We Had The Freedom, Yet We Shy Away from It

Copied from my techical journal, The Digital Blue Wave:

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Coming back to my techie life, I have been pretty much slowly crawling back to the things that I used to do: exploring new technological advances, doing more programming, keeping focus on what I want to achieve, mastering some skills, and so on. And of course, what’s a techie life all about if we didn’t get into the community :)? So yeah, so I made my silent return to a few tech forums that I used to join in the past.

There’s one particular forum that I kind of find it funny. It’s not because it has some new wacky changes that made it humorous, but instead it’s because it seems that the community haven’t changed a bit.

So the story goes when one of the topic asking for (extremely vague) help on ASP.NET, and due to interesting circumstances the topic derails and went off-tangent into a hot debate on the ethical issues of being academically honest (i.e. Ahem… The ethical discussion on… hiring someone to do one’s final year project). And a hot yet interesting debate ensues, and just when it comes to its climax, suddenly some cold water has been pour on it and people suddenly pull themselves out from the discussion.

And the reason? They don’t want to spoil the festive mood of Deepavali and Hari Raya! What?!

OK, I DO have to admit that there are slight mudslinging happening over there, but I don’t see the reason why people trying to shy away from intellectual debate and conflicts. As much as I would say that there are some participants really need to pull themselves away and keep their mind cool (and don’t take things too personally), that doesn’t warrant having somebody else to tell everybody to stop this interesting debate!

Hello, if you don’t want a heated discussion to spoil your festive mood, don’t read it in the first place! Don’t be a spoil sport and kill a good discussion. (as much as I knew that a person’s (except from a mod or the admin) voice don’t carry much actual impact to actually stop the discussion, and yet I still find that insulting.

… Maybe it’s just typically… Malaysian? More often than not we seem to be the gentle type who would want to avoid any sort of conflict as much as possible. And yet is this false sense of harmony is going to do any good for us? No wonder we always see a lot of whiners when it comes to everything: especially politics. So what’s the point of freedom of speech in our country’s constitution if we don’t use it?

Coming back, kudos for Amy Tang for stating her strong stance against this corrupted behaviour! (Refer to her Nov 10 entry, and do comment her on that one ^^)

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OK, back to work now.