Not yet seen the drawbacks of the cameras - certainly prefer the situation to SF where leaving your bluetooth enabled notebook in a car trunk is “asking for it”
I can leave my door unlocked, my parcel can be dropped off at my porch without porch bandits (lol) and car theft is non existent.
One can jog at 2am in any park at night wearing an expensive phone and earbuds and feel perfectly safe.
There’s no active shooter drills in schools, no need to clutch your handbag for it to not be snatched away by an errant bike, no drug zombies inhabiting specific areas of town. We go have dinner in the red lights district because food is great there and can leave the car unlocked.
There is no “no-go” zones or ghettos. No harassment on the subway apart from the occasional phone creep who invariably gets arrested.
So pray please, why is safety in quotation marks? Singapore absolutely delivers value for the tradeoff of cameras in practical, real world fashion and people absolutely understand that - so selling them abstract concepts like “real western freedom” falls short because they see the tradeoffs in every other country when they travel.
My son lost it at 7 years of age when we went to London and he experienced the authentic subway with belligerent drunks, homeless sleeping on the ground and shouting sports fans accosting a woman all in one ride - all things he’d never seen before.
Rich Americans pay for this “freedom” by their gated communities, Lake Tahoe retreats and corporate modes of transportation. In Singapore, every resident gets it.
Having lived here for a while, it stuns me how reflexive and ideological the conversation is about these tradeoffs and how misguided people’s perceptions are.
Most think Singapore is a Capitalist wonderland, not seeing the housing market is centrally run, the majority of locals working for the government in one form or another (GIC/Temasek Crown Companies/PSD)
Singapore defies western ideological expectations, it’s not neatly divided into left and right, capitalist vs socialist, western vs eastern societies, it’s 35% immigrants, 4 major races and religions, it controls racial composition of housing blocks and the nuance required to understand the country and the outcomes it produces, for better or worse is lost in the desperate attempts to make it fit into those narrow definitions.
It’s not a paradise, it’s not an utopia, there’s crime, there’s scams, there’s human vice, it’s election districts are more like Alberta or Bavaria or Texas but it does have safety and safe housing for every resident in a way no other country has and without the immediate tradeoffs western narratives are so hard on. Sure heroin trafficking gets you killed, but on the backdrop of the Opium wars or the US drug crisis, their strategy, whether killing or not is key to that, actually works in measurable outcomes for everyone. It’s been, well forever, since an addict stole a thing from me - a regular occurrence in SF id you visit into a few times a year. It’s western perspectives that try to “frame that” - it’s clear this strategy isn’t gonna work for the US.
But that doesn’t stop either side of the western debate from framing Singapore within their ideology, a kind of constant colonial mansplaining you get here - condescending explanations and quotation marks aiming to reassure Western audiences that their societies tradeoffs are the right ones.
Questions not asked by the very people who should:
- “Why don’t the cameras work in London?”
- “Why does gun control work for every developed country but the US?”
- “How did these guys pull of country level SSO that works”
- “How were they able to switch to remote work and learning without as much as a hitch”
- and my favorite.. “how do they manage world class public service, transportation and a government employing half a million people more or less directly with a progressive tax rate where most people pay lower single digit percent and the top end is not even 25%”)
all deserve to be examined holistically for the nuanced, multi-layered background of those policies executed by what I would consider the worlds most professional public service.
But especially for former colonial powers, this is really really tough and so escapism in form of slogans like “authoritarian” and “it’s just a city” are paraded 59 avoid them.
Reading the western coverage always reads like Singapore’s mere existence and choices are an affront to the the west because they point out that ideology had limits.
But Singapore doesn’t exist to prove hard on drug crusaders or believers in technocracy or authoritarian government right - it exists purely out of its own right and the sheer will of Lee Kwan Yew to think outside the box, to not accept prevailing narratives and choose the right solutions for the unique location and situation rather than the east ones.