A bit hyperbolic, but I think you're on the right track. Here's why, as unintentionally revealed by plain-spoken Charlie Munger:

> “In a democracy, everyone takes turns. But if you really want a lot of wisdom, it’s better to concentrate decisions and process in one person. It’s no accident that Singapore has a much better record, given where it started, than the United States. There, power was concentrated in an enormously talented person, Lee Kuan Yew, ...”

https://fs.blog/charlie-munger-wisdom/

In short, "what you don't want", according to the Munger social vision, is ... democracy. A benevolant dictator it seems, is the only way. But how many aspiring dictators in the long history of this world have proven out as benevolent? The track record of dictators selected by political struggle I would argue is, by any measure of mass welfare, even worse than that of hereditary monarchs.

I am a reasonably large Charlie Munger fan (read all the bios of him and Buffett, read the Bevelin books, read Poor Charlie's) but the guy has the most phenomenal blind spots of any person alive because, bluntly, he isn't that well-read. He has read very deeply in one area (if you look at his book recommendations, it is like the Amazon best sellers for rich elderly people who went to college in the US, studied sciences but never really thought about anything else) but he appears unaware of the limits of knowledge, and is exceptionally superficial about stuff like politics (the stuff with the UCLA dorm also highlights this, he has written a lot of sensible stuff, and a lot of stuff that would do well in standup).

Plato wrote about all of this stuff, he was of the same opinion (philosopher kings), and then spent most of life finding out why that didn't work (and was, as a result, sold into slavery towards the end of his life). This came up again in the Enlightenment. The perceived fault of democracy is the strength: it is strong because "everyone takes turns". You significantly reduce your upside, but you significantly reduce your downside too. The US has benefitted hugely from founders who not only understood democracy well, but understood the problems with dictatorship.

Also, it is worth saying that LKY's son now runs the country. It isn't a democracy, are we seriously saying that the country was scoured for the best people and it just turned out the best guy was the son of the last guy? Seriously? LKY's achievements were great, he was a great leader but there is a lot wrong with the country (it runs on slave labour) and has the highest level of political weakness possible (China is a perfect parallel: Deng was a great leader, but he didn't solve any of political issues and assumed the CCP would always lead by consensus, Xi has made himself permanent leader...this is why you have a balance of powers/strong constitution, this is exactly why).

> LKY's son now runs the country.

Thanks. Any pointers to sources that actually know something about the real power structure inside Singapore politics? From my scan of several English-language sites there, it seemed only one -- Straits Times -- acknowledged that the country had any internal politics at all:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/whats-needed...

So, Lee Hsien Loong is LKW's son?

Also this. Wondering if the Progress Singapore Party is a token opposition that's allowed to exist, provided it never threatens to achieve real power, in order to put a fig leaf on the democracy claim?

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/former-candi...

> a balance of powers/strong constitution

Necessary but not sufficient. Support for those values, and a few others e.g. respect for rule of law, willingness to pay taxes, toleration of dissenting opinions, consideration for future generations, is also required, from some significant fraction of the electorate. A certain "political culture". Decay of which I'd suggest is at the root of any democracy's troubles.

Singaporean here.

Opposition does exist in Singapore's politics, and in fact they do get quite a large share of votes (~40% across many constituencies), it's just that due to the first-past-the-post system the number of opposition MPs that make it into Parliament is extremely small, and thus the ruling party has effectively full control over Parliament.

Now this is definitely a clear flaw of the system but things are changing - younger people are more willing to run as opposition candidates and in the most recent election the Worker's Party made some significant wins.

There are a few things I think are important to consider:

1. Credibility of the opposition. Opposition should not exist for opposition's sake. Many opposition candidates are simply... not that impressive. A good example is the Progress Singapore Party you mentioned (it is a new party, not the most representative of the opposition). Their rhetoric comes across as xenophobic and racist primarily against Indian immigration, which frankly seems to just be pandering to middle-aged, Chinese voters. Of course incompetency exists in the ruling party as well but I won't go there.

2. Where do we want to end up? I don't think it's wise to simply rush into "copying" another country's political system. Frankly, I believe that the 2-party system seen in many countries is the "worst case" equilibrium that we should try to avoid falling into. We are now in the midst of the rare process of political change and I don't mind that it happens in slow steps. Let the Worker's Party prove themselves. Let the ruling party take in the lessons from the election and improve themselves or change their policies. It all ultimately works for the improvement of the country which is great news!

3. On the note of not imitating other countries, one thing I am glad to see is emphasis and scrutiny on political integrity. We recently had a case of an MP being caught lying in Parliament and it was taken very seriously. I do certainly hope twitter politics never takes foot here.

>at the cost of human rights.

What human rights exactly?

That was a rhetorical question I suppose, in the sense of "whose definition is supposedly the universal one": Jonas Čeika has philosophical deep dive [0] into the topic of human rights worth watching.

[0] https://youtu.be/AhRBsJYWR8Q

People are down-voting you. But to them, I'd like to say, how can you read this and not be shocked?

> To illustrate how Better.sg tries to diffuse tensions, Keerthi recounted how a dark-skinned, ethnically South Asian member of the group had proposed a project after an interaction that she considered racist. She’d gone to an ethnically Chinese doctor with a dermatological complaint, but he refused to accept her as a patient, saying he couldn’t confidently diagnose conditions on dark skin. She wanted to build a map that collated reports of similar incidents with medical professionals. Keerthi said that he suggested an alternative product: why not build an image library of how skin conditions present on different skin tones, to help doctors out?

It feels like they're unwilling to accept, at a very fundamental level, that the issue wasn't that the doctor "can't diagnose X", but rather that they would prefer not to diagnose X.

> A digital education plan for the pandemic assumed that all children had access to devices, and that all households had one parent spare to supervise them, he added. That simply wasn’t the case, and lower income families suffered disproportionately. “You can map these dysfunctions and asymmetries onto certain socioeconomic statuses,” Kuah said.

This is again one of the more paternalistic aspects of the system at play, they're unwilling to accept anything that falls outside of their "norm," where they — a small subset of powerful people — get to define what is the norm — not the people who live there.

> In a country that’s notoriously obsessed with safety, where jaywalking and failing to wear a seatbelt can be punished with jail time, migrant workers can be transported on the expressways in the back of goods vehicles. Calls for change after a series of fatal accidents this year were rejected, on the grounds it would be too expensive for their employers.

I find this to be insanely inhuman, anyone who falls outside their preferred norm is the subhuman, or the untermensch. Their existence does not matter. Their concerns don't matter.

> The coronavirus burned through the close-packed migrant dormitories. By the end of 2020, more than 150,000 migrant workers, nearly half of them, had been infected, compared to just 4,000 in the general population.

> Inside the dorms, the systems seemed calibrated to trigger near-constant lockdowns; each time a positive case is found in a dormitory, its residents are isolated. Eighteen months on, migrants are still largely shut in. They’re only allowed to leave their dormitories to work, or, once a week, for a few hours at a designated recreation centre.

> That time [went] very fast… but on the other hand, very slow,” he told Rest of World. “All day we stay in the dormitory, [in the] same room. We cannot go out, [we were] only allowed to go to the toilet and shower. Even cannot go [into the] corridor.” Nights were the worst. Having spent most of the day sitting on his bed, watching movies on his phone, he found it hard to sleep. “This was a very, very bad time,” he said.

They've put a group of people, whom they consider to be the untermensch, within group housing where their movement is restricted and they are locked in.

There will be some who will make the parallel to lockdowns in the US and the rest of the developed world, but fundamentally, those lockdowns were about sheltering in place at home, applied equally across the population, and gave people autonomy to go out for essential needs etc.

This targets a specific sub-population. They are forced to live together in dorms. And they can only access recreation for a few hours every week.

That's a prison in all but name.

> People have to trust that there are limits to this organizing principle. If the government changed its mind about enforcing the law on homosexuality, for example, “it would be able to subpoena the location data of every queer person in Singapore to see who they’re meeting,” Rajeswari said. “There are jokes in our community about the government having files on us… but they’re morbid jokes.”

> In 2020, he was jailed for 10 days for hosting a live discussion via Skype with the Hong Kong pro-democracy figurehead Joshua Wong.

It's a "utopia" for sociopaths.

I don't believe in utopia, and any time I see a supposed utopia that is too good to be true I cringe a little.

This isn't rooted in cynicism but in what I think is an accurate understanding of life.

Life exists in a perpetual state of war against entropy. There are always massive problems. Your body spends anywhere from 20% to 50% (depending on how you count it) of its metabolic energy just not falling apart. If your body stopped doing this you would turn into mush in a few days... almost literally.

So if you look at a place and it looks like utopia, there are a few possibilities:

(1) Everyone is paying through the nose in the form of taxes or other fees to pay other people to fix things.

(2) The problems are being hidden through a campaign of propaganda and cosmetics. The extreme of this is known as a "Potemkin village."

(3) There is a system of slavery or near-slavery in which an underclass is handling all the dirty work.

(4) There are massive problems you are just not seeing yet because you are not looking closely enough. This often happens when people visit somewhere or live there briefly but do not stay long enough to really get to know the place deeply.

Singapore has low taxes. Their situation seems to be a mix of options 2-4.

Oh, and on lockdowns:

> There will be some who will make the parallel to lockdowns in the US and the rest of the developed world, but fundamentally, those lockdowns were about sheltering in place at home, applied equally across the population, and gave people autonomy to go out for essential needs etc.

I would argue that the US barely even had true "lockdowns." There were few places in the US where anyone actually got in real trouble for going out, not wearing a mask, etc. There were places of business and public buildings who would turn you away, sure, but that's about as soft of a glove as you can get here. I see tons and tons of people completely ignoring COVID orders and nothing happened to them.

I don't think I want it different. I will call people stupid for ignoring COVID orders and not getting vaccinated, but if I saw people getting arrested I don't think I would be okay with that.

I realize that it might not be clear from my tone, but I deeply agree with you.

This reminds me of the HK story. I'm happy to provide more color elsewhere (feel free to reach out via twitter or email), but essentially the no-tax government was deeply involved with the triads and the construction industry. There was a tax system alright, except one that was enforced with gangs and shady deals rather than lawyers.

Why is it a bad place to live, for someone who isn't part of the 1984 fandom?

You're getting downvoted because your post is incredibly disrespectful to countries where the main demographics are historically oppressed groups. Obviously North Koreans love North Korea, or else it wouldn't exist.