Curb, what curb?

Greet­ings, new read­ers who are here via my favouritest news­pa­per in the whole wide world, The Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald, which said this morn­ing:

Sin­ga­pore has barred ser­vice­men from post­ing unau­tho­rised accounts and pic­tures of mil­i­tary life on the inter­net in a fur­ther tight­en­ing of restric­tions on the grow­ing blog­ging com­mu­nity here.

The new rules, made pub­lic by the Sun­day Times, fol­lowed the con­vic­tion of two eth­nic Chi­nese blog­gers for post­ing anti-Muslim tirades deemed as threats to social har­mony and polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity in the multi-racial city state.

The news­pa­per said at least three national ser­vice­men includ­ing one of Singapore’s most pop­u­lar blog­gers were told by the Min­istry of Defence and mil­i­tary offi­cers to take down per­sonal post­ings about army life overseas…

Please read my pre­vi­ous post again. There was no bar­ring. There is no tight­en­ing. Everything’s still loose (and maybe that’s the problem).

Last week, a Crys­tal (is your mid­dle name Jade?) Chan from the New Paper emailed and then called me to ask me some ques­tions, mostly about whether there were dif­fer­ences between Sin­ga­porean and Amer­i­can blog­gers, and whether there the clam­p­down had affected us Sin­ga­porean bloggers.

So, I tells her, “3 sedi­tion con­vic­tions and 1 attempted defama­tion action does not equate to a clam­p­down, and in fact you’re more likely to be sued in the States for defama­tion than you are here”.

I’ll now add to that and say, “3 sedi­tion con­vic­tions, 1 attempted defama­tion action and 3 warn­ings from MINDEF and a par­tridge in a pear tree does not equate to a clampdown…”

I’ll even post an Army-related video just to prove a point!

Press 1 to pay $5000 fine and escape National Ser­vice altogether

Video: Mr Miyagi gets a National Ser­vice call up while record­ing the mrbrown show (.mov file, 1Mb, 30sec — recorded by Kenny Sia) Sub­scribe to Mul­ti­me­dia Miyagi

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