Hi guys, welcome to part 2 of my coverage of the S377A repeal in Singapore where I shall explore a number of issues which I didn't have time to cover in part 1 so I have structured this in a Q&A format to deal with some of your questions.
Q: Will anything really change for the gay community in Singapore after this repeal of S377A?
A: Not much at all if you ask me. Even before this announcement, there was already a gay community in Singapore. So you have a range: there are some gays who are very open about their sexuality in Singapore whilst there are others who are in the closet but would turn to using cruising apps every now and then to find a sexual partner. By that token, this is no different from a place like the UK despite the fact that we do have a lot more gay rights in our laws, we have even gay marriage for quite a few years now and openly gay ministers in government but that still hasn't given some gay people the confidence to come out of the closet - it may be because they come from quite homophobic families and they fear the reaction they might face from their own family members. Some of these gay people may have been brought up in very religious communities so they might have been taught from a young age that being gay is wrong, that it is sinful and so they are in deep denial about their sexuality. Whether you're in a more liberal, gay-friendly country like the UK and Germany or a more conservative, homophobic country like Singapore and Malaysia, you are going find that same sliding scale - thus it's just that in the more gay-friendly country, it will be far easier for gays to come out of the closet after for example, seeing an openly gay politician become a minister in the government. I'd like to think that this small step has just shifted things a little bit in Singapore, to have made it a little bit easier for gay men to feel a bit more at ease with their sexuality but I stress that this is just a tiny step in a long journey. Yes it is a small victory but the war is hardly over; this battle for equality goes on and we will have to keep fighting for more equality on the issue of gay rights in Singapore.
The government seems determined that this token gesture would satisfy not just the LGBT community but those who are more politically liberal and progressive, but their attitude seems to be, "do you know how hard it was for us to get this done for the gays, now please just be grateful for a while at least and stop asking for more like gay marriage or more anti-discrimination laws for gays. We have done more than enough for the LGBT community in 57 years already." Yeah, the gays are supposed to wave their rainbow flags, dance to Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' and be grateful to the PAP without asking for anything else - well that's my cue to roll my eyes again. Apart from a little moral victory, the gays in Singapore really have gotten nothing more than just that with this move from the government without granting them any more rights, for example, to recognize same-sex partnerships for the purpose of immigration or purchasing a HDB flat. That's why I was quite cynical when I posted part 1 in this series because I know that a lot of Singaporeans are celebrating this right now but this has left me thinking, really, has anything really substantial changed for the LGBT community in Singapore? Is there anything tangible that we can point at and say, "this massive change has taken place". After all, S377A was never actively enforced to 'punish' gay men in Singapore and thus the removal of a law that was never enforced in the first place really makes very little real impact on the lives of the gay community in Singapore. So whilst tourists from the West may come and enjoy the thriving gay scene in Singapore, the local gays still face the same discrimination as they have done all this time - hence all that horrible homophobia isn't going to just disappear overnight.
Q: What is the aim of this repeal then and would it be effective?
A: As some of you pointed out, the repeal has far more to do with further court challenges of S377A rather than a genuine desire to be progressive and liberal. But if we put that aside, there could be two key aims with this - firstly, they want to stop the gay brain drain, they don't want talented, highly skilled gays from leaving Singapore because of the oppressive, homophobic atmosphere there. Secondly, there are a lot of expatriates in Singapore so they also want highly skilled gay expatriates to come to work in Singapore, to help develop Singapore's economy. On the first point, I don't think this will stop the gay brain drain as this is simply too little when you compare Singapore to cities like New York, London, Sydney, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, even Seoul and Taipei when it comes to gay rights. As for the aim of attracting gay expatriates to come and work in Singapore, I don't think it would have an impact either for a different reason: the expatriate community in Singapore have always led very separate lives. They tend not to integrate, they only socialize with people from their own communities and in some cases don't even have any local friends. Now this is the case whether you're talking about a white expatriate from Australia or an Asian expatriate from China or India. Thus gay expatriates have always come to work in Singapore if they are given a lucrative, attractive job offer - on one hand, they know that S377A won't be enforced, thus they can still meet other men for sex. On the other hand, they are not long term residents of Singapore so they whilst they are aware of the lack of gay rights in Singapore, they could feel like it's not their battle to fight. One gay British expat told me that if things got too bad there, then he would just pack up and go home to England or move onto another country. Thus gay expatriates have never been deterred by the threat of S377A.
A: That's not an easy question to answer, the obvious answer is that the gays would benefit the most from S377A but it would be wrong to treat the gays in Singapore as a monolithic entity. I have a good friend in Singapore who is gay - he's rich and lives with his boyfriend. Thus apart from the little moral victory this week, nothing will change for my rich gay friend in Singapore. The key factor is that he is really rich - oh yeah, his wealth protects him. He's not dependent on the approval of his parents as he is financially independent, he is such a highly skilled professional in his field and so he earns a lot more than his parents ever did; so conversely, it is the elderly parents who are asking their very rich gay son for money - that's him wielding the power in that relationship. Likewise, people like him are not interested in purchasing a HDB flat, so the fact that he cannot purchase a HDB flat with his boyfriend is a moot point as they already live in a very nice condominium. Now if you imagine what a poor gay guy in Singaporean faces: if he is financially dependent on his parents, then he is at the mercy of them being accepting of his sexuality. They could even kick him out and leave him homeless if they find out he is gay. Perhaps this repeal might go some way to change the attitudes of his parents on the matter of gay sexuality. If he is poor and working class, then he wouldn't be able to afford a nice condominium on the private market - no he would be dependent on the HDB public housing scheme which would send him to the back of the queue whilst prioritizing married couples with children. So whilst this repeal wouldn't have an impact on the rich gays, but then it simply doesn't go far enough to help the poorer gays either. So really, I'm struggling to see whom it would benefit.
Q: What are some of the other changes in the law you'll like to see in Singapore then?
A: I would refer you to the Wikipedia page on gay rights - they have a checklist of 15 key indicators to check how homophobic or liberal a country is. So if you take a very homophobic country like Sudan for example, no surprises there - they score 0/15 and if you take a very liberal country like the Netherlands, then they get full marks 15/15 on this checklist. The first item on the list is whether consensual gay sex is legal and of course, that was what S377A is all about. But then there are the other 14 criteria which include issues like an equal age of consent, the provision of anti-discrimination laws to protect the LGBT community in various aspects of civil life, the recognition of same-sex relationships through civil partnerships and/or marriages, adoption rights for gay couples, allowing gay people to serve in the military, the legal right to change one's gender and the right for gay men to donate blood. So the only somewhat contentious criteria on this list is the access to commercial surrogacy by LGBT couples - this is illegal in some countries for all couples including straight couples. I don't really see this as a form of discrimination as long as gay couples are treated equally in this aspect, it is really only discrimination if straight couples are allowed to do it but not gay couples but since Wikipedia has included this on the checklist, it has prevented some very liberal, progressive countries like Sweden, Germany and the UK from scoring full marks on this matrix. Before this announcement of the repeal, Singapore scored 5/15 and once S377A has been officially repealed, it will nudge it up to 6/15, now that is still a dismal score compared compared to somewhere like Taiwan which scored 13/15. Singapore can do so much more to be a lot more like Taiwan when it comes to LGBT rights.
A: We need to consider which changes would have the biggest impact on the quality of life for the gay community in Singapore and I think the priority should really be on criminalizing any kind of anti-gay discrimination. Many politicians from the PAP have made it clear that gay people in Singapore should not fear discrimination, that this kind of hatred has no place in Singaporean society but there is a huge difference between telling Singaporeans, "let's not be homophobic" and making any kind of anti-gay discrimination illegal. You have to consider the context of Singapore when picking the right kind of public policies that will have the greatest impact: so the streets of Singapore are famous for being clean and tidy unlike other cities, where you see piles of rubbish on the side of the road. The reason why the streets of Singapore are so clean is because of the draconian laws that punish anyone who dares to litter in Singapore; there's an element of public education as well to convince Singaporeans that they all have a shared responsibility to keep the streets neat and tidy but it is mostly the threat of punishments that deter people in Singapore from littering. We need that threat of punishment to deal with anti-gay rhetoric, particularly online, to make Singaporeans change their behaviour in public. Let's take my father for example, he is very racist and no, I don't condone that for a moment; that's totally wrong but I am using it as an example of how he would be racist in private (in a conversation within the confines of the family home with no outsiders) but he would censor himself when speaking to others and refrain from using racist language in public. You can't stop him from being racist in his mind but at least you can stop him from being racist in public, that's a good result.
In Singapore there is already some many laws to deal with discrimination but these are mostly focused on discrimination on the basis of race and religion - needless to say, let me mention the elephant in the room. Singapore is a majority-Chinese society, hence it is always the Chinese majority discriminating against the minorities like the Malays and the Indians so these laws are designed to curtail that kind of discrimination though they can also be applied to other forms of discrimination against other forms of minorities, such as the LGBT community, the elderly or disabled people. So in 2019, the government has brought in a bill designed to protect the LGBT community from anti-gay aggravation, thus it is an offence to use force or violence against a person on the basis of their sexuality. However, there is a gulf between what the law dictates and how people behave - most Singaporeans have no clue what the law states when it comes to discrimination and thus the government often uses the 杀一儆百 ("kill one warn a hundred") principle to make it very clear to the public that a certain kind of behaviour would not be tolerated under the law and would be punished - such was with the case of the CWO (corrective work order) where litterbugs are publicly humiliated in front of the local media and made to pick up litter in crowded public places. I'd like to see some idiot who spews hateful anti-gay rhetoric online be arrested and subject to a long and humiliating public trial, before being thrown in jail whilst begging for forgiveness for his folly. It is only with this kind of public "naming & shaming" that you can well and truly get the message across to the Singaporean public, otherwise the public are really quite clueless when it comes to whatever new laws that the government may pass.
A: Well no, not really - sadly, the opposition parties have never been bold enough to try to advocate for more LGBT rights in Singapore. Either they are equally homophobic or they just don't believe that this could be a vote winner for them. I don't think that this is a vote winner per se, given that it doesn't really please anyone - the gays like me feel that this is just too little, too late and I still hate the PAP regardless and the conservatives in Singapore are so pissed off at the government repealing S377A. Thus the hand of the government was forced in this case by the courts rather than this being a political move to try to win the liberal vote from younger Singaporeans. But of course, it is never too late for both the PAP and the opposition to start trying to win the votes of more liberal, progressive Singaporean voters as this block of voters will grow with time as the much older conservative voters will die off eventually but then are you prepared to wait?
Q: Could you explain why Singapore is so homophobic compared to the other non-Muslim Asian countries like Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal and Japan?
A: There's definitely an element of "divide & conquer" on the part of the PAP, since the opposition have not been a threat at all on their grip on power in Singapore, they need to pick a scapegoat to demonize and make the enemy. Thus the gay community has been depicted as this immoral, sinful threat that will destroy the fabric of Singaporean society, that will challenge traditional institutions like marriage. The real reason why straight Singaporeans are not rushing to get married and have kids has nothing to do with the fact that they are turning to homosexual relationships or gay sex - look, if you're straight, you are not going to be tempted to have sex with someone of the same gender even if you are horny. You're gonna have affairs or visit prostitutes and still have sex with people of the opposite gender as a straight person. As mentioned in part 1, the real problem in Singapore is that people work such long hours and there's so much pressure on young people to pursue their careers that they put off marriage and having children - this has led to the plummeting birth rate and that has absolutely nothing to do with the gays. But blaming the gays will allow the government to deflect blame away from themselves when it comes to their failure to rein in this culture of ridiculously long work hours (which is a reflection on the very low rates of productivity in Singapore, if you're working hard rather than working smart). Thus the gay community has always been the PAP's scapegoat when it comes to appropriating blame. Hopefully this will change with time as the younger generation of Singaporeans are far more open minded these days but it is still the older, more homophobic brigade in the PAP who are in charge of the country today and the PAP still have many elderly supporters.
Q: As an older gay man who has been there, done that and seen it all, what advice would you give younger gay men in Singapore today who are witnessing all this and trying to make sense of it all?
A: It's the same advice I would give gay people all over the world, you must learn to rely on yourself, believe in yourself so you can take care of yourself even when the world crumbles around you, you know you will still be your own best friend. There's a sad story from the UK about a British-Asian doctor who killed himself after he got rejected by his family after they found out that he was gay, at the risk of sounding very unsympathetic and cruel, I rolled my eyes at the story. If I had killed myself the moment my parents had treated me badly or let me down, I wouldn't have lived to adulthood - heck, I wouldn't have made it through primary school given how seriously fucked up my childhood was. But having had a such a tough childhood has prepared me well for whatever this world can throw at me; if you were to take the war in Ukraine for example, all those Ukrainians had normal lives before the war broke out and then suddenly any kind of normality that they had ceased to exist - how the fuck are you supposed to deal with that? You have to learn to be super tough and self-reliant, you can't expect things to always go to plan, people will let you down, you will encounter bad luck and you just have to be tough enough to deal with it all. And if you're gay, then make sure you study really hard at school and make sure you can get a good job; money will set you free as a gay man and can make a huge amount of difference to the quality of your life. Don't believe in the lie they say about money can't buy you happiness - it could solve a lot of the problems you will face as a gay man so make sure you excel at school, get into a top university, so then you can get rich!
Q: Why do you have such a bad relationship with your father then?
A: Ah yes I talked about this a lot in my last post - I need to explain that a 'bad' relationship implies that you don't get along, that you fight all the time and that's not the case. We don't even talk to each other anymore, so that relationship is practically nonexistent rather than 'bad' per se. I feel sorry for my father because he isn't well-educated, he most certainly isn't intelligent and he's very working class; he doesn't know how to exercise better judgment or think for himself and because he is autistic, he has extremely poor social skills. He was socially conditioned to believe that he needed to get married and have a son, then somehow he has achieved everything he was meant to do. However, he has a terrible relationship with my mother - I don't think they even love each other, it was just that he was desperately looking for a wife to settle down with at that time, my mother was from a poor family and desperate to escape that family, so it was this shared sense of desperation that brought them together but it doesn't mean that they even love each other. Nonetheless, they went on to have three children and I'm the youngest of the three. I have two older sisters and being so Chinese, they believed that they just had to keep having children until they had a son to carry on the family name. My father thought that the moment he had a son, everything would become better, like his extended family, his peers, society at large would respect him as a father of a son but none of that happened. I'm just the sad reminder that he married a woman he doesn't really love or even get along with and thus he didn't want to spend much time with me (or my two older siblings). He must feel awfully cheated and bitter, having followed a formula that was prescribed to him by his culture, only to be left awfully disappointed and miserable - I know it is a sad situation, but he has only himself to blame.
So there you go, that's part 2 from me - I did stumble upon another really interesting aspect of gay life in Singapore and I realized that I couldn't do it justice here, so look out for part 3 coming soon when I would be taking a look back at the history of the gay community in Singapore and how things have changed so much because of the internet. I am working on it as we speak so akan datang, it shall be ready in a couple of days. I hope you're ready for a gay trip down memory lane with me next. As always, please do leave a comment below to let me know your thoughts, many thanks for reading.
Hey Alex, I really didn't think of the HDB aspect of gay marriage and equality. I remember stumbling upon an opinion piece by a lesbian woman in Singapore about how she wasn't willing to marry a man just so she could buy a HDB before she turned 35. It is pretty hard for an LGBT person to start a family in SG considering that restriction, unless they're wealthy. Lol even when they favor married couples in giving out HDBs, the birthrate still doesn't go up. I can confirm the crazy long hours in Sg since I did briefly work a corporate job. They expect people to clock in from 8am to 5pm officially, but unofficially it's 7am to 6pm. Gay people have nothing to do with that haha. Like sure other developing countries also have long working hours, but they have less access to contraception and education so don't mind having big families. When I was working those long hours when I got home the first thing on my mind wasn't going on dates on Tinder, but just sitting in bed playing videogames and relaxing. I can't imagine a married couple having the energy to raise a child while working those long hours. In the West the hours are much more lax, even with flexible hours. My brother as a software engineer can even work Monday to Thursday then take Friday off to go on a road trip, and he works remotely from his living room too. Now that's the kind of workplace environment that is conducive to raising a family, hence why the US birthrate is 2. But that number is misleading because the birthrate among richer white and Asian people is lower than 2, while the birthrate of working class people is a lot higher. Anyway, no way is that lifestyle and workplace environment possible in Sg, and the government isn't going to change that anytime soon because it's as much as a cultural change as suddenly accepting gay people exist. I think Sg is just a newly rich country trying to shed old habits of being a poor country, just like how a newly rich person will struggle to not spend so much time checking prices of items in a grocery store and just relax and enjoy not having to think about it so much.
ReplyDeleteWell it is hard for anyone - gay or straight - to try to start a family and at the heart of that challenge is finding enough money. I have come across LGBT people with children and there are a number of different circumstances: so you have Tom Daley and his husband who have gone through surrogacy and now have a son. I have met gay men who used to be married to a woman and have children via the previous marriage. Then there are those who have adopted, as well as those who have settled down with a man who has a child from a previous relationship etc. It's complex but it's a lot more common here in the UK.
DeleteBut yes, the way Singaporeans are made to work such crazy long hours, who has the time to date, get married and have babies? That's one problem they cannot solve, one aspect of life in Singapore they cannot change, so the PAP finds a scapegoat even though gay people are not the threat to families in Singapore. For crying out aloud, it's not that these Singaporeans are turning to gay sex instead of having children, it's that they are stuck working 75+ hours a week that they are way too exhausted for any kind of relationship, never mind parenthood.
Yeah even a gay person in Sg probably doesn't have the time or energy to go find a relationship. And yup, you do see a lot of rich gays having families like Ricky Martin having 2 children via egg donor and surrogate on his own. A working class straight couple does not have the same luxury, and it has nothing to do with what gay people, rich or poor, are doing. Tom Daley and his partner look so cute together, they took the kid to the pool too.
DeleteI think the reason why the PAP does not want to have better working conditions is because they don't want to sacrifice GDP growth. GDP growth is almost like their "report card" as grade obssessed Asians. It's something they can point to to say they're doing better than other rich countries like the US and UK. Like sure Singapore has a higher GDP per capita than the UK, but the standard of living for the average Singaporean isn't higher because they have to work longer hours. If they were to wind down the GDP growth machine to fix their demographic crisis, then it would make them look bad in the short term. China also has the same problem actually. Like who cares if you're the richest country when you aren't the happiest too?
Exactly, you're right in that the PAP is pursuing economic growth at the expense of everything else, even though this culture of crazy long working hours masks the problem of low productivity. If we're working 35 hours a week in Europe vs 70 hours a week in Singapore and still producing the same GDP, then something is desperately wrong with the Singaporean system. In terms of the 'report card', if one student studies a few hours a week and gets a B in the exam and another student studies 70 hours a week and gets an A, does that A grade prove that the second student is smarter than the one who scored the B?
DeleteWow the grade analogy is perfect! I mean, considering that students in SG spend hours at tuition while the average UK student doesn't, it seems productivity is just not a concern in Singapore. It doesn't prove they're smarter, just more desperate. Maybe if Singapore has an awful aging crisis would they suddenly start to slam the brakes on GDP growth, or just import more people like they keep doing.
DeleteWhat the Singapore government is doing is simply procrastinating: they are pushing this can further and further down the road by chasing GDP but it will come back to haunt them at some stage. They are only looking no further than the next general election but one would have thought that the benefit of having a one-party state would be the ability to implement long term policy to deal with the challenges of an ageing population - they only need to look to countries like South Korea and Japan to see what the governments have had to do to deal with this problem and use their more successful solutions.
DeleteY'know the funny thing is when I was in Sg many middle class Singaporeans asked "how can we fix the low birthrate?" but nobody ever thought to cut down working hours. To them long working hours is just normal, and they assume it is the same in other Western countries like the UK, France, Germany, etc. The PAP has never told them otherwise I suppose. Also it doesn't look like South Korea and Japan are succeeding at all. With Korea housing prices are a huge issue, at least in SG it's not as bad.
DeleteActually Singaporeans are aware that Europeans, Australians, NZers etc do work far shorter hours than Singaporeans, however, they turn it around and claim that white people are lazy whilst Singaporeans are very hardworking. So instead of dealing with the fact that Singaporeans have very low productivity vs countries like Germany, France and Belgium (which are very rich and work no more than 35 hours a week), they shove the issue into a massive blind spot and call the Europeans lazy. So whilst they cannot change their stupid system of crazy long hours, they can change their perception of the world by calling the Europeans lazy whilst putting themselves on a pedestal by declaring themselves hardworking when they put in 75 hours a week.
DeleteThe house price issue in South Korea is not so bad - sure if you want to live in fashionable Gangnam in Seoul, it is crazy expensive. But young people can simply get a job where they can mostly work from home and then move out to the countryside where rents are very cheap. There's still a lot of pristine, empty countryside where you have loads of farms and forests - if you can get a job as a coder say where you communicate with your team via teams/Zoom etc, then you really don't need to be in Gangnam. So South Koreans do have the option of doing that but Singaporeans have no where to run to within Singapore and it doesn't get dirt cheap until you get to Malaysia but Malaysia isn't going to hand out work and residency permits for poor Singaporeans priced out of the market.
Lol what kinda attitude is that? "Oh white people are lazy..." Well at least White people can still produce a slightly higher birthrate than Singaporeans haha. I guess Western Europe used to have crazy working hours too during the industrial revolution. They just got "lazier" due to the rise of unions in setting the 8 hour workday. Singapore does not have strong labor unions at all, so they're still stuck in a developing country mindset laborwise, despite having the prices and educational barrier to entry of a rich country.
DeleteOh yeah that's true, Korea and Japan are far larger than Sg and one doesn't have to live in Seoul or Tokyo to live a good life. By the way, one thing I noticed about Asian countries compared to Western ones is how frowned upon dating is. Like even I feel a little shame about going on many dates even though I should just treat it as a job interview process to look for someone agreeable, rather than just waiting to bump into the right person at school/work. In Asia people don't like going on dates because they have to bring their date home to their apartment which they share with their parents, which can get pretty awkward. In America people leave the house when they turn 18 and live alone, so it's not awkward at all. So I think another issue with getting young people to start families in Sg is that it doesn't seem like a "fun" thing to do at all, it just sounds more like a time-consuming duty to be avoided rather than a source of happiness to want. If dating is not even allowed to be fun, then why should being married or raising kids be?
It's called 'yes I know things are bad, I can't change the way things are but I can change my view of the word, it is far easier to change my perspective than to fix my situation." Let me give you another example: I knew of this poor Singaporean who couldn't afford to buy anything for his children because he was broke - the kids were going to school with barely enough food in their stomachs and had to beg their classmates for charity. Yet he justified this method of bringing up his children as, "I don't want to bring up a spoilt brat who takes things for granted, this way when my children actually do get something they like, then they will cherish and appreciate it more." I rolled my eyes, all I see is a painfully poor family with no money at all, a father who has failed to provide for his children, yet he's trying to make it look as if it is some kind of nobler, minimalistic approach to life, where the children are being taught some values about materialism through this enforced poverty. Whereas the way I see it, he's just a sad, poor loser who should have never had children in the first place because he couldn't afford to support a family at all on his pathetic, meagre income. You'd be amazed at the lies people are willing to tell themselves to make themselves feel a lot better about the situation they are in.
DeleteAs for Western Europe during the industrial revolution, you have to then factor in the issue of class: the working classes had crazy working hours of course, but the rich who controlled the means of production didn't and so you would have the workers turn up at the textile factory at 8 am in the morning to start the day, the managers might turn up at 9 am, then the big boss might roll in at 11 am to have a chat with the managers, disappear for lunch and they may not come back after that. The managers would stay till 5 pm whilst the workers would stay till the work got done which could be very late. So how long your working hours were in those days would depend entirely on your social class.
As for S Korea and Japan, oh yeah there's a lot of 'middle of nowhere' countryside in those countries which have pristine natural beauty and more to the point, it is cheap to buy land/property there. Same thing in the UK, my hubby has just reminded me that his brother's birthday is coming up in October and we ought to go visit - he has moved to the middle of nowhere south-west England and has bought a nice house with a wonderful garden and some land around it, for the same price, it would barely get you a tiny one-bedroom flat in London. People who live in bigger countries have that luxury, Singaporeans simply do not as it is a tiny place. As for dating, you gotta know what you want rather than have this 'surprise me' attitude. Like surely you have a clear idea of what your 'type' is and what your ideal man is - so you only date men who fit that criteria and so that means quality dates rather than quantity. Fewer dates but hey much higher quality because they are the kind of men you like a lot.
That reminds me of the fable of the sour grapes. But it also reminds me of this NFT/crypto promoter named "Gary V"(Gary Vaynerchuk) who grew up a rich boy but tells his followers "the only thing better than being born rich is to be born poor, so you have a better work ethic", and his followers just eat that up and buy his training courses and NFTs. I never understood why poor people fell for these "free training" scams or even pyramid schemes, but it seems it's because these scammers make them feel good about being in a bad situation. Someone who is hiring for a highly paid software engineer position doesn't make someone uneducated feel like they can aspire to that.
DeleteOh yeah there was terrible inequality during the Victorian era of the UK, hence the novel Oliver Twist. You could argue Sg is still stuck in that era of civilization haha. I dunno how it changed so much, maybe the government just turned a lot more socialist after WW1 and the communist revolution in Russia. Unfortunately there isn't much of a socialist movement in Asia, and it only seems possible among the wealthier countries which haven't been wealthy for very long. Probably only Taiwan has the best hope of transitioning into a modern economy with sensible working hours and human rights, since they're the most democratic Asian country. Gotta hand it to them for both having a female head of state, two CEOs of two of the biggest computer hardware companies(Lisa Su of AMD and Jensen Huang of NVIDIA), and being the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage. Taiwan is really punching above it's weight!
Lol yeah Japan has lots of forest land. I remember reading a NYTimes article about how some Japanese were forced to transition to being farmers when they were laid off from white collar jobs. There is no option in Sg, they don't even have farmland.
Yeah I'm gonna go to a concert and a few dates after I finish this conference deadline. Also I think maybe I'll leave with a masters instead of finishing my PhD. Losing the 5 figure a month job offer stung really bad for me... And it makes me think maybe I have been playing life like an Asian parent who cares about their kid being famous for something academic, when maybe I'd just like to enjoy my life while enjoying science as a basement hobby while living in a very big house. I don't need to be famous, it was never about that, but I think my boss only cares about getting famous at the expense of the science which really annoys me. That kinda attitude is sadly very ingrained in Asian society though. Sometimes I think the Asian mindset is less about prosperity and more about feeling like one has "made it" and is better than everyone else, which really sucks... Here in the US I have a lot more friends who are encouraging me to go out and enjoy myself more. Had I stayed in Sg I don't think I would've changed my mind.
Cheers Amanda, sorry it's my first day of my new job tomorrow, I said I'll get an early night and eeks it is already 1 am damn it got late so I'll reply to your post tomorrow.
DeleteWithout marriage or civil union for LGBT+ there are so many obstacles for couples. What about inheritance regulations should one party pass on? And medical instructions and visitation rights since they won't be recognized by law as a spouse? Probably many other problems that I haven't thought of yet. But it would be better for them to get legally married/civil union overseas before moving living in Singapore.
ReplyDeleteWell even if you get married elsewhere (like Li Huanwu, gay grandson of LKY did, in South Africa, the wedding was attended by Lee Hsien Yang) then it's useless if you come back to Singapore and Singapore doesn't recognize your marriage. So if Li Huanwu and his husband went to a country like the Netherlands, then yeah the Dutch authorities will gladly recognize a gay marriage from South Africa, but not the Singaporean authorities, even if you are LKY's grandson. There is no provision in the law for that which means there's still a massive incentive for gay Singaporeans to leave and move abroad anyway.
Delete