The authorities see Raja Petra Kamarudin’s post ‘Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell’ as seditious and Malaysiakini has reported which paragraphs in his article were highlighted in the charge sheet against the blogger.

I was surprised to find included this ‘seditious’ paragraph: “Even pigs can be cute,” my wife who was driving the car butted in and I repeated what she said. “Yes, even pigs are cute. These people are not even the same level as pigs. They are lower than pigs. Melayu babi, the whole lot of them.”

raja petra court case 060508 petra arrested I agree with Raja Petra and his wife that pigs are indeed cute. Some Hollywood celebrities keep miniature designer pigs as pets and say they’re very smart and clean animals. When George Clooney’s 18-year-old pot-bellied pig Max died in 2006, it was even reported by BBC .

Sedition is in the mind of the police. For a truer definition of sedition under the law, please view Haris Ibrahim on video at The People’s Parliament, an advocacy website which early this week passed the million hits mark.

The People’s Parliament has – among its several ongoing projects – Hartal MSM which urges a more honest representation of the national narrative or in other words, to call a spade a spade … and a pig a pig.

My own mini project in People’s Parliament is Sun-stroke, dealing with the contestation of views. Sun-stroke is named for theSun newspaper. What we’re advocating is that Sun-block has to be applied whenever one reads its reports, i.e. liberally slather the suncream for protection against the paper’s spin-doctoring.

The current edition of Sun-stroke is headlined ‘Help! MCA think tank a tipple’ and deals with the Chinese party’s attempt at reinventing itself.

MCA and its inbuilt obsolescence

Out of a total 214 parliamentary seats, the Chinese party won a paltry 15 at the last general election. And a significant number were not in Chinese-majority areas. The party’s desperation and slip is showing. It has been upping the ante on its communalistic rhetoric to woo the Chinese back to the MCA fold.

If the trend of the Chinese electorate voting for Malay PKR and PAS candidates were to continue into the next election, you can expect MCA to become obsolete. The party is of course aware that it is losing its traditional vote bank. What it is doing is try to re-brand itself and with ‘too little, too late’ results.

One instance of the rebranding exercise was an article in theSun by CEO of the Institute of Strategic Analysis and Policy Research (Insap). Fui K Soong who heads the MCA think-tank Insap last week wrote an analysis headlined ‘MCA must regain its vision’. The gist of her article is that the Chinese party is sore with the Opposition who have stolen the march on them through Pakatan Rakyat’s emphasis on welfare for the poor.

Nonetheless, for someone heading a think tank – having a string of credentials and some academic cache doubtless – Soong does make over-blown claims for which you wished she would back up by providing the source of her statistics.

For example she says, “Today, 90-95% of the Chinese population (and they are mostly concentrated in the MCA constituencies) are one way or another tied to the private sector either as employees, professionals, businesses or as petty traders. They all have an interest in economic expansion and prosperity.”

mca and penang and election 120208 Malaysia has roughly 6.77 million Chinese, and she claims they are mostly concentrated in the MCA constituencies. Can MCA’s mere 15 federal constituencies accommodate these millions of Chinese? Not that the party’s constituencies in the states are any greater in proportion. MCA after all was completely wiped out in Penang and practically swept away from the West Coast.

But more tellingly, would it be fair for us to extrapolate that if something up to 95% of Chinese are in the private sector, this leaves only portions of the remaining 5% in the other sectors, such as the public sector. If less than 5% of Chinese harbour hopes of entering the civil service for example, I would read this as MCA having been a colossal failure – the party cannot get government jobs for the community it claims to represent.

Dynamics of New Media

A People’s Parliament project in the pipeline is the Anak Bangsa Malaysia roadshow which aims to take one of Haris’ pioneer causes to parts of the country where the races are more polarised as well as to learn from other parts of the country, such as Kelantan and Sabah, where the races get along better than in the rest of Malaysia.

One action to promote national unity that Haris encourages is when we’re asked to fill our particulars in official forms, under ‘Sex’ say “Yes please” and under ‘Race’, to write “Irrelevant”.

However, I’m disappointed that Haris for all his political-correctness is just as guilty of insulting animals. ‘Chimps’, he had called the prime movers of the Kongres Permuafakatan Melayu.

Kongres is a coalition of 200 Malay NGOs to ‘uphold Malay rights’. Haris calling the NGO leaders as such is a derogatory comparison which has hurt the feelings of cute and cuddly chimpanzees all over the world.

But I guess that’s what a contestation of views is all about. Opinions are free. Whose is more convincing? Project Sun-stroke explores this facet. theSun is a member of the Fourth Estate, blogs belong to the Fifth Estate.

If you’re at the People’s Parliament, you’ll see a panel on the right of the page that says ‘Top Clicks’. Two clicks have presented a pair of contesting views: the ‘Bibliobibuli’ blog administered by English writer Sharon Bakar carries another side to the story claimed by sun2surf.com. Hartal MSM similarly with ‘Do Malaysian newspapers not publish clarification?’ and our topic is related to Sharon’s post titled ‘Corporate Censorship’.

cij press freedom central market 030508 zainon pak non At a recent forum to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, theSun consultant editor Zainon Ahmad told the audience, “As the [Bersih] procession was going on, we were informed by the internal Security Ministry to play down the event and to limit the story only to one picture and 10 paragraphs.”

Malaysiakini reported Zainon as saying when his paper abided by the same condition during the Hindraf rally, they were blasted by the ministry for not playing up the story. He added: “It shows that even the Home Ministry itself does not have a foggiest idea how the media should behave.”

I would add that the licensed media themselves do not know how they should behave because as Zainon has admitted, they only obediently obeyed orders from the top. The Fifth Estate on the other hand is less obedient than the Fourth and if you are to believe the government, more subversive. Hence the reason Raja Petra is in jail.

Disobedient people are naturally more vocal than obedient ones, and if you wish to speak your mind, please visit ‘Help! MCA think tank a tipple’ at People’s Parliament.