mein soapbox

This blog will serve as my soapbox, which is, according to the singular source of all knowledge: “…engaging in often flamboyant impromptu or nonofficial public speaking.“

Flamboyance you say? Awesome, I shall not dissapoint. But in addition to serving as an outlet to persuade others to join me in my quest for galactic dominance (that’s right, you can have your puny “world” for all I care), this blog is for me. In fact, more importantly, it’s for me. You come second. At best.

I am a firm believer of the notion that you know nothing about something until you write about it. The act of writing, or more generally articulating thoughts about a particular topic serves to reveal the shortcomings in your understanding, gaps in your knowledge, and flaws in your logic. My belief in this idea has been reinforced in the course of my PhD research; writing academic papers should not just be motivated by the goal of having a long publications list, the truth is writing a paper forces you to organise your thoughts in a manner that we rarely do automatically, and once you’ve organised your thoughts you are unforgivingly forced to confront your own ignorance. For that alone, writing is a worthwhile enterprise, that pays for itself many-fold.

You know, it probably says something about our current state as a civilisation that people rarely keep private journals anymore – I think if someone looks hard enough, they will find a correlation between the lack of private journal writing and an increase of incidence of misunderstanding that we often attribute to “the rat race of life”, or on a larger scale “the clash of civilisations”, which basically attribute conflict to the clash of two or more personalities. This may be incorrect: in many cases it may just turn out to be an internal conflict boiling over – holes in our understanding of our own value systems and emotions – while we conveniently attribute our angst to external actors. To solve the world’s problems we all need to start keeping private journals again… hey wait, that’s a blog! Salvation is upon us, alhamdullillah!

Aha, you see? That’s exactly the sort of flamboyance that you can expect to see if you subscribe to this blog.

Oh, one more reason that I’ve decided to start this blog, and this is a warning for readers too: I find that I sometimes change my position on certain issues as I learn more about it, or even simply if I just think more about it. It might be interesting to document these flip-flops. It would be awesome if there were some way to quantify it, so I can look at a candle-stick chart and detect trends that would deepen my understanding of myself (e.g. we might form a conclusion such as “in bitter winter weather Tirath turns into a war-mongering jerk”) but as far as I know, no such technology exists. For now, I figured at least by blogging about things that matter to me, I could read old posts every now and then to see if my position has changed, and then try to draw some useful conclusion about what brought about such a flip-flop. And hey maybe you, my readers, could help me there too, by frowning and accusing me of being inconsistent whenever you detect a flip-flop.

This won’t be a personal blog. To give you an idea of the kind of topics I am likely to bring up here, let me present a brief overview of things that interest me:

• Malaysian politics and current affairs.
• New media.
• Free speech.

I think most of the time I’ll be talking about Malaysiana – it’s something I’m quite passionate and hopeful about. Anyways, we’ll see what transpires as time goes by, that may be one of the things that I change my position on sometime soon…