The convenient scapegoat barring technology and social media

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The convenient scapegoat

ALONG THE WATCHTOWER By M.VEERA PANDIYAN veera@thestar.com.my

Barring technology and the social media is not the answer to quelling unrest.
Image via CrunchBase

IS the social media and free flow of information via digital technology good or bad? It depends on where it happens and whom it affects.

Text messages, Twitter and Facebook were hailed as powerful tools against repression when the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya took to the streets to protest against their authoritarian rulers in February.

British Prime Minister David Cameron declared then that the Internet and social media belonged to people who had “enough of corruption, of having to make do with what they’re given, of having to settle for second best”.

But when riots and anarchy broke out back home in London and elsewhere in Britain, the reaction was patently different.

“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media.

“Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.”

And Cameron told an emergency session of the British Parliament: “So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

The UK police have rounded up close to 5,000 people and taken about 1,000 rioters and looters to court since the ugly wave of unrest and arson hit.

Britain’s entire national intelligence machinery – including its Security Service, or M15, which usually handles espionage and terrorism – is now focused on identifying the culprits and trying to prevent future occurrences of disorder.



The authorities have been generally blaming the misuse of social media for the mayhem; it appears that Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was the most effective tool used because of its tight security features.

The BBM application provides password-protected messages to individuals or groups that can only be read with a PIN.

During the height of the riots, British MP David Lammy used Twitter to call for the halt of the service by tweeting: “BBM clearly helping rioters outfox police. Suspend it.”

RIM, Facebook and Twitter have since given assurances that they would comply with the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the country’s privacy laws.

Besides his government’s willingness to consider shutting down or blocking access to social networks, the British PM also pledged a “zero tolerance” system of policing under which no form of law breaking would be condoned.

Critics have been quick to censure Cameron’s call for curbs and tough measures as smacking of hypocrisy and as a violation of free speech, civil liberties and human rights.

Index on Censorship news editor Padraig Reidy slammed it as “a bizarre and kind of knee-jerk reaction by the government”.

“More recently, we’ve seen this kind of thing in Egypt,” he said.

Actually, the most recent incident of shutting down a phone network happened last week in the United States.

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut down the cell phone service at four stations to prevent a protest rally over the shooting of two men by police.

BART deactivated the service from 4pm to 7pm to stop protest organisers from communicating.

Meanwhile, China, which was subject to Western sermons over its fierce crackdown on dissent in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, has raised safety concerns over the 2012 Olympics to be staged in London.

The Chinese media has responded to the UK riots with “a mixture of shock and schadenfreude”, as fittingly described by the Daily Telegraph.

“The West has been talking about supporting Internet freedom, and opposing other countries’ government to control this kind of websites. Now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit (of their complacency) and they can’t complain about it,” wrote a People’s Daily commentator.

But the real issue to be addressed by governments everywhere is distrust brought about by the gap between the haves and have-nots and unfairness, whether real of perceived.

Ian Williams, a veteran journalist and analyst, described it aptly when he said the UK government’s posturing ignored the fact lawlessness in the highest places was at the root of the riots.

“The rioters who were interviewed and people on the streets all remarked upon members of parliament stealing expenses from the tax payer, mostly with impunity, although some went to jail,” he said when interviewed by Press TV.

“They look at the bankers making billions of dollars and getting away with it; they look at Rupert Murdoch, the head of News International, hacking innocent people’s telephones, and getting away with it.
“So basically the message that is being sent from the ruling classes of Britain is that the law is not there to be obeyed.

“So to start shouting that the lesser people - the people who steal televisions - should be locked up for life whereas the people who steal whole industries and banks and countries should be given knighthoods and peerages for it is not really a sustainable one on the streets I suspect.”

> Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan likes this quote by Edgar Allan Poe: The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Malaysians are always an ‘exception’?

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We are always an ‘exception’

Musings By Marina Mahathir

Malaysian policies often state that we are different and therefore cannot be compared with others. Yet those who join peaceful marches are likened to British rioters. Suddenly we are the same?

ARE we getting progressively schizophrenic? Judging by current responses to events around the world, it would be easy to conclude that we are.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses and to behave normally in social situations.

If you read up on Malaysian policies and statements on various issues, the one striking factor is our insistence on exceptionalism. That is, we are different and therefore cannot be compared with any other country.

Fiery aftermath: The violent riots in London left many properties in ruin. — AFP

In the early years of the AIDS pandemic, we thought we were protected because we were different. If non-Muslims in other Muslim countries use the word “Allah” for God with no fuss, ours can’t because we are different. We are apparently unique and incomparable to anyone else in the world.

Which is why it puzzles me that all of a sudden our citizens, or at least the ones who want to voice their opinions with peaceful assemblies and marches, are being compared to British rioters and looters.
If we are always different, how come suddenly we are the same?

Going by the statements of our leaders, basically we are nothing more than savages who would rob, rape, loot and pillage given half the chance. Therefore, we need all sorts of laws to keep us in check and not venture in groups of more than five outside our homes.

Now, this is why that schizophrenic inability to think logically comes into play. Despite evidence that none of the 30,000 or so peaceful marchers last July robbed, raped, looted or pillaged, our leaders insist that we would have. They must be looking at mirrors.

Just a few days ago the fellow who demonstrated how inconvenient a protest is by inconveniencing everyone in Penang declared that he would burn down two online news portals whose reports he disagreed with. Now if that’s not London rioter behaviour, I don’t know what is.



More disturbingly, after already having insulted all the good citizens who exercised their right to peaceful assembly, our leaders go on to insult them some more.

Instead of being proud that we did not have the type of violence that the UK experienced, instead of talking about how so much more civilised our people are, our leaders liken us to rioters who have vandalised, stolen and killed.

Talk about the inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

A certain amount of hypocrisy also rears its ugly head. What if Mark Duggan, the man who was shot by police in London and whose family’s peaceful protest became the original rallying cry for the rioters, was Mohamad Duggan?

Between 1987 and 1993 and 2000 and 2005, the Palestinian people went through two uprisings against the Israeli government, known as the First and Second Intifadas, respectively. Both Intifadas involved demonstrations, protests and, yes, a certain amount of violent rioting.

They were met with an even more violent response from the Israelis that resulted in many deaths and the eventual blockade of Gaza, still in force today.

Our government supported the Intifadas then. Does that mean that our government supports the right of Palestinians to demonstrate, protest and riot, but refuses its own people’s right to do much less, that is to just march peacefully?

Or is the logic that when governments are democratically elected, its people then lose the right to protest against them?

Conveniently ignored, too, is the fact that in the UK, protests and demonstrations are held all the time without the type of violence we saw recently.

One of the biggest was in 2003 when hundreds of thousands of people marched against the Iraq war. At the time we looked benignly at this because we had the same stand. Did we tell the Brits and others round the world that they should not demonstrate against the war?

So what is the message here? We may be trusted to peacefully protest as long as the subject of our protest is in sync with the Government’s. Otherwise, if we should protest for free and fair elections, against corruption or anything else that the Constitution gives us the right to, we are labelled as unpatriotic thugs out to disturb the peace and destroy the economy and image of our country.

Looking at the UK riots, are we even talking about the same thing? What cause was the UK rioters espousing?

Some wide reading instead of political posturing might be more beneficial here. The UK rioters did not loot bookshops, and some have suggested it’s because they don’t like to read.

Perhaps they are not unlike some of our politicians.

British Society is Broken: Cameron's gang war 'long overdue'

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Cameron's gang war 'long overdue'

Source: AFP

For the communities and youth workers facing the daily horror of gang violence on England's streets, Prime Minister David Cameron's vow to tackle the problem following last week's riots is long overdue.

Cameron has declared "all-out war" on gangs, which he blamed for fuelling four nights of frenzied looting and said they were "a major criminal disease that has infected streets and estates across our country".

He has hired US "supercop" Bill Bratton to advise on tackling street gangs and has rolled out the use of court injunctions to stop gangs wearing colours of allegiance, congregating in certain places and using dangerous dogs as weapons.

Cameron also admitted that "social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our faces", and vowed to redouble efforts to tackle broken families, welfare dependence and educational failure.

But to those living and working with the problem, many question why it has taken so long for the government to notice -- during which time gangs are getting more and more violent, and their members younger and younger.

Sheldon Thomas, an ex-gang member who runs a mentoring programme in London, supports Cameron's assertion that British society is "broken".



"People like me have been saying this for decades," he said, adding: "People are angry, people are frustrated. There are no jobs, there is no aspiration."

He also accused Cameron of only acting on gangs now because shocking images of youths rampaging through relatively wealthy areas of London last week caused a national outcry, when successive governments failed to respond in the same way to up to 800 gang-related murders in the past decade.

"Are we now a nation that values materialism -- businesses and shops --more than the life of a 14-year-old kid who was chased down a road by several gang members who stabbed him 17 times for his BlackBerry?" he asked angrily.

Youth worker Patrick Regan, who has been advising Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the recent violence, agrees that the government has failed to address the issue, although he is more hopeful that ministers can help.



"People have been warning for years that something like this could happen. I'm hoping there will be a long-term view of things, that we won't paper over the cracks," he told AFP.

Regan, the chief executive of youth charity XLP, cautioned however against any simplistic definition of gangs, and also warned that it was unlikely that organised criminal groups were entirely responsible for last week's riots.

"It wasn't all young people, and some were just purely opportunistic. Young people who just got wrapped up in it, crowd dynamics took over," he said.

He said he had spoken to his local authority who reported that known gang members had actually stayed home during the riots, "because they knew if they went out they'd get targeted by police".

One of the main pieces of research on British gangs, a 2009 report by the respected Centre for Social Justice thinktank, found that 170 gangs operated in London, although Thomas puts the number at 260, with 15,000 individual members.

Another 170 operate in the Scottish city of Glasgow, where police and local authorities claim to have cut violent offending among gang members by almost 50 percent in two years through a targeted community initiative.

Community workers are calling for more resources for proven mentoring and intervention schemes, and the US supercop, Bratton, warned this weekend that a police crackdown alone would not solve Britain's gang problems.

"You can’t just arrest your way out of the problem. It’s going to require a lot of intervention and prevention strategies and techniques," he said.

Although in the past gangs used to be defined by ethnicity, most are now about territory -- the Pembury Boys take their name from the Pembury housing estate in Hackney, east London, for example -- and they often control drugs within that.

Although they range from criminal organisations to groups of disaffected teenagers, a recent government report found that people join them for protection, a sense of belonging and status as well as a way of making money.

Gavin McKenna, 21, was in a gang in Newham in east London before he turned his life around. Although he carried a knife and robbed people, he told AFP that he and his friends weren't an organised group, "we were just trying to survive".

He grew up with an abusive father who left when he was young, had little money and his gang represented both a way of earning cash and a substitute family -- a story that is played out over and over among Britain's gang members.

McKenna says he has little faith in the government's new drive against gangs.

"I think they're going to patch it over, like they always do," he said, adding: "They don't care about us."

-Sapa-AFP

Related posts:

UK Riots: Lessons to be learned; Role for US crime guru?

UK riots: resembles more of the Third World, bring up questions about society, moral decay! Anger still burns

Anarchy in the UK - London Riots Sparked by Police Beating, Poverty, Ethnic differences...

Anarchy in UK - London Riots: Malaysian student mugged...

Three Ways to Think Big and Start Small

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From katerha via flickr

Taking the plunge into entrepreneurship is simultaneously exhilarating and paralyzing. If you’re like most entrepreneurs you’ve been living and breathing your business idea for what feels like forever, growing its potential in your head with each passing moment. And despite the anticipation and excitement, when the time comes for action, you feel stuck. Where do you even begin? How do you go about building an empire, changing an industry, or creating a legendary business?

The key to success for most entrepreneurs is learning to toggle back and forth between thinking big and moving things forward, which often requires taking small manageable steps. Here are three ways to make some progress.

1. Get in the Right Frame of Mind Entrepreneurship is a marathon not a sprint. It’s easy to succumb to the feeling of urgency to do everything now. But burnout and entrepreneurial fatigue can mean sabotage for your business as well as your personal life. Prioritize longevity and keep one eye on the horizon. Think about what pace you need to set now to maintain your stamina and enthusiasm for years to come.
   
   Establishing good habits and resisting bad ones go a long way to preventing burnout. I have several strategies for staying refreshed: setting and sticking to my work/life boundaries; making space for creative thinking time; and taking vacations. When I don’t practice these habits, I feel compromised and overwhelmed. When I do, I am optimistic, creative and energized.
   
   


2. Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment Think about the big questions that drive your business. What challenges are you trying to solve? What changes are you going to make to your industry? How will you know when you’ve succeeded? While these questions can help to keep the big picture in mind and your mission in focus, they don’t exactly inspire a neat step-by-process. And the truth is that there may be multiple, viable alternatives instead of one clear “right” answer.
   
   Instead of pre-determining a hypothetical outcome, get clarity by experimenting with various strategies. Experimentation will help you get more information, test the market, and build momentum for the big master plan. It will also help you get products into the marketplace faster and help you resist the inclination to be a perfectionist. For example you can test retail concepts with a pop-up store, improve products with focus groups, and test services with pilot participants. Consider the biggest question facing your business and what experiments might yield the necessary data.
   
   


3. Brush Up on Your History Lessons What businesses or entrepreneurs to you look to for inspiration. Its important to identify businesses you want to be like when you grow up. But remember, these entrepreneurial superheros had beginnings too. Do some research to find out their early days were like. Learn from their lessons and take note of their milestones and decisions points. Seeing their journey helps to demystify the process and makes your business heroes human. It’s helpful to know that all business heroes had doubts and doubters of their own.
   
   It’s also important to dismantle your own myths of the overnight success. For example, few people realize that Hanky Panky, the famed lingerie company, had already been in business for 27 years before they scored the front-page Wall Street Journal article that made them a household name. Instead of focusing on their impressive brand recognition or their significant market share, see what insight you can glean from Hanky Panky’s recent decision to build a robust e-commerce site after being exclusively wholesale or their recent introduction of several new product lines. What can your business learn from this example and the examples of the giants in your industry?

Keeping your focus on building long term momentum, establishing good habits and taking small steps can help build momentum that will take you closer to your business goals.

Courtesy of Y.E.C. 

Adelaide Lancaster is co-founder of In Good Company, a collaborative workspace for women business owners in NYC. In addition, she consults to small business owners helping them to create and grow businesses that meet their needs and goals. Adelaide regularly teaches, speaks, and writes on topics relating to women and entrepreneurshi

via Y.E.C.

Co-Founded by Natalie MacNeil and Scott Gerber, Y.E.C. Women is an initiative of the Young Entrepreneur Council (Y.E.C.), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The Y.E.C promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth.

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Penang, It’s time for 'softly-softly' Koh to let go!

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It’s time for Koh to let go

Analysis By BARADAN KUPPUSAMY

Calls for Gerakan president Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon to step down from leading the Barisan Nasional charge in Penang is gaining momentum, putting the coalition at a political crossroad.

THE Hungry Ghost festival is in full swing in Penang but Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon, the former chief minister and current Gerakan president, is seeing more political ghosts than he could imagine.
Image via Wikipedia

He feels a puppet master is pulling the strings to force him out. He feels there's an agenda against him.

He blames the Opposition of wanting to dethrone him. If he listens hard enough or has the gall to admit it, the loudest calls are from his Barisan Nasional partners, from his Gerakan party and from the Penangites.

The calls are coming in stringent and unwavering, so much so that Dr Koh called a press conference in Kuala Lumpur on Friday to refute the charges.

He gave investment figures that “skyrocketed” under his watch as chief minister from 1990 to 2008.

He gave facts and figures of the projects undertaken during his tenure, the constructions that were done and the wave of investments.

But the fact remains that under his 18-year stewardship of Penang, the island's economy headed south and a new generation of Penangites could not find any use for a man who bent over backwards to please big brother Umno.

What counts is that Penangites rejected him so thoroughly like Sabahans did to Datuk Harris Salleh and his Berjaya Cabinet in 1985 and brought in the rule of Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan.

No matter how he wants to justify it or mitigate it, the fact remains that the voters of Penang have rejected him in totality.

After such a massive and thorough defeat, it is a wonder that only now, nearly four years on, that we hear rumblings for Dr Koh to step down as Gerakan president and as a federal minister.

The rumblings are coming from within Barisan Nasional and not from the Opposition, which is happy if Dr Koh stays so that it can continue to lampoon him for all the failures in Penang from uncollected rubbish to closure of foreign factories, which were household names, moving to China and the dramatic drop in foreign direct investment.

The verdict of 2008 shows Dr Koh, 62, has outlived his usefulness, so his critics charge. He is no longer relevant and has become a liability and a burden to Barisan Nasional.

Dr Koh is a man from the past, best suited for the world of academia. In fact, he was in academia as a deputy dean of education in Universiti Sains Malaysia but was persuaded to leave that cosy and comfortable job for the topsy-turvy world of politics.

Dr Koh was a big name in academia with a string of degrees and awards to his name.

And the Chinese value a man of learning like him. He was an ideal man for the times, his education, his intellectual rigour and his origins made him best suited to take over from Gerakan founder Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu as administrator of Penang.

Dr Koh was born in Penang in 1949 and attended Phor Tay Primary School and Chung Ling High School. He went on to graduate from Princeton University in 1970 with a degree in physics, and obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1977 in economics and sociology of education.

He was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University and made the transition to politics, first winning in the 1982 general election as a Gerakan Youth leader.

Eventually he climbed the ladder to become deputy president of Gerakan all in 15 years and under the tutelage of the plain-speaking Tun Dr Lim Keng Yaik.

After 18 years at the helm, years that some critics say he has nothing to show for he and his entire Gerakan team of Cabinet ministers were wiped out in the 2008 tsunami.

A new man is at the helm as the chief minister in DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng.

First Dr Koh is not doing what he should do fighting Pakatan Rakyat point for point in Penang and at the same time revive his own party's fortunes.

Neither is he combative nor has the leadership acumen to lead the state Barisan in its time of crisis.

The most telling thing said of Dr Koh came from his former boss Dr Lim who, in a recent interview, said Dr Koh had the intellectual capacity and integrity but was unable to match it with political decisions or to provide the crucial political leadership.

Dr Lim, who headed Gerakan for 27 years, believes that Gerakan has lost Penang for good.

Barisan Nasional has carried Dr Koh for some three decades and it is time to let him go.

What next for ‘softly-softly’ Koh?

COMMENT By JOCELINE TAN

Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon is trying to move his political base from Penang to Kuala Lumpur but the renewed pressure about his political future shows that he is still a liability for Gerakan in Penang.

GERAKAN members in Penang say Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon has sold the Tanjong Bungah house in Penang where he had lived for much of his 18 years as chief minister. He seldom goes back to Penang these days and seems set to make Kuala Lumpur his home.

The talk in his party is that he is preparing to make Kuala Lumpur his next political base too and that he is eyeing a parliamentary seat in the next general election. Some people call it running away; others say he is merely moving on. Anyway, Penang is no longer a tenable option for the Gerakan president. His party has been wiped out in the state that used to be synonymous with Gerakan and he is still being blamed for the catastrophe.

At the height of their political standing, party members were fond of saying that Penang is Gerakan and Gerakan is Penang. And now, without Penang, the party is floundering and Dr Koh’s shortcomings have become the DAP’s strength. He has not had an easy time since the 2008 general election. But the last one week has seen him come under renewed pressure to atone for the loss of Penang to Pakatan Rakyat.

Scathing remarks about him by Tan Sri Tan Kok Pin, a developer tycoon and Penang Chamber of Commerce president, resulted in calls for Dr Koh to step aside in Gerakan and give Barisan Nasional a chance to make a comeback. They claimed he is not helping his party or the coalition in Penang in accepting a Cabinet post via the Dewan Negara.

Several figures in his party have defended him and he held a press conference in Kuala Lumpur yesterday to refute some of the allegations. The circle around him imagine there is a conspiracy to bring him down and they use terms like “orchestrated” and “coordinated attacks”.

But, by and large, his party, especially in Penang, has been strangely tongue-tied about the criticism. The Penang Gerakan folks are aware of what people in the state think of the party and the former chief minister. They are disturbed that public sentiment has yet to shift in their favour three years after the political tsunami.

“I get a lot of that from members on the ground but I always ask them: I know you guys want a change in leadership, but tell me, change to who? They have no answer to that and neither do I,” said Gerakan Youth chief Lim Si Pin.

Party members, as Lim admitted, are resigned to accepting the situation till the next general election which will decide the fate of the party.

Dr Koh has shown little sign that he is about to exit the political stage now or in the near future. During the recent party’s state conventions, he asked members to give him two terms as president so that he can put things back on course.

Some were stunned because they felt that he should be thinking about a workable exit plan instead of trying to push for an extended term in office. Some had even wanted him to address the transition issue at the coming National Delegates Confer-ence but it looks like that is the last thing on his mind.

The trouble is that very few top leaders in Gerakan are in a position to ask Dr Koh to go because many of them had also lost in the election and are unwilling to make way.

There was empathy for Dr Koh immediately after March 8. He won respect for overseeing the peaceful transition of power to the new regime and was praised as a gentleman politician.

He could have gone with his head held high at that point. His sin was being unable to stand up to Umno but he had little personal baggage - he was seen as a relatively clean leader and he led a moderate private life.

But the goodwill quickly evaporated when he accepted a Cabinet post via the Senate. The public perception was that he had not taken responsibility for his party’s losses. He conceded the moral high ground by accepting the ministership and when MIC president G. Palanivel was appointed a minister recently, some blamed Dr Koh for setting the precedent.

The fact that he is making a fresh start elsewhere also irks those who are left trying to clear the mess in Penang. They feel that he is washing his hands of a problem that had and still has much to do with him.

Penang is where the party base is most extensive, yet he has relegated the party’s recovery in the state to Penang chairman Datuk Dr Teng Hock Nan who has been unable to inspire the troops.

“He should consider not running in the next general election. He would bring the whole party down with him if he does. He is a smart guy. He should be able to see that,” said a Penang Gerakan figure.

Even former party president Tun Dr Lim Keng Yaik has not been spared – he is being blamed for grooming Dr Koh.

He has privately told people in that blustery way of his: “Don’t think I don’t feel bad about what has happened to the party. I am very frustrated but there is nothing I can do.”

Chinese history is full of lessons in politics and Dr Koh should know that his intellectual and “softly-softly” style was suitable in peace-time politics. But it is a war zone out there these days and Gerakan needs a wartime leader – someone who can take the hits and hit out at the same time.

In private conversations, party members readily admit that he is not balancing his priorities between the party and his ministry. They feel that he should spend more time on party matters.

Instead, he seems more concerned about his ministry duties, to be seen with the Prime Minister and appearing in the media with him.

Dr Koh has been put on the defensive by renewed pressure for him to go. While it is true that the calls are coming from people without any real locus standi, the point is: There are not enough calls from his own party expressing confidence in his leadership.

It will be 30 years in politics for Dr Koh next year. That is a long time and that may be why people are wondering whether he still deserves to be up there.