Let’s not forget the whole fiasco with Singapore’s TraceTogether app for contact tracing during the pandemic. The actual implementation of it differs significantly from the white paper they open-sourced. The actual app does not anonymize the data and the government has access to everyone’s location and interaction data. Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed the data for investigation purposes. There is no constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any laws so it was mostly an “oops, too bad, we didn’t do anything ‘wrong’” moment for them.
Good thing the United States has a constitutional amendment that totally protects us from having our location data harvested sold and deanonymized by thousands of data brokers!
The unfortunate reality is a lot of people post comments like GP but do so reflexively to deride non-US governments then play defense for posts critical of the US. Some do it for China, and so on. It would help in general if people are reasonably (emphasis on reasonably) skeptical of all states.
Let’s not pretend that China’s laws and norms are comparable to those of the US here, though. Yes, it’s reasonable to be skeptical of all states, but there’s definitely a difference of degree in state overreach.
1) I fully expect to see the US government make up most of the US economy by spending in my lifetime (I'd argue they are already there, but that involves an argument I don't feel like typing).
2) COVID shows us that the US government also sees their role as deploying an invasive level of social control for The Greater Good. COVID level threats aren't going to be that rare, we'll see another one in our lifetimes.
3) The US government pioneered using phones to support a global surveillance apparatus (probably military too, I expect more than one missile has been targeted on an iPhone).
So to repeat myself, although I'd still rather take the Americans than the Chinese, these are not categorically different things. They see their roles as the same and their methods are converging. Especially on the subject of surveillance and the risks it poses to ordinary people.
China lacks rule of law, or even an attempt at it: the Chinese government has stated that the notion of rule of law is just western imperialism. This is why, China having a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and so on, is completely meaningless (no independent judiciary means the law is whatever officials claim it is) whereas an attempt of rule of law is actually made in the USA, even if it is far from perfect.
Ironically, we are debating Singapore in parent, which has extremely strong rule of law, but the laws are such that security is prioritized.
I bet the guys taken blindfolded by CIA, questioned in the middle of somewhere, and then brought back, will fully agree how much better the US system happens to be.
Naturally the ones that survived the question process.
It’s not that there’s nothing to criticize about the US and this example is one of the worst things the US does. However a key difference is that the CIA is not doing this to American citizens, we can be sure that if it were there would be considerably more outrage. In China this sort of treatment is on the table for anyone who crosses the line.
Binarism (that there is only right and wrong, and not a large spectrum of gray scale in between) is one of those huge fallacies that allows one to claim that China and the USA are basically the same, when in reality, neither is white or black but one is much closer to black than the other.
True, yet acting as US is a country that should be a moral example where such things never happen also doesn't help, a country where having the wrong skin colour might be a death sentence when stoped by the police.
Not much different than being stop by the police in more dubious countries.
Are we talking about China or the USA? Because having the wrong skin color is also dangerous in China as well (eg being caught African or Uighur in Guangzhou). I get it: the USA is more diverse so ethnic tension is much more common, but China has the same issues, even worse, just papered over a 90% Han majority focused into the east. Frankly, China’s ethnic tensions are a hundred years behind the states.
2) is a weird objection to level given as almost all restrictions have been lifted in the US and China remains a repressive nightmare on this issue as it has been since 2020. The US did not come anywhere near what China did with regards to lockdowns. And it’s a core responsibility of all states to protect their citizens. Overall our response was bad but we developed effective vaccines that have mostly saved us now while China refuses to use them for nationalistic reasons. Very different situations.
I think the point was, we can't use the fact US (or China, or state X) is a corrupt basket case to lazily dismiss any valid criticism here. That's like dismissing the teachers criticism of an A grade student's English Literature exam question by saying "Yeah well, Ralph's answer was 'boobs'". Ralph exists. The A grade student wants to improve. These are separate concerns.
What is the value of this comment? The US government, privacy in the US, and the like is already discussed frequently here. People are also aware of it so you aren't bringing it to light.
I think it's fair, given that GP mentioned "There is no constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any laws". There's a long history to the debate of whether there's a constitutional right to privacy in the US; it's not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution but it's a fairly common interpretation nowadays, so whether or not the courts in the US would consider it legal if the US government did this is not a sure thing either way.
Looked at a wiki article, and it looks like not many states have a "right to privacy" in their constitution but rather have it specified by various other laws.
My point was that there's disagreement about whether the US has a right to privacy, compared to in Singapore which, at least based on the comments in the thread, it seems like there's consensus that there isn't one.
TraceTogether is being phased out as the end of the pandemic nears. Haven't had to use it for weeks now.
As for privacy issue - they ended up stating that they would only use it for serious crimes e.g. they used it in a murder investigation. Seems like a reasonable compromise for better public safety.
(I recognize that not everyone will agree on that, but the level of safety and security in Singapore is mind blowing.)
The US is large enough to have had its government break promises like this time and again. That’s why you’ll see a lot of people on here that will object to a design requiring you to trust the owners of your infrastructure.
Signal is the chief example of this kind of design. All they can provide a government is the creation date of someone’s account, and the last time they tried to check for messages. Neither message content nor metadata (who sent messages to whom) is accessible, assuming the app follows the design and the design doesn’t have defects.
> Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed the data for investigation purposes
Australia is also complicit in abusing COVID contact tracing datasets. At least in one well publicised case, a police officer accessed someone's location information even without requesting a court order first because… well, it made sense to the police officer. There are likely other instances of the contact tracing abuse, however they are likely to have been quietly swept under the rug.
To be honest, I am actually kind okay with that, at least the public now knows what is being tracked and not, so in a sense, there is no secrecy in the trace-together saga.
This commentary is incredibly inaccurate. The code of version 1 of tracetogether was open sourced in April 2020. The server side wasn't open sourced. There was a hardware based version of tt that went through a community based tear down and it was reliably determined to be only doing (as did the phone app version) ONLY bluetooth-based contact collection. At NO time is any GPS or location data collected. The hardware token only has a bt based hardware and nothing else.
It is true that the Government kept insisting that there is no way the data will be used for any other use and the minister who kept repeating that in parliament subsequently had to apologise that it was indeed used for a murder case. But, legislation was introduced to specifically limit the use cases of any of the data collected - https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/proposed-restrictions....
The contact data in the phone or hardware token is stored for 21 days in a rolling manner with only the latest 21 days available and should there be a need to send the data to the health authorities in the event that there is a need for actual contact tracing, the data extraction is a two step process: a) the owner of the device (phone/token) has to agree to the extraction b) there is a OTP-like code sent to the individual for it to be entered into the phone for the data to be extracted.
Now, should the person deem that he/she does not want to make the data available, the app in the phone can be deleted and be done with. At which point nothing much can be done for subsequent contact tracing.
The right to privacy of data etc is embodied in the Personal Data Protection Act of 2012 (https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/PDPA2012) and all of the data in the app/token is convered by that law.
Yes, trust in the Singapore Government dropped many notches when it was revealed that despite numerous assurances that data won't be used for anything else, that it was indeed used and for a specific criminal investigation, it left a bad impression that the SG govt has not recovered from yet. Suffice to say, as of last month, you can delete the phone app and just take the battery out of the hardware token and be done with it. There are, however, a small set of scenarios where the "SafeEntry checkin" via the tt/token is needed - for places where there are large number of people attending, like weddings, concerts, etc. What I've done is to "force stop" the app in the phone, deny bluetooth access to it and just keep the app still installed.
Korea and Japan rose from the ashes (Japan having lost WWII after their imperialist ambitions failed) in the same amount of time. Korea had a dictatorship or sorts but Japan didn't, but unless I'm mistaken, neither government was as autocratic (and still is) like the PAP is today.
The first Korean Republic (1948-1960) was vastly more repressive than the PAP at its worst, let alone today. Mass arrests of political opponents, reeducation camps, massacres: you name it, Rhee did it. The second republic (1960 to 1961) was theoretically a liberal democracy, but got couped almost immediately. After that, South Korea remained a somewhat milder developmental dictatorship, ala Singapore, until 1987.
good question, maybe because their neighbouring countries have a strong relationship to a certain religion (1) and (2) SG used to be a GB colony like HK which is doing great as well.
We have something similar to this in Antwerp, Belgium.
Most of our solutions are built on top of a kubernetes-powered microservices platform, with an API-first design approach. It is called the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (https://acpaas.digipolis.be).
And finally for UI consistency, we have a design system called Antwerp UI (https://antwerp-ui.digipolis.be), which includes a custom-designed font meant to evoke the city's historical architecture, used both for internally facing web apps, and for our public facing website https://www.antwerpen.be
Hey Joeri, thank you! I've previously lived in the Antwerp province.
The whole time of my stay, I was in love with the city's visual identity (posters, website,..) and the effectiveness of digital services across the administration offices, public institutions and media centers. It's the one city in Belgium taking advantage, in the best way, of digital infrastructure and modern tech.
Nowadays I'm living in the Ardennes (Bastogne) where I can see a huge gap (compared to Antwerp) in Internet services and tech investments. I'm grateful to the people at Digipolis and the city offices taking visionary steps in fostering the local tech scene and building beautiful interfaces/apps.
I’ve worked on a Singapore website sponsored by the major University and a Govt. office and frankly speaking, it’s a poorly managed process dominated by IT protocol more than business/client goals. The admin responsible for running the site was inept and his colleagues were worse. The person who inherited managing the complex web stack was a secretary with no dev skills. I hope it works out for them, but I’m not optimistic.
There's several different government bodies working on tech in Singapore. GovTech is the more 'elite' group that pays better and generally rolls out decent products.
On the one hand you said it's dominated by IT people with no business goals but then complain the manager is a secretary with no dev skills...which is it?
Why reinvent the wheel? A lot of govt websites have very similar use cases. I would e.g. just get The UK Government Design System, which is really good: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system
I prefer to think of it as what politics and society gained.
It was pretty clear that most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the pandemic.
At a time where technological advance has vastly outpaced politics (Joe Biden was around 65 when the first iphone came out) I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS major heading up a (small) nation.
> most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the pandemic.
Maybe they did and chose to ignore it. Lots of countries (including but not limited to the USA) have people with high credentials at the helm. Or they have advisors with high credentials close by.
> I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS
Math never gets old.
> a (small) nation
They may be small, but they definitely punch above their weight :)
I believe that's precisely why the SG government choose to pay extremely well. They gain candidates with great credentials that otherwise will have gone to the private sector.
Also, having well compensated staff makes the ranks less susceptible to corruption and bribery.
I used to work with Singaporean government on a project (which I cannot legally share more about), and, they are actually as dysfunctional technically-wise as any other government.
The dynamics that make government technically dysfunctional are present in Singapore too.
They might be helped by Singapore having so many IT companies of SEA because of low taxes and good rule of law, compared to other countries in the region. (There is no risk of SG government just taking your company away. There is the risk in other SEA countries.) And just sheer power of money. But at the end of the day, it's still a government, with all the good and the bad.
I'm sure there might be because several years ago the U.S. created the U.S. Digital Service with the premise being recruiting professionals (yeah mostly from corporate but not only) to spend time in the government and help modernize many of its aspects and offerings...for the benefit of the citizens, etc. Here's one example of their playbooks: https://playbook.cio.gov/
...While not exactly like the Singapore page linked in this post, alot of the intent with the USDS - as i understand it - is alos to be quite transparent with the hope of any other government agencies/orgs such as state/province level, city level, etc. benefiting from their ideas and hopefully broadening the benefit at all levels. Here is the main site, but of course (as the above playbook link denotes), there are plenty of other related sites that might help better answer your question: https://www.usds.gov/mission
Just over a week ago, Singapore executed by hanging an intellectually disabled Malaysian man (of Indian descent), Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam. His crime? He was caught trying to import heroin – I think it very likely the traffickers exploited his intellectual disability in order to talk him into becoming a drug mule.
In this regard, Singapore is a rather extreme outlier among developed countries – few of which retain the death penalty, and those which do largely restrict it in practice to murder. William Gibson's famous phrase, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", is as true as it ever was.
So yeah, Lee Hsien Loong seems like a cool guy – wow, a Prime Minister who can write C++. But, remember Nagaenthran, and realise he's not actually cool at all, he's actually a rather terrible human being. Whatever the Prime Minister's formal role in decisions about executions, I don't think anyone doubts that he had the political influence (even if quietly, behind the scenes) to stop it going ahead, if he had wanted to.
On the flip side, Singapore has an order of magnitude less drug abuse that we see in most Western countries (not hyperbole, backed by statistics).
My great uncle, at one point, was heroin addict who was trying to get his life together. After he came out of rehab, his old "friends" tracked him down to convince him to get back into the game. The first hit they gave him put his body into shock (he had been clean for weeks), and rather than call an ambulance they propped him up against a tree and left him to die.
I do agree that the most recent case was a bit different as the guy was clearly exploited, but is 1-2 executions a year really worse than tens of thousands of lives being destroyed by drugs?
I think there is another option that is better than either. Heroin is unfairly maligned as a drug – the majority of the harms of heroin addiction are due to its illegality, not due to the drug itself.
Suppose the government sold pharmaceutical quality heroin to the general public. It could open premises where heroin was sold, for on-premises consumption only. The premises would have staff who were trained in safe administration of injections, resuscitation, administration of naltrexone, sharps management, etc. The government could operate these services on a non-profit basis, so the price of the heroin was the minimum required to pay for the drug itself, and the premises/staff/equipment/security/utilities/administration/etc. It could prohibit entry of minors, promote counselling and withdrawal services, etc.
What would be the likely outcome? Well, the black market would shrink dramatically – most addicts and long-term users would migrate to the government-provided service, since it would be cheaper and safer. Faced with the sudden competition, black market operators would likely shift to other lines of business (other drugs, or non-drug illegal businesses such as people trafficking or extortion). The number of deaths from heroin overdose would dramatically fall, since most users would be using heroin at these supervised premises. Pharmaceutical quality heroin would enable precise control over dosage which would eliminate many accidental overdoses; any overdoses remaining would receive prompt medical attention. With prompt medical attention, the odds of surviving a heroin overdose are actually very good. And, unlike illegal operators, it seems unlikely that a government-run service would try to push the substance on the public (and if that ever did happen, the solution would be to remove and punish the staff responsible for that, not abolish the service entirely.)
Long-term heroin addiction, if the substance is legally available at a low cost, pharmaceutical quality, and under medical supervision, is a relatively benign condition from a medical viewpoint. Sure, it does have some negative psychological consequences – such as dulling of thought and motivation and emotions – and it would be best for the addicts to (if they can) gradually wean themselves off it to overcome those negative psychological consequences. But, to be honest, in that respect it is actually not hugely different from many psychotropic drugs (such as antipsychotics and antidepressants) prescribed long-term to a significant percentage of the population. It is far more benign than alcohol, which is a far harsher substance on the body, with potential consequences as cirrhosis of the liver. Most of the negative long-term health consequences of heroin are due to its illegality – for example, many heroin addicts end up with cirrhosis of the liver much like many alcoholics do, but via a very different mechanism. Alcohol directly causes liver disease, heroin is a very benign substance as far as the liver is concerned. [0] Rather, heroin addicts end up with viral hepatitis from sharing needles, and then the hepatitis causes the cirrhosis. If heroin were legalised (in the way I've described), sharing needles would be eliminated, and then heroin addicts would be no more likely to have liver disease than the general population.
I can't see how one can justify the government killing people in cold blood in order to (allegedly) save lives, when there is something else the government could do which would likely save just as many (or even more) lives without killing anyone at all. Ultimately, since the majority of drugs deaths are caused, not by the inherent nature of the drug, but rather by the consequences of its (near-)total illegality, we should really blame for those deaths, not the drug traffickers, but rather governments and legislators, upon whose misguided policies drug traffickers rely for the existence of their businesses.
What you're describing sounds like the Nordic model, where drug-related deaths are about on par with most other Western countries.
Sure, it'd be an improvement for the US, but it would still be around an order of magnitude more death (and God knows how much more harm) than the Singapore model.
What I'm describing is not the "Nordic model". Most Nordic countries do not have the government legally supply heroin to users – only Denmark has an established programme to do so; Norway has it on a trial basis (with only a limited number of users involved); as far as I am aware, the rest of the Nordic countries are still discussing the proposal of doing it. And, even in Denmark, I think you will find the ease of access (you have to find a doctor who is willing and able to prescribe it) is significantly less than in my proposal. My proposal was that the government should try to (near-)completely take over the heroin market, to try to drive criminals out of it altogether – even what Denmark is doing is sufficiently less ambitious.
Since what I am proposing is not the Nordic model as it actually exists, but rather something which goes a lot further, I don't see how overdose death rates from the Nordic countries have any relevance to evaluating it.
>Since what I am proposing is not the Nordic model as it actually exists, but rather something which goes a lot further, I don't see how overdose death rates from the Nordic countries have any relevance to evaluating it.
I am also against the death penalty. But I am for consistency. It does not sound like a clear-cut case of injustice to me, and I am quite sensitive to injustice. Any compassion the state shows is a lie to cover for discretionary enforcement, which is a pernicious type of corruption. It truly sounds like a tragic case. If Mr. Dharmalingam was unable to understand the risks he was taking, then clearly he needed more guardianship, maybe from his family, or if that wasn't available, from the state. But state-sponsored guardianship of the intellectually disabled has it's own evil air, does it not? (Not knowing the details, if he was sent from Malaysia, then I hope the Malaysian authorities find and punish the ones who used him so cruelly.)
> Any compassion the state shows is a lie to cover for discretionary enforcement, which is a pernicious type of corruption
You actually think there is no discretionary enforcement of the law in Singapore? Like every other jurisdiction on earth, Singapore has prosecutorial discretion. [0] A handful of jurisdictions, such as Germany, traditionally reject prosecutorial jurisdiction in theory, but that theory belies the fact that even in Germany it has always been inescapable in practice–no prosecutor on this earth has the resources to prosecute every known crime in their jurisdiction, they always have to pick and choose which cases to prosecute and how much effort and resources to put into each prosecution, and there is always going to be an element of subjective judgement in that decision, which will inevitably be coloured by the prosecutors' beliefs/culture/politics/attitudes/biases.
And, is prosecutorial discretion in Singapore applied in a purely impartial and non-discriminatory way? Considering Singapore's lengthy and ongoing history of politically motivated prosecutions (see for example [1]), it is rather obvious that it isn't.
Most jurisdictions accept that factors like intellectual disability need to be taken into account as mitigating circumstances, frequently leading to more lenient punishment, and sentencing which focuses more on protection and rehabilitation than less on retribution and deterrence, compared to an offender with normal (or above-normal) intellectual capacity. The idea that intellectually disabled people ought to be treated with particular leniency is one supported by the United Nations, and even by the US Supreme Court (which held, in the 2002 case of Atkins v. Virginia, that executing the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional)–so extending them that leniency is hardly a "lie to cover for discretionary enforcement", nor a "pernicious type of corruption"
I wasn't actually confusing them. Javajosh was admiring the father, I mentioned the admiration (expressed by some other comments on this post) some have for his eldest son. "Like father, like son" as they say, and the criticisms I have for the son are regarding matters in which I doubt his father would have done any differently (and indeed, did do very similarly when he was alive and in charge.)
I concede that I could have worded my comment better to avoid creating the impression that I was though.
I'd actually urge you to look into the details of the case — Nagaenthran had two psychiatrists and a psychologist evaluate him on separate occasions, each of them certifying that he was of borderline intelligence, but not mentally ill (or 'mentally retarded', per DSM-5). The third examination established that Nagaenthran knew he was carrying drugs, that he was the member of a gang, that he was carrying out such an act because of 'a sense of loyalty and gratitude to his boss', that he had not been coerced into delivering the drugs, and that he was aware of the sentence for drug trafficking in Singapore.
Nagaenthran's lawyer disagreed with these assessments, but, unable to find a psych willing to certify Nagaenthran's intellectual disability, got so desperate that he signed an affidavit declaring himself convinced that Nagaenthran was intellectually disabled. The court rejected this affidavit after establishing that Nagaenthran's lawyer had no medical expertise and after he admitted that he was essentially 'speculating on what the appellant's mental age was'. Then the AG's office got a fourth medical assessment in 2021, which was blocked from submission to the court by Nagaenthran's lawyer, arguing that the 'appellant was interested in 'medical confidentiality'. At that point the court sort of threw up its hands and went 'you claim he's intellectually disabled but now you want to block medical reports on that exact issue, due to privacy reasons?'
Keep in mind that at this point, the case had been in Singapore's courts since 2010, and the various assessments and appeals had lasted more than a decade.
Nagaenthran's family, with the help of activists, requested appeals from both Malaysian's prime minister and a direct appeal to Singapore's president, who had the power to stay the execution by issuing a pardon. Singapore's president said she looked into it and was satisfied that the case was sound.
Finally, Nagaethran's family — again with the help of activists — filed a final appeal, arguing that the sentence was unconstitutional because Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, who presided over Nagaenthran's previous failed appeals, was also the Attorney-General during his conviction.
At this point the panel of three judges threw the application out on the grounds that it was a 'calculated attempt' to diminish the finality of the court process. "No court in the world would allow an applicant to prolong matters ad infinitum" by filing such applications, said the judges. They'd been pushing such applications over the course of a full decade by that point, switching arguments three times.
I'm sympathetic to the goals of the activists — they want to push a test case to repeal the death penalty. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be a particularly good test case. Nagaenthran had successfully stayed his execution multiple times over the past decade, and he had pretty decent legal representation throughout. (Notwithstanding the affidavit — which probably harmed his case more than it helped).
You may argue that Singapore is a 'rather extreme outlier among developed countries' — but its policies on drug enforcement is 100% consistent with just about every other country in its vicinity. In fact, had Nagaenthran been caught in his home country of Malaysia, he would be sentenced to death just the same, since Malaysia has pretty much the same laws on drug trafficking. The activists have been raising international awareness of the case, but Malaysia's government is pretty blase about the whole thing, since they have similar laws and a similar justice system, and Malaysian anti-narcotics officers have a long history of working with Singaporean anti-narcotics officers to stop the drug trade from trickling into their countries from the Golden Triangle to their north.
Edit to add: I was actually prepared to get angry over this case, but then I read the full judgment and now I think ... "hmm, this is a more complicated case than I thought."
> It is also not disputed that in subsequent post-trial proceedings for re-sentencing, he was assessed to have an IQ of 69. The trial judge found that the Plaintiff was not suffering from intellectual disability to any degree but accepted that he had borderline intellectual functioning.
Usually "intellectual disability" is defined as an IQ < 70, so that IQ test result would just put him in the intellectually disabled category, rather than the borderline category (which is 70–85).
> 52. I am of the opinion that Mr Nagaenthran suffered from an abnormality of mind at the time of his arrest, namely: Severe Alcohol Use Disorder, Severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD) [sic] Combined Type and Borderline Intellectual Functioning/ Mild Intellectual Disability
> 53. Psychological Assessment had revealed his Full Scale Intelligence Quotient (IQ) to be 66 to 74. This is in the range of Mild Intellectual Disability suggested in [the American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 5th Ed, 2013) (“DSM-V”)].
> 54. Intellectual Disability requires the presence of functional disability as well and I am of the opinion that Mr Nagaenthran had functional disability in the conceptual domains and to a lesser extent in his social and practical domain
So we have a psychiatrist concluding that he was intellectually disabled (even if only "mildly" so), and met the DSM-5 criteria for both Severe ADHD and mild intellectual disability.
Given the reports concluding he was not intellectually disabled were procured by the government, one ought to question their independence. The only report produced independently of government concluded that he was. I think, to settle the question with sufficient confidence, one would really want someone respectable from overseas – such as a respected professor of psychiatry with a specialisation in intellectual disability – to review the case, but that was never sought. (I'm sure the Singaporean government could have arranged it if they had wanted to do so.)
> but its policies on drug enforcement is 100% consistent with just about every other country in its vicinity. In fact, had Nagaenthran been caught in his home country of Malaysia, he would be sentenced to death just the same, since Malaysia has pretty much the same laws on drug trafficking.
Malaysia currently has a moratorium on the death penalty, due to serious national debate (in which the government has been an active participant) on whether to abolish it, or at least significantly narrow its scope. That is a quite different situation from Singapore–unlike the Malaysian government, the Singaporean government has shown no signs of wanting to specifically encourage any public debate, or evolution of public opinion, on the topic.
The problem is that Dr Ung walks back certain elements of his report, as is summarised in the final judgment:
> the High Court found that the appellant had borderline intellectual functioning; not that he was suffering from mild intellectual disability. This was conceded by the appellant’s own psychiatrist, Dr Ung Eng Khean (“Dr Ung”). Further, Dr Ung also accepted (see Nagaenthran (CM) at [76]) that borderline intellectual functioning is not a mental “disorder” as set out in the American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 5th Ed, 2013). Further, in Nagaenthran (CA) (at [34]–[41]), we held that even assuming the appellant suffered from an abnormality of mind, any such abnormality did not substantially impair his mental responsibility, because he did not lose his ability to tell right from wrong.
I then think Nagaenthran's lawyer made a grievous concession:
> [The appellant’s counsel, Mr Thuraisingam] eventually conceded that this was a case of a poor assessment of the risks on the appellant’s part. But, as the Minister stated in Singapore Parliamentary Debates, Official Reports (14 November 2012) vol 89 … ‘[g]enuine cases of mental disability are recognised [under s 33B(3)(b) of the MDA], while, errors of judgment will not afford a defence’. To put it quite bluntly, this was the working of a criminal mind, weighing the risks and countervailing benefits associated with the criminal conduct in question. The appellant in the end took a calculated risk which, contrary to his expectations, materialised. Even if we accepted that his ability to assess risk was impaired, on no basis could this amount to an impairment of his mental responsibility for his acts. He fully knew and intended to act as he did. His alleged deficiency in assessing risks might have made him more prone to engage in risky behaviour; that, however, does not in any way diminish his culpability.
I'm not sure if your reading of 'intellectually disabled man' aligns with the court's reading, and I don't think it's as clear cut as "oh, Singapore executed a man with no mental responsibility over what he is doing, according to the rule of law there, and so LHL is evil"
> Malaysia currently has a moratorium on the death penalty, due to serious national debate (in which the government has been an active participant) on whether to abolish it, or at least significantly narrow its scope
You're right on the moratorium. 'Due to healthy debate' is a rather charitable reading, though. There's a depressing account of the entire moratorium in Chapter 45, 'Law Reform', from former AG Tommy Thomas's autobiography My Story: Justice in the Wilderness, which lays out the background machinations of the former administration's attempt to repeal the death penalty, which was ultimately a failure. The moratorium was implemented by the Prisons Board under the instructions of acting AG Engku Nor Faizah Engku Atek, and supported by Thomas. More surprisingly, (if Thomas is to be believed) the Prisons Board themselves had no objection to abolishing the death penalty! I won't try to summarise the complex political machinations here, but saying that 'strong National debate' is a factor for the moratorium would not be Tommy Thomas's reading of the situation. I don't expect the moratorium to last — though I pray that it will. But it's difficult to say which side might use it as a political football given the current state of Malaysian politics.
My overall point: using the moratorium on the death penalty as an example of Malaysia's 'enlightened approach' vs Singapore is grossly mistaken; it's more accurate to describe it as a political football used to score points against one's opponents (made complicated by the fact that there is quiet support for the penalty from both the conservative Malay power base as well as the conservative Chinese political power base, on both sides of the parliament, as Thomas found out the hard way). I say that the chapter is depressing because 'national debate' seems to have very little to do with it.
I disagree with what you say on the intellectual disability issue, but don't have the time or motivation right now to respond in detail. I did want to comment on one thing you said though:
> More surprisingly, (if Thomas is to be believed) the Prisons Board themselves had no objection to abolishing the death penalty!
That's actually not surprising at all. If you look at the experience in most European countries – and also Australia, Canada and New Zealand – often the prison bureaucracy was a strong proponent of abolition. The staff of prisons often find they dislike killing prisoners, it eats at their conscience, and even many who support the death penalty turn into opponents when it becomes their job to play part in implementing it. It is easy to support killing people when they are nameless abstractions such as "murderers" or "terrorists" or "drug traffickers", much harder when they are specific individuals with names and faces and personalities, whom you see and talk to every day. Even if the executives aren't seeing the condemned every day, the perspective of their indirect reports who do often trickles up to them (and some of them will have risen through the ranks from that position). To some extent, part of the reason why the US has kept the death penalty while the UK/Canada/Australia/NZ/Ireland/etc have abolished it, is that in the Commonwealth governments have historically tended to be much more responsive to the demands and wishes of bureaucratic elites than in the US, especially when those demands/wishes conflict with the majority of popular opinion.
The European and Commonwealth model of abolition has generally been that governments need to lead public opinion rather than waiting for it. The former Malaysian government was attempting the same approach, even if it didn't work out quite as well for them – maybe unsurprising given the significant political and cultural differences between Malaysia and those other countries in which it has been quite successful – but I'm not sure if they should be criticised for trying. (Maybe moving too fast on this issue hastened their demise, and they should have waited to act until their position was more secure; but maybe their demise was inevitable no matter what they did on this issue.) If the Singaporean government tried to lead public opinion toward abolition, it is possible they might have much more success than was had in Malaysia – but they do not appear to be interested in trying.
The first genuinely feel they know what is best for the country and how to best govern it. They might still enrich themselves and their cronies in the process of course.
The second are primarily out to enrich themselves and their cronies. The country exists to support this selfish goal.
Of course this is not black and white, but rather a spectrum but various historical figures seem to strongly lean to one side or the other.
And history repeatedly shows that even if you get a dictator of the first kind, it’s an unstable equilibrium of a system that eventually leads to a dictator of the second kind.
Gerrymandering is a popular tactics used by PAP in Singapore, to ensure they stay in power. In most democracies the Govt., Supreme Court and the Election Commission are independent of each other. Thereby elections are run fairly. But in Singapore, the election commission and supreme court is run by the govt. in power. This makes it easier for the party in power to sustain it's reign.
Gerrymandering would be somewhat curtailed (not nullified, I agree) if most of the people would have supported the opposition. They just don't. In the last General Elections, PAP's margin of victory did shrink from the past but it was still a pretty big margin[0].
I'm not saying they don't give themselves unfair advantages in the election, but that's a very different thing to, say, Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Putin's Russia where power was simply seized and held onto with no accountability to the people.
If the PAP torpedoed the entire economy because of some stupid beliefs of the leader, they would be quickly and quietly removed.
Yes, but it's not always true - see cousin comment. There are examples of actually good dictators in history - but my back of the envelope estimate is that its like 1 in 20.
I understand the sentiment, and I don't think you were probably being serious, but, for the sake of conversation, I think the issue with dictatorships is eventually with stability. The allure of that much power in a single position leads to the wrong kind of people talking it.
Actually, when we frame things that way, it almost makes me feel like democracy is primarily designed to provide a certain amount of slowness in government; enough to spot corruption coming and head it off. Maybe corruption always eventually wins, just more slowly in democracies. Kinda feels that way lately.
It's nice to get the benefit of the doubt, and I'm tempted to let it remain, but let me clarify: I'm serious. I was impressed with Lee Kwan Yew's "From Third World to First" and it seemed to me he wasn't bashful about talking about the times he made an illiberal, dictator move. Both from the outcome and his telling, he made these moves as rarely as possible and didn't relish them. And he did smart things like rewarding government officials extremely well so that they would be (relatively) immune to bribery. I'm sure there are other examples of good leadership from the seat of absolute monarchy, even if we mainly focus on the bad ones in history class. FDR's wartime leadership comes to mind (people seem to forget how illiberal American government was during the war - and it was surely effective).
In all cases, the key to success with illiberal government seems to be self-restraint. When the war ends, you give up power. Or in general, when the object is achieved, you give up power. I've not followed Singapore's timeline since I read the book, so maybe they've backslid? Maybe its a psuedo monarchy run my Yew's ancestors? If so, that's a failure. Hopefully they can figure out how to pick leaders in a rational way - like an aptitude test.
https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/...
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/31...