>Gated communities whose guards become jailers.

Left Singapore after 10 years because of this. If you go into a shopping mall you need to "check in" fully authenticated with picture ID, "ambassadors" photograph any perceived violations, work from home is the standard. With the never-changing weather that was hard on the mental health. Surely, the rules have relaxed now, but that wasn't a fun experience.

There was no picture ID “ambassadors”. You either checked in using TraceTogether app, or your TraceTogether token. Before the app and token was mandatory you had to use your ID card.

The reason my wife and I left after 10 years is security due to being rejected for PR and the company I work for laying off everyone to close the office. So we moved to Taiwan.

Even better was the government statement “TraceTogether is used for infection control and isolation only”.

Then a year later they used it to solve a crime. When called out on the prior statement said “oh, well, we’d only use it for serious crimes”. They then pass a bill legalizing using it for criminal investigations.

Sounds good to me. Singapore is the only country you could walk around with 10k hanging out of your back pocket and no one will touch you.

Friend left their phone in mall bathroom and 4 hours later when she went back it was still there.

I mean hey, if authoritarianism is a plus to you, have at it. Not to mention the government promising X, then doing the opposite, then quietly passing a law to make it legal.

And no, petty theft is not that uncommon in Singapore, it’s just not broadly reported on. Not to mention the 3 public knife incidents in the last few weeks.

Yes, you can leave stuff on a table, yes it’s remarkably safe to walk around at night, but to pretend things don’t get stolen, people don’t get robbed is fanciful but regularly promoted by the government.

I friend of a friend worked for the SPF and said “a lot of crime never makes the news”.

And don’t get me wrong it’s a very unique place with a lot of benefits. But it’s also a system with some weak checks and balances that so far has been run by pretty benevolent leaders, but it’s a bit weird being there and seeing it in action. There is definitely a bit of “if we don’t talk about it it’s not a problem”.

You can do that pretty much in Saudi Arabia as well.

You can even do that in Montréal.

Please re-read the sentence. The TraceTogether app can be used or the picture id. But the information in TraceTogether is the same as in your NRIC/FIN. So you are authenticating with two strong keys phone number and NRIC / FIN wherever you go. The "ambassadors" walked around taking pictures. I think you combined two parts of the sentence into one.

> It's about how the systems people erect around themselves turn against them. Gated communities whose guards become jailers.

Historically this is backwards. 小区 existed in the Tang dynasty much as they do today, but the gate was not operated at the direction of the residents - there was a curfew, and if you lived in a 小区 you had to obey it. If you lived in a house that opened directly onto the street, you were exempt from the curfew.

That is interesting. But surely you're talking of things that happened thousands of years ago. Are you saying that modern Chinese people are generally comfortable living in conditions approximate to imprisonment? Is the Great Wall really like the Iron Curtain, there to keep its citizens inside?

I'm saying this doesn't represent systems being set up for one purpose and then developing into a different, more nefarious purpose. The men at the gate were jailors before they were guards.

> surely you're talking of things that happened thousands of years ago.

Well, sort of. The Tang dynasty was from roughly 600-900 AD.

> Is the Great Wall really like the Iron Curtain, there to keep its citizens inside?

I realize this is just rhetoric, but as far as I understand it, the Great Wall's primary purpose is indeed to keep people in. Just not to keep citizens in.

You can't stop barbarians from getting over the wall, because it's too long to defend it all. But when they do come in, you can respond by sending an army to fight them. And when they retreat, they'll have a hell of a time getting over the wall before you can catch up to them.

(The steppe nomads to the north of China are highly mobile but low in population. China is the reverse. So in practical terms, the nomads always want to retreat, and to the extent a battle happens at all, that's a victory for China.)

What is 小区?

A 小区 is a walled complex containing several residential buildings. 区 is the simplified form of the character 區, which is more or less just a depiction of the concept.

This is the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict#China

(Though it's pretty bare-bones and traces the idea back no farther than the Soviet Union.)

...self-driving cars that can be turned off enmasse by the "authorities"..

Let’s take time to discuss this, as it’s easier to discuss when it happens to another country with an entirely different social system.

I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe and USA. As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new disease.

Talks about how magic money doesn’t exist but then printing out checks for everyone and it materially helping loads of people was definitely an Overton window shifter as well.

There are principles and a status quo, and it always stays the same… until it changes.

There was no magic money tree. It took a while for the effects to spread to the whole of the economy - perhaps because people were in lockdown and limited in their ability to spend money - but throughout the western world people's incomes have been dropping in real inflation-adjusted terms. There's no way that they couldn't; a large chunk of the economy was shut down and producing nothing, so there's just plain less stuff to buy which means people can't possibly be able to continue consuming the same amount. Printing and handing out checks just redistributed where in society the economic pain was felt for a while.

$2000 one time checks are not what is causing inflation. Extended unemployment insurance... I doubt it.

Inflation right now is happening because logistics are messed up. Yeah, turns out that when things get messy then the price of things go up, cuz it's harder to get things done.

It had more to do with the hundreds of billions of loans to rich people to keep companies open. That don't have to be repaid. And went predominantly to fraud.

I really hope the DoJ sets up a task force and starts sending people to jail. We can let out some people who smoked dope if we need more cells.

Ah yes. I suppose you still believe in Powell's story that inflation is transitory. Forget about the money supply or the sudden course correction to hike interest rates faster.

You’re way understating things. It was an injection of hundreds of billions of cash into the economy.

The initial bailouts were something like over $10,000 per every American.

So if magic money exists... what's stopping us from printing out 100x the amount of money? Why not continue this policy indefinitely?

It's because our own political apparatus is not that different from the Chinese one. We just like to pretend we still have a choice with our "democratic vote".

You won't be able to dismantle it or even to reduce the huge amount of money it consumes.

You won't be able to escape its rules. We should be thankful we're still able to leave for the least worse country.

The real disease is called statalism and we're seeing the symptoms of that.

In WW2 we had Lord Haw-Haw (the defector William Joyce). He is mocked in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" as the deranged voice yelling from the ruins

"The Statue of Liberty is kaput".

That's disconcerting.

I can't prove I'm not Chinese propaganda but I'm torn between China having bought our politicians or just our politicians doing their thing, trying to gradually accumulate more power and money over 200 years. Probably both, considering China got wealthy relatively recently.

> it’s easier to discuss when it happens to another country with an entirely different social system.

I'd say it's actually harder, because one cannot compare like for like. But of course that shouldn't discourage one from careful analysis.

> I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe and USA.

I think those making condescending remarks about China were not realists, and perhaps a little racist. Of course similar authoritarian responses were applied around the globe, some less heavily handed than others, and some with better results than others. And in some places there was a liberal response that put choice and civic responsibility into the hands of citizens, again some with tragic outcomes, and some with joyful results. Quite a mixed bag.

> As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new disease.

It certainly is. I think the results surrounding disgust and disease that Jordan Peterson and his group of researchers talk about , as well as the theories of Adorno etc on the "authoritarian mind" should now be checked against data we have from the pandemic. There will surely be xome confirmations and surpises.