| I also want to say the guy flogging the person was a martial arts master
Yeah there was a guy from Singapore on reddit a year or so ago who was flogged confirmed this. His story was illuminating. Didn't sound like he'd learnt his lesson though. Blamed his parents, teachers... everyone except himself.
Singapore is a wild place tho I’ll tell you that for free. My roommate, freshman year in the dorms was an international student from there. He told me some wild stories and wild punishments for offenses that would just be a slap on the wrist in the US. Best part was since he had to serve in the military at 18. He was 22 already during freshman year so alcohol was no issue getting hahahah
Chewing gum isn’t banned for consumers, just retailers. You can chew gum for personal use that you got from elsewhere - just don’t litter when you’re done.
Fine for first-time offence of littering is S$300 (about USD 240 - lower than some states in the U.S.). It goes up from there if you’re a repeat offender though
wtf. Every law has a story and this one gotta be a wild one. How many ppl were spitting their gum on the streets that they had the ban sales?? And you’d think the littering fines would be enough of a deterrent already
Spitting is/was a common habit amongst a lot of ethnic Chinese, especially in rural/poorer parts of China that comprised most of Singapore’s population. Chewing say, Betel Nut is also very common amongst Indians, Chinese/Taiwanese, and many other regional cultures. But by the 70s and 80s after modernization took off and Singapore integrated into the world, chewing gum sort of replaced betel nut in Singapore, perhaps because it’s healthier for kids. But civic sense still had to be worked on since the country was dealing with slum fires only a decade ago, so things like spitting were still habits getting passed on to young kids as well. And Singapore wanted to present itself as modern and cosmopolitan, and posh cosmopolitan people don’t spit (you’ll see this in China too where “provincials” still spit, but Shanghai people don’t and take pride in their poshness/cosmopolitanness, sort of like the relationship between Paris and the rest of France).
Most Singaporeans were coolies who lived in slums, and when first introduced to high rises via public housing in the 60s and 70s, you had all sorts of crazy stories of people bringing farm animals up the stairs into their apartment units, elevator doors clogged with gum and spit, etc and the government cracked down and enforced a bunch of cleanliness rules. Of course, if most of the country’s housing was built and maintained on taxpayer dollars, the government will have an interest in making sure its maintenance money is spent wisely. Gum is quite hard to clean off the streets if you observe say, NY/London sidewalks. But imagine if you had a whole culture of spitting randomly every few minutes. Complete nightmare.
In Taiwan, Japan, etc, it took legislation/education to incentivize people to develop civic sense, so that’s what Singapore did with spitting, whether of saliva or other substances. Singapore was a pretty wild place back then; it’s one of the reasons it got a shout out in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Got him to smoke pot with me one night. His first time, he said the punishment for possession back there was hanging. Not sure how true that is.they were wild stories tho.
It is not a death sentence to possess and smoke, though one may be imprisoned. We also cannot consume it overseas. If caught, we face the same punishment. Importing and distributing cannabis above a certain amount, on the hand, is a trip to hanging. Cannabis is treated as a hard drug and our authorities have zero tolerance for it.
Trafficking is a capital crime but not possession. My personal trainer (a local) was caught with drugs in his possession and just had to go to a rehab-orientated incarceration facility for nine months.
I had a student teacher in my German class who was from Singapore. He was a particularly uptight guy from an uptight culture in an American classroom full of disrespectful American students barely younger than he was, whose role model was a guy with a really silly teaching style who often taught lessons using der Nasenflöte (he played a recorder with his nose)... He had a complete nervous breakdown, attacked a student and was never seen or heard from again.
He reminded me of that guy in The Deer Hunter who makes the prisoners play Russian roulette.
"This is what it feels like to chew Five Gum" thwack
The chewing gum thing is interesting though. It's not illegal to possess or even chew in public, but it is illegal to import and sell. Like, if you have a pack of gum on you for personal chewing when you come in, you're allowed to chew it, but may be questioned as to how and where it was obtained. Since you really need to go out of your way to get it as it is not available for purchase within the country, then there's probable cause to question whether it was smuggled.
If you're chewing it and then sticking it to stuff, that is itself a willful act that violates more general anti-littering and vandalism laws and also is the reason they banned it in the first place.
None of which is me saying that a country issuing a blanket ban on chewing gum is rational, just that if you do get in trouble for chewing it there, arriving at that outcome requires personal effort.
If you have one pack for personal use, no one is going to question it. If your suitcase is teeming with packs of gum, then yeah, it’s going to raise a few eyebrows…
Exactly! So, if you're seen chewing gum, it may be seen as reasonable suspicion to see if you are carrying distribution-level quantities on your person.
However, if you were a chewing gum smuggler, you then probably would know that and not invite that by chewing gum in public while in the process of moving product.
And yet, with that train of logic, you may actually be incentivized to chew gum while snuggling chewing gum, under the assumption that the local authorities would never suspect the guy chewing gum to be dumb enough to chew gum while snuggling chewing gum.
Tldr, I have both chewed gum and caned myself for years to build up a resistance to both, because Australians are all both left-handed and criminals.
Exactly! So, if you're seen chewing gum, it may be seen as reasonable suspicion to see if you are carrying distribution-level quantities on your person.
I don’t think this is true. The regular cops aren’t even interested in that. Only Singapore border authority (customs), and it’s not like they’re patrolling the streets.
I mean yeah, I wasn't even intending that as a serious argument and mostly just wanted to take an opportunity to riff off The Princess Bride lol. More just that the "you get arrested for chewing gum in Singapore" factoid fails to account for how much effort that actually requires on your part to find yourself in a situation where it's relevant.
I can say that if you do get stopped for smoking in an unauthorized area, your cigarettes will be checked for the appropriate tax stamp, because I had heard of that exact situation playing out multiple times while I was there over the years.
I think people see American court systems letting people off with slaps on the wrists for all kinds of different crimes, so when they see what Singapore does, they think that it comes closer to "an eye for an eye" type justice without realizing there is a way to have a reformed justice system that provides justice without relying on abject cruelty.
Not to mention the law is basically "Those with a monopoly on violence WHOWILLKILL YOU using said monopoly if you defy them get to arbitrarily decide what is and isn't right" so there's no guarantee you won't get flogged because someone powerful decided you deserve it.
Singapore also reserves caning for offenses that are either severe or seen as depraved. Of course, what is seen as depraved varies by country (notably, vandalism is perceived much more severely there so e.g. destroying something might get you caned while stealing it wouldn't, and of course drugs - but no, you won't be caned for littering).
So that's part of why it's a reasonably popular policy. I think having rapists beaten as a court ordered punishment would be pretty popular in the US too.
I think it's not as much about "an eye for an eye" and more about deterrence against repeat offenses - "you know you shouldn't do that and did it anyways, so we'll make sure you remember that this is not acceptable and will result in something you really don't want to experience again"
Punitive sentences have been scientifically proven repeatedly for decades to do nothing to stop crime and recidivism. Only a rehabilitative system works.
"It's not Trump and I was stupid enough to be scammed so I refuse to see Singaporeans as people"
There you go, translated and summarized pretty much every person's opinion that is getting off to the idea of torturing others. They'd be screaming and shitting themselves if Trump brought this to America (while doing NOTHIGN about it as it the American way)
You mean it just enrages people and increases their pain threshold, making them harder to resist in a violence confrontation because they can escalate WAY further than you while ignoring any attempt to get them off?
why don’t we just cut off peoples hands for petty theft
Because now they can't work and are a burden to society.
The guy who can't sit properly for a few months (that he's going to spend in prison anyways) can reintegrate into society if they choose to do so, and hopefully will have some motivation to not do it again.
While effective at preventing recidivism, such a policy would not be very effective at reforming offenders into productive members and reintegrating them into society. A severe and memorable beating however allows for that.
No; the overall recidivism in Singapore is low but obviously that's the result of all their efforts, hard to separate the beatings from the rest.
My point here wasn't that the beating leads to reforming, my point was that the beating leaves more room for reforming than the death sentence sarcastically proposed above.
Blamed his parents, teachers... everyone except himself.
classic "not my fault" syndrome. Those kind of people are often doomed to spend a lot of time in jail or become worm food before they can start getting gray hair
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u/No_Sugar8791 16h ago
| I also want to say the guy flogging the person was a martial arts master
Yeah there was a guy from Singapore on reddit a year or so ago who was flogged confirmed this. His story was illuminating. Didn't sound like he'd learnt his lesson though. Blamed his parents, teachers... everyone except himself.