This following statement is made by Michael Arrington, after he felt he got the short end in his cooperation with a Singaporean company called Fusion Garage on the CruchPad (now called Joo Joo).

Sweeping statements is a clear sign of a person’s desperation and that he is short on arguments. Here’s some facts for Michael Arrington: Do something offensive against bloggers and / or their friends in Singapore, and see just how quickly the bloggers react and how the offender gets a cyber-drubbing he’ll never forget. The offender will also be the butt of all jokes for a long time and it won’t be long before the incident becomes the thing most talked about in Singapore’s blogosphere and major forums, and in no time even the local evening tabloids would have picked up the news and reported it. In short, bloggers in Singapore are generally spontaneous when they are slighted, or when they read about something unjust, outrageous and offensive – such as a group of foreigners bullying an old trishaw rider. One can find no more passionate argument and solidarity in Singapore than Singapore’s blogosphere, even though at times there are several opinion camps on the same matter. In fact, at times I am concerned with the viciousness of some fellow bloggers when they expressed their opinion.

If Michael Arrington is trying to provoke some response or support from the local blogosphere for his plight, sweeping statements isn’t going to get him any. In fact, while I may even have agreed with Arrington if he thinks Singapore’s blogosphere is full of shallow and mundane postings such as mine, but accusing that all of us are controlled by the government gahmen is one bullshit that really takes the cake. Just what the fxxk were you thinking, Arrington?

For the record, I have never heard of Fusion Garage, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan or even Radixs until recently. What Fusion Garage or Radixs do, and just who the fxxk is Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan wouldn’t have mattered to me unless they are going to put together something that is revolutionary. Try pull someone off the streets and ask him about Radixs or Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan and most of them would have given you the ‘what the fxxk’ look. Simply put, Singapore’s bloggers such as I won’t and can’t report on how allegedly shitty Fusion Garage, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan or even Radixs is when they have never even heard about them!

Even if I have heard about those people, it probably was reported by a geek or tech blogger – being rare and few in Singapore – and it wouldn’t have attracted more interest beyond the article the names were written on. After all, these companies and people aren’t as famous as Dell or Warren Buffet. Frankly, I don’t even know who are the chief scientists and engineers behind the Large Hadron Collider, even though I have heard and read about that more often than TechCrunch. Personally, the reason I have heard about TechCrunch is simply because of the Techcrunch vs Nuffnang saga 2 years ago. In short, I wouldn’t give a sh*t about TechCrunch otherwise even as a blogger, much less about a Michael Arrington in his little petty squabble with a company situated here in Singapore. For the record, the only person with a name close to that is a Michael Carrington Tan, a classmate of mine back while I was in Polytechnic.

As to Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan and Fusion Garage’s dispute with Arrington, Arrington has taken everything online, presented all the evidence from his side while Fusion Garage hasn’t presented their side of the argument at all. While I personally have some bigoted opinion and reservations about people from the Indian sub-continent, I detest what I called ‘trial by the Internet’ where someone presented a one sided argument and pronounced the other party guilty when they simply haven’t even given their side of the story yet. In my opinion, no one could really make a comment or take sides in the matter when everything is so one sided and unclear regardless of our personal sentiments or sympathies. Either way, even if the courts of law ultimately ruled in favor of Arrington, I would still have kept my bigoted opinion of Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan (whom I do not even know) to myself.

I’ll give Michael Arrington some credit for being a tech writer. But on socio-political matters, he’s definitely out of his league. He should get out more often from his geeky existence, and perhaps even look at all the Singaporean sites like The Temasek Revew, The Online Citizen and even some of the so-called ‘social activists’ sites which I considered cesspools to see just how one sided Internet opinion is against the ruling party and the gahmen before he labelled the whole blogosphere as being gahmen-controlled. After all, reading some of these articles makes us think a revolution is about to break out tomorrow and the Tali-PAP will be thrown out of power right way.

All these being said, I personally wouldn’t mind being a blogger ‘controlled’ by the gahmen. In fact, if it would throw in a unit at the Duxton Pinnacle, write off my housing loan, and put whatever I have paid from my CPF back into my CPF account complete with accrued interest, and pay me another 120% of my salary monthly while I keep my current job, I would gladly write glaring reports on the gahmen’s policies and directives unabashedly. Who gives a damn on what names people are calling me while I enjoyed ‘the Singapore Dream’ in the land of my birth?

Alas, I can only dream about that while I remained a serf laden with debts in Singapore, endlessly complaining and whining about ‘a system of modern slavery’ perpetuated Singapore’s ‘caring and responsible’ gahmen. Then again, maybe Singapore’s bloggers can sue Arrington in a Class Action Suit for libel in the U.S., since Arrington probably couldn’t produce any evidence to show any blogs of persons not affiliated with the ruling party as being controlled by our gahmen.