It is hard to take a comment like this in good faith. You make multiple references to Singapore being a dystopia with zero justification. You make several strongly negative analogies of Singapore ("deal with the devil", "costs you your soul", "zoo for homo sapiens") with the thinnest of connections.

Singapore is far from perfect. It is horrendous on gay rights. It struggles with inequality. The amount of power resting in Government and political entities, even if currently not fully exploited, makes me incredibly uneasy. And it has many other issues too. But it is far from the fictionalized robotic totalitarian state you want to pretend it is.

Any place that executes people for minor crimes or non-crimes is pretty awful on human rights issues. Couple that with its status as a single party state, corporal punishment for minor infractions, the fact that it is awful on LGBT issues, and so on, and I don't need to know much more. I don't care how clean the streets are if that's what it costs.

Also: Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, often considered the father of the place, was a fairly virulent "scientific" racist: https://lkyonrace.wordpress.com

Sure, other places are much worse. Sure, many places like the USA have their own huge issues. That's "whataboutism."

As I said, the thing that makes Singapore almost alarming to me isn't that it's the worst place for human rights. It's not even close to that. The thing that bothers me is that it looks like it works and serves as an advertisement for better living through totalitarianism. Most other places with awful human rights records look like places with awful human rights records.

I'll say it again: if what Singapore does is the cost of clean streets and virtually zero crime, I'll take a filthy slum. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. I currently live somewhere that's far less punitive and it isn't a filthy slum.

>Any place that executes people for minor crimes or non-crimes is pretty awful on human rights issues.

I am going to press you on this. Which non-crimes lead to capital punishment? And on what basis do you get to decide whether a crime is "minor" or "major"?

As for "whataboutism", that defense doesn't hold when you label something as "the scariest dystopia". When you use a superlative, that's exactly the point where even single counterexamples matter.

EDIT: You edited your comment to add more substance, so I will too.

>Couple that with its status as a single party state Which just got dealt its biggest blow in 50 years.

>the fact that it is awful on LGBT issues I raised this before you edited your comment.

>Also: Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew is a racist: https://lkyonrace.wordpress.com Non-sequitur. We have mentioned Lee Kuan Yew in no part of the discussion thus far.

>The thing that bothers me is that it looks like it works and serves as an advertisement for better living through totalitarianism. And you've not justified the label of "totalitarianism", just like you haven't justified your label of "dystopia".

Having weed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapor...

I live in a place that recently legalized marijuana. Nothing bad happened. The result proves quite conclusively that this is a non-crime.

While I'm not convinced on blanket drug legalization, especially of certain very dangerous drugs, I can't justify the death penalty for any drug crime. Of course I have a tough time with the death penalty in general, and can only ethically justify it for the crime of deliberate murder.

Singapore seems to believe quite emphatically that the ends justify the means. This is just a large scale political version of naked psychopathy: "if I get the outcome I want, it's okay." Any student of the 20th century knows where this goes. The fact that Singapore seems to exercise some restraint, refusing to follow this principle to its logical end, doesn't justify it.

> Having weed?

The death penalty would only apply if one had more than 500g of weed on them — that's enough for anywhere between 500 to 1,500 joints [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/science/how-much-weed-is-...

>The result proves quite conclusively that this is a non-crime.

You've just invented a new definition of "non-crime", which appears to be "did not have any apparent impact when decriminalized in a different legal jurisdiction". Most people would take the definition non-crime to simply be "not a crime", which bringing marijuana into Singapore is.

>Singapore is scary because it's a dystopia with many desirable characteristics. It's a dystopia with curb appeal, one that could be sold to people.

that's exactly my impression, too.

My friends tell me how great the food is, and how clean the area is; meanwhile i'm thinking about caning laws and drug executions -- this tells me that Singapore has enough appeal that some folks can sort of breeze past the really grim stuff.

That's a scary trait.

There are a lot of people from SF on here. I think that's part of what powers HN's wing of totalitarian utopians. SF is itself a dystopia, an open air psychiatric hospital that is simultaneously unaffordable and smells like piss. People need to realize though that SF is a bubble and that its problems are as strange as its virtues. SF is not only dysfunctional but peculiarly so, and its disease is not common elsewhere. I call it "the world's only six figure slum."

I find utopias scary in general. Not only do they always have a mass grave or a gas chamber hidden away somewhere, but even without considering the underbelly they sort of by definition represent a local maximum.

Studying evolution and AI/ML made me fear the local maximum as an existential danger. It's one of my Fermi paradox speculations. Maybe it's easier to create a utopia than to build a starship. Find a local maximum, get stuck, and wait for a black swan. A utopia is a luxury lounge waiting room for extinction.

I can't see a society like Singapore settling Mars or sending the first probe to Proxima Centauri. I'll take my junkies, batshit crazy politics, and litter on the streets. Just give me good music and spaceships plz. God (and who knows what else... Cthulhu f'tagn!) bless the USA.

I wonder if the local maximum evolutionary dynamics of a utopia isn't the reason they always have a mass grave or two. Evolution has natural mechanisms to escape local maxima (search phrase: evolution of evolvability). The local maximum must therefore be enforced. Life has to be actively held there. "Smile or die."