cookie-cutter comments

Don’t ask me what prompted this.

For some of us, reading the opinion columns in newspapers comes first, before the actual news. That’s normal, I think. We either agree with the columnist or *gasp* we don’t. And when we don’t, depending on the tone of the column, we either disagree objectively, or irrationally disagree to give said columnist the time of day for perceived wrong-headedness, arrogance and such.

Hey, who died and made newspaper columnists god, eh?

And so some of us, a small percentage anyway, go online, visit their blog-management dashboards and type up suitable invectives villifying said columnist. There are some, however, who take this a step further: they write up opinions — and that’s what it ever is, isn’t it — in such a way that their opinions sound more declarative as fact than as opinion. That’s what’s scary, to me.

Hey, who died and made bloggers god, eh?

Oh well…

The good doctor alerted me to the fact that he’d been posting instalments of Kassim Ahmad’s thesis here. It’s been very, very interesting so far; a brief foray into methodologies of interpretation, and then a brief overview of a pre-Islamic Malay community. I think the meat of En Ahmad’s interpretation comes in later chapters, but the initial layout of the terrain has been interesting in and of itself.

Go check it out!