Upon further thought, this is the issue I have with similar posts as the OP's comment:

Imagine you're an entrepreneur in Austin, TX. Every time you write a press release, post on HN or otherwise mention Austin, someone immediately comes up and talks about how Texas has such strange politicians, that Rick Perry is corrupt and hates the environment, that the Church of X or Y has done something bad, that rednecks this or that, that there's no state tax, welfare is bad, regulation too lax, gun laws scary, Texans too fat etc. and the original topic never gets discussed because the conversation ALWAYS, systematically, diverts upon criticism of Texas and its defenders' attempts at correcting it.

Maybe it's selection bias, maybe I'm more sensitive to Singapore threads because I live there and have to endure these stereotypes all the time from family, friends and foreign communities, but it really feels that way sometimes. Singapore brings up a lot of really interesting discussion points, as an experiment in a lot of dimensions from the COE which limits car ownership to put a price on damaging the commons, from their Worker Pass to legalize no-minimum-wage work from anyone in the world, from their "city as a garden" policy, their extraordinary racial integration, their water policy, or more meta, the way LKY pulled a third world country with strong communist undercurrents into the first world in a generation, or how he fought Mao's agents... or this thread, which was originally about the developing startup hub, written by one of the government's own VCs (an interesting question to ask them is what % of their portfolio by value is in Singapore).

I take issue to his stereotypes, which are trotted out regularly upon the merest mention of the word Singapore. I mean, "hung for smoking a spliff", really?

The chewing gum ban was an attempt at restricting the supply after kids got into a fashion of blocking the subway's doors using it, particularly painful in a country where millions use it every day. The solution was the least obtrusive way round the problem (you can't go arrest kids systematically...); it's perfectly legal to chew it, you just have to import your own stock. Then you realize that you don't care enough to bother, and you stop chewing, and you wonder why every bloody article ever written about Singapore on any unrelated topic has to include the "factoid". Sometimes I think it was a very clever press troll by LKY.

Or take the caning of that American kid: caning for damaging a few cars? Sure, but a car in the US costs a few grand; in Singapore, it can cost more than a house and take half a lifetime to pay for (this, incidentally, is about passing on the cost of thrashing the commons to those who do the thrashing - a "liberal" policy never even discussed in the US). If somebody went and torched 10 houses in a street, what magnitude punishment would the US justice system reserve him?

As for dancing on tables, my first week in Singapore, not only did the bar I visited for what I thought would be a quiet beer - in Somerset, not Geylang - have paid models to dance on tables, they invited customers to take shots off their body. Not my thing but it's there if you want it.

I guess I'm not yet used to the constant stereotyping, so feel the need to speak for the other side. People don't go around generalizing Texans as Christian extremists who eat 5 big macs a meal whilst hunting deer with a machine gun from the back of their Ford pickup (FWIW I know Texans who are/did all of these things); somehow the same level of stereotyping with Singapore is acceptable, and people think a few hours stopover once in a while is enough to qualify their opinion.

"People don't go around generalizing Texans..."

Yes they do. All the time. Like I said most of my friends from the Bay Area would never work in Texas.

Forgive me if I would like my kids to learn about Cesar Chavez in history class.

Honestly it's because of the weather more than anything.

They've probably never been to Singapore, and are stereotyping to begin with. Singapore is nothing like a red state.

My point is that Singaporean culture is very different to Bay Area culture.

You're right, red states have less censorship. The Economist ranked Singapore as having more censorship than China. In another study it was 133rd out of all countries.