Freedom is Slavery!
Yay, Freedom House has released our latest damning media-freedom results. The original article is at Freedomhouse’s website. This is part of the wording, in case you’re lethargic to click on that;
Media freedom in Singapore is constrained to such a degree that the vast majority of journalists practice self-censorship rather than risk being charged with defamation or breaking the country’s criminal laws on permissible speech. The constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of expression in Article 14, but it also permits restrictions on these rights. Legal constraints include the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act, the Defamation Act, and the Internal Security Act, all of which allow authorities to restrict the circulation of news deemed to incite violence, arouse racial or religious tensions, interfere in domestic politics, or threaten public order, national interest, or national security. The government proposed a series of amendments to the penal code in 2006 that would cover offenses committed via digital media. The draft amendments would not only provide jail terms or fines for defamation, “statements that would cause public mischief,” and the “wounding” of racial or religious feeling, they would also make it a crime for anyone outside the country to abet an offense committed inside the country, thereby allowing the authorities to prosecute internet users living abroad. Singaporean students studying overseas are the presumed targets of this amendment……
Annoying people! Why do you come and ruin my happy ideal that the Gahmen is good and free and the punishments it enacts are only to control unwieldily nation-wrecking elements of society?
At this rate it’s gonna be unsustainable. You have a good education, you teach your cream of the crop about true democracy, about true knowledge gaining, about true critical thought – because otherwise you’ll be really indoctrinating through-and-through. But someday your pupils are going to grow up, and by then the NE that was so soothing in childhood will seem too small a plaster for that gaping wound, and they will either a)try to reform the country [and get jailed?fined?ruined for life?] b)b)brainwashed by the Gahmen or c)leave.
And Joel Tan who talks about ST bloggers who seem as annoyingly preachy as my some history teachers that I know.
Tsktsk! And Melvin from Hougang sifted through the information:
2007
Ranking: 154 out of 195
Category: Free / Partly Free / Not Free
Same Rankings: Afghanistan, Djibouti, Gabon
First class city, third class press. Fun!
