Slashdot Mirror
Singapore Bloggers Charged Under Sedition Act
ChannelNewsAsia is reporting that for the first time in at least 10 years Singapore has invoked the sedition act and charged two local bloggers for posting racist comments on an online forum. From the article: 'Said Singaporean blogger Benjamin Lee (Mr Miyagi):" A lot of them will be looking at their blogs and wondering if they made any legally seditious remarks. I think because of the way this will be played up, it's negative publicity for the Singapore blogging community."'
for non-southeast asian slashdotters:
singapore is an outpost of chinese in a malay region
it is a country independent of malaysia simply because the chinese there feared dilution of their power by malays
there is a history of friction between the chinese merchant class and the local malay population throughout the region, actually very similar to the resentment europeans had for the jewish merchant class that led to so much racially motivated nastiness there for centuries
malays and filipinos to this day complain of how they are treated by the chinese in singapore, who they say view them as little more than domestic servants or coolies
in the 1960s, under the guise of fighting communism, indonesians slaughtered thousands simply for having chinese ancestry... and confiscated their businesses
so maybe some of you who are very idealistically attached to the concept of free speech, without any mitigating conditions, perhaps you can at least understand why singapore would be so interested on clamping down on hate speech in its territory: it's not a big country, and it must remain at peace with its huge malay neighbors, at whom this hate speech is directed by some really stupid chinese bigotted bloggers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wrong! Nobody, that I have EVER heard of, has ever been prosecuted in the US for denying the holocaust. In fact, there are plenty of people who deny the holocaust and they are allowed to continue on and print/publish/say whatever they want. While you can certainly point to some flaws in the Hate Speech legislation, we are nowhere near the state of Singapore. And for good reason.
Don't make a mountain out of molehill. It's not even a close comparison.
His blog can be found here and the post where he talks about the charges can be found here.