Singapore should not be lectured by anyone but should it lecture other countries?
As I said a few days ago, I think YES and here's my reply to all those raising their concerns about it.
Min. Shanmugam reiterated the country's stance that it is going to make decisions in line with its best interests and not be swayed by external complainers without skin in the game.
It's hard not to agree with that, but it is only so, because Singapore is - by many objective measures - the best managed and most accomplished country in the world.
Why should it listen, for example, to rants of Richard Branson, who decries local death penalty for drug traffickers, when drug crime takes thousands of lives in UK alone each year?
Take any other area - education, healthcare, taxation, public transit, pension system, housing, law enforcement - and Singapore is at the absolute global top or among the world's best in each of them.
However, while SG is doing so well, many other countries - including the world's so-called "superpowers", are not.
It's easy to say "oh, what do we care? they should sort their sh.t out themselves" - but we live in the same world and their problems, directly or not, contribute to our problems too.
Drugs remain attractive even in SG in no small part because of the permissive pop culture of the West.
Scams continue costing the society hundreds of millions of dollars each year because of Chinese and Indian syndicates that prey on the gullibility of the civilised, trusting Singaporeans.
Piracy in the straits remains a problem as the country's neighbours can't get their act together.
Terrorism remains a threat because Western security services are not equipped to nab suspects early enough and their lenient laws crated breeding grounds for extremism in local prisons.
Taxation sees upward pressure from inefficient, populist Western economies, which seek to impose minimum tax rates around the world not because they're somehow fair but because their useless politicians can't manage their countries properly. Why should Singapore be penalized by being governed better than they are?
This isn't just "their sh't" - it's ours too.
Why shouldn't Singapore occasionally grandstand in a way it has often been on the receiving end of?
We're all in the same boat but not everybody is putting the same effort to keep it afloat.
And, unlike the often self-righteous West, the city-state has very measurable, non-ideological, evidence of its superior achievements that others could - and should - learn from.
People often forget that as a species we're still fighting for survival. Nothing that you see is going to exist beyond the scope of a few human lifetimes.
We're sitting ducks waiting for a cosmic rock to hit or another ice age to come, before land masses move and crush everything we've ever built.
Unless we eliminate waste coming from crime, violence, populism or demented ideologies, and put it to productive, effective use, we are exposing ourselves to being wiped out one day.
And nobody will be left to tell the tale of a tiny, rich city that kept to itself.
