed, death penalty rules are changing. Not changing fast enough, but changing. Hopefully they abolish it entirely asap.
I take it then you're also in favour of the death penalty for alcohol consumption, distribution, and production then?
It would certainly be hypocritical if that were not the case.
Adding quotes and a question mark makes it appear is if you are paraphrasing the comment that I made which I'd kindly ask you not to do as I can speak for myself and that's not what I stated.
So yes? Acceptance, regulation and social safety nets are probably the way to go for a lot of drugs. The alternative is to indefinitely fight an unwinnable war, to perpetuate a cycle of death and murder seemingly oblivious that the fight itself and the consequences of a punitive system are the things taking most of those lives, not the drugs.
The war against drug use is not “unwinnable” for a disciplined society. There are many countries in the world that still manage to keep alcohol out of the hands of most people. In my home country, 95% of people report never having used alcohol or tobacco: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6349140.
The fact that people in singapore still equate marijuana use to “harmful” “mind altering” “bad drugs” becomes more and more ridiculous as it gets legalized elsewhere. We’ll see what happens with thailand. As if for some reason asians can’t be allowed marijuana while it’s fine for white people.
Alcohol can only be purchased during certain hours.
It’s deeper than that. Generally, asian cultures place a higher value on community and thus have a lower tolerance for antisocial behavior. That same communalism also means they tend to place a lower value on individual life. Hence death penalties for people engaging in antisocial behavior.
It might not be your cup of tea, but Asians tend to think that their “well manicured garden” is desirable. In my view it’s far better than say San Francisco—the embodiment of European individualism taken to its logical conclusion—where you’re stepping over needles and human feces to get to work.
Looking at the map I think you'll see for yourself your point doesn't stand.
For example, the city of SF will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you are not from the correct demographic. There is a lawsuit where white police officers are suing the city for denying them promotions and a system of racial discrimination. What about their individual rights? Another example is how the city and state protect homeless encampments but make it difficult for regular people to build homes or other buildings. Or how homeless people and drug addicts attack and harass regular people and the city does nothing about it but it was up in arms when a former fire chief allegedly attacked a homeless person.
Individualism isn't broadly accepted, rather it seems the homeless have more rights than anyone else. This isn't individualism and shows that there is a ideology driving the dysfunction.
I'd like to avoid debating the extremes, but I think the example of "I'm not willing to put up with a San Francisco level of sanitation, public drug use, and petty crime in lieu of executing users of drugs, including marijuana" is a pretty extreme position. I think it's clear that marijuana doesn't pose the same societal risk as other illegal (in the US) drugs like cocaine, meth, and opiates, or even other legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine, so I don't think using it merits execution: the most severe penalty we impose.
Maybe the weed thing is a red herring, so I'll include users of drugs that do pose a significant societal risk. It's well established that drug use is a pathology and addiction is a disease, and that severe penalties have had little effect in discouraging use. US drug policy has failed its (facial) goals of:
- reduce economic dependence of foreign countries on drug production
- reduce domestic drug consumption
- reduce drug violence
(The starkest example of 3 has been the unrelenting violence in Chicagoland, which conservatives attribute to a failure of liberal governance, but which is a clear failing of national US drug and gun policy.)
Or, put another way, I would hope that if a US administration learned that in 2024 a drug would be released on the market that would have all the effects that the War on Drugs has had (overdose deaths, mass incarceration and surveillance via parole, violence in foreign countries, the HIV epidemic, domestic gang violence) we would act with some urgency to suppress it, but we're actively supporting it to the tune of ~$47B a year.
I think the policy position you're advocating is to ramp up the War on Drugs, your evidence is that execution for even minor drug offenses stops drug use as shown in Singapore. This is a pretty common conservative position: if we executed drug dealers--and maybe even drug users--we'd solve the drug problem in the US. The problem is we're soft.
My belief here is that would lead to the execution of many, many Black people and children. Lots of kids use drugs! I did and my friends did. Lots of gangs use kids in the drug trade. There's huge overlap between users and sellers of drugs. I and my friends also did this. This is a hard problem, I don't think the US is a society that will tolerate executing kids, but you will absolutely see gangs pressing children even more into service with these policies (just like they do with other vulnerable groups like women and immigrants).
So from my point of view, the War on Drugs has failed and not because it didn't go far enough, but because its core conceit was flawed: laws are not effective deterrents. Conservatives really want to think they are, but they are not. They don't even work on educated perpetrators of white collar crime who usually don't even need the money, they certainly don't work on the people in the organized drug trade.
Conversely, we've seen success in treatment programs. It's certainly not perfect and there's more work to do, but Portugal is a pretty good example of where this has worked (Oregon is an example where it hasn't, but I think they're starting to rethink how they're getting people into treatment--currently it's entirely voluntary and that dynamic is inadequate).
So to come full circle to our society vs. individual here. I think your position is "we must sacrifice individuals who fall prey to drugs and thus become a drag on society for the good of society." My position is "society must help individuals who've fallen prey to drugs so they don't become a drag on society." This is because following your position to its conclusion likely means ratcheting up the War on Drugs--a policy that has failed expensively and beyond doubt--and following my position to its conclusion pursues treatment and decriminalization, an approach that's shown success at least sometimes. I also believe there are fundamental human rights issues when it comes to incarceration (especially given the rates of violence in the US carceral system) and execution, and it's hard for me to accept that drug use merits either of those punishments.
Laws can be effective deterrents, when they serve to reinforce social norms. Singapore, China, etc., execute drug dealers to reinforce the social norm that drug use and trafficking are so bad that they warrant the death penalty. That social norm, in turn, prevents drug use and drug dealing. A street dealer might not be worried about getting caught by the state (the law might not have a deterrent effect in that sense) but they do worry about becoming socially ostracized. When laws and social norms are combined like that, you can reduce drug use. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-.... In the U.S., people lose almost 7 healthy years of life on average to drug use. In my home country of Bangladesh (which executes drug dealers) it's under 0.8.
The problem with American conservatives is that they're compromised by libertarianism. They'll pass the law, but they won't fight for the culture. So you end up with a situation where there is a "drug war" on the books, but where the culture is glorifying drug use and drug dealing. In that situation, the law cannot work, because the social norm is not there. It's not enough to just execute drug dealers. You must become a culture that executes drug dealers.
There's so much ambiguity here. While Japan has a staunchly anti-drug culture and severe legal and social penalties for drug use, they don't execute drug users or dealers, and they have a lower DALY of 0.6. By your argument it should be higher. Singapore's is way higher at 1.1. If Japan was considering an execution policy, you could argue against it by saying "it seems like if you execute drug dealers, DALYs increase, and potentially even double".
It's also important to note that this dataset also considers alcohol use, and Bangladesh is a dry country for Muslims (AFAIK). That's a pretty big skew.
> You must become a culture that executes drug dealers.
Again I don't think the data show that this would be effective, but also this isn't responsive to my point: you'll kill a lot of people, disproportionately kids, women, immigrants, minorities, and poor people. Americans assume that drug laws and task forces are geared towards dismantling drug operations, but this is entirely false. The vast majority of people picked up for drug offenses are very low level. We're not arresting and incarcerating criminal masterminds, we're getting people who are coerced one way or another into pushing drugs.
It's also worth saying this is pretty dangerous work on its own! Many people in the drug trade assume they'll die "on the job". It strains credulity to think that the threat of execution would really factor into their decision making here.
Finally, a War on Drugs approach doesn't even work in Singapore. Here are some samples from their 2021 report [0] (emphasis mine):
- the proportion of new drug abusers arrested remained high at 34%
- the proportion of new drug abusers arrested who were under 30 years old remained significant at 60%
- In 2021, CNB arrested 2,724 drug abusers
- CNB made significant drug seizures in 2021. The drugs seized in 2021 were estimated to have a street value of about S$18.16 million. There was a 31% increase in seizures of heroin to 95.45kg in 2021, from 72.70kg in 2020. Cannabis seizures saw a 144% increase to 105.18kg in 2021, from 43.10kg in 2020. Seizures of crystalline methamphetamine (more commonly known as ‘Ice’) saw a 3% increase to 48.11kg in 2021, from 46.81kg in 2020.
I don't want to give a false impression, these aren't huge numbers, but they're pretty big for a country who says, "Singapore is winning the war on drugs" [1]. But we should also note that Singapore doesn't really execute that many people for drug-related offenses, it's < 50 over the last 10 years [2]. But if we ratio that to the population of the US, it's something like 3,000 executions a year. That would be a huge increase in the number of executions in the US annually, which is ~20/year. A 15,000% increase in executions is... well I guess it depends on your point of view. Another comparison is that it would be a 9/11 in executions every year.
And you can't say these numbers would go down! Singapore's had this policy since the early 70s. Actually I think what would happen is our numbers in the US wouldn't ratio to Singapore's after ~50 years of this policy, they'd ratio to when it started which--while I can't find a source--I assume was way, way higher.
---
I think the truth here is that, like most things, the US is just a super weird outlier. The site you linked shows drug use in the US that's basically off the charts. If our reluctance to punish drug dealers is the cause, you'd expect the Nordic countries to have a way worse problem, but they don't. Hell you'd expect heavy drug-producing countries to have a way worse problem, but they also don't. I just don't see any evidence that harsher penalties for dealing drugs will improve the situation, on the other hand I have every reason to think it will be yet another horror visited upon the most vulnerable Americans by our carceral system.
[0]: https://www.cnb.gov.sg/docs/default-source/drug-situation-re...
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/singapore-is-winning...
[2]: https://data.gov.sg/dataset/judicial-executions
Edit: miscalculated; the US has 60x the population of Singapore, not 6x.
Give the history a look and you'll know why.
Unlike in Europe where people choose to unite and live largely peacefully after many conflicts (2 world wars got people fed up especially quickly), Asian countries landed themselves in a different situation, and reasonably suspicious towards "outsiders". What makes things even worse is that due to how many of these countries are governed (dictatorships, monarchies, monoparties and fake democracies), the recent movement of globalization is less effective in terms of bringing enough benefits to their citizens to allow them to brainwash their old world views out of their head voluntarily.
Plus, many of these Asian countries don't have enough market ability to support the development of such Internet product domestically. As a result, if you just fully open up your Internet, the majority of the benefit from the action will then be absorbed by some companies located half an earth away while continue to deplete the market demand for homegrown alternatives. This is the situation where when you fully obey the international treaties, you lose.
So, all and all, it's not "the east (just) does things a little differently" ("argh, these uncivilized barbarians" probably follows). Some delicate and sophisticated calculation is involved there.
It's not facebook.com that's blocked. It's BBC.com and other news sites.
None of the big companies you're talking about are significantly blocked (outside of China).
Meanwhile there's quite a few homegrown internet companies doing great over here.
Here in Vietnam, shopee.com and lazada.com are the most popular shopping sites.
Zalo is the most popular messaging app by far.
Grab is the most popular ride sharing and food delivery app (in Indonesia it's Gojek).
The only American companies that do have dominance are FB for social media and Google for search. Although maybe TikTok is more popular now.
What do you mean by 'home grown'?
He was a kingpin dealer who manipulated others into trafficking drugs, not just some poor guy who was unwittingly forced or tricked into carrying cannabis. His pawns, forced into doing his bidding, were spared the death penalty.
I personally don't think marijuana is harmful, but if you're going to be intentionally running a network distributing drugs knowing full well the law, there is really nobody to blame but yourself.
> Especially if you're raising kids
There is no better place to be raising kids to be honest. Singapore boasts a world-class education that consistently ranks at or near the top of the OECD PISA scores, a rich culture with both Eastern and Western perspectives. My Singaporean colleagues (here in the Bay Area) are all outstanding people with both a fine grasp of technical matters and great creativity and critical thinking skills.
Another factor: Safety - I doubt there is a safer country than Singapore.
As for the educational system, university is very expensive. Schools are free and yes they claim to be very good on academic scores. What they don’t tell you is they still do caning in public schools (boys only). Still stuck in the fifties. The educational system largely focuses on academic strength and if you are not academically strong you get put into a second tier system very quickly. Kids as young as 8 have exams and suffer from exam stress early in their life.
So yes, Singapore is an iron fisted, draconian police state, not much better than their Chinese neighbours.
Source: I live here.
Yes, there is caning, but only for very serious offences. They no longer cane kids just for being late (which was done to Lee Kuan Yew, though he mentioned in his memoir that "it never did me any harm").
Homosexuality is technically illegal (to be precise, the act of sex between men), but it is rarely enforced and most people don't mind it, especially the younger generation which tend to support LGBT strongly.
Not that long ago it was in many parts of the west too. Could get you fired from work, There were still gays in both places of course, both closeted and people everybody knew they were gay.
Hell, up until the 60s there was seggregation of blacks and whites.
I lived in Singapore for over 10 years and have 3 kids. Singapore is incredibly safe, it's fantastic a place for starting and raising a young family. You get a lot of exposure to people from all over the world.
On the other hand, it's actually "too" safe. Locals are sheltered, often making absurd comparisons that neighboring Malaysia / Johor Bahru is some crime ridden warzone, where you take your life into your hands by crossing the border. People file police reports over their food being overly seasoned at restaurants.
IMO raising a child over the long term in the bubble is detrimental as they wind up lacking street smarts which are necessary basically anywhere outside of Singapore.
There’s a lot of arrogance in this statement. The prosperous Asian countries (Singapore, Korea, Japan, maybe UAE too) all have more restricted social freedoms. But they’re also the safest and most orderly places in the world. Why would anybody living in those places look at LA, or NY, or Paris, or London, and think “I want where I live to be more like that”, ya know, filthy and full of violent and property crime…
"'The East' does not respect freedom of thought" is a sentiment one would be castigated for expressing in the West.
I don't disagree with him.
Not as common as you put it out to be.
Singapore has made its rules clear, these punishments aren't arbitrary. If you bring drugs into a country that will sentence you to death for it, something the population supports, that's not barbarism on part of Singapore, it's just reckless crime.
Probably because those media sites belong to countries with a tainted history with colonial involvement against the countries "in this part of the world", and push their narratives.
If the situation was inversed, and e.g. those developing countries had the inverse power relationship with western countries (e.g. had some past or present where Thailand or Vietnam invaded or exercized power over France or the US), and the media sites were theirs, they'd be banned or shadowbanned or cancelled within an internet nanosecond.
Edit: See https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-block-as... for the local news about the blocking.
Interesting, I haven't heard of email providers blocking senders by a country, so I wonder if you could connect a static site generator with a LLM to read emails from users and respond with the corresponding article. It'd be pretty easy to disseminate headlines because email clients typically give notifactions already and emails are really easy to share to other people.
I suppose no matter what they should be allowed to publish whatever they want. But still is this a news portal? Or some kind of personal blog?
From Wikipedia's Singapore article:
Ethnic groups (2020)[b]
74.3% Chinese
13.5% Malay
9.0% Indian
3.2% Others ***About 20 years ago SG required all Chinese language broadcasting to be in Mandarin, for example, following the party line in China.