Brilliant Stupidity

Amazing what can happen in the space of a week.

Here I am again, typing in my chair, with the familiar orange tinged light bathing my room and the soft burr of the fan behind me. I expected to come home to a relatively unchanged world.

Sadly, this is not the case.

Apparently the past few days have been filled with an overwhelming assault on the sheer intelligence of the Malaysian citizenry. It's always amazing to see how powerful a tool ignorance is, and how blind, silly ambition makes fools out of (ordinarily foolish enough) people. Sad, sad, little players.

I'm talking about the Berita Harian fiasco regarding Jeff Ooi. Some of you may have heard of this, or even followed its course. I won't comment on it yet, since I'm only beginning to scratch the surface of what's been happening so far, but I'll post some links for the interested reader. It's the least I can do.

To paraphrase: Jeff's site made it into the main page of the Berita Harian, after an anonymous reader made a report to the daily of a comment posted on the blog. I'll leave it at that for now, for I'm a bit incensed, and it's never good to blog when in that state of mind. Anyway, here are the links so people can see for themselves:

Idlan's first alert
A newer alert, also by Idlan
The web version of Berita Harian's "report"
Jeff's responses

One last thing. If we can use our homegrown technology to catch the culprit who wrote the malicious emails to national treasure Siti Nurhaliza, why can't the authorities just ask Jeff for the IP of the commenter and track him/her down? Or do we persevere in the mentality that to kill a mosquito we have to burn down the whole house? I leave it to my readers to make their own conclusions. Who knows how much longer we have before we need licences to think?

Over and out.