Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Sheltering the Thieves from the Charlatans
Like a good parent, you shouldn't favour one sibling over the other
If we had sufficient space for dissent on the mainstream media and a sense of humour, everyday would be a field day for political satirist, like the brilliant Stephen Colbert. But we have neither, so you'll have to be content with stolid little me and a promotion for an American satirist.
Onwards ho! then to the topic at hand. Yesterday, Datuk Fu Ah Kiow, the Deputy Ministry of Internal Security and a member of Malaysia's cramp and noisy classroom raised his hand to speak and the media promptly obliged. Answering questions at coincidentally, a school (not in a classroom though), he told bloggers to watch their mouth again.
Needless to say, it builds on a decades of non-affiliated mouthpieces as peddlers of lies, damned lies and statistics. Of course statistics are something that can may well be good, accounting for the lack of them forthcoming from the government. As I've said before, you can never counter rumours with lack of information. Obviously we can't tell a lie when we don't know the truth.
But the bigger whopper is him saying, "there should be some self-censorship of articles so as not to offend any group or religion or cause disharmony". Now I'm all for not pissing people off unnecessarily. I'm sure that's the best way to crack a relationship, using that analogy on races in Malaysia. But then again, we must remember that the line between acceptable and piss-off is very limiting. The slight raising of theological issues would bring the big elephants bearing down on you the very second you go public (Elephants are heavy).
So here's my question. Is it most effective that we go after everyone who airs thoughts that may be deemed sensitive (even the mild opinions that breaks no law) instead of educating reason into the people who raise a ruckus at a prick of a rose thorn? Let's face it, Malaysians are a touchy bunch. It doesn't matter in what way you broach the subject (whether in an academic and polite way or in a fiery way), people would pick up their placards and tie their bandanas if you even broach the subject.
And here comes the analogy aforementioned in the title. Those who post deliberately ire-raising content are just as guilty as those who are pissed off by the most docile and harmless of words. The former however, are the only ones who Johnny Law wants to watch. The charlatan gets away while thief rots in jail.
As an aside, notice the misquoting done by The Star when they said
"A case in point is the comment in a blog where readers were urged to "shoot to kill" a local journalist" concerning the whole lame saga at Screenshots. Apparently journalism has degraded into chain message passing and information is minced up before it hits the presses. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the experiment on how a sentence is passed on along a chain of people via whispers that concludes with the sentence being mangled beyond recognition at the other end. This is what's in operation here.
Oh well I'm hungry.
cheers
If we had sufficient space for dissent on the mainstream media and a sense of humour, everyday would be a field day for political satirist, like the brilliant Stephen Colbert. But we have neither, so you'll have to be content with stolid little me and a promotion for an American satirist.
Onwards ho! then to the topic at hand. Yesterday, Datuk Fu Ah Kiow, the Deputy Ministry of Internal Security and a member of Malaysia's cramp and noisy classroom raised his hand to speak and the media promptly obliged. Answering questions at coincidentally, a school (not in a classroom though), he told bloggers to watch their mouth again.
Needless to say, it builds on a decades of non-affiliated mouthpieces as peddlers of lies, damned lies and statistics. Of course statistics are something that can may well be good, accounting for the lack of them forthcoming from the government. As I've said before, you can never counter rumours with lack of information. Obviously we can't tell a lie when we don't know the truth.
But the bigger whopper is him saying, "there should be some self-censorship of articles so as not to offend any group or religion or cause disharmony". Now I'm all for not pissing people off unnecessarily. I'm sure that's the best way to crack a relationship, using that analogy on races in Malaysia. But then again, we must remember that the line between acceptable and piss-off is very limiting. The slight raising of theological issues would bring the big elephants bearing down on you the very second you go public (Elephants are heavy).
So here's my question. Is it most effective that we go after everyone who airs thoughts that may be deemed sensitive (even the mild opinions that breaks no law) instead of educating reason into the people who raise a ruckus at a prick of a rose thorn? Let's face it, Malaysians are a touchy bunch. It doesn't matter in what way you broach the subject (whether in an academic and polite way or in a fiery way), people would pick up their placards and tie their bandanas if you even broach the subject.
And here comes the analogy aforementioned in the title. Those who post deliberately ire-raising content are just as guilty as those who are pissed off by the most docile and harmless of words. The former however, are the only ones who Johnny Law wants to watch. The charlatan gets away while thief rots in jail.
As an aside, notice the misquoting done by The Star when they said
"A case in point is the comment in a blog where readers were urged to "shoot to kill" a local journalist" concerning the whole lame saga at Screenshots. Apparently journalism has degraded into chain message passing and information is minced up before it hits the presses. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the experiment on how a sentence is passed on along a chain of people via whispers that concludes with the sentence being mangled beyond recognition at the other end. This is what's in operation here.
Oh well I'm hungry.
cheers
