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.
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".
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.
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-...
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 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.