EXCEPT DEMOCRACY
http://www.ratifiersfordemocracy.org/where_nothings_impossible.htm
The ad above is run by the Singapore government as part of their
campaign to attract business and foreign capital to Singapore.
An international marketing campaign is presently underway to
sell Singapore as the biotech capital of Asia. The main pull
is the most complete data base of the populace of any place in the
world, all owned by the government, which prides itself on the
extent of data it maintains as well as the reach of its
surveillance.
The sales pitch goes like this:
For sale: "untapped pool of genomic data from a diverse population
living inside a biomedical system with some of the best record
keeping in the world."
"The fact that the country has a single patient identifier - all
computerized government records identify an individual by the same
type of number - creates "a unified data structure that population
geneticists are very happy with." -
Edison Lui, head of the Singapore Economic Development Board
One scientist wrote, commenting on an article describing these
plans, "The advantage of a patient database (exactly what today is
impossible in most developed countries) seems to be one great
(only?) advantage."
- The HMS Beagle:BioMedNet, letters
If you click on the ad above, you can read the attractions of
this peaceful city-state as sold by its rulers.
One of the reasons it is peaceful is that dissent is not
allowed.
One of its selling points is "Consensus, not conflict" - a
beautiful attraction to those looking for a peaceful place to live,
where there is no diversity of opinions tolerated, no real choice
of other views and representatives as a democracy has, and the
state controls everything down to the right of the citizen to chew
gum.
But freedom is not being sold, because freedom does not
exist. Democracy is not being sold, because it is a cosmetic
democracy.
For the sake of Singaporeans and all other people in the world
who live in cosmetic democracies, this page is dedicated.
Because "consensus" without free speech is dictatorship.
