"Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters." - Margaret Halsey

***

A: Frankly I'm sick of hearing all this negativity. About Andy, about Singapore's politics, about damn near everything we talk about on this email list. I don't set aside free time to read my mails to get more depressed than I already am offline!

so i'd like to hear from you: what is good about Singapore? today ST ran an article on our *shock!* 800,000-strong foreign-born (but all featured were caucasian, heheh) residents, and mostly they were like "oh taxi driver was friendly to me thats why i dropped my british passport and bought my sweet little hut in bukit timah isn't it
adorable?". k seriously, what about life in Singapore is better than in other cities? many of you are or have been overseas, so I'm hoping to gain a wider perspective from your collective experience.

positive comments appreciated.

me, I heart the kopitiam. coffeeshop. food court. the urban planner's greatest gift to us. try finding its equivalent in new york (disclaimer i only spent like 3 days there so perhaps i may have missed one if there were). the concept is alien there and yet to me it just seems like the most natural thing in the world.

>^<


B: Food.
Infrastructure.
Warmth.
Weather.
Public libraries.
The waterfront.
Transport.


A: transport?? i much prefer the NYC bus&train systems, dunnoe if I'm taking sgp for granted on that count. then again, SMRT never shuts down cos of a worker strike :)

i don't know about public libraries though. it's a good point. "Infrastructure" is pretty vague as a point by itself.

>^<


C: But their subway looks so crappy... (Ours is newer so it's not too surprising, but...)

There's a small food place with several outlets in a local mall here, and sounth of our campus there's a road packed with restaurants and other food-selling things. I think in some parts of NYC there aren't even malls, so you won't expect to find large food-places.

The life expectancy is pretty good in Singapore. It's reasonably wealthy. Plenty of good things I'm sure. But it's not fun to talk about good things, since there isn't much to say about it, but "yay!"...


D: Hi I think one main advantage Singapore has that other countries lack is security. There's an exceptionally low crime rate and if there was a crime, you can be pretty sure that the police would do something abt it. But in Britain/US, this is not the same case. You would never know when someone may suddenly attack you and even if he did so, the police may not do anything serious about it. And of course, there's explicit racial prejudice overseas which is not present here.


E: Yes. Indeed. When I am walking in San Francisco, I constantly shudder at the thought of the possibility of someone sneaking up behind me, knocking me out and then up. Then when I show my bruises and wounds to the police, they will be very unsympathetic and say, 'you chinkychongchink, get back on the boat from which you alighted!"

Yes. Right.


Me: San Francisco Crime Statistics and Crime Data (San Francisco, CA)

Overall San Francisco Crime Index
2004 Total: 40254
Per 100,000 People: 5373.1
National per 100,000 People: 4627.9

STATISTICS SINGAPORE - KeyStats - Annual Statistics

2006 - Crime Rate (Per 100,000 Population): 745


For those who require explication, these statistics show that Singapore has roughly a sixth the crime of San Francisco.


North Gate News Online :: Cop Panel Ignoring Brutality Claims, Activists Charge

"SAN FRANCISCO - Angry Bayview residents accused the San Francisco
Police Commission of ignoring accusations of police brutality at a
news conference at the Hall of Justice today.

*snip*

"Over the last couple years, we've seen a decline in the accountability of the police department," Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the ACLU of Northern California, said. "We have cases of serious misconduct being dismissed because the Police Commission doesn't act on them in a timely manner.""


In case no one understood the meaning of that quote, it means that the San Francisco police are alleged to be brutal and to use excessive force.


As Johann Hari said about Guantanamo,

"We have to start by adopting a defensible position. Too many of the critics have let the Bush administration off the hook by basing their opposition to the camp on the claim that virtually everyone in Gunatanamo Bay as innocent as Dilawar. A string of
documentaries and dramas have presented Islamic fundamentalists who went to Taliban Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 as akin to Cliff Richard in 'Summer Holiday', setting off on an innocent jaunt and astonished to find themselves on the battlefield alongside Mullah Omar's men. The Australian detainee David Hicks is an Islamic
fundamentalist who told his father he was going to Afghanistan to make sure the Taliban was not toppled by "the Jews' propaganda war machine" and to ensure "we live under Muslim law again." Yet John Pilger describes him lyrically as merely "a larrikin", the kind of person who was "lauded by our bush poets and balladeers"."

If this requires explanation, it basically means that refusing to adopt a reasonable position because you're blinded by ideology or personal feelings means that you look stupid and that no reasonable people will take you seriously.


F: Singapore has many things going for it.

1) Excellent infrastructure. This includes well-maintained roads, good public transport system, internet connectivity, etc.

2) Clean, green environment.

3) Close to zero corruption in the public sector.

4) A competent government composed of intelligent people. Singaporeans like to criticise the government, but so do people everywhere. In my opinion, the PAP has its flaws, but it does a much better job of governing the country than most other countries in the world, and especially when compared to its neighbours.

5) Excellent education system.

6) Adherence to meritocratic principles.


E: Gabriel,

I assure you that police brutality occurs anywhere. The point is that you should have safeguards against it, e.g. a free press and laws that prevent policemen from having excessive powers. This is not the case in Singapore, where there is evidently no free press and there are no such laws governing policemen. Indeed there are no such laws governing the police system as a whole - last time I checked, Singapore had no habeas corpus. And it is not that there is no police brutality. It is that SPH simply sees no point in reporting it. I also recall very brainless police raids on gay clubs like Happy, ostensibly for drugs, but this came one day after the cancellation of the Squirt (or one of those Fridae-organised parties). In this case they also man-handled everyone, and many made very shitty homophobic jokes in full view of the gay men who were (like me) gawking in horror at their very stupid Andy-Hoesque opinions on gay men and how they behave.

Which brings me to my next point. I see no point in trying to defend the Singapore system. since, though Singapore is excessively 'safe', there are no safeguards against, say, abuse. What comes to mind - let's see, the entrapment of gay men in the late 1990s comes to mind. So very interesting.

Oh and another incident comes to mind - I remember being very horrified once when my friend regaled me with a shitty tale of how her friend went to the policemen, having been molested by this very shitty person. But the policeman was merely very 'oh you
are dressed very skimpily, are you sure you didn't bring it upon yourself'.

Next point - I get very irritated when people are like 'oh in the US and the UK things are very dangerous'. Since I assure you that this is not the case. It is not significantly MORE dangerous. One does not live in fear of one's life when one is walking in London, or New York, or wherever. To state otherwise is ridiculous. When I am in NY, the feeling that I get is not one of 'OH MY GOD I WILL BE MURDERED BY THAT HOBO.' Instead, the feeling that I get is 'I can do whatever the fuck I want here, and no asshole policeman is going to be able to annnoy me without me having the right to recourse and calling the press down his neck.'


Me: Fair enough, mostly, but man-handling (you probably mean shoving and pushing aside?) and making homophobic jokes isn't quite brutality. Shitty, yes, but calling it brutality is like calling the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians a Holocaust - it mocks those who truly suffer police brutality.

I question what the true level of police brutality is. Even the SAF cannot cover up its misdeeds these days with forums and IRC, yet we don't hear of policemen in Singapore roughing anyone up. If nothing else, there's a reason they invented the aircon treatment, you know.

One may not live in fear of one's life in London, or New York, or whatever, but one does not visit certain neighborhoods alone, especially not at certain times of the day.


A: security.. well.. I was a little chilled by Tom Plate's account of his first interview with LKY (i think it was in an article called "This article on Singapore, you sure you want it to run?"), when he asked why political dissidents had been detained without trial and LKY chose not to answer that, but instead stared him straight in the eye and said, "Tom, look at the streets. They're safe." This was of course in the not-so-stable context of the 1960's-70's...

i've also been thinking about the fact that we have no earthquakes like in Sumatra and no Katrina-like disasters. worst we had was that recent flooding (was it Napier rd?) and those poor plant growers complained that they lost all their stock. imagine trying to build a world-class anything hub when every few years an earthquake or tsunami wipes out your effort.

>^<


G: To be fair, racial discrimination is still a problem with the police in places like NYC and LA, I believe last year this black guy was shot 23 times by a policeman even though he was unarmed.

Thus Stephen Colbert's joke: "I don't see race. People tell me I'm white, and I believe them, because the police call me 'sir'."

HOWEVER, such incidents are immediately widely reported in the media, and are subject to official investigations, etc.

And as for general public safety, obviously how safe a city is depends on whether it has a very large and mobile population, very poor ghettoes, etc.

Singapore is very similar demographically to Stuttgart, I believe, and the last murder to take place in Stuttgart was like in 2005. When I walk home from my friends' house at 4 am in the morning in Oxford, I do not take a can of pepper spray with me for personal protection. Now, of course, what I encounter on my walk home in Oxford might be more unsavoury/interesting (depending on your point of view) than what I encounter in Singapore -- e.g. drunken boys throwing up in the street, naked man running after his mates who are holding his clothes, etc. But these drunks/naked men do not kill/rob/threaten me. There is a big difference between disorder and being unsafe. Singapore is definitely more orderly, but I don't think significantly more safe.