Non taken.
“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.”
Mark Twain

Do tell the dark one to come back. We miss him dearly ;-)
g

This is essentially the take of our blogo history.

I think all of you should read it.

As their planners will be using it as a benchmark definitive reference point for their planning efforts.

http://dotseng.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/suggested-solutions-for-managing-e-relationships-between-netizens-and-government-part-1-preamble/

Thank You

Y2K

How are you? Tell yr team not to take what was said personally. They’re (brotherhood) flustered because by allowing those faith sensitive comments to pass thru. Rightly or wrongly, they felt you left the back door open. You need to understand this a very sensitive period and this brotherhood people are always slightly paranoid. They believe, real or imagined, there are dark elements out there in blogosphere who are out to conspire and do them in. They psyche is very much like the state of Israel. It’s a survival mechanism thingy. Nothing personal, I can assure you.

On top of that their dream team seems to be hitting a brick wall in their proposal to AIMS. They can’t seem to stabilize any of their models.

You see their plan is divided into 3 phases spread out across 5 years. It’s really like a rocket with 3 stages, each segment needs to peel off for the next stage to reach higher. From what I am able to see, every time, they press the launch button, they can’t even get it 2 ft off the ground. At other times, the first stage goes well, but somewhere in the separation it just explodes. Every time, this happens, everyone looks down and they need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again from scratch.

You see a simulation program doesn’t lie. Neither can it be negotiated around with beautiful words. Not like a human argument. It needs to make math sense. So far they can’t even get their models to keep a straight line for one year, let alone for five.

By now many of the teams are demoralized, but the discipline is holding. They have been working non stop after their day jobs everyday for the last 2 weeks. Sometimes without sleep, still no progress. By now some of them have even started to form cliques, where some of them are blaming others. In the middle of all this is poor Harphoon. You see in the good old days Darkness always knew what to do. Or he did a good job of pretending he did. So if anything went wrong. Darkness would always be there to fix it. If he failed, he would just pin it on some poor fellow. But with Harphoon it is another story. He is a honest Joe.

So now not only do you have technical issues, but there are also leadership, discipline along with dysfunctional team issues creeping in.

However, I believe despite their countless setbacks they are actually making real progress. What is strange is none of them can actually see it. As they are very isolated (they actually remind me a lot of Amish people, that is how isolated they are) and very much caught up in the doing.

The reason why I say this is because what I do is basically like a fly in the wall, so I can be very objective and distance myself to see things clearly.

In real terms with each successive model, they test out, they actually go higher and higher. They don’t notice it themselves, because they are too preoccupied with the nuts and bolts to see the bigger picture.

But always bear in mind politics is furiously at work here. Though it is seldom verbalized many of the boys harbor a morbid fear of failing. Some of them are now waiting for the merest excuse just to bail out in a face saving way by chucking it all in. All they need is a morsel of an excuse. It doesn’t even have to a real excuse. The smallest excuse is enough for them to just burn it. My feel is we should never give them this excuse to give up.

As I strong believe deep down in my heart, this work may actually bring a lot of goodness to not only government but more importantly netizens in the long run.

Do try ‘G’ to keep the comments thread clean and fun. Please. For my sake, if not for theirs. And please don’t take what was said to heart. My fervent hope remains, our ties with the Singapore Daily will always be based on strength, honesty and trust.

That is why I am taking the trouble to share all this with you. With friends, my feel, we must be honest with each other.

I hope you will have a big heart to overlook the slight.

Regards

Y2K

The Director General of the FILB

I think they get the message loud and clear.

But if we keep going on and on abt it?

What does it really say abt us?

You have made your made position very clear.

I am very confident from this point onwards it will be quiet.

Infact, I am very sure of it.

Maybe it is best to let thing cool down?

Reg

Y2K

The Director General of the FILB

That is to say, they will ask who is the Singapore Daily? Why is the brotherhood talking to the Singapore Daily like this? What is their relationship?

Who reall is behind the Singapore Daily? What is their relationship with TOC?

Always remember we did not start this war.

You started it and I think we have every right to foreclose on it.

Harphoon

See to it Guild, by the time I finished with these ppl, they wished they were never born.

Remember just one post is enough for me to throw it all into the Singapore river.

I dont need two, I dont even need three. All I need is ONE racist and faith inflammatory post.

You ppl better start earning your salary.

You want to play right? I’ve play with you then. How is that?

Harphoon.

See to it guild, one post and burn everything.

Always remember the people upstairs cannot sleep very well at night. They are restless and nervous lot. Sure they try to mask it, but there is enough nervous energy confirm this as a fact, though I admit, they’re putting up a brave front.

In the dead of night they pace up and down mulling to themselves, “what if this or that happens, what if…” Do you really believe for one moment, the solution lies with a bunch of useless dead wood who just know how to take off their ties on stage? Or a bunch of derelicts whose only claim to fame is to seat warm a newspaper and run it to the ground? Do you really believe they actually hold the key?

Then that says a lot about your judgment.

Only we can do this. All of you know this only too well. Only we can bring balance to blogosphere and buy those people upstairs a good night’s sleep and still secure the interest of the blogging community.

But you have to help me to help you. I can’t do it alone, not with the running dogs howling in the background. Do you have any idea how much work is required?

We can spend 6 to 8 hours inputting data into a computer, press a button and it all turns to mud in 3 secs and go back and do it all over again, not once, not twice, but again and again and again and again and again.

It’s a tedious and laborious process, but why are we in this shit hole? Because you people never bothered to jaga your house, you were derelict and negligent, but that is OK – we understand, that is the tao of stupid people, but if you are stupid, sit down before you fall down, don’t disturb us.

Because if you keep distracting us with your nonsense, some of my men might just take the whole report and throw it into the Singapore river – then what will happen?

Always remember, the people upstairs cannot sleep and when they are restless you will get the heat and they are likely to pack all off to the Sino-Russian border to man the Singapore mission to study bird migration patterns. Why? Because you never jaga properly. You fucked up.

No report =freak elections. No report = we cannot perpetuate our class politics. No report = the end of the $2.2 million superman.

Do you understand what is at stake?

So you have to help us to help you. What do we ask in return for all our efforts? Absolutely nothing. No honors, no ticker parade, no epullates, no recognition, not even so much as a thank you.
Those trinkets you can give to the likes of Yawning bread, Mr Choo and the media socialist. We know who we are, we don’t need others to validate or edify us further. Those things are meaningless to us.

Besides what they have offered you, all you planners have already told you, its amounts to zero. As our northern cousins will say, “tak boleh pakai.” What we offer is something that even your most fastidious planners will wax lyrical, “Ah, these people know how to get things done. This we can definitely use.”

Which one do you want? Salvation or predation? The choice is yours.

All we want in return is the right to be who we are in blogosphere. To play our game in peace. This is a very reasonable request.

Do we understand each other?

Good.

Harphoon

I must now return to my work now, I don’t want to be disturbed any longer.

Harphoon 2008

N.B: The brotherhood is in desperate need of economist and mathematicians.

I have made numerous request to the rubberband brigade, yet all of you have rebuffed me.

I will make this plea again in the memory of the father of the game, Darkness who you all once served so well, none of you ever turned him away, when he asked for help - why should you do otherwise with me?

You should give me the same benefit of the doubt.

I expect all of you to come forward and serve the brotherhood in our hour of need.

Remember this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu-rLA4POkI

======================

Dear Harphoon/Darkness/Dr Lim Teck Heng/Dentist Jan/Singaporedaddy/Y2K/whichever-of-your-multiple-nicks you wish to choose for yourself,

Let’s be frank - with or without the idiotic racist posting, you don’t even have a proposal in the first place, and all you are doing and will do in the future is to slam any blogs which doesn’t put up your lousy trash “articles” and make vacuous threats against them - like what you have always done. The truth hurts, doesn’t it? :P

Has it occurred to you that Theonlinecitizen feels that your arguments in your trash “articles” are weak and that’s why they haven’t put it up?

I suggest you mug hard for your A Levels General Paper exam because, by the evidence and content you show in your absolutely lengthy gobbledygook which you pass off as “essays”, you’re going to need to learn how to argue properly first before coming up with more trash “articles”.

By the way, do conduct some research into what that Cyrillic bit “Союз Советских Социалистических Республик” meant. It certainly doesn’t mean “International Communist Group”, and the “Союз Советских Социалистических Республик” is no longer in existence. You come across as even more foolish than I ever thought you ever could be.

If you want, I am willing to give you basic Russian and English lessons - at a price.

Sincerely,
A Little Bird Atop the Canopy
http://justalittlebird.blogspot.com

My role here is not to tell people how they should lead their life. I can certainly suggest, but I have no right to tell you what to do.

Only let us not treat these recent racist and religious sensitive post as anything other than a real and present threat – they are not sporadic – they are not acts of random mad people – these are very well planned and executed actions designed with one goal in mind – to depict the net as a feral domain to justify and even legitimize the whole idea of regulation – in whatever form and guise.

They are also designed to reinforce the lie or myth to the blogging community; the ONLY way to make our blogosphere a better place is to go the TOC way and I will even surprise me in the least. If some people in power even see TOC as the preferred model of where our blogosphere should ideally be going towards.

If you believe the TOC way is the way to Shangri-la. Then go ahead, no one is stopping you. But my question is why try to push this whole idea by blackening the rest of the neighborhood in blogosphere by posting racist and sensitive faith comments?

Do you see the problem?

Let me be crystal clear here, we the brotherhood and our readers reject this whole utopian architecture of TOC as the gold standard of blogging. While we are totally committed to the whole idea of making our blogosphere a better place.

We do NOT believe for one moment TOC offers anything beyond the staid, trite and boring which we have come to associate with the MSM.

So our suggestion to the site owner here is that moderation should be put in place to filter such comments in future. Remember, we kept quiet for nearly 7 days. We did not interfere as we believed good sense will prevail, but when we see the fire going out of control and spreading to our eaves, my feel is we have every right to step in and tell you what to do in your house.

In future we want all these racist and faith sensitive comments to be strictly moderated in this site and elsewhere.

If there is even so much as a SINGLE post appearing in future here, then I will instruct the ASDF to throw the proposal they are working on for AIMS into the sea. And that will be the end of that.

I know it is a weekend, but you need to pick up and call up your bosses and discuss this matter with them.

The release date for the proposal to AIMS will be pushed by one day AFTER they have officially made a recommendation to govt. It is regrettable that it has to be this way and this will also probably mean our plans to recruit the rest of greater blogosphere into this whole discussion is now no longer possible – we all have no one to blame but these people who think they are so clever that they can go around making these inflammatory statements.
This is regrettable.

Harphoon 2008

Dear Valued Readers,

In these past few weeks. A few rumors have been circulating around our net, that TOC may or may not be a govt site.

There is even a rumor that suggest the Singapore Daily is actually a site that was set up to steal and divert readership to TOC.

Inaddition to this, many racist and religious remarks have been posted here and elsewhere. Such as this:

http://aaron-ng.info/blog/the-sad-state-of-blogosphere.html#comment-18237

We would like to believe all this is just a coincidence. But we have prepared well in advance for this meet this eventuality.

We are monitoring the situation very closely.

Meanwhile please remain calm. Not only do we know who is behind this. We even know their motivations.

All I can say is, if this con’t further. We the brotherhood may have to re-evaluate our position as to whether we would like to submit a working proposal to AIMS.

Always remember, we don’t want to start an arms race i.e you build one aggregation site. We build 2. You build 4 and I build 8 and so on and so forth.

All we want is a fair and level playing field.

I think our terms are very reasonable.

If we ask politely and we cannot even get this. Then I think, we have every right to just barge in and take it.

Have you ALL considered what will happen, if there is an arms race in blogosphere?

Meanwhile, may I wish you all happy reading

The New leader of the Brotherhood.

Harphoon