"Although if you're worried that the US is a police state, you might not like it there." That is putting it mildly. It is illegal to possess chewing gum there. Vandalism is punishable by torture.
'Punishable by torture' is ridiculous. Caning is rarely used, and I would probably prefer it to a prison sentence.
But again, this is a matter of preference. If you love being an antisocial asshole, Singapore will be hell for you until they kick you out (if they let you in). If you're a responsible adult, you won't notice the laws because they won't apply to you -- the penalty for vandalism or heroin use or spitting on the sidewalk is inconsequential to me.
>'Punishable by torture' is ridiculous. Caning is rarely used,
By any definition, caning is torture. There's no potential ambiguity, unlike waterboarding. Singapore no longer publishes caning data, but illegal immigration carries a mandatory sentence of caning and more than 10,000 people were arrested for that in 2004.
Edit: there is a torture exemption for pain and suffering arising from "lawful sanctions": perhaps caning is excluded from the definition of torture. I guess judicial waterboarding would also be legal. http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm
Well, yes. It's a very nice place to live, and part of the reason for that is how selective they are about who gets to stay there. So I can sympathize with the idea of really cracking down on illegals.
Anyway, compare it to prison: caning probably hurts a whole lot, and might take weeks to heal. And then it's over. Prison hurts less, but takes years -- during which the prisoner is subsidized by the taxpayers. If the US introduced caning as a prison alternative (for first-time offenders, at least) it would probably make the country a much nicer place to live.
It is a serious improvement for the law to reflect the culture. The US has a schizophrenic attitude towards many vices -- the Puritans write the laws, but the sinners write the TV shows. Singapore is much more united, so you're not guaranteed to feel out of place.
A scriptwriter in LA feels like he's living in someone else's country when his friend gets busted, or when he can't marry his partner -- a gas station owner in Nebraska feels similarly alienated whenever he watches a sitcom or a big-budget comedy. This doesn't have to be a problem (though it probably doesn't scale past a city-state).
The US gum lobbyists actually won. You can buy medicinal chewing gum (the sugar free kind commonly marketed as "white" here) from an approved healthcare professional, such as a dentist or a pharmacist.
