reduced and recycled

Things seem to be heating up, and the crackdown has begun. When you have the Chief Minister stepping up to the plate and demanding some justice for people thousands of miles away, it begins to look more and more like Myanmar than Malaysia over here. True to form, Nazri wets himself and tells the Chief Minister of Tamil Naidu to, basically, piss off. How mature. But what else is expected from someone does Badawi’s barking?

In the meantime, Hindraf lawyers were arrested and released, and another one arrested and then released again. At the same time, the NST is reporting how 88 people arrested in the course of the Hindraf rally were charged merely for turning up. The pattern emerges, especially with Badawi’s talk of using the ISA.

The government is running scared.

They are shit scared of escalation.

They are shit scared of what they might do when pushed into a corner.

And they aren’t mincing words about how they’re planning to wipe out the possibility of future rallies. In the case of the Hindraf crackdown, their position is clear: they are hell-bent on treating the rally as a racist uprising. It doesn’t help that the memorandum submitted to Gordon Brown (the purported memorandum - I don’t know if it’s true) was cast in extremist language - ending with a threat of Indians taking to the shadows and whipping up an insurgency.

In the meantime, the firestorm surrounding the leaders of Hindraf and the members charged throws a veil over the real concerns of the Indian community - those same reasons that pushed them to the streets to demand their rights.

The gaffs in this cyclone of spin, though, present opportunities for a good laugh. Like that one about Nazri characterizing K. Devamany as “Robin Hood“. Well, firstly, K. Devamany isn’t a Robin Hood. He’s the same fler who made a fool of himself on Al-Jazeera, after that channel gave the government an opportunity to have their say.

And secondly, stealing from the rich to feed the poor is illegal but not morally reprehensible. Robin Hood, therefore, was doing the right thing, Nazri seems to suggest. He probably realized his gaff and quickly recovered: K. Devamany, he’s saying, was trying to be popular. Well, logically, that means that doing the moral thing is the right thing and will be popular with the community. Well, duh! If being Robin Hood is morally admirable, then Nazri and the rest of his ilk are the Sheriffs of Nottingham!

Maybe Nazri should think before he talks? Fat chance!

Speaking of the news, I fully agree with Helen Ang’s latest article: it’s time we start thinking about making the press accountable to us. The mainstream media is the mouthpiece of the government. This is a fact, and I’m making this assertion based on the biased reporting of the past two rallies alone. That should be enough.

Newspapers are a business. Helen advocates canceling our newspaper subscriptions. I think we can go further. We can let it be known that we wont’ support any company that advertises with the mainstream media.

We aren’t just the rakyat, we are consumers as well.

We can withhold support of any company that wishes to advertise with the mainstream media. Companies are businesses. Imagine what happens when 27 million people boycott these companies.

How fast do you think they’ll pull out their ads from the mainstream media?