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The OP is using it in a figurative quote attributed to the British armed forces, not in their own voice.

Some 50,000 of OP's father's compatriots were killed by the Japanese, the survivors can call the invaders what they wish.

If my edgy teenager says that, he'll be in the corner for a good long while.

But if you've been slaughtered and raped, you can call your oppressor whatever you want.

Educate yourself on what the Japanese did to the people in the region.

Literally every country that was ever colonized by Japan hates them in ways that are impossible to convey to most westerners. Same dynamic with China too. This is why the people of Vietnam LOVE Americans despite our war with them (their war vs China is the "1000 years war")

Most of the people from the countries that Japan colonized openly want/beg for westerns colonialists to "come back".

American WASPs and Burmese people (among many others) both have a history of their grand/great grandfathers being brutally tortured circa WW2 by the average Japanese persons great grandfather.

As it turns out, a slur that's literally just removing a couple letters from your countries name isn't all that bad in the grand scheme of things. I'll stop using it when they stop calling me "Jingai" and "Gaijin" because I had the audacity to put my seat down on the Shinkansen without asking the entire train if I was going to lose face by doing it.

Interesting. I assumed he wasn't. Bad assumption. I don't think he gave a "rivers of blood" speech but that doesn't let him off the hook. Maybe the difference was LKY got to be in control and Powell just got to watch from the sideline.

Most these countries had decent literacy and industry/proto-industrial base before WW2 or before becoming independent states. Singapore itself was richer than Spain in 1960 and one of the richest cities in its region despite the slums. This is why it makes no sense for example to compare China or India, they were just in a fundamentally different spot.

Regardless many of the strategies these countries used are increasingly difficult for low income countries to do as these countries (China is the biggest example) themselves are protective of these industries, there's no push for globalizing and as factories got increasingly automated.

That's not to say that I believe governance isn't important but the one's history is important for governance itself.

Absolutely agree. There's a lot of "yes, but.." in this for me, but the simple economics are pretty clear: post colonial asian states like this do fantastically well.

Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.

But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.

The issue has never been previous status as colony but society and culture (East Asian countries and Sinpgapore are all part of the sinosphere culturally).

Eh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls.

I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.

Did you know anyone who owned a building that had been tagged?

You was never attacked by a wild graffiti jumping out of the wall to beat you up? weird /s

> Such a person is very rare and even rarer is for someone like that to rise to a position of power.

Even more dangerously, I think they're even rarer than people who can convincingly pretend to be one. So even if you go looking for such a person you're heading into the danger zone.

The link you cited has nothing to do with "life satisfaction", but rather "job satisfaction", which is a completely different measurement. Singapore has the highest life satisfaction of any Asian country other than Taiwan[1]. Being unhappy with your job obviously does not necessarily translate to being unhappy with your life.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction

In Korea, Lee Kuan Yew is actually more often cited as a target of criticism. Of course, a small number of people praise him, but he is usually mentioned in the context of nostalgia for dictatorship (like Park Chung-hee in Korea), and more often than not, he is talked about as a kind of idealized image of dictatorship created by the West.

[1] https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/0104_201503231558059503

Rather, Korean academia and Korean media are generally more critical of Lee Kuan Yew compared to other countries, precisely because of the issue of dictatorship. The reason is simple: we experienced Park Chung-hee. Park Chung-hee receives overwhelming support in some parts of Korea. But fundamentally, academia does not glorify Park Chung-hee. This is because Korean political history emphasizes the flow of democracy. Korean conservatives tend to favor Park Chung-hee, while Korean progressives favor Kim Dae-jung. And since the debates between Kim Dae-jung and Lee Kuan Yew are often brought up, this leads to a more critical view of Lee Kuan Yew compared to other countries.

[1]https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/pc/view/view.do?ncd=5590151

[2]https://www.khan.co.kr/article/201503251135171

I'm curious: why are people told not to use the em dash and the semicolon? I honestly don't know.

When I learned English writing, I was taught to use an em dash after words like 'by the way' or 'to add to that' — as a kind of aside. For hyphens, I was taught to use them in compound words. And for semicolons, I learned to use them when moving on to the next sentence within the same clause.

Actually, this is formal writing — techniques I learned in graduate school. Is this 'AI writing'?

It's hard because I'm not a native speaker.

He's not a native English speaker so I suspect he is heavily using AI to generate his comments and seems oblivious to how em dash is viewed in the anglosphere post-chatgpt

>Ptolemy’s maps of the world

I can assure you Ptolemy never been to India let alone Singapore.

But hey you just deleted your Ptolemy narrative, are you misleading a narrative?

Ironically although Ptolemy never been to Singapore it's apparently recorded in his book as Sabana [1]. Perhaps that the reason you deleted your Ptolemy entry.

It's also recorded in ancient Chinese record in the 3rd CE Chinese traveller's record describing an island at the same location called Pú Luó Zhōng a transcription of Singapore's early Malay name Pulau Ujong, literally meaning Tip End Island because it's located at the southern most tip of Malaysian Peninsular.

The famous Indian Emperor Chola also said to briefly conquer Singapore/Temasek in the 11th CE [1].

Singapore by any definition for the past two thousands years was not an obscure fishing village. It's always has been a bustling metropolitan with international entreport status. Anyone who said otherwise is lying through their teeth and pushing their own wicked narrative.

[1] Early history of Singapore:

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

Not sure about Singapore but Malaysia's racism is not complicated. It is discrimination into law. It makes things rather clear. About discourse of course there is not discussion to have.

>Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers")

What nonsense, colonizers do not live and settle there for thousand of years. Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there?

>Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.

Albuquerque was the first European colonial who conquered Malacca in the early 16th CE, later Dutch and then British. They all came because they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman, the most powerful maritime empire in the Mediterranean and Europe for many centuries.

The local authorities most probably very well deployed a typical scorched-earth strategy to prevent the Albuquerque to fully utilize Singapore infrastructure. The British did exactly this to most part of Singapore including totally damaging the very important causeway when the were defeated by Japanese in the mid 20th CE. Fun facts, the world busiest causeway still not return to the its original sophisticated design with elegant pass-thru water design until today, thus pollution side effect are still happening and not being solved [2].

[1] Scorched earth:

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

[2] Why Singaporeans Are Fleeing to Malaysia Every Weekend | AB Explained [video]:

https://youtu.be/vUWOhAs5rTs

Naturally they inter-married, the first wave from out of Africa people (e.g Perak man) and the second wave from the Taiwan diaspora [1]. This as you probably know happened over many thousands of years.

The word one to ten in most Austronesian countries from Madagascar to Hawaii, spanning more than 17,000 km or 10,000 miles (about half of earth's perimeter of 40,000 km). These countries main languages including Malagasy, Malay, Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, Sulu, Palau (Micronesia), NZ Maori, Hawaii (Polynesia), etc are very similar. In particular, "Lima" meaning five/hand is the common and signature Malay/Austronesian world, even in Hawaii.

Based on your throw away name, most probably you're from Papua Island, you probably know that one of its original main languages, apart from the recent colonial based Tok Pisin, is the Malay Austronesian based Hiri Motu [2].

>Today, they have been mostly genocided by 'Malay' (sometimes used to cloud the term Austronesian term) settler populations.

What nonsense, as they said the proof is in the pudding. If genocide happened as you claimed most of these people are gone but they're everywhere. Please check Borneo Island for example, ruled by the Malay Brunei Kingdom for several centuries until the colonial Brooke the White Rajah came. This third largest Island in the world probably has the most diverse demographic population of indigenous peoples in the world [3].

Fun facts, as comparison the Champa Malay people were genocided by the Vietnamese warlords mainly by the Nguyen lords. They controlled majority of Vietnam for about two thousands years but now you hardly find this Champa Malay people, similar to what happened in muslim in Spain. The highly contested South Chinese Sea original name was Champa Sea [4].

>I hope this information will help you and others correct your misunderstanding and stop spreading such disingenous claims intended to enable land grab by settlers.

Since we are in the Singapore topic, by your own definition of land grab by settlers, the Chinese immigrants where the first PM LKY are from, that constitute majority of Singaporean were performing land grab by settlers because just 200 years ago majority were Malay?

[1] Asia’s secret World Heritage site:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20160518-malaysias-11000-...

[2] Hiri Motu:

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

[3] Borneo:Demographics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borneo#Demographics

[4] The Cham: Descendants of Ancient Rulers of South China Sea Watch Maritime Dispute From Sidelines:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140616-so...

The idea that Singapore isn't corrupt is one of the biggest lies of all time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m7xrd2z0o

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/spanish-couple...

As the article points out, Lee Kuan Yew did not believe that democracy meant that his (or any other party in power) should also help opposition parties politically thrive. While such political philosophies can be abused by authoritarians (and Lee was an authoritarian) in a democracy, I do see the wisdom in it. For example, Nehru - India's first Prime Minister - invited even some opposition leaders into his Cabinet as his party got an absolute majority in the first election post-independence. That was a rare departure from the convention of a Parliamentary Democracy, where only members from the ruling party or coalition form the Cabinet. Nehru however wanted to promote democratic values in India and since his party didn't really have an opposition, he invited some into the Cabinet to ensure their voice would have prominence in the media and the public. But he later abandoned this practise because the political ideological differences made this untenable in practise.

Did you know Philippines adopted American style democracy and were much more wealthier than Singapore and other Asian countries?

How do you think Philiippines compare now to Singapore as a result of its "democracy" ?

I have no idea and probably not, but it is a bit more complex than that. There isn't any particular rule saying that the only functional democratic model is multi-party democracy. One could imagine a successful democratic model with one party allowing diverse internal factions, for example. It is really hard to get a read on China, but their success raises some interesting questions of how exactly their internal party decision making is set up.

That being said, I would assume that a one party state isn't very democratic. It'd be an unstable democracy.

Competitively authoritarian, so, democratic.

If Singapore isn't a democracy then the U.S is a dictature.

Singapore has been described as a "managed democracy". There are genuinely free elections, and there's an actual opposition, but the government/ruling party (they're largely inseparable at this point) exerts a heavy hand to ensure they keep their supermajority.

One of the big questions of Singaporean politics is what would happen if there ever was a "freak result" (in LKY's words) and the opposition won a majority, since thanks to the first past the post voting system further exacerbated by mandatory "group representative constituencies" the winner always wins big and coalitions or minority governments are not an option.

> But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".

tbf that applies to all democracies, including genuinely competitive multiparty democracies. Would PAP accept defeat and cede power if they handled a crisis so badly an effective opposition party emerged? That's unclear, as is how many of their appointees would support them in that goal, though it is considerably more likely than nations which do not attempt to hold representative elections. But we've also seen the answer to questions of how much success will someone have in explicitly overriding democratic norms and revelling in open corruption be plenty in the United States with all its storied separation of powers and tradition of political freedoms, and perhaps more surprisingly he gave up quietly to wait for the next election was the answer to what would happen when a narrow majority rejected a guy who'd spent years turning Hungary into his personal fiefdom....

The other quirk about the PAP's paternalism is how many of their authoritarian type policies have been primarily driven by a culture of trying to avoid upsetting people, hence years of doublethink on homosexuality and newspapers being told that publishing aerial before and after photographs of Singapore's coastline might be a touch too provocative towards their neighbours.

>The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.

I don’t think this is only by luck. Singapore made the decision to ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ so that they can build a career on it. This attracts more people to be a bureaucrat. The alternative is that only already rich people become politicians and bureaucrats or bureaucrats only getting their bag by joining lobbying firm after their time in government.

IMO, the hard part about implementing this ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ system is that it is often hard to determine the market rate as there are often no equivalent roles in the private market.

Trump is testing the limits of USA democracy every day, just from the top of my mind: top lieutenants worth 5%+ ownership in Thether holding company, Ivanka's husband with the Saudis, Ivanka herself in the ONU, shameless plugs of crypto tokens and cards in the podium after elections, pardons for criminals

democracy failed America

How so?