Bloggers under threat

It’s not just happening in the West, and it’s not just harrasment by anonymous posters you know. (No) Thanks to one of the major newspapers in Malaysia, two prominent bloggers of this country celebrated the early months of 2007 with a libel lawsuit (read here and here) that started the whole bloggers-are-bad brouhaha and sorry politicians stating silly facts about bloggers that aren’t so factual (like “80% of unemployed Malaysia bloggers are women“).

And last week the cutesey-wutesey Sultan Muzaffar of AF blogging sensation has made a police report together with Mr Manager and KlubbKidd over threats he’s been getting on his blog implicating the latter two men. When you read through their blogs, you’ll notice that at least 60% of the offensive remarks in the blogs were made by commentors, not the bloggers. Really, what we need here is not a 12-commandments-like statement of what we can/not or should/n’t do, but to simply stop being an idiot. Let us pray and hope that we remember to apply all the good manners our parents and teachers have taught us.

Which weirdly enough brings me to a memory of my college years. One day during our English lesson, our class was divided into male and female groups. The ladies were required to list out adjectives, verbs and adverbs that describe the ideal man/boyfriend, and the guys were to do the same of the ideal woman. So one of us went to the board to write out the words, and our group started stating words like “loving”, “understanding”, “loyal”, “funny”… you get the picture. After about 25 words or so, it was the guys’ turn. One of them, Arman, got up, went to the board, wrote two words, and went back to his seat. We smiled sheepishly as we read the words — “Not Demanding”.

---

Check out my other posts: « Long time no hear / 32 years young »

Posted on 17 April, 2007 under Life in reality