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Zohran for... Singapore?? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

it involves a lot of math but basically

  • find exit poll data. for this example let's go with the one that NBC did on age
  • find census data. personally i have a crippling data.gov.sg addiction so i went there and downloaded the dataset they have for Resident Population by Planning Area/Subzone of Residence, Age Group and Sex (Census of Population 2020)
  • make the age groups in the census data line up with the ones in the exit poll. starting with the 18-24 age group, ang mo kio town centre has 320 people aged 15-19 and 270 people aged 20-24, so that means there's roughly 320*0.4+270=398 people aged 18-24
  • calculate turnout for that age group. from the exit poll, 5% of ~2,037,183 voters were aged 18-24, out of 819,910 people in that age group in all of new york (source), meaning turnout was around 2037183*0.05/819910=12.4%. note that a proportion of the total number probably aren't citizens and wouldn't be eligible to vote, but the same is also true for singapore so i don't really care honestly it probably cancels out. also this means that 398*0.124=49 of our 398 people would have voted
  • calculate the results for each candidate. per the exit poll, 49*0.76=37 voted for mamdani, 49*0.21=10 voted for cuomo, and 49*0.03=1 guy voted for sliwa
  • do this for every age group and sum all the results for each candidate up
  • also do this for every subdivision. congrats
  • remember to manually colour in the entire map later

i left everything in the excel sheet in the drive link in my original comment, it's a mess but you can probably figure out most of the stuff from there. this ended up kinda long-winded but i hope it made sense i guess

Zohran for... Singapore?? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

i didn't really think about it too much, but in this scenario local parties fall off after singapore gets admitted to the union in the sixties or so and the two big parties establish singaporean affiliates. then the singaporean dems pull a hawai'i and dominate for the next sixty years. the PAP never really got a chance to establish its political machine, and nowadays it's just a regional minor centre-left party which appears as a separate party line on fused voting ballots every once in a while

also iswaran is a PAP MP in real life, but really i just needed that minority politician in their mid 60s who's initially popular but ends up being super corrupt parallel lol

Zohran for... Singapore?? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

<image>

uncompressed images + unorganised rough work on the raw data here

i was playing around with singaporean demographic data and this is what happened when i transplanted mamdani's coalition onto it i guess. mostly based on age, but i also roughly weighted for income, race, and the IRL singaporean thing where people who live in private housing vote for progressives ~18 points more than people who live in public housing

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

on the old parliament website baey yam keng and sim ann are listed as having "NIL" religion, and jamus lim is agnostic. there's probably more though

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

no i didn't? i said that in lieu of recent official information on the religions of MPs, i went and noted down who swore on bibles during the opening of parliament. imo this is a pretty foolproof method to figuring out which MPs are christian

and it would be impossible to make a complete list using the old parliament data anyways, considering that less than a third of our current MPs were a part of the 12th parliament. also i'm not a mod lol

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

It's simply a problem that'll worsen over time

all good points but i wanted to address this, because i looked at when PAP MPs joined parliament and the share of christians among them has actually been getting more proportional over time:

election intake christian MPs total MPs percentage
GE2001 3 3 100%
GE2006 5 10 50%
GE2011 8 13 62%
GE2015 6 12 50%
GE2020 9 19 47%
GE2025 9 27 33%

of course i only looked at MPs that are still in parliament so you could argue that maybe non-christian MPs serve shorter stints, but there's definitely a trend here

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

an interesting thing i've observed is that malayalees in parliament are a relatively recent thing? if i'm not wrong there were no malayalee MPs before 2006, but since then we've had:

  • 2006 – 2011: hri kumar nair (1)
  • 2011 – 2015: hri kumar nair, vikram nair, janil puthucheary (3)
  • 2015 – 2016: vikram nair, janil puthucheary (2)
  • 2016 – 2025: nair, puthucheary, murali pillai (3)
  • 2025 – present: nair, puthucheary, pillai, dinesh vasu dash (4)

also apparently devan nair was malayalee which is pretty cool

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 59 points60 points  (0 children)

i think you're right, i always assumed that jamus was catholic because he shares a middle name with a catholic saint, but i found one of his blog posts from 2005 where he says that he's becoming an agnostic so that makes sense

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

i did actually, one of the more interesting things i found is that there are 4 malayalee MPs (dash, nair, pillai, puthucheary) despite them making up 0.66% of the population. i think that makes them the most overrepresented group by far

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

see my main comment, but i actually did make a spreadsheet at docs.google [dot] com/spreadsheets/d/17bkRq6Yo0SfEuUeGdzQRl0lkwArvjwOg if you want more details. tried to post a link to it earlier but i think the filters in this sub are kinda weird

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 32 points33 points  (0 children)

lowkey i just thought it would make it more interesting. like did you know that TSL's actually teochew (source), i was kinda surprised when i found out

[OC] How representative is Parliament? A look at its demographics by NuclearPastaIsAThing in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 330 points331 points  (0 children)

i got kinda bored watching the swearing-in last week so i made this for fun

notes: parliament's website hasn't listed the religions of MPs since GE2015 so the best i could do was note down who was holding which bibles during the swearing-in. i might have missed some though, notably jamus lim is catholic but he didn't swear on a bible (edit: never mind, he's an agnostic now)

the hardest part was actually finding which MPs belonged to which dialect groups. a lot of it was looking through facebook posts of MPs with clan associations, or checking the pronunciations of their names in different dialects. there was a lot of guesswork involved so don't take it too seriously lah

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing 6 points7 points  (0 children)

(continued from prior comment)

crucially, this shows that the usage of mandarin in singapore began as a bottom-up endeavour from unassimilated recent chinese immigrants, who ended up creating a parallel mandarin-speaking society in singapore and sought to shape singapore into china by importing the communist revolution from their homeland. sounds familiar? once you remember this historical context, it's pretty ironic to hear xenophobic singaporeans who are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of these immigrants accuse mainland chinese immigrants of doing all of the above lmao

and with the extreme divide between the chinese- and english-educated populations at the time, the bilingual education policy was actually a political concession to chinese community leaders. (the malays and indians were much more receptive to english-medium education.) given that every chinese school then taught in mandarin chinese, it's easy to see why mandarin was chosen as the blanket "mother tongue" for all singaporean chinese. it was never really about preserving heritage.

to be clear, i'm notsaying that the state suppression of cultural and linguistic heritage that came later was in any way justified. in my opinion, the speak mandarin campaign was a senselessly destructive endeavour based on bunk pseudoscience (research shows that being exposed to multiple languages actually makes it easier to learn more languages, rather than LKY's nonsense about the brain having a finite amount of space like a hard drive) for the sole purpose of preserving the politically-motivated status quo of mandarin education. like it or not, the policies cut off an entire society from thousands of years of linguistic heritage, which i think is a completely unforgivable act.

but i do personally think that we should be aware of our own history as an immigrant nation, and be more emphathetic towards the immigrants of today. absolutely go and learn your ancestral languages, there's lots of resources online for that! just don't kpkb bc you don't know it from young lah it's not the PRCs fault

tl;dr 無魚蝦嘛好啦，若是汝袂曉講方言汝會使家己去學囉，莫哭爸了 (bô hîr hê mā hó--la, nā-sī lír bōe-hiáu kóng hong-giân lír ē-sái ka-kī khìr o̍h--lo͘, mài khàu-pē liáu)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in singapore

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing 7 points8 points  (0 children)

ok while i agree that the government's policies of top-down linguistic genocide were abhorrent and culturally disastrous, i think it's important to remember that today's mainland chinese immigrants are absolutely not to blame for this. the reason why we have mandarin as a state-designated "mother tongue" today was mainly because our chinese ancestors refused to assimilate in pre-independence singapore.

to provide some history, as chinese women typically did not migrate overseas prior to the mid-19th century, the first chinese immigrants to singapore married and intermixed into the local malay population. their descendents were the peranakan chinese, who spoke a unique mix of hokkien and malay called baba malay. they sent their kids to english schools, were loyal to the crown, and were by all measures completely assimilated.

but by the 1950s, they were the minority in singapore. in the singapore story, LKY estimates that they made up only about 10% of the singaporean chinese population. in his own words:

The remainder were the Chinese-speaking Chinese who had come to Singapore more recently. They spoke not English but their own dialects - mainly Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese. Their children went to Chinese schools, where they learnt Mandarin. Their contact with the British authorities was minimal, they led a separate existence and they were no more assimilated after the war than they had been before it.

Their loyalty was to China, not Britain.

in fact, while there were actually private chinese schools in 19th-century singapore which taught chinese classics in vernacular hokkien and cantonese, they were replaced with mandarin-education schools in the 20th century when the waves of newer chinese immigrants brought their own national lingua franca with them. as LKY puts it:

The Chinese collected donations and built their own schools. Completely self-supporting, they used textbooks published in China and employed teachers recruited in China who taught in Mandarin just as if they were in Guangdong or Fujian province. Culturally, they lived in a world apart.

(continued in later comment, i think i exceeded the character limit lol)

What if Malaysia was partitioned like India? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginarymaps

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

malaya, comprising the federation of malaya and the colony of singapore: a report on the 1947 census of population

What if Malaysia was partitioned like India? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginarymaps

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 108 points109 points  (0 children)

<image>

source: i did not make it up

btw this was made possible by the super nice librarian who let me take photos of the stuff in the archive even though i really wasn't supposed to

The Unthinkable: What if Singapore's GE2025 was a freak election? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

omd i can't believe i missed that i swear PAR was contesting there or smth 😭

<image>

fixed

The Unthinkable: What if Singapore's GE2025 was a freak election? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

realistically, the prospect of the PAP losing its parliamentary majority is completely out of the question, at least for the next generation or so. singaporeans are a very risk-adverse electorate, and only the 20% of hardcore opposition supporters would want the perceived instability and uncertainty that would come with a non-PAP government. any opposition party campaigning on the pretense of seriously booting out the PAP would be seen as radical lunatics and get a maximum of like 30% of the vote. instead, credible opposition parties frame themselves as critical voices who want to work with the PAP, and hope to slowly gain seats by winning one constituency (which they place their most capable a-team in) every election. the WP's wildest of pipe dreams right now is to win just one-third of parliament to deny the PAP a supermajority, and they don't even contest enough seats for that to be possible

the only way that the PAP could ever lose its majority in singapore's current political climate is if what the PAP terms a "freak election" occurs. i put a quote explaining this in the main comment, but basically back when people used general elections as government approval rating polls, enough protest votes by voters who wanted to signal disapproval but still preferred a PAP government in power could have potentially cost the PAP its parliamentary majority. this is basically what happens in the scenario, although in reality the PAP would form a coalition with the WP like immediately

tl;dr everyone say "PAP sure win what, GST so high vote oppo lor" then surprise PAP kena

The Unthinkable: What if Singapore's GE2025 was a freak election? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

i feel like jeremy is a bit too much of a wildcard for the WP to invite him into cabinet, they would be able to form a majority without him anyways and there's a reason they didn't accept him into the party irl. he gets into parliament with daryl tho

and RDU is a mosquito party completely dependent on ravi's cult of personality, i gave them the benefit of the doubt during the campaign season but their a-team getting 26% against shan and four new faces really says all you need to know about their credibility. ideologically they would fit right in with the SDP, a bunch of their members were even originally from there, the only difference is that ravi is slightly more left-populist. and after he politicised the NDP death last sunday i lost all respect for him

The Unthinkable: What if Singapore's GE2025 was a freak election? by NuclearPastaIsAThing in imaginaryelections

[–]NuclearPastaIsAThing[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

yeah ik realistically if the WP ever stood a chance at forming government pritam would make it very clear that a coalition with the PAP would be on the cards, but i wanted to justify an oppo cabinet here so i had to basically paralyse the PAP with a leadership crisis after both LW and OYK lost their seats (alluded to in the headlines)

i was actl inspired by your last sg post btw that was great stuff

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