It's time I dusted off this blog. I love commenting on forums and blogs. I've got a lot to say and the great thing about saying it online is nobody tries to shut me up. Except on Malaysian blogs and forums. OK, fair enough - this is a totalitarian state, but when the 'movement for change' is censoring me it does chafe a bit.
Facebook is very popular here. The government have ruined the print information industry by giving licenses only to those information sources which say nice things about them and horrid things about anybody they don't like. Probably a great idea in the short-term - if that's your cup of tea. It has been a disaster in the long term. Nobody reads anything any more because everybody knows it's either written by an idiot or (occasionally by someone who should know better) in praise of an idiot. Everybody just consumes opinion - and it shows. Please overcome your sensitivity to irony and continue reading my humble opinion.
Since the 'political tsunami' of 2008 - in which nobody actually got wet - the government has been fighting back in the information theatre. Everybody who consumes public money now has at least 5 Internet portals each. That's more portals than they have holes! The
Prime Minister's facebook page is linked from his
shiny 1Malaysia website, as are those facebook pages of many prominent Malaysian members of the mediacracy linked from their respective fundamental portals.
Are facebook pages called 'pages' or are they 'walls' or something? I don't know, I had a facebook profile once, but I closed it and asked
AdBlock to never show me anything from facebook ever again. I had to disable AdBlock to look just now. It was as awful as I remember.
Anyway, in today's news a couple of the
co-founders of facebook have been putting their Web2.0 windfall to work and are sponsoring the Drug Policy Alliance, a
campaign organisation proposing the legalisation of marijuana in California. Far from marijuana being legal to do whatever marijuana consumers and traders wish to do with it in California,
drug traficking in Malaysia is punished with the death penalty.
So that makes me wonder: how do Malaysians, who live under threat of capital punishment for involvement in the drug trade, feel about patronising an Internet property whose proceeds are being used to openly recommend the consumption of marijuana? Let's not beat about the bush (!) here: marijuana doesn't magically appear under your pillow when you go to bed wishing you'd had a better day. To consume it, you have to buy it, and to buy it there must be a trade in it. So doesn't it seem odd that a nation should attempt to 'reach out' [bleck] to its citizens using a medium that (however indirectly) supports something they think it's okay to kill people for?
This in a country where the government recently
scolded one of the opposition states for giving a "We love you" payment to residents of the state. You see, some of the recipients were Muslims and since the money was public money, some of it had to come from taxes on gambling and alcohol. Those things are haram (forbidden), so the money is also a bit dirty. I don't know - I don't follow the reasoning, but it made perfect sense to the
Deputy Prime Minister who is also a Muslim and collects a very fat salary from precisely the same source. Maybe you only have to give dirty money back if you're poor or something.
So anyway - if you're not allowed to accept money from a dirty source, are you allowed to associate with a medium that supports a drug trade that you kill people for participating in? I seek enlightenment. Over to you, Malaysians.
