“I will kill you, you asswipe!”

“I will kill you and your mother you swine!”

“I will kill you, your mother and your dog!”

And so it goes. I thought we were bloody civilised. At least, those of us who pretend to have an existence on this planet - let alone the internet - should act with some measure of decorum. But you know something? Acting like a child is not restricted to bad posters, commentors nor to script-kiddies intent on showing off l337 skillz. Promising damnation for perceived hurts against communities you don’t actually care about, for content you couldn’t arsed to think through, really is the shits, brothers and sisters.


Aiyah, I’m not going to bother talking about racists and ‘good men’ and hunting down anonymous strangers on the internet lah. Others more eloquent and more attuned to the situation are much more able to do that.

What I’m starting to notice is how the experience of being sued for comments and posts on site are starting to change how people operate their blogs. I mean, check this out: someone gets sued for comments made on their site not one month ago, and now everything’s in an uproar. You spew potentially libelous comments and you get your ass kicked in 12 different places.

Eh, HARLOW, do you see what the hell is happening? Jeff Ooi turns obnoxious and bashes commentators who state anything that does not have ironclad, irrefutable proof of claims, Mack Zulkifli and Peter Tan go on a witchhunt against a racist commentator — heck, for fear of repercussions, Peter Tan took down his blog for a day or so — and now Mack Zulkifli humbly requests that Lim Kit Siang take the lead in stamping out ‘racist commentators’. Oh, and on the latter point, he calls out LKS to pursue action against said racist commentators and ‘not just political opponents’, viz.:

We don’t want people to think that our Parliamentary Opposition Leader is practicing double standards, reserving his police reports against political enemies only.

You know, the implication is this: if Lim Kit Siang does not lodge a report against the said racist, “we don’t want people to think that our Parlimentary Opposition Leader is practicing double standards”, but actually that’s what people might think. And such a rhetorical statement in fact does induce people to draw the conclusion that if LKS does not lodge a police report, then he’s nothing but a hypocrite.

So, really, dude, how much have you contributed to damning LKS’s reputation? Fellas, so many damn things cut two damn ways, lah.

Come on, let’s stop dragging anyone into the dirt along with us. It’s not fair, and it’s pretty damn uncalled for.

Yes, the threat is real, and that’s what so many have been saying: that the threat is real. But instead focusing on what this threat means, all the ants are scrambling around headless without their queens.

We’ve got to recognize there are idiots out there who will post potentially libelous bullshit, but to censor and not castigate them in the medium in which the comments are found and instead take recourse to the law is to give up far too much. You know what? Now that I see this fear of the prohibitions in the content code in action, I change my mind: blog and website adminstrators must not be held liable for the contents others have posted.

You wanna sue anybody? Sue the damn commentator. If you can’t trace the commentator? That’s your damn problem.

Hey, check this out, you authoritarian nazis: get on IRC and check out the racist, sexist, obscene, licentious, violent, hateful rubbish spouted there. Legislate that!