2D3D
1d ago
I alluded to it in a previous comment, but I have seen high tea luncheons and to a lesser extent charity committees function the same for Chinese wives who wield their husbands fortunes. There are a large number of management corporations in London and Vancouver where blocks of flats are owned by these wifely consortiums who often rely on a relative staying there to act as the property manager/agent. These also are tens of millions of dollar size deals arrived at over shit conversations men would gnaw their leg off to avoid.
2D3D
1d ago
In the hunting examples I'm thinking about the guy who got shot by dick cheney but still found it worthwhile to go to those retreats after the incident.
2D3D
2d ago
I really like this article that @Stefferi posted, and it highlights the appeal of the third space. This line in particular:
from the point of view of inequality, equality or the environment
Was raised by the author of the article as a specific reason to object to these sauna deals. I for one hold this type of decision by committee in absolute contempt, especially if it is debated in a public forum. Some grandstanding blowhard endlessly harping about his stupid pet issue about how a major decision must be held back because an impact study on how one particular species of mud beaver is maybe going to be endangered will gum up necessary actions. Every additional participant in a committee increases the risk of some single issue militant holding everything hostage. This is precisely why these backrooms remain attractive: stay beyond the attention of roadblocks and just get shit done.
2D3D
2d ago
There is no DEI admin forcing fuggos in. Hell I've seen plenty of weirdo looking buck toothed women in a stable. They just don't ever get selected and go home without earning anything. In a pure commission environment its entirely their own volition to stay or go, with of course significant encouragement from a mamasan. If a place shuts down (normally a visa raid) the joint reopens with a new stable about a month later. Like a dozen places shut down three months ago when the mall owner managed to sell off the property and some of my girls happily announced they were going on a 2 month cruise to China as a break, with loyal patrons encouraged to join the fun on the high seas. I am also certain that the cruise bookings were directed to a company set up by a retired mamasan, so its really a full circle of money extraction going on.
2D3D
2d ago
Good point re undertale. That game had a pretty decent core gameplay loop to underpin the experience, but the dialogue was actually decent and emotionally investible. My specific complaint about 'choice' is that Mass Effect, Fallouts and to a lesser extent Skyrim had really poor consequences for choices, they were just different coloured lights and minimal FMV cutscenes. Perhaps the challenge of working in a Universe means you can't have wild ranging consequences, any sequel requires certain base states to persist: I can't nuke the universe in ME3 or kill Preston Garvey in FO4, and that cheapens the 'freedom of choice' in the game.
2D3D
2d ago
Asian racism cannot compare to the promise of being with an American, and even if 90 out of 100 girls view your black skin as pure vileness there will be 10 girls who want to get their freak on with what daddy hates most.
2D3D
2d ago
I mean, if Trump was going to be the harbinger of death, he's been the shittiest one possible. He just whines about being disrespected, blusters about how he totally is on top of things, and acts as a bugzapper for progs to sperg out and suicide straight into with increasingly unhinged takes. Trump cant even get a proper militia running to shake down a library of degenerate trannies, much less round up every BLM activist and lynch them like they've been screaming about. The only faction in the last thirty that walked the talk of being a bunch of brutal bastards who wrecked shit has been ISIS and the Cartels. Putin hasn't nuked London, Kim hasn't invaded Seoul, Meloni hasn't sunk the migrant boats, Bibi hasn't initiated Nakba 2 and Trump hasn't killed a single fucking prog.
2D3D
2d ago
Video games became irrepairably damaged when FMV cutscenes became more than cheesy mid mission rewards, and when Metal Gear Solid became an interactive movie. The gameplay loop should be the point, not the opportunity to see a badly rendered aerith get stabbed followed by a yellow polygon shaking irascibly.
2D3D
2d ago
paid parasocial entertainment isn't really a thing in the western world,
Superior western capitalism has commodified thottery into cashapp and snaps. Parasocial relationships, without even needing to leave the house.
2D3D
2d ago
3 foot soldiers dead on national TV was enough to end BLM; how much worse for turbo-BLM in a free-fire zone?
BLM ended because the godzilla threshold for sending in the troops to quash rioters was breached. The riots could definitely have descended into haiti-level extortion rackets if the police never came in.
I don't doubt that cowardly looters would scatter at the first few dead, and reprisal raids conducted by amateurs are easily defended as you state. However defense of territory is never easy with multiple entry vectors, and territory can never be held in anarchic situations. A regression to defensible strongpoints with the rest being grey zones is the likely path for any conflict state with insufficient bodies and weapons to wage permanent war.
2D3D
2d ago
You can shove any number of ugly 'women' there as you want, you can't force men to select them and a joint that does so simply ceases to make money. The selecting entity in this case is the mamasan curating her stable, not some admin forcing a DEI hire in.
2D3D
2d ago
Presuming the actions of Russia are deliberate gives them too much credit. Incompetent management of criminals that happen to be Tuvan or Chechen is hardly different from incompetent management of Ukrainian or Muscovite gangs. The consequences are not borne by the stare, so what incentive is there to really crack down on criminal elements even if there is a racialized component.
2D3D
2d ago
I view invitations to hunt and golf being a similar activity, but women in those environs face no barriers to entry. I do not know how this necessarily, if at all, changes the networking dynamics at play.
2D3D
3d ago
Frankly women can enter as well, were it not for the nannying and tutting. The sex adjacent focus in Asia is a combination of degeneracy and ability to exclude schoolmarms. There does exist the interesting female equivalents of private high teas in Hong Kong and johnny bars in Japan where female managers of their husbands wealth end up forming consortiums to buy up Canadian and London property but that is a different tale.
2D3D
3d ago
Emergent narratives rely on players choosing their path wholly, not selecting dialogue options to force the player to sympathetically experience the trials of the PC. Full sandbox games where the gameplay loop is independent of the baseline narrative allow this freeform, hence Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, CK and most 4X allow players to organically develop an emotional connect with their suicidal shitheads. The same cannot be said for voiced action RPGs where the core narrative must be experienced to unlock more of the core loops. If the loop is tedious, then the narrative strengths must shore up the experience. I played GTA IV only till it was necessary to unlock all the cities, and then ignored literally everything in favor of just dicking around. Same with Skyrim even before mods, just collecting butterflies. The core loop being good enough allows a narrative choice and its risk to be diminished.
2D3D
3d ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities
Choice sucks. Most players in Bethesda or freeform character created open world games go for troll runs because the available choices end up sucking pretty hard and are inconsequential or inconsistent. Railroaded games don't offer choice beyond letting players play the game in different styles, and that has always lead to tighter narratives with greater emotional depth. The denouement of achievement is better savored when the outcome is amenable to the player.
LLM generated missions are unlikely to be any better than the standard algorithmically generated quests and maps of Roguelikes or Bethesda style radiant quests. By their very nature within a game a quest cannot significantly affect the world, otherwise other aspects of the game get broken. Unless the world is fully dynamically generated each playthrough and allows full destruction of not just the environment but the very engine itself, any LLM game quest will just be a high quality filler anime episode, inconsequential and distracting from the core experience players are actually intending to invest their time and effort in.
2D3D
3d ago
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
2D3D
3d ago
The current 'favored minority' position seems a function of the deft political power employed by Shiogu and the necessity of Kadyrov as a strongman to keep Chechnya in line. Bribes siphoned by Shoigu and paid to Kadyrov are not necessarily indicative of any Muscovite high opinion of those peoples and cultures detached from their political leaders. There has been little wealth flowing downwards to the tuvans or chechens from Moscow, and doubtless the utility of Shoigu and Kadyrov in keeping those populations docile is part of their value proposition to the state.
2D3D
3d ago
Frankly the USA lacks a clean racial/cultural split across demarcated geographies to let a proper civil war play out. Gretchen Whitmer isn't rallying Dutch-German Americans in the Midwest to take up arms against the New Englanders of Hochul. There are too few concentrated natural resources or geographies worth fighting over in the USA because it is so large. The most likely failure point will be race based riots collapsing a major metropolitan area totally combined with a refusal by a governor to send in the national guard or said national guard rebelling. Think full riots of BLM and Rodney King with 0 law enforcement for a few weeks. A spontaneous violent mob horizontally coordinated along racial lines for ease of identification just to wreck shit. Less armed factions battling street by street Stalingrad style, more Harlem Riots with more destruction.
Civil wars really require geographically consolidated factions free of any local element capable of resistance. This is especially easy when the state institutions are token rebrandings of existing tribal or ethnic power structures. When the state falls, the militias simply swap out their patches and return to their old ways.
2D3D
3d ago
Ethnic self flagellation happens because progressives do not view normal whites as part of their tribe, hence denigrating white people and white supremacy does not diminish the interests of white progs. Gutting the promotions of white Royal Air Force and forcing new hires to be uninterested and unqualified blacks stationed in some isolated northern airbase has zero impact on a Ministry of Defense desk jockey in London whose tribe is oxbridge peers in the city. The institutional capture by progressives to advance value negative minorities is to crush the vile bad whites, and at no level do these progressives view themselves as vulnerable because the championed classes can only survive under their stewardship.
This is the big difference between western style progressive championing of minorities and Russian/Chinese style 'wokeness'. The Russians and Chinese have no internal enemy they need to weaponize a minority against, so they can make a pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities. Moreover these are neither market dominant minorities whose presence upends the socioeconomic dynamic nor violent separatists who need to be clamped down on. Let the minorities have their food and costumes so long as they do not cause violence or upend the dominant order; the Hui have always had minimal trouble compared to the Uighur or the Yunnans for the Chinese, as the Buryats have been ignored compared to the Tajiks for Russia.
2D3D
3d ago
If you are with your girlfriend, the indian dance clubs and thai discos actually have pretty bar stool + table setups for you to drink without indulging in the proclivities. The door bitches look quite intimidating but on slow weekday nights (mon tues thurs) they will rather have anyone coming in to down a jug or two instead of having zero business at all. Be as shameless as the Asians in looking without seeing in thai discos or indian dance clubs, you are under no obligation to tip or hang flower. The best place for that as tourists is Circular Road, near Boat Quay which is the drinking area for the professionals in the Central Business District. Filipino bar girls and indian dance clubs there in between ridiculously cheap (and good) indian muslim food joints. If you get supper around 930 to 1030pm at the restaurant called Shah Alam you can usually see a Vellfire pop up and drop off a clown car full of girls in saris. For thai discos that will require a local, if only for the language barrier and the difficulty of navigating the Middle Road to Arab Street nightlife areas.
If you're with your girlfriend and have good heat tolerance, do stuff like Henderson Waves or Botanic Gardens. Can't really go wrong with green tropical forest shit. If you have more time then consider trips to JB, it is basically cheaper Singapore. Temples and culture may require trips to Indonesia or Thailand or Vietnam. At least the trips to the airport in Singapore are fun unto themselved, and many Singaporeans actually treat thr airport as a shopping center with an attached airplane management facility.
2D3D
4d ago
If your intention is to experience the more salacious nighttime entertainments in Malaysia/Singapore, you have to set aside your expectation of a Soi Cowboy style bargirls spilling into the sidewalk, and know how to navigate the red light scene. The influences of East Asian courtesan style entertainments permeate throughout everywhere the Chinese/Korean/Japanese diaspora has a presence, and the manifestations especially in Singapore are truly unfindable anywhere else.
There are a few extremely interesting nightlife entertainment options that are not commonly experienced by westerners, so I think it is worth sharing the mechanics of Southeast Asian seediness with the fine denizens of themotte. The experiences described below are rated on three variables: Engagement, Play, Damage. Engagement is how much of a conversation/activity you can have with the girl, like if you're on a date. Includes conversation, flirting, playing bar games, having the girl pour your drinks or sing or dance for you. Basically the geisha/courtesan experience. Low engagement is basically when the girl is a meat mannequin, high engagement is the full GirlFriend Experience, whereby it is what loveless guys imagine: a girl waits hand on foot to compliment him for how awesome he is and sympathize with every slight he complains about. Play refers to the amount of physical hanky panky allowed. Low play is sitting side by side, stroking of extremities and handholding (how lewd), medium play is light fondling and sitting on laps, and high play is full on snogging and groping, pretty much first base. Full play is third base and above, in the venue so be prepared for some public action if you're in a full play joint with friends. Damage refers to price. Low is around 50/hour, and at the higher end you are looking at 600/h, not including additional expenditures you may incur of your 'own' volition. More on that at the end
BROTHELS The most obvious is the literal Red Light Brothels. In Geylang they are in the even numbered 'Lorongs', which are on the southern side of the main road and restricted to the earlier numbers (Lor 6, 8, 14, etc). These legal brothels are literally marked with red lanterns, usually with a man lounging outside shooting the shit with other guys. Be warned that there are chinese temples interspersed with the houses that have red trim on the shrines, and these places are not open for business. The working girls here provide purely sexual services, and it is an extremely upfront transaction: you go in, you see the girls in the fishtank (no more glass walls like Thailand, they're just out in the open), and select one to go up to the rooms. If you are unhappy with the selection you can ask the headman for the catalogue, the girls are arranged by nationality so some neighbouring houses may have a girl more suited to your preference. Don't expect too much vibing, these are purely sexual services. If you step into a house without ordering, you won't be harassed or otherwise disturbed, but the headmen will clue others in if there is a tourist just eyeballing, and entry may be refused. No engagement, full play, damage is low to medium depending on the girl.
MASSAGE PARLOURS Because there are plenty of legit parlours, patrons of special service parlours should seek these out at specific locales, particularly Peoples Park and Orchard Towers (the four floors of whores). The obvious sign of the girls will be young women with too much makeup and tight dresses with long fingernails inviting you for a massage. If you find an attractive woman in slacks and a polo t inviting you for a massage, it will be a real one and you would find a very different form of relief following the session. Like the brothels, these massage parlours are fairly straightforward affairs. Select, go in, get it done. Little engagement, pure play. Damage is slightly less than the brothels because these are strictly speaking illegal.
BARGIRLS Hunting grounds for working girls looking for itinerant businessmen unconcerned about fidelity. These are typically filipino bars operating in Lucky Plaza and Circular Road. Though there are plenty of working girls at the various hotels in Orchard Road, these girls typically are prearranged on telegram groups these days and not open for solicitation. The filipino bargirls usually are professional working girls, but often you will find domestic helpers or white/pink collar women having a side gig on weekend nights. These are the establishments where you sit in the bar area with other patrons and have the bargirls chat you up to buy more drinks. High engagement, but very little play on station. Damage on site is medium because these girls are great at convincing you to huy many many drinks to keep them by your side
INDIAN DANCE BARS These are a rather unique feature catering to professional NRIs who have been excluded from other venues due to complaints from working girls about dealing with Indians. The patrons sit on couches surrounding dance platforms, and girls come in to dance to Bollywood hits. Depending on how well you tip the girl may come sit with you and engage in conversation, but there are many platforms and other patrons. Girls stay at each platform for one song before moving to another, averaging 4 songs per shift before retiring for another set of girls to dance and the first batch either rests or sits with a high tippet. The girls are largely hindi speakers because of the makeup of NRIs with the cash to burn - tamils in Singapore and KL can take advantage of local tamil connections to indulge in other entertainments otherwise barred. Due to this specific market dynamic, the demand is surprisingly inelastic and girls can choose to ignore a man even if he tips aggressively. Between the heavies on station and aggressive police presence nearby (at least for Singapore), unruly patrons dont get to stay unruly for long, so the girls make bank. Low to medium engagement, very low to medium play, surprisingly high damage - the tips stack up quick.
KTV This is where things get interesting. Ignore the family friendly venues where you drunkenly belt out hits from your teenage years with your friends for that sweet hit of nostalgia to fend off the advancing years. These KTVs are where the girls make every effort to make you feel like a young man again while draining your wallet to make you as poor as a young man as well. These places are everywhere and at the same time invisible. A local is necessary to navigate to find these bars with opaque windows and negotiate with the door bitches, but it is quite the experience. Upon entry you and your buddies are guided to a private room, then the mamasan will bring out a selection of available girls to entertain you. The job of these girls is to get money out of you in one of twp ways: directly paying them for how much fun they provide you, or playing drinking games with you to both drink your booze and make you finish your booze more quickly. And these girls are good at both: the modern courtesan experience, where the girls alternate between singing and dancing for you， to aggressively challenging you to games of liars dice whereby the losers drink, to sitting on your lap and stroking your hair while you sob about why your boss isn't giving you your promotion and topping up your cups every few minutes. Then at the right moment they will put your hand on an appropriate body part and let you start feeling like you're going somewhere... only for the notorious butterfly system to kick in. See, these girls aren't exclusive to you during the 4 hour shift, there may (or may not) be other patrons who also enjoy the charms of your selected girl, and these girls flit between rooms akin to a butterfly. All the better to whet the appetite and loosen the wallet. The girls typically are mandarin speakers, so looking for an english conversant one can be difficult. Thankfully the language of lust is purely physical, and for everything else wechat autotranslate lets them tell you how much money they are demanding of you. Virgin punters are easily taken advantage of, and it is necessary to get the mamasan to reign in her girls. If one has no favourites, it is best to get the mamasan to determine payouts, otherwise the girls are aggressive double dippers and will try to convince you to pay them separately from the mamasans. As a fun note, the snacks in these establishments always feature the infamous fruit platters, a shitty collection of cheap cut local fruits that somehow go for fifty to a hundred bucks a pop. Baffling till you realize this is how entertainment budgets allow for this type of expense to be charged to the company - the fruit platters are the mamasans take for her to distribute. Engagement is medium to very high (depending on your own level of game), play is medium to high, and damage is medium to high, or even Catastrophic - more on that later
THAI DISCO/SIAM DIU This is the cleanest yet most damaging sleazy establishment. Like an Indian dance club, the girls are on a stage to sing and dance before the tips determine which patron ends up winning their affection for the (partial?) shift. Unlike the Indian dance clubs, where girls rapidly rotate between the small platforms to get each set of couches to tip aggressively, these girls on stage get bidded on like prize horses. And like prize horses, bidding gets crazy. A runner collects money from bidding patrons who signify the amount they are paying and the pin number of the girl they are interested in. During the 'award ceremony' after the sets, the girls get garlands or sashes draped across them like mardi gras beads, signifying how much they are earning. Each garland starts at 50 bucks, up to 25k. Did you notice I said earning, even though I said bidding earlier? Thats because this isn't an auction, its a bet. The amount a punter puts into the pot only lets the girl know he's in play, but the winner is whoever tilts the hardest. When the alcohol flows and a popular girl flits between two or three high rollers in a shift, things can go nuts towards the end. I've seen bidding wars have a girl get competing bids of 10 12 15 20 25 30k in a single session, with the runners frantically rushing back and forth to scan QR payment codes and drape increasingly lavish flower garlands on the girls. All this just for the girl to sit with you and chat you up, mainly so you can rub it in another mans face that you've been better at draining your companies bank account than he is. No play on site, but you are guaranteed to bring her home for the night if the damage exceeds 10k (yes the threshold is that high). Engagement is low to medium, play is low, damage is a binary of low or catastrophic. Thai discos are magic money draining pits. Magic money draining however happens not only at the venues themselves, for many girls - especially the thais- fancy themselves shamans. By the magic of a sob story and promises of exclusivity, a girl who obtains your phone number will cast these spells incessantly to drain you of all your funds and any lines of credit as well. Many men have fallen under the sway of these girls, and a single night of 300 can be the gateway for tens to hundreds of thousands to disappear into an abyss.
A circumspect man with his head screwed on tight will be able to experience exotic entertainments without losing everything, but everything can be lost if the right spell lands.
Singapore has a rather staid reputation, deservedly earned relative to the insanity one can experience in Bangkok, Pattaya or Batam. Yet the febrile sleazy scene, guarded by conscript police and a political establishment unbeholden to moral grandstanding has allowed an extremely robust commercial sex sector to thrive, without the stain of organized gangs and it's consequent violence blighting the land.
Oh and for other touristy crap, just stick to the good hawkers near train stations. Maxwell, Amoy, Old Airport Road and Chinatown Complex are the top tier hawkers and the internet recommendations are generally quite accurate.
2D3D
16d ago
Maybe its a case of 'solve this quadratic equation or you don't get to cum?' Its the ultimate exercise in reinforcement learning but I can't imagine a greater recipe for sexual nonperformance than failing a captcha at orgasm.
2D3D
19d ago
I find the bigger problem is that our friends tend to be more fickle than we calculated. True friendships are a tribe unto themselved, sufficiently bonded to ignore external cultural variations. Either your friends aren't so close that they are willing to censure you over inconsequential opinions, or they're weaklings who can't stand up against Current Thing. Both lead to the same conclusion of 'get better friends'. Difficult, but just like a good romantic relationship, worth it
Strictly speaking the dynastic quality of Lee Kuam Yew to Lee Hsien Loong is clouded by Goh Chok Tongs equally unremarkably competent 'seatwarmer' Prime Ministership of 14 years, which is no small quantum of years save for the long tenures of LKY and LHL to stand as contrasts. Detractors point to an early health scare in LHLs career as the reason for extending GCTs PM tenure, but other commentators note that LKY would not have allowed an incompetent son to be in a political leadership position. I leave it to readers to determine whether LHL is a nepo baby inheriting a position he did not earn or a man groomed from high school to helm a thankless position. I for one err towards LHL doing a fair job of unclenching his fathers grasped fist on Singapore only to replace it with his own everpresent guiding hand.
As for Lawrence Wong, it is fair to say that he is less charismatic than the other leaders we are used to, but to be frank Singaporeans do not really trust charisma. Old guard oratory opposition firebrands like Joshua Benjamin Jeyaratnam and Chee Soon Juan were unable to rally the populace to their cause of freeing Singapore from Lee Kuan Yews harsh view of society and the world, and modern sweet talkers like Jamus Lim are viewed by the polity as soft idealists who will fold when push comes to shove. In short, the relative lack of charisma is not a shortcoming for PM Wong. Why Singaporeans are unreceptive to charisma is likely a combination of successful government propaganda about being wary of false prophets but also a brutal calculus by even the educated population who view politics as something best left as a topic of complaint and not a cause to rally against.
One can readily observe that Singaporean politicians are overwhelmingly senior civil servants and military generals (who are basically civil servants in the Singaporean administration), and my personal view is that save for extremely few egoists the vast majority of politicians are simply guys who got asked by their boss to take up the role of politician. Singapores political administration, especially in the Lawrence Wong cabinet, is a cabinet of civil servants forced to the top. Is being forced to the top bad? For these men, yes it is. Singaporean civil servants often command far higher salaries than politicians, and the educational pedigrees of these politicians certainly puts paid to accusations of incompetence-blind nepotism. This chart below is a snapshot of the difference between Singapore and Malaysia: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Y5CGZO4eQBY/TQS1sT9gTrI/AAAAAAAAChQ/7X-cnkUP7yE/s1600/Singapore+Vs+malaysia+Politic+2007-Final.jpg
It is a common observation in the Admin Service - the elite civil servants, recipients of extremely competitive scholarships that allow Singaporean kids of even modest income to massively overrepresent at all elite universities - that it is better to rise to Director or Deputy Permanent Secretary of a major ministry, than it is to become a member of parliament. It is an easier career progression path and salaries are inevitably higher than junior politicians, much less the eye watering salaries admin service scholars can command when they jump to MBB or FAANG - typically 0.3m is the starting salary for jumpers who go straight to VP or higher, compared to Admin Service deputy directors (the typical jumping point) who command 0.15m at that juncture.
All this is to reinforce the point that for these men of means and brains, there are much better opportunities for self enrichment than being a politician. Between a blisteringly robust private sector and an extremely aggressive Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau which set its sights on a prominent minister, there is little opportunity for a politician to self enrich and better opportunities outside the cosy confines of the civil service-politocian pipeline. As an extreme example, one of the main Prime Minister prospectives, George Yeo, lost his seat in 2011 and 'retired' to be director of multiple major conglomerates both in Singapore and overseas. Rest assured that he is making 4x the money for 1/2 the effort as when he was a minister.
So what does this mean for Lawrence Wong? Well, it means that he is, in effect, a chump. His boss told him 'I need you to take over' and like a good boy he said 'yes sir'.
https://www.theonion.com/black-man-given-nations-worst-job-1819570341
(He isn't black, but the point still stands)
PM Wong is certainly not a deer in the headlight about to be run over. If not LW then others in the cabinet would have been picked, notably Chan Chun Sing who is bafflingly removed from the new executive core despite his immense popularity among everyone that worked with him - maybe looking like a 20 year old boy trying to fit into his dads suit harms him more than even the voting populace thinks. The Singapore civil service is, by this point, a well tuned machine churning out remarkably competent administrators and bureaucrats who have proven competent at navigating their institutions away from ruin. Perhaps that is the best placeholder government a society can hope for, a solid ship well maintained till a visionary captain finds his hands at the helm. Till then, the bureaucrat-politicians of Singapore will navigate as best they can, which honestly seems like a better deal than what the rest of us (globohomo retards time-capsuled in 2012 liberalism that we are) have to go through.
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