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Well I suppose there's nothing in the definition of state-managed capitalism that says the state management has to be directed towards social democratic aims like postwar France... I actually kind of like the European social democratic model of dirigisme. Also what the gently caress is up with the spelling "Lee Kuan Yew"? Did his parents even use a romanization system or did they just go "oh it looks like it sounds" and that was that? Wikipedia says his name in Hanyu Pinyin romanization is Li Guangyao.
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Apr 2, 2015 04:46
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It also helps that singapore is small city state with the population of minnesota in a fraction of the size. I think his name was romanized in the wade-giles system like all the old school chinese people which is out of style today
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Apr 2, 2015 04:49
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Nope, that would be Li Kuang-yao. Lee Kwan Yew looks entirely non-standard, none of Wikipedia's romanizations come anywhere close.
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Apr 2, 2015 04:52
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I didn't know Salon was soliciting articles from primary school children.
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Apr 2, 2015 04:54
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Also the government deals with singapore's racial divisions by enforcing heavy handed residential integration schemes and hate crime laws that would make americans explode like the guy in scanners. It's funny how groups like heritage line up to praise singapore when applying a similar policy of not allowing whites to buy a home in a certain area until a minority quota is is met and banning reddit-style dogwhistle racism would be met with violence in the streets.
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Apr 2, 2015 05:02
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Romanizations of dialect names is pretty arbitrary, especially since Singapore's Chinese were not themselves originally Mandarin-speaking. Lee's grandchildren's surname are now Li, for instance. This is not regarded as unusual. Continuing with non-Mandarin romanizations would also not be unusual. Singapore is pretty liberal about perceived personal issues like naming and marriage, partly as legacy from the role the Maria Hertogh riots plays in its national mythos. Woolie Wool posted:Well I suppose there's nothing in the definition of state-managed capitalism that says the state management has to be directed towards social democratic aims like postwar France... It was democratic-socialist in its conception, and arguably Singapore 1965-1975 represents a politics recognizable to Europe at the time. Until the mid-1970s there was an active political scene - the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act only dates to 1974. Campus politics remained unrestricted until the Universities Act in 1975. The break with Socialist International only occurred in 1976. The state narrative contains a heavy degree of revisionism - the PAP overemphasizes its power prior to 1975 because it wishes to identify the only opposition of the time as Barisan Sosialis - the only faction that was actually suppressed with detention - rather than any other participant at the time, and by now, long after the Cold War, Barisan Sosialis is utterly unrelatable. Singapore's contemporary opposition cooperatives in this narrative because it has no real wish to lay claim to that New Left politics of the era, any more than neoliberalized social democratic parties today would enthusiastically lay claim to the spirit of France 1968 or the entryism of the Militant Tendency in the UK. ronya fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Apr 2, 2015 |
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Apr 2, 2015 05:20
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Chinese has had a bunch of romanization systems. As a native English speaker, I've always been a fan of the Yale system but that ain't happening. It looks like a variant of Wade-Giles with some Korean influences (Lee instead of Li). His birth name is "Harry" so strange spelling makes more sense than not.
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Apr 2, 2015 05:24
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Singapore officially uses Mandarin romanized with hanyu pinyin in schools and official media.
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Apr 2, 2015 05:33
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Everybody uses Pinyin nowadays. No need to be a dick about people's names though. What we really should be talking about is the flag.  Is Singapore a secret Muslim sleep nation waiting to destroy America?
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Apr 2, 2015 05:38
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Of course. It's only a matter of time before they pour across the southern border and cane us for farting in an elevator. (this is an only slightly modified version of an actual Republican ISIS scare story--can't remember which GOP lawmaker said it, might be Lindsey Graham)
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Apr 2, 2015 05:46
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Pshaw. Look at this. Is Malaysia a secret American sleeper nation waiting to destroy Singapore?
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Apr 2, 2015 05:48
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Woolie Wool posted:Of course. It's only a matter of time before they pour across the southern border and cane us for farting in an elevator. Sen. Graham does have a lot to fear from ISIS, though! They treat gay people very poorly indeed, even worse than the GOP! 
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Apr 2, 2015 05:52
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Everyone knows that Malaysia is just an Illuminanti Psy-op programing us for when the Homosexual Judeo-Bolsheviks take over America and bring back the Caliphate.
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Apr 2, 2015 06:03
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ronya posted:Pshaw. Look at this. I wonder if I posted this on Freep or Facebook and claimed this is what Obama wanted to change the U.S. flag to, how many would fall for it.
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Apr 2, 2015 07:36
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Fojar38 posted:"Authoritarian state capitalism" is an economic system whose only successes have been in spite of itself. Singapore because of its geographic location and China because of its sheer size. India is a democratic capitalist society which is on the same scale as China and isn't doing nearly as well. In general past a certain point size becomes more of a hindrance than help, it's a lot easier to develop south korea than china for example because you only need to modernize a couple of regions instead of a dozen ones. And yeah real weakness with authoritarian states is that inevitably you get someone really terrible like Mao or Pol Pot instead of Deng and Lee Kuan Yew in charge and they proceed to screw everything up. Typo fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Apr 2, 2015 |
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Apr 2, 2015 07:56
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In the historical context of Indonesia starting an undeclared war against Singapore under its Konfrontasi policy it's a little bit easier to overlook some of LKY's flaws. Then I went to Singapore last year and they charged me $9 for a lovely coffee and $20 for a bottle of wine which costs $5 here. The moral to this story is gently caress LKY, gently caress Singapore.
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Apr 2, 2015 11:19
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I heard a singaporean lady on NPR/BBC a week or so ago talking about this. She said that sure he was a bit authoritarian, but that because she grew up in singapore she got a good education and if she'd wanted to she could have left singapore and made a nice life for herself pretty much anywhere she wanted. A couple years ago I read an article in either the New Yorker or the NYT magazine about Rwanda and its leader Paul Kagame and how his authoritarian leadership has made Rwanda orderly and how that's really been helpful for its development. Anyway, Singapore is a bona fide success story of development, and there is a very real question of whether Lee's unsavory stuff wasn't well and truly balanced out and exceeded by the very real good it did for Singaporeans. An orderly society with a strong government can be a silver bullet for developing countries. Look at China v India. Singaporeans are eulogizing Lee Kuan Yew, and are doing it amid the great prosperity that his leadership helped them achieve. On balance, I think he was pretty good for Singapore.
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Apr 2, 2015 11:37
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I think the economic story is a red herring. The city state is well positioned and was in the right place at the right time during the Cold War and economic globalization. It also helps when you are also the money laundocracy of SE Asia.
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Apr 2, 2015 13:36
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I don't think so. There are some obvious areas where Singapore could have screwed up early on: defense policy and transitioning to containerized logistics fast enough to out-compete Port Swettenham/Klang. The credit for that is usually laid at Goh Keng Swee's feet, though.
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Apr 2, 2015 14:58
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quote:
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Apr 2, 2015 15:41
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hakimashou posted:I heard a singaporean lady on NPR/BBC a week or so ago talking about this. You do realize that you could make the exact same argument about Stalin, right?
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Apr 2, 2015 15:47
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Cerebral Bore posted:You do realize that you could make the exact same argument about Stalin, right? Stalin also had a moustache. Let's just throw out random associations and see what sticks! Every successful state in Asia has gone through a period of liberal authoritarianism, some worse than others (compare Lee to Park Chung Hee, for example). Not to say that there wasn't another way, but it's pretty much the formula.
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Apr 2, 2015 16:24
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menino posted:Stalin also had a moustache. Let's just throw out random associations and see what sticks! No, it's an entirely valid comparison. Both men are significantly credited in their respective countries with building them up and laying the groundwork for future prosperity. Either the sacrifice of freedoms and liberties that dictators invariably entail is an acceptable trade-off for economic growth or it isn't, you don't get to pick and choose.
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Apr 2, 2015 16:57
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Forums Terrorist posted:No, it's an entirely valid comparison. Both men are significantly credited in their respective countries with building them up and laying the groundwork for future prosperity. Either the sacrifice of freedoms and liberties that dictators invariably entail is an acceptable trade-off for economic growth or it isn't, you don't get to pick and choose. Well, on the contrary, Asian nations are different. BTW, I'm glad my time machine worked in bringing me from 1996 to 2015!
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Apr 2, 2015 16:59
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I don't understand.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:01
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Forums Terrorist posted:I don't understand. Back in the days that only 90s kids remember, people were convinced that Asian countries didn't follow the same rules as everyone else, which was why nobody believed that anything like the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 could happen. But it did. Almost twenty years later, people are invoking the same thing.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:04
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I figured it was a 1997 joke.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:05
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Forums Terrorist posted:No, it's an entirely valid comparison. Both men are significantly credited in their respective countries with building them up and laying the groundwork for future prosperity. Either the sacrifice of freedoms and liberties that dictators invariably entail is an acceptable trade-off for economic growth or it isn't, you don't get to pick and choose. Most non-idealists would probably say that it very much depends on how much order and prosperity they're getting in exchange for giving up certain liberties. In this case, the difference in degree between the two leaders becomes a difference in kind.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:07
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Forums Terrorist posted:No, it's an entirely valid comparison. Both men are significantly credited in their respective countries with building them up and laying the groundwork for future prosperity. Either the sacrifice of freedoms and liberties that dictators invariably entail is an acceptable trade-off for economic growth or it isn't, you don't get to pick and choose. That's a pretty over-reductive way to look at non democratic systems of government. The fact that they're both well regarded in their home countries doesn't mean much, given their respective track records. People can believe whatever they want about their favorite strongman, there's other ways to determine how liberal their governments were that don't involve polling survivors of the Great Patriotic War.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:09
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Cerebral Bore posted:You do realize that you could make the exact same argument about Stalin, right? In a trade off between human rights and economic growth Stalin was worse than Lee Kuan Yew in just about every way. Not only did was he way more dictatorial but his system of political economy never brought the USSR to a first world standard of living, in fact, it crashed horribly and the USSR no longer exists today. It'd be a lot different if Stalin killed less people and the USSR exists as a successful economy in 2015.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:30
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Well yeah, but for every Lee Kuan Yew or Chiang Kai-shek you get a Mao or Kim Il Sung. When a dictator takes over it's generally hard to tell which end they're going to tilt towards. In other words what fojar38 said upthread.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:34
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Forums Terrorist posted:Well yeah, but for every Lee Kuan Yew or Chiang Kai-shek you get a Mao or Kim Il Sung. When a dictator takes over it's generally hard to tell which end they're going to tilt towards. Oh I agree, I said as much in my last post. Also Chiang was pretty corrupt/incompetent and totally outside of Lee or Deng's league.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:43
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Forums Terrorist posted:Well yeah, but for every Lee Kuan Yew or Chiang Kai-shek you get a Mao or Kim Il Sung. When a dictator takes over it's generally hard to tell which end they're going to tilt towards. I agree that in a vacuum I would much rather live in a well-structured republic than under any sort of authoritarian government. But the OP goes farther than that by exhorting us to make no study of the good in LKY, effectively suggesting that there was no good in him worth studying. This is absurd.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:52
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Jack of Hearts posted:I agree that in a vacuum I would much rather live in a well-structured republic than under any sort of authoritarian government. But the OP goes farther than that by exhorting us to make no study of the good in LKY, effectively suggesting that there was no good in him worth studying. This is absurd. The OP is written in a context where people are lauding him as a hero. Why should it, as a response to such things, play up the good parts that are already being publicized?
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Apr 2, 2015 17:53
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generally polite society looks down on people who say "$DICTATOR has some good ideas", yes But I see your point. I suppose part of my reaction was the first half of the front page or so being full of comments to the effect that LKY was a pretty swell duder.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:57
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Forums Terrorist posted:generally polite society looks down on people who say "$DICTATOR has some good ideas", yes Julius Caesar had some really good ideas.
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Apr 2, 2015 18:05
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i think castro would probably be a better comparison to LKY than stalin tbh
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Apr 2, 2015 18:10
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I knew a Muslim-Chinese woman who hailed from Singapore, and she was quite saddened by Yew's death, and spoke of him, the way one talks about George Washington.
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Apr 2, 2015 18:15
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V. Illych L. posted:i think castro would probably be a better comparison to LKY than stalin tbh I don't think that's even fair, even though I do hold a certain amount of respect for Fidel Castro. There's way, way more corruption in Cuba, the economy is much less functional, other political parties are outright outlawed, and the restrictions on political speech go far beyond anything in Singapore.
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Apr 2, 2015 18:24
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V. Illych L. posted:i think castro would probably be a better comparison to LKY than stalin tbh Except for the prosperity bit. So, not at all.
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Apr 2, 2015 18:40
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