I live here. Right now. For years. I lived in the US before, I lived in Europe including Eastern Germany? I lived through the collapse of the eastern block.

How is this not exactly what I just called “colonial mansplaining”? A bunch of quotes from a bunch of statistics and feel good metrics? Some handwaving about projects not spent for the common good? Which ones, do tell. Be specific, educate me about my oppression!

Do tell me, how does this unreasonable surveillance manifest? Are you explaining freedom to me? Surveillance?

Number of cameras === bad? Poor London. Poor american amazon ring infested suburbs. Seems like a bad metric.

Also: All properties have cameras in their lift lobbies, by law. There’s no difference between private and public. Condo cameras are monitored by condo security and directly accessible to police.

In practice

- Haven’t yet to see weekly harassment by local police trying to make their ticket quota at a local high school

- In fact, most of the police you see, if any, is kids doing their national service

- Never once had a gun pointed at me by officials - happened twice in the US

- Never stopped at a roadblock in 10 years.

- Pretty sure internet wise it en par with what the NSA does, but setting encrypted DNS is all that’s needed to get past the porn blockers.

- There’s a camera in my lift lobby. It seems to make it nobody steals my parcels. If I ever kill anyone, my freedom to move the body is infringed.

- There was monitoring bracelets during early covid if you were on home quarantine. If I broke the law, the bracelet and the camera would have made short work of me. Singapore had a world class pandemic response with much shorter lockdowns than other countries.

Gino Coeffient: That’s a long and nuanced conversation (part of Singapores Sentosa Island is literally built to attract rich people fleeing China) and having a high concentrations of billionaires destroys the statistic from the top and ignores that there is two worlds in Singapore.

One for locals with subsidized housing (basically zero homelessness, 80% ownership, plentiful subsidies and almost free education) and one for foreigners with very very different economics.

There’s plenty of legitimate criticisms one could make, especially on LGBTQ+ rights, etc, but this? please.

If you are actually interested in understanding, I suggest this interview by the man we just elected President yesterday by a landslide.

https://youtu.be/hpwPciW74b8

Otherwise, thank you for making my point exactly and perfectly. Stop for a moment and think just how arrogant it is to lecture someone living in a place you probably never visited about how their are oppressed with a bunch of statistics. And maybe don’t do it again next time and instead ask yourself if maybe your perception of the world is very limited from your vantage point of Cambridge studies and Statistics.

Think for a moment of the freedom to not get bankrupted by a medical emergency, the freedom to be free of hate speech talk shows and politicians, the freedom to not have your home broken in my drug addicts, the freedom to jog at night in the park without fear are actually real freedoms people may care about.