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Malaysian Candidates Required to Have Blogs
Pioneer Woman writes "Abdul Rahman Dahlan, secretary general of the United Malays National Organization party's youth wing, said all those vying for national youth posts must have blogs to introduce themselves and their programs ahead of party elections in December. The decision appeared aimed at countering heavy losses that the ruling National Front coalition suffered in last month's general elections. In a country where mainstream media is tightly controlled by the government they underestimated the power of online campaigning. In the past, party politicians have said bloggers spread lies and rumors but now even youth deputy Khairy Jamaluddin — who once compared bloggers to monkeys living by the law of the jungle — has a blog."
This site is and pretty much has always been a personal blog with a particularly active comments section. There are many stories that are posted in categories they are at best tangentially related to. Who can forget kdawson's past love affair with putting virtually everything in the Enlightenment category, even though that category was intended for news about the Enlightenment window manager?
The Politics section was originally designed to drive page hits by taking advantage of the hot topic of the day, that being the 2004 elections. It has since morphed into a holding ground for basically any vaguely political story, and serves as a way to get controversial (and therefore high page view generating) stories on Slashdot that aren't necessarily directly tech related. The FAQ itself is so rarely updated that you could hardly expect it to contain up to date information on what individual sections of the site are currently used for, or even provide a good list of what sections currently exist.
In short, take a deep breath, relax, and learn to let these things slide.
A correction: His party did not lose their majority. As of now, they lost their 2/3 majority which they have held for a very long time. The party still form government with simple majority, elects the Prime Minister, and can pass any law they wishes if voting enbloc.
Why is the 2/3 so significant, considering in most matured democracy getting 60% itself is considered a landslide? There are a few reasons:
- The ruling party is very dominant and had always held on to power since independence by large margins,
- The ruling party affliated companies owns most mainstream media and controls it tightly, so even with rampant corruption and abuse of power, all these are surpressed and the opposition made to look like weak and ineffectual,
- The last time the 2/3 majority was lost in 1969 - racial riots ensued, lots of people were killed, emergency rule was declared, and the government made a deal with an opposition splinter to join the coalition when parliament reconvened a few years later thus regaining the 2/3. So the government use this event (called the May 13 1969 riots) to scare and warn the populace: that to deny the ruling party 2/3 majority is to invite racial bloodshed again,
- With 2/3 majority the government have made more than 160 amendments to the constitution as they liked and wish. A recent one was to extend the Election Commissioner's tenure even when he was supposed to step down (some allerge that this is so that he can be trusted to skew the results in the government's favour).
- Internal politics within the ruling party is very intense with multiple 'camps', strong vested interest due to concentration of money and power, and ineffectual whips. Each camp is waiting to pounce to secure the crown of Prime Ministership.
Despite all these, the ruling party still managed to lose the 2/3 majority even with tight control of mainstream media (who denounce the opposition mercilessly before the elections). The explanation most pundits agree is that for once, the younger people have internet access to alternative media exposes of all the many scandals that came to light in the past few years.
This is a typical knee-jerk and panic reaction by the government that is bewildered and shaken that its tight grip on people's ears and eyes are loosening (it even got a Kafkesque Ministry of Information), and instead of cleaning up its act, feel like they must master the PR game that is now shifting to the internet.
To which I say... good luck to them!