Two charged with sedition for racist remarks online 3

Part 1|2|3

He [the King of BROBDINGNAG] laughed at my odd Kind of Arithmetick (as he was pleased to call it) in reckoning the Numbers of our People by a Computation drawn from the several Sects among us in Religion and Politicks. He said, he knew no Reason, why those who entertain Opinions prejudicial to the Publick, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was Tyranny in any Government to require the first, so it was Weakness not to enforce the second: For a Man may be allowed to keep poisons in his Closet, but not to vend them about for Cordials. - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, III, vi

For the mother of all collation of links, see Elia's wiki. With that thing, I see no need to continue scouring the net for links to collate. Most of the important new additions had been, in any case, added to the previous two posts at the points where they are helpful (e.g., Singsingapore and Mr. Wang on the "Sedition Act", etc.) To round off the coverage of l'affair on this blog, here are more stuff that caught my eye, or thoughts that come to me (such as the one from Swift above, transferred from the other post)--in no particular order.

- One blog link: this one, because it links here, and because it is Dutch cool.

- Elsewhere in the the mainstream media, Mr. Miyagi has a Today column out, quoting various bloggers. The other ones I found using news.google.com don't seem to go beyond what is already in the initial CNA, ST, Today, AP and Reuters reports. But the ST report is now available from Asia Pacific Media Network (legit, I suppose), in case you do not have a subscription. But for the photos, you have to go to the hardwarezone forum instead, where the discussion continues apace.

- add: Likewise over at the SPUG forum, which, if you remember, was where much of the action of the CZ Affair took place. It is thus unsurprising that forumners there are asking the question (also on many other people's mind--e.g., in this cartoon): how come the scholar got off easy compared to these two? (I do think that there are important differences between the two cases...)

- Talking about forums, the one at www.doggiesite.com has its share of the more recent action, some of which not exactly serious, others are just tasteless, much to the unhappiness of the enthusiasts frequenting the site. add: Another two. What's going on? Does someone have a beef against the good folks of www.doggiesite.com or what?! The site admin is getting fed up. He's locked all the relevant threads, announces that the IP email addresses of the troublemakers will be reported to the relevant authorities, and advises the members not to respond to such posts.

- I see that my previous two posts had been picked up by the Global Voices Online under their Global Roundups. Mr. Brown also has a piece there. Elsewhere, the furor in the comments section of the Slashdot entry did not seem to abate. But I did see more comments by people who are either from or have actually been to or lived in Singapore, and injecting a healthy dose of, you know--facts--about our little country. No, chewing gum is not a "controlled substance" in Singapore, and HDB apartments are not assigned or allotted by the government. (I'm too tired to dig out the exact threads again, but believe you me they are there.)

- All in all, I suspect that the bulk of good (and bad) information on the backstory has more or less been exhausted, for the moment. Unless anyone has caches of the original forum threads or the blog in question, we'll probably just have to wait until more is known about the case. As Mr. Wang assures us, It is the time will eventually come for all the details to be made public. Except that until then, as I said earlier, people will continue to do the easy thing and draw the worse conclusions about the morals of "bloggers" and netizens in general, or about the "climate of fear" in Singapore.

update: - Mr. Wang has a nice post detailing how the case likely proceeded (from someone making a police report to the DPP deciding to charge) which indirectly collaborate my earlier "gut feeling" that someone must have complained--that it wasn't like there is some internet police snooping around the forums. On a related note, I am particularly impressed by the fact that everyone's (from the police to the DPP to the AG) got a "job" to do and exactly that: a picture of the rule of law rather than men.

breaking news: A third one just got charged under the same Sedition Act.