You’d be surprised by just how much those words describe Singaporean policy. A pragmatic authoritarianism might not be nice but it seems to do a good job of ruling.
EU France is on fire. Again.
- Thread starter DarthOne
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Terthna
Professional Lurker
A lot of that has to do with Singapore getting lucky enough to land an arguably benevolent dictator in Lee Kuan Yew, who died less than a decade ago.
I also think it has something to do with it:
1) Being populated by overseas Chinese, so lots of Confucian social elements that emphasize education, order and "harmony"
2) British common law.
3) The fact that they were surrounded by enemies and thoroughly fucked over economically basically forced them to succeed or else.
Hong Kong is a lot more libertairan, or was a lot more libertarian, and managed to do quite well for itself, too.
The laws are important, the people and their culture are more important still.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Singapore should never be used as an example for anybody. Granted they have much to admire but the country basically exists because it rolled a huge string of natural 20s in both government, location, and political advantages. What worked for Singapore is highly unlikely to work anywhere else.
I'll note for the record I consider the United States to be the same, it also succeeded via an exceedingly unlikely string of beneficial coincidences ranging for the incredibly useful Mississippi basin making transport logistics easy to George Washington being a bizarre mix of bloodthirsty berserker and mild-mannered farmer who had the luck of the gods on his side.
I'll note for the record I consider the United States to be the same, it also succeeded via an exceedingly unlikely string of beneficial coincidences ranging for the incredibly useful Mississippi basin making transport logistics easy to George Washington being a bizarre mix of bloodthirsty berserker and mild-mannered farmer who had the luck of the gods on his side.
f1onagher
Well-known member
I always enjoy watching the French get hoisted by their own petard. The low retirement age was a bribe to get the unions on board with centralizing power for the government. Now the bill has come due and the unions are suddenly realizing that the wolf has arrived to eat them too.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Vatnik
How did humans ever do without pension systems? Oh right, family did it. Sometimes it feels to me like replacement of family with state is a massive mistake, but I guess that is just me.
Hm, this may be one of those things were the industrial revolution does radically change things.
When most people were farmers of some sort, you either have family capital available, the family farm, so the family "owned the means of production, so the family had a means to directly support the family.
With the change to modern work however, you go from having an ownership relationship to the employee relationship. If you make your living working for a factory, working for 40 years at the factory does not give you an ownership stake in the factory, and you can't seamlessly transfer your job to your son as a property either.
One solution is for work to gain you some level of ownership in the company, through pay in company stocks. However, that keeps you very dependent upon the survival of that specific company, and companies aren't necessarily super stable either: a family farm might be something someone can rely upon for the long term: a company might have a fairly short time frame.
It should also be notable that work that didn't have a direct ownership stake like a family farm did have pension systems of sorts: roman soldiers for example got pensions, though admittedly generally paid in the form of ownership in a productive asset directly, like land.
Unfree labor likewise did have pension like set ups: the masters of slaves and serfs for example did have some obligations to their charges in their old age, though the extent of care in practice I'm sure was highly variable.
So, modern life is more suggestive of some sort of pension like system, so that workers can somewhat re-create that building of an ownership stake that is hard to otherwise replicate, and the variability of the modern economy suggests its benificial for security reasons to have it large rather than small.
Family, extended family, small local community like a village.
We are not optimized to function in an oversized society with a nanny state.
You are also missing one major difference between what "retirement" in agricultural societies meant and what it is now. It wasn't that upon 60th or 65th birthday the granpa/granma just sat down like a leisure class that the family would shower with a generous amount of money every month. If you have any family or friends who had "farm living" grandparents, you would know it wasn't like that. They would do less hard physical work, but at the same time they did as much lighter and managerial/advisory work as health allows. And with pre-modern medicine they would be unlikely to live much after it gets so bad that they can do hardly anything.
Well, not quite. Greek City States seemed to manage for the most part, and they were quite a bit bigger than villages. Indeed, some of them had populations of more than a hundred thousand. Then again, they arranged their systems alongside the "tribes", which are almost super villages/towns that existed within the Poleis. At least, that was the case in Athens.
Sergeant Foley
Well-known member
I hope the protesters realize Macron isn't leaving until 2027.
Yeah, not exactly.
The extended family and the whole Patre Familias thing we're huge in Greco-Roman civilization and marriages and respect for elders was a big part of rheic civilization.
Similarly with the Slavs the main and most important institution was the free village municipality, the extended family and the tribe.
When I look at older literature describing the lives of village communities and families that are separated from me by only 3-4 genererions I see a large family centered around the head of the family and a very tightly knit community in both the smaller towns that produced some more complex goods and the villages where the majority of people lived.
And whatever Athens did, thet does not change the fact that during that time and for thousands of years after the majority of people lived in smaller towns and villages, and were born and died where the last 5-6 genererions of their family were born and lived, with their marriages being arranges by their clan or family elders.
Yeah, my grandfather on one side(over 80)and my great grandfather on the other kept at it taking care of their respective livestock till almost the day they dropped, same with my paternal grandmother.
She kept on working in her vegetable garden until a stroke took her out and passed away some days later.
It wasn't because they did not have money, it was because they and the generations before them did it that way.
I remember this one time when this ancient chief of institute was talking to one of my friend's bosses while he was doing an internship.
"But you are young and do not know(the person being addressed was over 70) how it was in the good old days when we lived in the villages, sure, when somebody got sick we'd put him into a cart and try to take him to the city, and he would day halfway there, but..."
And here is a very politically incorrect story about what the Tzar's jandarmes/guards would do if there were Roma anywhere near the village causing trouble and ther it is pretty politically incorrect.
Those times were a lot more severe, but ultimately no matter how much doodads and stupid software and other "productivity enhancers" and cheap thrills and distractions we have somebody has to grow the food, maintain the infrastructure and take care of the sick.
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DarthOne
☦️
You think they would broadcast it if there is any? Please tell me you’re not that stupid. Most media isn’t even reporting on the protests at all!
No, like not media. The only social media stuff is showing the same exact footage.
There has been zero outside of this one shown.
So it isn't wide spread if at all happening...
As much as storming private property isn’t something I approve of…Blackrock really shouldn’t have got ideas above its station and started meddling in the affairs of nations.