[thaumaturgy]

There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...).

Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.

So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?

[preg_match]

Right, and the elephant in the room here: if you aggressively suppress dissent, then of course people will say they're happy and everything is good.

I'm sure North Koreans will tell you to your face that it's fantastic, they love it, it's the best government on Earth. So once the surveillance is powerful enough, truth ceases to exist.

[janalsncm]

There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.

For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.

> unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it

On the other hand, the government in Singapore is genuinely popular. A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent. For reference, only 32% of eligible American voters chose the current US president.

[jjav]

> There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.

#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.

#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.

Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.

[janalsncm]

I’m glad you only find crime “annoying”. Others find it oppressive. For example the murder rate in New York City (a similarly dense urban area) is around 35-50x the rate of Singapore. This means your chance of being murdered within the first two weeks of living in NYC is equivalent to a whole year in Singapore.

You don’t have to walk around wondering if you will get mugged or shot. You don’t worry that your car or apartment will be broken into. Crime solve rates are very high because police have fewer crimes to deal with.

[mlrtime]

#1 is more than annoying, and OP cited a problem with no solutions. In SF who are you going to sue when someone breaks your car window and steal your laptop?

It's crazy to think the amount anti-social / low trust behavior SF/NYC puts up with on a daily basis. It's some weird type of Stockholm syndrome.

[nikkwong]

> #1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.

It's glaringly obvious that you don't live in a major city. Defend yourself? So you're advocating, in the US, that you engage in a shoot out with the criminal? Like a sister comment said, if your laptop is stolen out of your car, who are you going to sue? To live in a US city is to be surrounded by criminals who rule the streets with impunity.

> #2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.

The US is still a democracy (to its own fault) regardless of how many Flock cameras exist and how they're being used. Why not advocate for changing laws around data use and retention. What is being advocated for instead is that we get rid of the cameras because of all of the theoretical potential harms, while losing the benefit that we get as a society right now (700k crimes solved/helped solved per year by Flock, including 10k missing persons cases). It's just maddening that people are leapfrogging to a theoretical scenario while victims of crime are truly suffering today.

[thaumaturgy]

> A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent.

I wish you could have seen the meme-able face I made when I read this.

Putin is similarly popular in Russia, China's government is also incredibly popular with its citizens, and Nicaragua's government is so popular with its people that they just decided not to have elections anymore! There is a remarkable correlation between authoritarian governments and popularity with their citizens, don't you think?

> For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.

Invasive state surveillance and authoritarianism are not the only answers to crime, San Francisco is not the only city in the US, and crime rates in San Francisco have been overall flat or declining for the last few years (https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s...). That's a false dichotomy, cherry-picking, and a false premise ... gotta be some kind of bingo card for this somewhere.

I suspect the true nature of this disagreement is that you feel more threatened by a free society than an authoritarian one. I wonder, how does someone reconcile the ideas of a free market and a non-free society?

[paol]

How meaningful is that in a society where political dissidence is suppressed?

[vkou]

It's somewhat meaningful. No society can go on for very long when a supermajority of it actively hates the government.

[adrian_b]

Even in the recent past, all the countries dominated by the Soviet Union have gone for a half of century without problems, while a supermajority of their citizens actively hated their government, and by "hate" I mean like really wishing all of them dead.

This was made possible with traditional surveillance.

With the modern surveillance means and with drones and robots, there will no longer exist any way in which even a great supermajority could remove a government.

[vkou]

Those countries were occupied by a foreign empire. You may recall what happened when they attempted regime change - the Soviets would roll in.

As soon as Gorbachev made it clear that he's not going to do that, all of the Warsaw pact states immediately overthrew their governments.

Thank you for providing an example that further supports my thesis. No government can survive very long when a supermajority of the country hates it.

[zombot]

> the government in Singapore is genuinely popular.

Easy to say when the opposition rots in prison.