And two fellas in Singapore get shafted. I’m sure by now the whole Singapore blogging community is in an uproar, or has been in an uproar for the past few days. Apparently two yahoos got themselves charged with… making racist slurs on their blogs. I wonder how that would measure up against our content code, though I’m sure comments denigrating another race is beyond the pale under the general prohibitions.

I’ve discussed this before at some length, over here. I don’t thinkI should rehash anything, it’s just vaguely disturbing that all this comes about two weeks after I wrote that bit. I’ll have to grab a hold of Singapore’s Seditions Act, so if google expert can help me out here, I’d appreciate it.


All of this didn’t originally pique my curiousity nor raise my blood pressure because in this instance, the charged bloggers did indeed make comments that slurred another ethnic group. Kamigoroshi makes a point about blog-administration. We need to look at this aspect of blogging seriously, and while doing that, we need to see how compliance in this one aspect of legitimate law (libels and slander, I mean, not the Seditions Act) may lead others using the same laws to silence bloggers with legitimate complaints.

Sometimes I wonder if its enough that fellow bloggers shout down the ones that talk shit, honestly. It works in some other communities, and those communities are tied together by certain rules. I’m no programmer, or hacker by any stretch of the imagination (I have problems with HTML, believe or not), and I’m just a some time observer, but you’ve got to check out how things are done by the open source community. Or who knows, maybe I’m looking at this wrongly.

Not a few days before the charges of sedition were brought against the two Singapore bloggers, we had a display of real-time internet justice via blog wars between xiaxue and shaolintiger. That’s the law of the jungle in practice, a sort communitarian justice not unlike lynch mobs but without actual deaths, eh? This way you have the right to say whatever you want, and have the majority take the piss out of you.

If only all things could be sorted out this way in cyberspace.