While all right-thinking Malaysians, regardless of race or religion, agree that stern action should be taken against those responsible for the blog which insults Prophet Mohammad, many are asking why the authorities have been so tardy and laid-back in acting when complaint was first made many weeks ago.
Although Utusan Malaysia first reported about the blog last Saturday, 27th December 2008, with the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, responding on the same day by directing the Home Minister, Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar and the police to act quickly against the blog over insults to Prophet Muhammad, in actual fact, the authorities had been aware of the blog concerned for weeks.
This was revealed by the Information Minister, Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek who said on Saturday that the woman in her 20s whose photograph and identify were used in the blog containing insults to Prophet Mohammed had denied owning the Internet domain and had in fact met him two weeks ago to ask RTM to help clear her name.
Shabery said:
“She sought help from RTM to publicise the matter because the web log, which also contains Deepavali messages insulting the Hindus, was not hers and had tarnished her reputation and the company she works for.”
But neither Shabery nor RTM gave her any help although she had lodged reports with the police and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to trace the people responsible after coming to know the existence of the blog several months ago.
Instead, the woman was picked up by the police at 6 pm on Saturday to “assist in the investigation” and later released on police bail!
The police said today that they have identified several suspects in connection with the offensive blog and several people would soon be called up to assist in the investigations under the Sedition Act.
The question Hamid Albar, Shabery and MCMC should answer is why the police, the RTM and MCMC had been so tardy and laid-back in taking action against the blog concerned when the woman victim had lodged reports with the police, the Information Minister and the MCMC weeks before the Utusan Malaysia report last Saturday and why she had to be taken into custody to “assist in investigations” despite her earlier complaints!
Biasa la YB Kit, Holiday mood. Everyone especially those with money want to go away.
Typical, typical, typical at the end just get someone to be the mangsa. 50 years no change so do you expect them to do anything when it is not in their interest.
Happy 2009, Good health for the coming year.
This was a blogspot.com (Google) blog, right? Not a lot the Malaysian police could do, I wouldn’t have thought. She’d have got a quicker response complaining to Google. Poor girl got a nasty surprise, but other than that, I don’t see what’s newsworthy about it.
I’d imagine if the authorities are aware of anything at all, it is that the Internet is a large and difficult-to-control phenomenon, and Religion-insulting websites are not at all uncommon. What do you want them to do – ban the Internet?
Terengganu by-election soon.
So UMNO must again show….the are the one and only true protector of Islam in Malaysia.
What can one expect from the civil service when holiday mood is in the air? OrangRojak is right. She should’ve made a report to Google instead. Why bother made a police report? I didn’t even know police exist in Malaysia. The only police i know is like a security personal/ body guard to the UMNO members. If ther’s other suspects, why wait to \call’ them in? This is serious. They should’ve hauled them in…
Sorry, sorry, sorry, must have missed the bit about “right thinking Malaysians”.
Since I’m a funny-thinking foreigner, regardless of race and religion (can I use ‘regardless’ like that?), I’ll leave it to the orthodoxy-conforming, vote-attracting, not-causing-trouble-lah Malaysians to comment on this one.
See you next article.
Wasn’t ‘stern action’ what Anwar was accused of?
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The question YB Kit Siang is really asking is why the 27-year-old woman – an accountant with an automotive giant in the Klang Valley – who had lodged reports with the police and MCMC several weeks earlier, seeking help of Information Minister Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek to clear her name through RTM was (according to NST report of 30th Dec) “picked up on Saturday afternoon and was released on police bail after having her statement recorded”.
Explanation on bail by Wikipedia : “Traditionally, bail is some form of property deposited or pledged to a court in order to persuade it to release a suspect from jail, on the understanding that the suspect will return for trial or forfeit the bail (and be guilty of the crime of failure to appear).”
Key question is : why are authorities harrassing and penalising members of public who report a crime, seek assistance to effect damage control, and instead of getting speedy assistance let alone praise (denied), is instead harrassed and made to suffer by doing her civic concious and public duty.
That I believe is the primary question asked – not just the secondary one of why “the police, the RTM and MCMC had been so tardy and laid-back in taking action against the blog concerned”. :)
Yes the the 27-year-old accountant has not been charged yet . She is released on a Police Bail where a suspect is released without being charged but must return to the police station at a given time. Question, why is she treated a suspect? Is there any circumstances to justify a reasonable inference that she is a suspected offender? Who would make a police report of an offence if the chances are that the one making the report is given first privilege of being a suspect in respect of that offence brought to the attention of the authorities? They should apologise to her.
Even so, it’s not so surprising is it Jeffrey? If some terrible misfortune were to happen to you and someone scrawled “love from OrangRojak” in blood on the wall next to the crime scene, I imagine the police would be interested in my availability for questioning too, even though I have already publicly protested my innocence in a previous thread and claimed that the scenario was only an illustration. The police are not IT experts, even if their ‘customers’ sometimes are. How can they be experts in every way to commit a crime? Criminals are very inventive!
The woman was doing “her civic, concious and public duty” by default when she was acting in her own best interest, once she knew she was both the victim and apparent perpetrator of (what is locally) a public outrage. That she is the victim is not established beyond all doubt, is it? That she is the apparent perpetrator is the root of the problem. Perhaps a later report from the authorities will claim they picked her up to ‘protect her’ in the same way they did for Ms Kok.
The ‘clear her name on RTM’ sounds over-optimistic. I would have thought Google would willingly have given her (or her proxy) access to the (reset) blog to post an explanation. Misrepresentation on the Internet is common, but the rules for dealing with it are well-known and widely regarded as working well.
Jeffrey – are you building a photo-fit? Why ‘accountant’, ’27’, ’employer description’?
“That she is the apparent perpetrator is the root of the problem” – OrangRojak. Well if police are not IT experts, and as OrangRojak said, “the Internet is a large and difficult-to-control phenomenon, I can’t fathom why if she were one of the perpetrators of such a mischeivous blog insulting the Prophet (in this country), would want her own photograph and identity to be used in the blog, and thereafter bring the atention of the authorities to it. Can you think of a rational reason why she would do that if she were one of the perpetrators? The part about ‘accountant’, ‘27? is reported and “photofit” by NST.
I am working on a law article on why posting information in the Internet should be treated differently from publication in the traditional (print as well as broadcast) media. I will be completing it soon and I hope to to submit it for publication before CNY.
Didn’t RPK set a precedent for this? I don’t actually read a lot of press in Malaysia, but I thought I recalled someone defending him on the grounds that even though his name and picture appeared next to an offending Internet article, it could not be proved that he wrote it. Do I remember correctly?
You’re suggesting a rational person wouldn’t cause pointless public outrage without first concealing their identity – at least, I think you are. I had to add the qualification so I wouldn’t be tempted to get myself in hot water with the obvious examples from history. With the qualification, and since the copy of the blog content I saw this morning (quite coincidentally) appears to be utterly without value, you’re almost certainly correct. But then, a person does not need to be rational to come to the attention of the authorities! I imagine the Malaysian police don’t often pause to consider whether their suspects have acted rationally.
Sorry, maybe I was being over-sensitive – I knew the woman’s name from this morning coincidentally reading the blog of someone who happened to blog about the subject a few days ago. I just wondered why, when ‘the woman’ was probably sufficient to identify the subject of your comments, you were providing more detail. I was only worried that you were leading up to a full name, address and marital status.
Orang Rojak, I merely mentioned she was an accountant as NST reported it in public domain. I do not know her full name, address and marital status but if I did, and they are not in public domain, it would not be proper to mention it.
RPK is a different kettle of fish. His is to tell the truth as he sees it to power so he owns up and challenges the authority whether if his domain was in UK, and server in Singapore, would the alleged cyber offence attributed to him, as owner of the webside, which he does not concede is an offence anyway) be demed committed within jurisdiction of Malaysian laws.
It is radically different from this blog allegedly insulting the prophet where the objective/message is different from RPK’s and also no one claims responsibility!
“You’re suggesting a rational person wouldn’t cause pointless public outrage without first concealing their identity – at least, I think you are”. I am suggesting a person would not publish in the blog materials insulting to the Prophet, knowing fully well that it is a grave offence in this country, leave her identity and photo in that blog, and then before the authorities knew it, brought the attention of the authorities to it, with the object of exonerating/exculpating herself implicated by the identity/photo in the blog. Why would she put her identity/photo in the blog in the first place if she were one of the perpetrators? I am talking of whether it is reasonable for authorities to view her an apparent suspect. If stretched too far every innocent civic minded person who reports a crime on the basis that he witnessed it would be an apparent suspect and on that ground she should be released on bail?
If not for the hoo hah in the press, I wonder how many people actually read this insulting blog? Not more than two hands full, I bet. Unless the blog is widely read like Lim Kit Siang’s blog or RPK’s Malaysia Today, how would “authorities” or press reporters know about it? it is like finding a needle in a haystack to hit this particular blog. Someone with evil intent must have planted the blog and tipped off reporters.
This is like the “mega sex beach party” thing. Some scam which the press thought could be the real thing and gave plenty of space to it and got police, religious leaders etc to comment.
I agree with madmix.
I think the Islamic apologists in our country should direct their attention to websites such as
http://www.islam-watch.org/
(I neither endorse nor reject its contents; I’ve got no opinion about its contents).
This is a website set up by ex-Muslims, mostly from South Asia, to provide arguments for the falsity of Islamic claims. There are articles highly critical of Mohammad on the website. Our zealous Islamic apologists should focus on responding to their arguments, since they are unlikely to get this website closed down and cannot get these authors charged under our Sedition Act. And this website is much more detrimental to the Islamic cause than some blasphemous blogs that do not really provide any substantial reasons to think that there is anything wrong or bad with Islam or Mohammad.
All those involved or suspected to be involved in the said blog should be arrested under ISA to assist in investigation. Remember Theresa Kok?
I didn’t mean to compare the content of RPK’s and this woman’s blog, only that there was a precedent for someone coming to the authorities’ attention because of a blog that bore their name and picture, and then used the defence that anyone could have put those things there. Harme Mohamed’s witness comments:
http://westmalaysia.com/?p=3494
There are plausible explanations for a person doing exactly what would be the worst case story (for the woman involved) in this case, mostly involving temporary or permanent loss of reason, or ‘error of judgement’, if that isn’t the same thing. This case is not about a civic minded person reporting a crime, but about someone reporting that an outrageous work which purports to be by them, is not their doing. I think you may have stretched the point too far with “every innocent civic minded person who reports a crime on the basis that he witnessed it”.
What does ‘released on police bail’ mean in Malaysia? In the UK I would expect someone to be charged with an offence before they were released on bail. I’m sticking to my ‘police not experts’ line, and siding with the police on this one. The copy webpage I saw was just a set of silly names, like a child might create in a playground. While offensive, it was never intended to be anything but. If there is an ‘offence’ (whatever that means – what will the police charge be? Disturbing peace?), the police will want charge somebody. The page implicates the woman, regardless of her claimed innocence. If the police did not charge the apparent perpetrator, everybody who commited a crime would be videoing themselves in the act for YouTube and claiming that someone faked it.
I am not without compassion. There’s every chance that the poor woman is in the midst of a completely unexpected and possibly terribly traumatising experience. The police have to charge the apparent perpetrator for the public offence until they’ve got someone better. I don’t think the police have an attractive choice in this matter.
rockdaboat Says:
Today at 18: 13.15 (1 hour ago)
“All those involved or suspected to be involved in the said blog should be arrested under ISA to assist in investigation. Remember Theresa Kok?”
Rockdaboat, you are so damn naive and ignorant about how the Malaysian Police is doing their job? Based on your stupid logic, I can also make the Police to detain you and send you to the ISA detention camp by lodging a Police Report that “Rockdaboat did say in front of me that he wanted to throw the pork to the mosque nearby his house!”
Of course, I am not going to set you up by the dirty trick because it is against my own principle to do so. However, I do hope that you can wake up by now and not be too kiddy or too idealistic about the Police trustworthiness in Malaysia. You will be able to find a whole lots of racist Policemen if you happen to be so unlucky to be detained by the police some day in the future!
The Police will just not believe in the basic assumption that all men shall be deemed innocent until proven guilty. If your skin colour looks like a Chinese or an Indian, then I can only say “God bless you” if you are trying to tell the Police that somebody is making use of your name without your prior consent to defame Prophet Mohammad!
It is very difficult for someone to produce a fake video evidence of someone else committing a crime without signs of fabrication.
It is very easy to put up an essay on a website and claim that it is written by the girl next door. I just have to know her name and some easily accessible details.
This distinction shows that the fact that, in the absence of other prima facie evidence implicating that woman, the police should not treat her as a suspect given those considerations raised by Jeffrey does not mean that they should also think that someone whose crime is captured by a video should be taken seriously if he claims that the video is fake, in the absence of signs of fabrication.
“What does ‘released on police bail’ mean in Malaysia? In the UK I would expect someone to be charged with an offence before they were released on bail. I’m sticking to ….” OrangRojak
In Malaysia, the police stations are courts unto themselves. The OCPD is the judge. Also in Malaysia, it is mandatory for this judge to impose bail although bail was not proposed by the absentee prosecutor. The purpose of police bail is to give opportunity to the police to show why they deserve a salary revision.
Shabery Cheek…exposed himself…talking cock…when he debated Anwar Inbrahim.
Have you seen the life debate…with his foaming mouth?
Anwar talked to the point….Shabery talked grandfather stories…promoting UMNO’s history.
Such a low class minister…exposed…you want to believe him?
One thing most UMNO ministers do own…..are big mouths to master the art of twisting ….from facts to fictions..and vice versa….all to UMNO BARU’s advantage.
Everything they say or do is not for the country….but for UMNO.
Now..I read and see which one is a Chinese two timer…commentator…twisting …to favour government.
So far…great vigilantes ..great minds…all alert..to battle them..so I keep quiet.
I suspect that this news is created by some goons in the run up to KT by-elections. Either that or some goons is trying very hard to create a dis-unity among Malaysians. I had better not pen my suspicions here further, else I’ll probably be sued.
Every right thinking Malaysians would not do such a thing. Insulting the religion of others is a BIG NO-NO.
monsterball Says: Such a low class minister…exposed…you want to believe him?
Why? Shabery is not the only low class minister around. ALL the ministers (including the PM & DPM) are all low class with low mentality. Most of them are second class lower grads only… Shame on them. Nothing they do is for the good of this country & us. Everything they do is for the good of their own pocket only (i.e. good for UMNO = good for their own pocket)…
“If there is an ‘offence’ (whatever that means – what will the police charge be? Disturbing peace?), the police will want to charge …” OrangRojak
Investigation is the work of a person they call the IO (short for ‘Investigating Officer’ – although most times they have no clue what they are supposed to be investigating and hence the need for a police bail. It is like a request for “time-out.”
The police does not do the charging. That’s the work of the public prosecutor. The work of the police is to collect evidence. Occasionally, the more creative among the investigators with some knowledge of the country’s Penal Code, would manufacture evidence to try and match the evidence with the offences found in the Penal Code. How else could they hope to close their files – and achieve their quota of “teh tarik” breaks??
All in the spirit of “Malaysia Boleh”.
“The police will want charge somebody….The police have to charge the apparent perpetrator for the public offence until they’ve got someone better. I don’t think the police have an attractive choice in this matter..” – OrangRojak at 20: 00.53 (1 hour ago)
This is precisely a very wrong attitude (if correctly attributed to the police). They should only charge someone or treat someone as suspect if there is reasonable cause and evidence to do so. This kind of attitude of needing to charge someone at all costs (until they’ve got someone better) only happens only in totalitarian police state with no respect for civil rights.
Police should act with restraint and work with and foster good relations with the community whose civil rights police are supposed to protect not violate just because they need to charge somebody, to show they’re doing their work.
I call this malfeasance: the overzealous performance by a public official like police of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, contrary to law in violation of a public trust and civil rights.
We should protest against such attitude, not apologise for it.
See the pattern!!
Information minister must inform….someone is belittling Prophet Mohammed.
Home minister must arrest under ISA….insulting Islam religion.
Is not UMNO….the great defender of Islam faith…in the world?
Have you ever heard thousands of UMNO members died fighting Isreal….to defend their brothers being slaughtered?
Arrest by Home Minster…back fired….yet feeling no shame.
You see…these two…jokers need to perform to win votes for coming Trengganu by-election.
Once you know their characters…so easy to know how they think and perform.
Hope PAS does not fall into the trap..to talk religion …to win votes. It’s out-dated and behaving years behind time Malaysians….yet proclaim…can live and see the real future.
Leave it to UMNO….can live in the past and show they are Space Age politicians.
They are simply ….real low class hypocrites…and corrupted actors.
Undergrad2 is right. The Police do not “charge” suspects. They detain suspects or treat them as suspects with liberty to post bail. They should do so if there were reasonable cause. They should not treat a person reporting a crime as a suspect for mere expedience or their convenience without reasonable cause just because they’ve not yet got someone better : this is a bad attitude and violates civil rights.
I do not believe UMNO’s non stop religion and race politics will win votes under current situation and condition where vast majority Malaysians are sick of such kind of politics.
They are so…because the Third Class Malaysians .the Malays..have their educate friends to explain.
The educated Malaysians read Internet….not only newspapers.
If internet is not powerful and influencial…Mahathir will not use that to continue his personal “mission”…to lie…to promote race and religion politics…to take revenge on UMNO…all against him..to talk till he drop dead…..defending his family wealth…keeping UMNO busy…from suing them.
So voters for coming Terengganu by-election…all system go by UMNO…starting by Information…Home and Khairy.
After that…watch their reactions on good or bad news.
My bet..they will all keep quiet…going to mosque….asking Allah…”‘Why like that?”……as all gone case braggarts and corrupted hypocrites….are simply having fantasy…they own Malaysia and should rule forever.
“It is very difficult ”
On a scale of ‘not at all’ to ‘extremely’? What exactly is “very difficult” in kilometres per hour? OK, I too may be guilty of stretching points. It isn’t the job of the police to make judgements where there’s no testable criterion. “Did she do it or not?” “Looks like it” is good enough for most police work. The chance that the incriminating evidence is fabricated is a matter for someone better equipped to judge.
When you exercise your judgement to second-guess the police, are you using the same mental faculties and education they are? In a matter like this, the police may as well throw dice to decide whether to suspect someone or not. I think we can grant them some leeway when they’re faced with acts outside their usual fare.
Just in case I’m confused and we’re talking about different subjects – you mean this one?
http://www.menj.org/islam/siapa-adibah-ahmad/
I’ve a feeling this issue may have started quite some time ago. That we’re reading about it on LKS blog now may be a sign that MPs are on notice to respond to any substantially controversial issues with a “thankyou for your letter, you’ll hear from us in February” letter, so that there’s nothing better for LKS to make political capital out of in the run-up to the KT election.
I started this reply hours ago (before bored children needed a proper father), so it’ll look odd now. Thanks for explaining bail undergrad2.
Jeffrey, if you can read ‘suspect’ where I say charge (my misunderstanding of the mechanics of police work), I stand by my previous statement. This is not ‘a person reporting a crime’, this is an uncommon instance where a person has reported something when it appears (to a casual observer) they are the perpetrator. There is no suggestion in my comments of ‘needing to charge someone at all costs’, those are your words.
Regardless (since we cannot expect the police to examine Google’s logs, and I doubt TM will keep sufficient logs for long enough, even if the true perpetrator was in Malaysia) of who the true perpetrator is, the blog is all the police had to go on. This is a rare and interesting case, where the police could have acted more generously and people would have been complaining that they weren’t taking the insult seriously or acted as they did and suffered LKS’ exclamation marks. An easy choice, for them, I suspect.
OrangRojak, you are right she was not reporting a crime but clearing herself against her photo and identity being used in an offensive blog. I have assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the comments insulting of the Prophet were known to be insulting constituting an offence and no perpetrator who does that would ordinarily leave his/her photo and identity in such a blog.
In the court of law….lawyers need to look up old cases related to whatever the case is…that he/she represents.
Research and read read read…all the cases…then mark those points and consult his/her an old master of the law.
I noticed most young lawyers passed out….serving few months as apprentice in a law firm….give him a simple case…they will make a mess out of it…making the poor client that should win…loose out…then they apply appeals after appeals…which infact…make the said poor client pay more lawyer fees than he/she expect.
When I deal with reputable law firms to handle business cases…I insist they give me a final legal opinion…can I win or not.
Most professional law firms…..will give for and against arguments…makes me satisfied,.even if I loose the case.
I notice few talking here…law students.out to write a thesi….or are young lawyers….arguing cases.?
No good…if you do not burn midnight oil…..think and have the attitude to win..even with 1% chance.
How many of you witness criminal cases where the culprit goes free…even on murder case…real court case stuff.
How many have you witness lawyers fighting for compensations…for or against and the one for the victim…win huge amount compensation.
How many have you seen lawyers arguing about estate from dead …divorces …children custody rights….that this group is the most unreliable….if you are not careful to choose right law firm or lawyer.
My main objective of this message is…no matter what profession you are representing……no one owes you a living and no one can help you as much as you must help yourself.
If you have the luck…to succeed with great friends with great minds.. and their advises…are real good..you are a lucky bloke.
May I end….by saying….God help those who help themselves.
Continue discussing …arguing and be smart Malaysians.
But please register to vote….change of government.
Remember. In Malaysia, it is first class infrastructure. But third class mentality in many aspects. Talking about internet security, it is just a false sense of security when you have your passwords and other forms of so called security measures. Internet service provided by Telekom and others actually know which websites you have gone to even if you just went a second ago. So the police needs to show a warrant to Telekom and other service providers if they see the need to. When you post anything, it can be copied and pasted and linked and circulated round the world in less than a second. In order for others to access your website and to camouflage as the owner, these people are the I.T. genius which means they are geniuses with computer codes, programmes, softwares and they have partners to link together to break into your website. They are not the ordinary internet savvy people. They must have enough computer intelligence in order to do that. Like the case when some teenagers broke into some bank and stole the money online. Intelligent computer culprits will have to be overcomed by equally intelligent computer law abiders. Or some people who can break into the military website. Dangerous. So if they can break into something that is so classified, there is nothing that they cannot break into especially the simple websites. Some people post everything without thinking that others can just copy and paste. Especially the dating websites. All the photos and personal details are posted for the whole world to see. This case that you mentioned. The lady accountant should be intelligent, not just with numbers. As for the blasphemy thing, some Italian film maker made a movie about Prophet Isa. But people are not that emotionally charged. Are not all prophets supposed to be treated with the utmost reverence ?
Is there a way to seek redress in the case of a person reporting a crime being treated as a suspect for mere expedience without reasonable cause because a better suspect has not been found yet,Jeffrey? Or the police has immunity since
Malaysia is a ‘police state’ on the quiet.
Yes, I’ve got this feeling the anti-Prophet Mohammad blog could be UMNO’s own creation to brew racial sentiments. It clicks nicely with the recent protest by the Penang Malays. With the KT by-election near, UMNO wants to portray itself as championing Islam and the Malay race. Being desperate and bankrupt of issues against PR, they, as expected, play up the race once again ( thanks to sifu Mahatir ) to win over the Malay voters. This is their only lifeline. This issue of insulting the Prophet Mohammad will be magnified during the KT by-election campaigne. Maybe some of you will think I am being overly suspicious, but I can’t help it because knowing UMNO the party, and run by the present crop of leaders, isn’t it true that it’s hard to tell what is true and what is not??
So many lawyers are behaving like gangster protecting the clients or trying to squeeze the clients..to the limit with legal fees….not really representing clients in total sincerity and professional ways.
They even apply postponement in cases…playing games and pally pally with the opposition lawyer….”I do one favour for you…next time you do for me”…..that kind of attitudes.
So many private Accountant firms…will audit your account…so slow…know only how to charge Secretarial fees and Audited fees…plus few more fees..and yet you need to pay fines..for late or no submitting the forms…..to the government punctually.
The almost impossible profession to prove they kill lives….are doctors and surgeons.
Do you notice..surgeons have no time for politics….thus these are very responsible and reliable people.
Hundreds of general medical practitioners… .we addressed as doctors…love MCA and Gerakan swearing that …they join politics to save Malaysians..to make us ….real happy.
DAP..champion of freedom and democracy.. is too low class for them to join in. I wonder why.
It guess…it takes high class Chinese politicians to show how to please UMNO…carry their balls.. and get things done….for Chinese??
So…lawyers….doctors…accountants…which one is you?
For Engineers….most half past sixes must be with UMNO….Highland Tower…Hillslope disasters…floods…do I need to paint the picture?
Great ones….quiet and will avoid government contracts….as they are so wanted all over the world…no time for nonsense.
cemerlang: just a false sense of security
You’re right, but usually a sense of security (false or not) is the foundation of the joy in our lives. It can be a rude awakening when fortune catches up with you and you discover what it is to be ‘unlucky’. The chances are this woman has no connection at all to the website her name and photograph appeared on, nor possibly any connection to those who provided the blog content. Her image and name may have been selected from somewhere on the Internet for no particular reason at all. In her place, I would be appalled and terrified.
It seems to me in this case that no work of genius was needed. If you had a reasonably unique name, any of us could start a blog at any of the major free blogging sites tonight with some equally mischievous content, with your name and photograph attached. I strongly doubt Telekom keep sufficient records to detect unanticipated crimes that occurred longer than a few hours ago. You need only to multiply the international bandwidth that Telekom uses by a few hours and you’ll get a figure that would quickly outstrip the largest storage devices. Further, if they can’t keep my telephone working, I wonder at their ability to keep forensic records. I looked at the issue briefly this morning when I coincidentally came across the site I linked above. There are other trails left on the Internet to the blog in question that could be followed to provide suspects.
Can this be a hoax specially manufactured for the KT election?
“Police should act with restraint and work with and foster good relations with the community whose civil rights police are supposed to protect not violate just because they need to charge somebody, to show they’re doing their work.” Jeffrey QC
What you say is true of the London Bobbies who walk the streets to lend a helping hand to whoever needs it. One moment it may be to help nab a snatch thief and on the other it may be to help an old lady cross the street. Once somebody was shouting obscenities at me from the seventh floor of a building and I informed a passing London Bobby. He walked up all seven floors to look for him. On an unlucky day, he may find himself delivering a baby at a street corner in full view of passersby. At other times he would be rushing a liver for transplant through the streets of Kensington to the nearest hospital thirty miles away.
In Malaysia, the job of the police is to help keep an eye on the public and hence the earlier name given to it i.e. ‘mata-mata’ or the eyes and ears of the government. They keep watch on citizens instead of criminals. So when you report a crime, they look at you suspiciously thinking you’re up to no good and are wasting their time and government money. When they finally move their asses to investigate they do so grudgingly, treating you like a criminal. When they arrest suspects, they don’t read their constitutional rights known in certain jurisdictions as the “Miranda” rights. The person arrested would then end up giving evidence against himself even making confessions to crimes they never committed. If he is lucky he gets charged with the wrong crime and walks away.
That’s police work in Malaysia.
The police should only treat someone as a suspect when there are some reasonable grounds to do so. If we do not agree with this principle, we should be prepared to be arrested and then released on bail pending further investigation whenever the police feel like doing so even if they do not have reasonable grounds.
In this case, whether the police are justified in treating the woman as a suspect depends on whether they have reasonable grounds. Jeffrey argues that the fact that she reported the ‘crime’ (if insulting a prophet is a crime that can be charged under the Seditious Act in our country, it is a crime according to our country’s law. So Jeffrey was right in his earlier suggestion that she reported a crime [on the assumption that she did not author the blasphemous article and that the article is indeed blasphemous] – someone who authored the article committed a crime under Malaysian law. There may be another crime involved, depending on whether forgery is seen as criminal according to our country’s law.) and that on the reasonable considerations that her action does not fit very well with an ordinary person who indeed committed the offence or crime, the police do not have reasonable grounds to treat her as a suspect.
Of course, for all we know, the police might have other prima facie evidence implicating her which has not been revealed to the public. In that case, they would have reasonable grounds to treat her as a suspect. However, Jeffrey is right that the police do not have reasonable grounds on the sole considerations mentioned in the last paragraph.
Barring prima facie evidence, the police do not have reasonable grounds to treat her as a suspect. One might contend, as OrangRojak does, that the fact that the blasphemous writing is attributed to her with her name and photo appearing together with the writing is the required prima facie evidence. However, given that she has reported to be a victim of forgery, and given that forgery in this case is very easy, this cannot be a piece of prima facie evidence that justifies treating her as a suspect.
OrangRojak suggests that if her claim to be a victim of forgery is to be taken seriously, the police will also have to accept the claim of someone whose criminal act is captured in a video that the video is fabricated, in the absence of signs of fabrication. This is clearly a bad argument since being a victim of forgery in the sense of having a blasphemous article attributed to oneself is highly probable on ordinary standards of inductive reasoning, and being a victim of a fabricated video when there are no signs of fabrication is highly improbable on ordinary standards of inductive reasoning. Since there is a clear distinction between the former (X) and the latter (Y) in that X is highly probable and that Y is highly improbable, the argument from analogy that if we require the police to believe/accept X we will also have to require the police to believe/accept Y is clearly a bad argument, since the crucial distinction breaks down the analogy.
OrangRojak suggests that it is not the job of police to determine or judge whether X (i.e. the woman’s claim to be a victim of forgery) is true. This is a problematic suggestion. If we accept that the police should have reasonable grounds in the form of prima facie evidence to treat someone as a formal suspect (with the legal implications of requiring a bail when the formal suspect is released on bail pending futher investigation), then determining or judging whether X is true is crucial, since it is crucially relevant to whether there is such a prima facie evidence, and thus reasonable grounds.
Also, OrangRojak suggests that there are no testable criteria to determine the truths of X and Y given that there are no such criteria to determine the exact degree of difficulty (perhaps with an accurate number) of ‘falsely claiming the girl next door of putting up on a website something she did not write’ (A) and the exact degree of difficulty of ‘fabricating a video of someone’s committing a crime without leaving any trace of fabrication’ (B). Of course, he is right that no criteria are available for us to determine the exact degrees of difficulties of A and B. But this is a red herring. Why should we need exact degrees of difficulties? One simply has to show that A is comparatively easier than B. That is sufficient to determine or judge the truths of X and Y. It should be clear that in this case, A is much easier than B. In science and ordinary life, we have to rely on such comparison of the relative probabilities of various hypotheses on ordinary criteria of induction. Of course, inductive reasoning does not yield mathematical certainty. But this is what we have to rely on in science and ordinary life.
The police may well have reasonable grounds to get her to assist in the investigation given that the information extracted from her can be incorporated to determined whether X is true, and thus whether there is prima facie evidence that justifies her arrest (upon taking her as a formal suspect). But reasonable grounds to ask someone to assist in an investigation are different from reasonable grounds to treat someone as a formal suspect or to arrest someone as a formal suspect (in this case, arrest seems to be implied by her release on bail).
oops… ‘… incorporated to DETERMINE whether…’
sorry!
It’s high time that an external body such as IPCMC was set up in our country.
Kit Siang suggests in his article that the relevant authorities have some shortcomings in this incident.
When he says that the relevant authorities (the Home minister, MCMC, etc) have been tardy, what he suggests is that they should have investigated her complaint and helped her to clear her name if her complaint was confirmed by evidence discovered during the investigation. Had they done their work and found evidence indicating that her complaint was false and implicating her involving in the blasphemous writings, the police would have had reasonable grounds to arrest her as a formal suspect.
Now, the crux of the matter lies in whether police have such evidence. It seems that Kit Siang has to find this out to make sure that he is justified in claiming that the relevant authorities have done something wrong or at least manifested some shortcomings in this incident.
oops… ‘…implicating her INVOLVEMENT…’
There is a good lesson to be learnt from this story. Next time if you happen to witness a crime being committed, DON’T ever act the role of a good citizen by rushing to the police station to be an eye witness. You will become the first suspect. Then, maybe if you’re lucky enough, like the accountant in the story, they will release you on POLICE BAIL.
Godfather,
I tend to agree with Prof. Lee Wang Yen.
If A has the opportunity and B has the tools, then C who has the motive would give the police reasonable cause to believe a crime has been committed. The problem is who did the crime (a), who should be arrested for crime (b) and who should be sentenced to X number of years?
Lee Wang Yen, before you right another comment in which you claim that you ‘clearly stated’ something, I’ve got to tell you that I almost passed out for lack of oxygen before I’d finished the 2nd paragraph of your magnum opus above.
I’m not convinced you can cast this issue as a problem in Boolean algebra. Jeffrey is often right, though in this case I feel tempted to believe his point of view (as expressed at the outset) has merit. You are making an assumption here:
The degree of fit her action has with the ordinary person who publishes religion-insulting blogs with their name and photograph on in a country where even the leaders are prepared to desert their citizens for asking questions about religion, let alone insulting it is difficult to assess, isn’t it?
It appears to me (it is the basis of my lack of support for criticism of the police in this matter) that the police are not sufficiently well-equipped with facts regarding this kind of case to employ reason at all. I have already apologised for my abuse of hyperbole when I mentioned the YouTube videos, it wasn’t intended to shore up an already flaky argument.
X and Y. I’ve gone blind. Could you stop that voluntarily, or could the site admin please implement a filter blocking comments with pseudo-algebra in? Thanks. It doesn’t aid clarity.
Are you doing a PhD? Beg your tutor for forgiveness! You have a problem with degrees of freedom. To indulge you, if Y were ‘false’ (impossible / incredible) then all that is known about A (given its comparative ease) is that it … is … not quite as false? I don’t think there’s even a useful fuzzy-logic membership that can be drawn out with this line of attack. The best you could hope for is some sort of inequality predicated on too many assumptions.
Because despite your protestations of ‘simply shewn’, the police have no previous experience of these matters. Not of devout-upsetting blogs maliciously implicating an innocent third party, nor of deviously creative wrongdoers deliberately throwing YouTube video red-herrings (it’s still hyperbole!) They do not have sufficient experience to be able to make a judgement. In this specific and unusual case which bears only a passing resemblance to the everyday occurrence of citizens discharging their civic duty by reporting crime, the police were damned (by the devout) if they didn’t and by LKS (if they did).
I have, against my better judgement, read and re-read your ‘inductive reasoning’ paragraph and am no wiser as to what you have induced. I can see why you state that X (blog) is easier than Y (video) – is that right? I think ‘former’ and ‘latter’ were more obvious to you when writing than they are to me on reading. And A and B are degrees of difficulty? So you are attempting to show that because B is sufficiently high (extremely difficult), Y should be accepted as evidence that a person should be a suspect, and because A is less difficult it shouldn’t be? I can’t follow that leap. I’m afraid your ‘clearly stated’ is indistinguishable from my ‘incomprehensibly muddled’.
Ah! Perhaps you’ve missed some of the intervening comments. I misled everybody down my own crooked path by suggesting the same thing. I didn’t know that for a fact, I assumed it due to slightly different experience of police station practise. I think Jeffrey knew she wasn’t, and undergrad2 knew arrest is not a prerequisite for bail. Perhaps ‘bail’ is used as a ‘rights reservation’ by police in Malaysia, if they fear a crucial witness might disappear.
All this defending and attacking points of view in a novel situation is hard enough without someone casting all the unknowns in the concrete of formal logic. How is the PhD going? bbcnews.com added at least a year to mine, I wish you more restraint!
Ahahaha ‘right another comment’. An unconscious error, but not bad enough to need correcting
Let’s try Hussam Huddud law for a change..
There are two or three responses from posters here that are interesting.
First is what Taxidriver commented 06: 32.17 (50 minutes ago).
Never mind the techical difference whether the woman approaching the authorities did so to exonerate herself or to report an offence witnessed as pointed out by OrangRojak, the point is she, like rest of us, is entitled to civil rights that have to be balanced against, and not treated as a suspect for expedience of investigation unless there has already been an investigation and reasonable basis to treat her a suspect.
As what Lee Wang Yen lucidly points out, there is a clear difference between “reasonable grounds to ask someone to assist in an investigation” and “reasonable grounds to treat someone as a formal suspect”.
So on the question whether authorities have reasonable basis to treat as a suspect – although we don’t know all the facts but just based on what is known so far in public domain, it seems (at least to me) (1) improbable that she was a perpetrator as such an offender would ordinarily not leave his/her photo and identity in such a blog that he/she knows or (being an educated persion/accountant) ought to know would get him/her into lots of trouble with the law (2) improbable that she need, for reasons of police expedience, to be formally treated a suspect on bail to ensure her continued assistance in investigation – when it was the woman who has been trying to contact Information Minister, Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek & MMC weeks ago to clear her name, it is the authorities (rather than she) who, according to Kit have been “tardy and laid-back in taking action against the blog concerned”.
As Lee Wang Yen points out, we have to rely on comparison of “relative probabilities” even if it does not yield “mathematical certainty” rather than dwell on just possibility which can point to any direction, when making a judgment.
What Undergrad2 said about the difference between London Bobbies and the “mata-mata” here is true.
However in talking about fostering good community cooperation as prerequisite of tackling surging crime wave here, it is not that I use London Bobbies as point of reference – no, I merely take a leaf from what successive IGPs have preached to their men in their public lectures of what is important in police work to tackle the crime problem here.
To AhPek’s earlier question (23: 42.08) there is (technically in principle) a redress (eg damages) for misfeasance (as I defined) but in practical terms and in terms of proving it, indeed getting fellow “mata mata” to first investigate it is a tall order.
If false imprisonment of person as a suspect (when there is no reasonable basis to do so) were misfeasance, it seems treating someone a suspect (for the same lack of reasonable basis) and letting him/her go because bail were posted (the alternative, without bail would have triggered the same consequence of false imprisonment) should stand on same platform (though in latter case) no immediate hardship is suffered by the person unreasonably treated as suspect, except the inconvenience of posting bail, so I would think it is a waste of time, if not invite more reprisal, to pursue redress in the latter case.
You miss the distinctions between X and A, and between Y and B.
You miss the point of X-Y and A-B. These are meant to show that there is a crucial disanalogy which blocks your argument from analogy.
Using symbols is very common in analytic philosophy. By the way, philosophers are those who developed logic, and thus they do not ‘borrow’ the habit of using symbols from people of other fields (such as mathematics). It does aid clarity. Without using symbols I’ll have to repeat propositions like those represented by X, Y, etc or use a lot of pronouns such as ‘it’, ‘they’, or referring expressions such as ‘the former’, ‘the latter’, ‘the first option’, etc.
Pronouns and referring expressions often confuse and lead to ambiguities and vagueness.
I am not saying the Malaysian police are saint. But if we care to read through the whole arguments here, they are nothing other than unprofessional, lazy, not helpful, abusing power, lackadaisical, not IT savvy, apathetic, and may be even racist. If we begin with this premise, nothing done by police will be right even though we know nothing at this stage how the investigation should proceed.
Statement like this really amazed me: “I can’t fathom why if she were one of the perpetrators of such a mischeivous (mischievous) blog insulting the Prophet (in this country), would want her own photograph and identity to be used in the blog, and thereafter bring the atention (attention) of the authorities to it.” Now I am not saying she is really involved or otherwise. The fact is I don’t know. However, if we have idiot who can write statement like this does indicate that may it is worthwhile for someone to try out the strategy as stated. Look, you may be lawyer wannabe, but definitely you are lousy criminologist.
Oh come on, the reason why Sdr. Lim is raising the tradiness issue is because he knows there is a suspicion that the person behind it is somehow related to UMNO/Islamist group/institutions/groups. Liberal Malays/Non Malays/non-Muslim in this country i.e., DAP supporters don’t do these kinds of things and we know it.
Dig deeper into this and not only is superiority of DAP ideology is clear, the extreme charges against DAP such as anti-Malay, anti-Islam holds no water which makes DAP truly the superior moral compass of the country which makes UMNO/PAS claims of superiority of their religious ideas and non-secularity hollow.
Bro Kit,
Simple reason:- Prophet Mohammad & Islam is not a threat to UMNO. So Hamid & Shabery were not to concerned about the issue! The only reason they are now doing anything about it is because Pak Lah brought up the issue (probably he was scared that the the Opposition would bring it up first!).
You can be sure that they would have taken immediate action if someone in the Opposition says/does anything to threaten UMNO!
What do you expect from these worthless Ministers?!
Lee WY: Pronouns and referring expressions often confuse and lead to ambiguities and vagueness.
May be Cambridge Uni did not teach you this: If you have ideas or issues more complex or complicated than you can handle, break it down into simpler form. It is ok to write in Kg Attap style so long as people like me, mosterball and others can understand. Otherwise it may just be the exchange between you and a few wannabes who often write simple ideas in complicated forms.
“… unprofessional, lazy, not helpful, abusing power, lackadaisical, not IT savvy, apathetic, and may be even racist.”
We already know that! Have you got anything more to add about yourself.
“This was revealed by the Information Minister, Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek who said on Saturday that the woman in her 20s whose photograph and identify were used in the blog containing insults …”
This is like leaving your calling card at the scene of the crime except that in this case it is done on purpose. Even the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame would know that it couldn’t be her.
In this case the police, rightly or wrongly, thinks that she is in the same position as the victim who cried “Rape!” and reported the matter to the police five days after the commission of the crime. She becomes a suspect and the police would need to investigate her as well.
You will be amazed at what some people will do to keep their shares of free lunches, including prostituting their own religion. It is a sad thing isn’t it?
Yes, it is important to break down complex arguments into manageable components. That’s the whole purpose of using symbols to represent some smaller units of propositions within a complex and compound proposition. The use of symbols gives the argument a modular structure (akin to the idea of the modular structure of a computer programme), in which symbols such as X and Y serve as modules.
I haven’t employed any unneccesary technicalities here. I haven’t really used Boolean algrebra since no symbols of Boolean operators appear (i.e. the symbols for ‘and’, ‘or’ [v], ‘not’ [~]) in my comments. I have merely used some Roman letters to represent a propositions. By the way, these letters do not really function as ‘unknowns’, as in the case of mathematical algebra. They are not even meant to be statement variables as used in predicate logic. They are just meant to represent in a very informal way a proposition that is referred to more than once in my posts in order to avoid repetition and the use of potentially misleading pronouns and referring expressions. I apologise for the need to use these symbols to carry out my arguments and plead for patience.
hahahahahaha….limkamput call me a slime bag..now so nice to me.
OK la…tomorrow is 2009 .
It will be a better year than 2008….no thanks to UMNO and BN.
Millions of OXEN will work hard…peacefully…applying greater disobedience to the government with no fear…more stubbornly than the rabbits…to make sure…UMNO move out from Putrajaya…next election.
Hi you wonderful…cheeky adorable smart guys…keep it up.
Hi you low class double headed.. two timer…Malaysian Chinese…stand up and be accounted for. Confess…change sincerely and vote for change of government.
Don’t be like a kite or a man with no backbone…talk…and is actually unreliable…voters.
Change and be real great Malaysian Chinese…like Lim Kit Siang.
Hi..all of you!! Bless you all wonderful young Malaysians.
Please …please register to vote. You cannot walk the talk..at least back up your talks with your votes.
To all…..HAPPY & PROSPEROUS.. 2009 OXEN YEAR!!
And specially to Lim Kit Siang …I thank him for allowing me to post in his blog…and wish him./long life…good health…to him and his whole family.
What a wonderful son…Lim Eng Guan proven to be…and no parents can be more blessed than LIM KIT SIANG and wife.
That’s the reward…LKS is getting for given up.. 40 years of his live for a Malaysian Malaysia.
oops… ‘… to represent [strike out ‘a’] propositions…’
Lee Wan Yen is trying to write a PhD thesis here which not many commoners are able to understand. I used to carpool with a PhD degree holder who tried to park his car about 100 metres away from the entrance of my office because the only parking lot he could find was located 100 metres away. However, the thing which the PhD degree holder needed to do was just to drop me in front of my office and just said “good bye. Have a nice day!” and then went off to his next destination (his house).
Somebody may be deemed to possess excellent IQ, but sometimes in everyday life we might just need a reasonable EQ level in order to make our life much easier and happier!
Unathorised access and uninvited intruder are the common problems among the computer users who have their system installed with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Why don’t we just assume that the Accountant’s computer has either been planted with a spyware or her password has been stolen by the hacker through Internet Explorer and suggest that the Police shall simply release her without requiring a bail from her but requiring a guarantor recommended by her to prevent her from refusal to appear in court proceeding as a critical eyewitness?
No, I no longer need to write a PhD thesis.
Some accuse me of getting into unnecessary technicalities.
However, if you read my first post commenting on OrangRojak’s argument against Jeffrey’s points, you’ll find that that was a short and straightfoward comment without any symbol.
It is natural that the arguments proffered get more and more complicated when the discussion gets deeper, as in the case here. When OrangRojak responded to some of my points, what I did was to further elaborate my original short and straightfoward points to address his objections. This is a natural course of rational argumentation.
But it seems that many of us are too used to a form of impatient argumentation where each side mentions his own argument or assertion in a few words, and get into ridicules, lewd jokes, shouting, abuses and insults when the discussion gets past the first few exchanges of ‘short and simple points’. This is because many people think that their own assertions are so obviously true that any one who refuse to accept them only deserve ridicule. They are not aware of or have forgotten the fact that some simple propositions require extensive justification by addressing a network of assumptions and background beliefs when the those propositions are challenged in a discussion. But this requires patience. Many people would rather go for abuses and jokes or resort to comment on the commentator’s style, his background, his personal details, his location, his EQ etc rather than focussing on the challenged proposition and its assumptions.
Gradual development of complication in a protracted argument is necessary in rational and patient argumentation. This is different from the unnecessary use or flaunting of technicalities, a practice which starts off a discussion or argument with unnecessary techincal expressions. But my first post was clearly a simple and straightforward comment without any techinicalities.
oops… ‘…when [strike out ‘the’] those propositions…’
Sorry
oops… ‘…any one who REFUSES…’
oops… ‘…only DESERVES…’
oops… ‘…resort to COMMENTING on..’
Undergrad2: We already know that! Have you got anything more to add about yourself.
Yes, plenty add about you, undergrad2: half baked, commenting without reading, just to name two.
Onlooker,
PhD holders are square pegs looking for round holes!
another question is if DAP really for ALL MALAYSIAN,why they dont do a POLICE REPORT when they know about it???
Instead blaming everyone and everything..
Discrimination of religions adn race??
tetapi saya memaafkan anda Unc Lim because saya faham anda dah tua dah.. bila dah tua-tua ni tau saja la badan dan fikiran dah jadi lembab.. nak berfikir pun lambat nak ambil tindakan pun lambat.. oleh itu saya maaf kan.. semoga Unc Lim tak nyanyok ..
Lee Wang Yen, I find that you have a good inclination to become a good lecturer. However, sometimes we just need to find a coffee shop nearby and sit down together so that you may explain all your points to everybody who is interested to know about what you are trying to say! In the Blog Comment, I would appreciate it if you could try to keep your words concise, precise, short and simple! By the way, shall I address you as “Mr Lee” or “Miss Lee” or “Dr. Lee”? Or do you insist that I shall address you as “Professor Lee”?
Iskandarjohan, I don’t agree that DAP should lodge any report to the Police on any dissident opinion or dissenting opinion presented by others. The Police is not the best judge, besides DAP people shall bear in mind that they have the rights of the Freedom of Speech to uphold for everyone of us, the Malaysian citizens!
hahahahahahahahahaha
You guys…….light up my life!
When we join a discussion by giving our first comment or response to other’s points, we give a short comment providing the point and a short reason, as in my first response to OrangRojak’s argument against Jeffrey’s points. That comment is both concise and precise.
When someone questions my point or the reason given for that point, I’ve got to explain that point and elaborate the reason by addressing background assumptions. This naturally involves more words, since the scope has been widened from a point and a short reason to the deeper analysis of the point and the expansion of the reason into a network of background beliefs. But the increase of words does not mean the lack of conciseness, since it can be attributed to the expansion of the scope required by the natural progression of the discussion. By the way, to be precise in writing is to try one’s best to be explicit about one’s meanings in that one gives as much explanation as possible to prevent ambiguities and vagueness. Also, precision requires sensitivity to nuances in words and a range of possible interpretations of a particular proposition. Thus, in discussing others’ comments, one who is precise often has to refer to these nuances and interpretations, which naturally increase the length. Again, this does not mean unnecessary expansion of the length in violation of the principle of conciseness. The use of symbols is very common in analytic philosophy since symbols have been found to aid precision.
Yes, many people are just interested in coffee shop conversations. Perhaps many contributors in the blog are just interested in saying what they think about a particular issue and are not really interested to examine whether what they think about that issue is justified or reasonable. Fine! People who are just interested in doing so should just say whatever they think about the issue and leave it there. There are other people who are interested in examining whether their own view and others’ views on that particular issue are justified. Since the comments of the former are published in this public domain, the second group of contributors, who are interested in justified views, have the freedom to examine the views given by the first group, who are not interested in justified views. If the first group of commentators were really not interested in justified views, they wouldn’t have cared to respond to the criticisms made by members of the second group. If you really take your own remarks as a coffee-shop talk whose main function is to express whatever comes to your mind and whose justification does not really matter, you wouldn’t care if it is justified or not, and thus wouldn’t care to respond if others think that it is not justified. But whether the view is justified is important for someone who cares about discussing justified views on a particular matter.
If you’re not interested in expressing a justified view of a particular issue or getting into a serious discussion of the issue, there is no need to respond to my comments, whether they have touched on what you have said. You should just ignore them, and let others who are interested in justified views and serious discussion respond to them.
Come on you guys, we mustn’t denigrate Lee Wang Yen’s contribution to YB’s blog.He is well trained by Cambridge to argue the way he argues.If we can’t follow him just dig up some of your old books on probablity theory or logic and syllogistic arguments that might help to promote understanding Lee’s position.
Lee has certainly given us very good information on Islamic fundamentalist,how they aim to make the world islamic eventually by any means even by way of taqiyya.He has recommended us to get to http://www.islam-watch.org/ and it will do us good to get there to read some of the postings.They are definitely good stuff for information.
We may not entirely agree with him but he definitely has a point that we all must heed in respect to viewing who is the greater evil PAS or UMNO.
Professor Lee Wang Yen,
Thank you for taking your precious time to teach us the induction technique in logical thinking. I really appreciate it.
If you really live in Malaysia long enough or have mixed around with the laymen much more often, then you shall have no difficulty to understand that the Malaysian Police have all rights to detain or arrest anybody out of no reason for at least 24 hours. A Special Branch Police Officer used to disclose to me that the police records showed that a policeman had even dared to misuse this Police Power to harrass a competitor of his in the competition for chasing after a beautiful young girl by putting the competitor in the Police Lockup on Friday night and then got the competitor released only on Monday morning.
Furthermore, the OCPD is also given the full legal rights to require a suspect to be bailed out either with a collateral or with a verbal guarantee by a bailor. By inference from Jeffrey’s information, we might conclude that the bail might imply that the person to be released on bail was a critical eyewitness which the Police Prosecutor would like to call to stand as the eyewitness in the court proceeding and the bail might not necessarily imply that the person to be bailed had already been arrested by the Police. As far as I know, the OCPD is also given rights by the Police Act to require a critical eyewitness to pay a sum of money as bail without having to keep the eyewitness further in the Police Custody, based on the legal reason that the eyewitness is wanted by the Police at the Police’s discretion in order to assist the Police in the criminal investigation proceeding. Under the Police Act, the IGP has been given the rights to detain anybody for prevention purpose for a period up to two years. Under the Internal Security Act, the IGP is given the legal rights to detain anybody who is deemed to have anything to do with the critical economic services such as hospital staff during the happening of a natural calamity, or to detain anybody who is deemed to have any implication in relation to the national security or public tranquility, simply for preventative purpose.
If you know all about the Police Powers in Malaysia, perhaps you will no longer be willing to waste your time to attempt to do an analysis further on whether there is any arrest being conducted on the Accountant and whether the arrest is a wrongful one.
Would you please change your faulty assumption which implied that the Accountant had been put under the Police arrest because she was required to pay a bail sum before she was allowed to be set free from the Police Lockup?
You would never be able to reach upon a valid and logically correct conclusion if you continued to base your inferences on the faulty assumption!
Gift of the gap with no practical experiences…but based on theory…assumptions…reading the facts that one was never involved in the scene…can never give a strong sensible argument.
Touch ..feel and see ..be there…gives a clearer picture.
But it’s a good starter..if all the arguments are geared to learn more and not proving.. who is right or wrong.
I notice one…with the gift of the gap…uttered out most complicated….difficult to comprehend arguments…mostly based on assumptions and hearsay.
He is a smart bloke. Perhaps a genius in the making?
But alas…he sounds more like clown than a genius to me.
Maybe I am an old idiot.
It’s your daily results in your working life that counts.
So each of you….sit back and think…are you in financial difficulties…late to pay few installments….no money to impress your girl friend for a lavish dinner?
If so..that’s the first sign..your gap is worthless.
You are not a successful man yet.
Best sign…is your boss treating you with the best of the best?
If yes….you should have no financial problems….CORRECT?
But if you say…..I never have financial problem….because my parents is filthy rich…then you will have a mental and attitude problems….boastful and will be a full of shit man as you grow older.
Thank you AhPek for making a fair comment posting Today at 16: 59.46.
Yes Onlooker Politics said Today at 19: 15.13 our police have wide discretionary powers including determining who in their view is treated a “suspect” – often even without a reasonable basis.
That’s the problem here. Once they so determine you’re a suspect, even unreasonably, police bail is granted when investigation cannot be completed. Instead of detaining the suspect longer, police bail is granted to ensure that the suspect will appear at the police station and report to the
investigation officer at the appointed time. Usually, police bail takes the form of a bond by the surety without securities being furnished.
Now this ‘unreasonable’ determination of a person as a suspect is seldom challenged because of the ease with which bail may be posted by just getting a friend or relative to act as one’s surety (read, guarantor).
This act of going along to get a surety to post bail does not suggest the police have done right (both in sense of law or fostering goodwill of the community whose cooperation with the police is required to combat crime) or that their detrmination that you are a suspect cannot be challenged.
However in practical terms who would – considering the ease with which in most occasions a bailor/surety is obtainable as balanced against possible reprisals from law enforcement officers if one takes them to court for falsely or unreasonably treating one as a suspect? Also they could defend themselves that they have acted in good faith, however unreasonable their actions/determination may have been.
Onlooker,
The good professor obviously has come to the wrong place to show off his skills at inductive reasoning, logical reasoning etc. I suggest he seeks out a more professional audience.
Police bail is to ensure that the person returns to the police station to answer questions on the day and at the time required. The alternative woull be to have to spend a few nights in the police lock-up – a very unpleasant experience.
It is different from the normal bail in the case of bailable offences. In the latter case you pay money into court. In this latter case you have been formally charged but have been given bail to ensure you appear at the appointed time and surrender yourself to the court to answer charges. If it is a bailable offence, bail must be allowed. The purpose of bail is not to punish.
There you go! Can we now move on??
The Police Act does allow either Bond or Deposit be required by the Police as Security to be provided by the suspect. Legally speaking, the Police is not wrong to require a deposit as bail security from the suspect, even though a surety is usually adequate in most cases.
On the issue of wrongful arrest, I think it is practically not economically feasible to challenge the Police in court because the Police has been given the discretionary power to arrest anybody for 24 hours.
Under the law (CPC), the police will have to have you brought in front of a magistrate and have you formally charged within 48 hours – or have you released.
If it is a bailable offense under the Penal Code, bail will have to be granted. The amount of bail will be determined by the court with inputs from both counsel.
In murder cases, bail will be refused as you are a flight risk. In jurisdictions like the United States, bail is always given since it interferes with the citizen’s constitutional rights and they are dead serious about any interference with liberty, right to due process etc. In murder cases bail could be as high as $2.0 million which in most cases it is as good as no bail.
Onlooker,
The police must have probable cause or reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Why is that important? Here’s why. If they have no reasonable cause, then any evidence they find on you will not be admissible in court. It is called ‘fishing expedition’ which is illegal.
Before you jump up and down with joy and say, “That’s easy. Find probable cause and detain the guy.” Just what is ‘probable cause’ and ‘reasonable suspicion’ is never easy to determine and would depend on the circumstances. So who decides? The court does on the facts of each case.
AhPek’s slanderous remark with regard to my recommendation of the Islam-watch website is completely unacceptable.
I did not recommend that website as a source of good information. I said in an earlier post that I did not endorse the contents. I merely suggest the Islamic apologists should focus their attention on that website. Anyone who reads that post will find that AhPek has deliberated twisted the post. Below is that comment:
‘Lee Wang Yen Says:
Yesterday at 18: 13.15
I agree with madmix.
I think the Islamic apologists in our country should direct their attention to websites such as
http://www.islam-watch.org/
(I neither endorse nor reject its contents; I’ve got no opinion about its contents).
This is a website set up by ex-Muslims, mostly from South Asia, to provide arguments for the falsity of Islamic claims. There are articles highly critical of Mohammad on the website. Our zealous Islamic apologists should focus on responding to their arguments, since they are unlikely to get this website closed down and cannot get these authors charged under our Sedition Act. And this website is much more detrimental to the Islamic cause than some blasphemous blogs that do not really provide any substantial reasons to think that there is anything wrong or bad with Islam or Mohammad.’
If you don’t like my comments, there is no need to post sarcastic remarks about them. Just ignore them. In any case, you shouldn’t make false claims about my comments.
AhPek’s slanderous remark with regard to my recommendation of the Islam-watch website is completely unacceptable.
I did not recommend that website as a source of good information. I said in an earlier post that I did not endorse the contents. I merely suggest the Islamic apologists should focus their attention on that website. Anyone who reads that post will find that AhPek has deliberated twisted the post.
If you don’t like my comments, there is no need to post sarcastic remarks about them. Just ignore them. In any case, you shouldn’t make false claims about my comments.
Onlooker Politics says:
‘You would never be able to reach upon a valid and logically correct conclusion if you continued to base your inferences on the faulty assumption’
This comment is irrelevant.
As I mention in an earlier post, the kind of reasoning involved in inferences about whether someone is guilty of a crime is INDUCTIVE. Only a deductive argument can be valid. All inductive arguments are deductively invalid. The measure for inductive arguments is ‘inductively strong’.
By the way, you should have just said that ‘you would never be able to reach a true/correct conclusion if you continued to base your inferences on a faulty assumption, since the validity of an argument has nothing to do with whether its premises/assumptions are true or false/faulty.
Onlooker Politics says:
‘Would you please change your faulty assumption which implied that the Accountant had been put under the Police arrest because she was required to pay a bail sum before she was allowed to be set free from the Police Lockup?’
Where do you get the idea that I make the faulty assumption that the accountant was arrested?
You might have got the idea from one of my earlier comment:
‘But reasonable grounds to ask someone to assist in an investigation are different from reasonable grounds to treat someone as a formal suspect or to arrest someone as a formal suspect (in this case, arrest seems to be implied by her release on bail).’
Does this sentence show that I assume that the woman was arrested? No! I phrase that sentence carefully to show that I’m not sure whether she was arrested. Thus, I write, ‘…treat somone as a formal suspect OR to arrest someone as a former suspect’. I write this disjunctive sentence to show that I’m not sure whether she was arrested. I merely suggest that arrest seems to be implied. But the disjunctive sentence should indicate clearly that I do not assume that she was arrested.
In any case, and more importantly, my argument does not rely on the assumption that she was arrested, even if I did make that assumption. As long as she is treated as a former suspect (as indicated in the first disjunct), my argument will work.
Jeffrey, do you really think that AhPek’s comment posted at 16: 59.46 today is fair?
Lee Wang Yen, I’m sorry, a busy day left me only minutes to make silly comments on a rapidly degenerating “Happy NY” thread. I wanted to respond to some of your comments (not necessarily to argue with them), since I feel I might have opened Pandora’s Box by responding directly to the detail of your method.
I think if I harbour a simple objection to your method at all, it is perhaps, as you have noted above, that most of us here don’t make an appeal to formalism to back up our point of view. Sarcasm, hyperbole, metaphor, crap analogies, passion and bigotry are the lingua franca of this blog – with the occasional gem of real insight or helpful explanation. When I made the remark about ‘clarity is in the eye of the reader’ I should have made it with more care. If you employ formalisms in a forum where no other commenter uses them, you are not likely to be making yourself more clear (regardless of the clarity or lack of it in your formal approach) – I believe you may be obfuscating your argument.
If you’re ever in Port Dickson and you fancy an argument involving weighted networks of assumptions, I’ll buy you a kopi. I won’t entertain you for a second if you’re not prepared to sketch them on paper. Have a peaceful and prosperous 2009.
Everybody else – thanks for your patience, ridicule, counterpoint, information, misdirection etc. I look forward to an equally tortuous commenting experience in 2009.
Oops… ‘…as a FORMAL suspect…’
sorry
Lee Wang Yen,
And why do allow your inductive reasoning to come to the conclusion that I’ve deliberately twisted the post.Don’t tell me that inductive reasoning of yours can even detect intention.Look if you think I’ve been mistaken in my understanding of what you’ve written,just say so,make it simple.
Onlooker Politics says:
‘If you know all about the Police Powers in Malaysia, perhaps you will no longer be willing to waste your time to attempt to do an analysis further on whether there is any arrest being conducted on the Accountant and whether the arrest is a wrongful one.’
I find this comment very strange. I have been discussing whether there are reasonable grounds to treat the woman as a formal suspect. I wonder what the great or excessive police power in Malaysia has to do with the point I’m discussing. If the Malaysian police take actions based on their excessive power even when they lack reasonable grounds, aren’t I still right in contending that they have treated the woman as a formal suspect without reasonable grounds? And treating someone as a formal suspect without reasonable grounds is wrong – morally wrong, though it may not be legally wrong in Malaysia.
If someone claim that Malaysian police are corrupt, do you think that he should not waste time analysing or arguing whether they have done something wrong just because he is aware of the fact that many policemen take bribes?
To AhPek,
Because I assume that you’ve read and understood my comment before commenting. And both these assumptions are justified according to ordinary criteria, since that comment is very plain and is very unlikely to be misunderstood.
Of course, I might be wrong in making these assumptions – probable statements could be false. But what matters is that I was justified in making them.
Yes, inductive reasoning can make justified inferences about intention insofar as inductive reasoning yields justified judicial conclusions.
In many criminal cases, a judge has to conclude via a complex series of inductive reasoning that a defendant of a certain charge has a certain motivation (or intention) in order to arrive at the conclusion that he is (probably) guilty. For example, inductively ‘proving’ the existence of an intention is crucial in cases of premeditated murder.
It is highly unlikely for any one who is capable to write comments like those of AhPek to fail to understand that I did not recommend the website, given that I write in the post that ‘I neither endorse nor reject the contents of the website; I’ve got no opinion about the contents’.
No, I didn’t say that perhaps most people here were not interested in formalism.
What I said was that perhaps most people here were not interested in expressing justified views.
I think it would be best for those who are not interested in expressing justified views to ignore my comments. There are some who are interested in justified views. Let those who are interested respond to my comments.
Professor Lee Wang Yen,
Thank you for reminding me to correct my irrelevant comment.
Pleasantly, you make me recall of those fond days when I was still a freshie in the class of “Introduction to Logical Thinking”.
Amusingly, we have been discussing for the whole day here trying to figure out whether the Police has committed a wrongful arrest on the Accountant but you finally told us that all of us were logically wrong in using an inductive approach in the reasoning.
I think this is the best joke I have ever found in year 2008.
Thank you for making this a good day for me!
Have a Blessed New Year!
Lee Wang Yen,
You know there’s a certain smugness about you that I suspect quite a few here sense. Like I said you can just make it simple but no you have to take 3 comments to make your point,and even ask Jeffrey presumably to support you.For what,just to display your intellect.Is there a necessity to show your ego?
Professor Lee Wang Yen,
If I am allowed an opportunity to meet you in the coffee shop, perhaps I will have the pleasure to invite you for coffee shop conversation on theology.
I feel that theology will be a more interesting topic for us to talk about than the logics.
By the way, do you believe in God?
Did I say or imply that anyone was logically wrong in using inductive approach in this issue?
How could I have said or implied this, since I’ve reiterated that I’ve been using inductive reasoning and that inductive reasoning is what we have to rely on in science and ordinary life?
Please reread my comment on the irrelevance of one of your comments.
Yes, I do believe in God. But that is irrelevant to what we discuss here.
I will no longer respond to points about my personal life since they are irrelevant.
AhPek says:
‘…Like I said you can just make it simple but no you have to take 3 comments to make your point…’
Does expressing my points in three separate posts violate the principle of simplicity?
I responded to three different points raised in your comment in three separate and very short posts to make it more manageable, since I have been advised to simplify a complex argument. One way to simplify a complex argument is to break it into smaller components and to deal with each component in a separate post.
I have consistently shown that I’m only interested in discussing particular issues by focusing on comments on those issues, my arguments for my views, the responses of others to my views and methodology, the defence of my views, and of my methodology, etc. I have not raised the issue of ego. Perhaps one think that defending one’s view to the hilt is equivalent to ‘the need of showing ego’. But I don’t think so. For me it is the need to know the truth that drives me.
oops… ‘…one THINKS that…’
See there you go again,brushing away this fellow’s point as irrelevant,that fellow also and so on,placing yourself on a high pedestal and pissing quite a few off.Look Lee Wang Yen,you may be a wiz kid but you haven’t got a shred of wisdom in you.
Sadly, instead of focusing on a commentator’s arguments and methodology, some commentators here choose to focus on the commentator.
Even if I’m smug and egoistic, it is irrelevant to the discussion here.
undergrad2 Says:
December 31st, 2008 at 22: 19.26
“Onlooker,
The police must have probable cause or reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Why is that important? Here’s why. If they have no reasonable cause, then any evidence they find on you will not be admissible in court. It is called ‘fishing expedition’ which is illegal.”
Undergrad2,
Perhaps you have forgotten that the Police can always make use of the draconian ISA to invoke a preventive detention. Noone will have any chance to challenge the Police in court for ‘fishing expedition’ and to prove that the Police arrest has been done in an illegal manner.
Common sense tells us that it is much better for us not to take the Police to court even if there is a wrongful arrest that is deemed to have been done on us by the Police. The core question is whether the possible liquidated damages and additional penalty damages permitted by court will justify the expensive cost of hiring a lawyer in a civil lawsuit against the Police! Therefore, in Malaysia so far we can hardly see a civil case which has been commenced in a Malaysia legal court in relation to someone’s accusing the Police for wrongful arrest, even though wrongful arrest by the Police has been a very common complaint made by many victims of the Police misuse of power in Malaysia.
No, I don’t brush away points. One who brushes away points simply dismisses it and does not care about giving a reason or an argument for why a particular point is irrelevant, a particular argument is problematic, inconsistent etc. But I have given reasons and arguments whenever I disagree with someone’s views. In fact, I have also given reasons and arguments most of the time when I express agreement with someone’s views.
It’s precisely because you are smug and egoistic that some commenters choose to focus on you.Don’t you see that at all? Oh sorry stupid of me it’s irrelevant to you!!
Professor Lee Wang Yen,
I sincerely believe that whether a person does believe in God or not makes a big difference.
I would rather trust that a God-fearing person would have never used the formal logical argument in order to defeat his/her counterpart in the logical discussion. A God-fearing and academically-honest person will usually rely upon the common sense instead of convoluted logic in order to make a clarification on his/her premise/assumption or qualified statement.
Would you please justify your claim that I’m smug and egoistic?
And if you have any humility at all you could have taken some of the pointers given by OrangRojak Dec 31st 2008 23:20:30
I’ve not used formalism. I’ve merely used some Roman letters to represent some propositions to avoid repetition and the use of pronouns and referring expressions.
That’s not formalism. That doesn’t even qualify as semi-formalism. To be formalistic I’ll at least have to use Boolean algebra. But I’ve not used symbols for Boolean operators in my posts.
In any case, God-fearing analytic philosophers have used formal arguments to argue against views of other philosophers. I can cite at least three big names.
You haven’t given any reason to show that I’m smug and egoistic. That comment of OrangRojak does not contain any clue to support this claim. What it claims is that I’ve been using formalism. But this is a false claim, as I argue in an earlier post in response to Onlooker Politics, my mere use of Roman letters to represent some propositions in order to avoid repetition and the use of pronouns and referring expressing does not even qualify as semi-formalism.
And I don’t have to justify my assertion that you are smug and egoistic.Like I’ve said quite a few in YB’s blog have sensed that and that’s good enough for them to come to that conclusion.
Then I’m sorry I can’t take that assertion seriously.
Whatever it is, one shouldn’t simply conclude that ‘a person is smug and egoistic if that person defends some of his views to the hilt or if that person manages to show the weakness of his opponent’s arguments’ (let’s call the sentence within the quotation marks P).
Disclaimer: This is only meant to be a general point. I’m not suggesting that P is AhPek’s reason for asserting that I’m smug and egoistic. Since he does not justify his assertion and says that it arises from a kind of feeling, which he allegedly shares with ‘quite a few’ commentators here, I do not claim that P describes his reason for making that assertion.
You definitely don’t have to of course and it also isn’t my intention to ask you to take it seriously for how dare I ask a person of such stature to come down some of the time from the pedestal he has placed himself all of the time.Professor Lee Wang Yen a mere mortal like me just don’t have the audacity to do that!!!
How is that point about my smugness and egoism relevant to whether the police have reasonable grounds to treat that woman as a formal suspect?
“The core question is whether the possible liquidated damages and additional penalty damages permitted by court will justify the expensive cost of hiring a lawyer in a civil lawsuit against the Police!” Onlooker
Limkamput is prepared to work pro bono.
Professor Lee Wang Yen,the wiz kid from Cambridge,I am no wiser from your bloviating (thanks undergrad for introducing that word) and you are no wiser from my telling you that you are smug and egoistic.I am happy to give my opinion and you are happy bloviating.So what else is new!
What do you mean be bloviating? A sense of ‘bloviate’ is ‘speaking in a boastful way’. Are you saying that I’m speaking in a boastful way?
Which of my comments is boastful? Have I said anything like I think I’m very good or smart or etc?
Now, if you claim that someone is boastful just because he defends some of his views to the hilt and show the weaknesses of his opponent’s views and arguments, I must say that this is a very unjustified claim.
No, as I’ve shown consistently in my posts, I’m not happy to just make assertions or give opinions without providing reasons or arguments. I’ve been giving reasons for my claims. But you have not given reasons for your claim that I’m smug and egoistic. That’s the difference.
oops… ‘..and SHOWS the..’
oops… ‘ … mean BY bloviating…’
Professor Lee Wang Yen,the wiz kid from Cambridge, you are happy bloviating and I am happy telling you are smug and egoistic.So what else is new!
Professor Lee Wang Yen,
It seems that the formal argument is going to end up with some name-calling with convoluted logic. Why don’t we just try to use the logic reduction to close off the debate?
Boolean transformations work by accumulating and rearranging structures. Contrary to Boolean transformations, boundary transformations work by deleting structures. Deletion has excellent computational properties: the problem gets smaller for each rule application, thus processing gets faster while problem size decreases.
Common sense example: You are in a room. You walk out the door and then back in the door. You can delete, or not perform, the two passages through the door because you end up in the same place.
If the question you initially raised in this blog was whether the police had reasonable grounds to treat that woman as a formal suspect, then by using the boundary logic we are pretty sure now that nothing much has been accomplished thus far because noone has ever been able to provide a true/correct conclusion on whether the police had reasonable grounds to treat that woman as a formal suspect. Common sense would require us to get the woman to come forward to us and testify on whether she had really been treated by the Police as a formal suspect. Therefore the debate proceeding should be pending until the woman has appeared to us as a crucial eyewitness.
If you don’t understand what ‘bloviating’ means, maybe you understand ‘blow’ and ‘wait’??
Lee Wang Yen asked whether I thought AhPek’s comment posted at 16: 59.46 today was fair.
On first reading (without accessing the Islamic website – sorry that’s my fault in commenting without first bothering to access), I thought it was fair.
On second reading (after taking a peep at that website), it has not changed my view that he meant well than ill.
I take his 1st para as to urge us, reading your arguments, to dig up our old books on “ probability theory or logic and syllogistic arguments” as well meaning.
Whatever field people have been trained in – whether sociology, psychology, economics, law, business management or even medicine – my personal bias is that philosophy, especially the field of logics, syllogistic arguments, fallacies of arguments etc – is the first, and the important knowledge/foundation to sharpen thinking skills to acquire and sift through information for the determination of fact.
AhPek says “we mustn’t denigrate Lee Wang Yen’s contribution to YB’s blog” and I agree that your reminder (by the way of your method of arguments) of these fundamentals (so often neglected, amid what OrangRojak correctly said about “sarcasm, hyperbole, metaphor, crap analogies, passion and bigotry are the lingua franca of this blog” – is timely, helpful and well intentioned. I don’t view it as smugness or display of ego at all.
It is trite a recommendation to get to a site of interest does not necessarily involve a corollary recommendation by the “recommender” that the site’s contents are good in the sense true.
When AhPek said “the web site is “good information” or “good stuff”on Islamic fundamentalist, how they aim to make the world islamic eventually by any means even by way of taqiyya” – I take it as an expression of Ah Pek’s own views, presumably after his visit to it and after he had learnt about ‘taqiyya’ sometime back) (whether or not it is really true that perception of his). This is so especially in light of your express caveat.
Being so persuaded that the postinmgs are “good information” AH Pek himself recommended that “it will do us good to get there to read some of the postings” (esp when some of us might be nonchalant about implications of political fundamentalist thinking and complacent about PAS’s challenges).
The tenor of the whole posting that must be read.
On his last part: “We may not entirely agree with him” is certainly an attempt at balance – to say that disagreement in approach and way of tackling the problem of religious extremism that the rest may have with you, should not detract from the issue of which is greater evil, PAS or UMNO…
He has put his finger on the crux of the issue the subject of vehement debate with Godfather in the earlier blog thread.
He does not sound like someone trying to deliberately implicate you as endorsing a website or its contents which may rightly in some cases be construed as insulting Islam or plain paranoiac etc. That’s my impression.
I agree that AhPek’s statement that “Lee has certainly given us very good information on Islamic fundamentalist” by introducing the website may be misconstrued by some as implying that you recommend it as “good information”.
However we are all making postings in a blog where we don’t carefully compose our writings and thoughts that carefully (as some of us think it should be the case whilst rest of us respond to spontaneity) (or else it will have be something like this: “Lee has introduced us a web site which is interesting, which I personally found good information on Islamic fundamentalist but that part about it being good must be made clear is not his opinion as contained in his caveat”.
I look at the whole tenor and context of his posting rather than seize a single line, not that precisely expressed, in an informal blog posting and impute from that alone he has a less than meritorious motive. Judging as a whole, I would readily give him the benefit of any doubt for the reasons I have outlined in my preceding postings.
One may also ask, how do I know that when Ah Pek said “the web site is “good information” or “good stuff”on Islamic fundamentalist, how they aim to make the world islamic eventually by any means even by way of taqiyya” he was actually expressing his own views rather than implying tongue in cheek that it was Lee Wang Yen’s views, notwithstanding Lee’s caveat?
I form the view from the drift, leanings, and tenor of his postings in other blog thread in the past on issues relating to PAS.
Thanks, Jeffrey, for taking the time to explain this!
I may have misunderstood AhPek’s comment as sacrcasm. If so, I would be happy to apologise.
oops… ‘… comment as sacarsm.’
We’re not asking the subjective question of whether someone feels that she has been treated as a formal suspect. So the interesting boundary logic is irrelevant here.
We’re talking about whether the police are morally justified to treat, from a legal perspective, someone as a formal suspect without reasonable grounds.
This is an objective question that involves reasoning about the ethics of treating someone, from a legal perspective, as a formal suspect. One of the key issues is whether certain police action constitutes treating her as a formal suspect from the perspective of Malaysian law. This is an objective question we can discuss. Whether she feels she has been thus treated is irrelevant.
Lee,
Your attempt to inject a philosophical twist to the discussion relating to an issue which is one of law is hilarious!
Moderator/Kit: Could you please do me the favour of deleting my earlier two postings at 07: 28.09 (1 hour ago) and 08: 26.53 (15 minutes ago), as they are no longer necessary or relevant. Thank you.
The issue involves both legal and ethical aspects.
If we are only talking about whether the police action constitutes treating the woman as a formal suspect according to Malaysian law, it is purely a legal issue.
If we are talking about whether the police action constitutes treating the woman as a formal suspect, and if it does, whether it is morally right to treat her as a formal suspect under those circumstances, this is both a legal and ethical (and thus philosophical) issue.
oops… ‘… comment as SARCASM…’
sorry for the double corrections!
“One of the key issues is whether certain police action constitutes treating her as a formal suspect from the perspective of Malaysian law. This is an objective question ….” Lee
Your opinion on the issue is irrelevant. What is relevant is the law.
What does the law say about arrest, bail etc. Does the law require that your rights be read to you once an arrest takes place? What constitutes an arrest? How long can the police detain you without charging you? Can the police extend your detention without charging you? Do you have a right to counsel? If you cannot afford counsel will one be made available to you at state’s expense?
In all these issues your opinion is not relevant.
In some jurisdictions, the police is understandably slow in arresting or even declaring a person to be a person of interest or worse a suspect, because once they do, then the person arrested need not answer any question asked of him by the police. If he requests counsel then one must be provided to him.
For the police to arrest you, they must have probable cause or reasonable ground that a crime has been committed. If they do not have probable cause then the arrest and detention is unlawful. There is nothing that a writ of habeas corpus cannot solve.
Mere suspicion would not do. Even at this early stage the police would need to show some evidence to the magistrate. If they lack the evidence they will need to convince the magistrate that they believe they can get the evidence within the next several days. What the police can and cannot do is spelt out in the Criminal Procedure Code.
Since we have been giving our opinions on ‘whether a certain action constitutes treating someone as a formal suspect from the perspective of Malaysian law’ (let’s call the clause within the quotation marks P), those opinions are relevant.
Of course, some opinions on P are more accurate (in the sense of being closer to reflecting whether that action constitutes treating someone as a formal suspect according to Malaysian law) and some are less accurate. But whether accurate or not, all these opinions on P are relevant.
You should have said that my opinion, and by extension, the opinions of other non-experts in Malaysian law who commented on this aspect of the issue, may be questionable or unreliable given that I’m (and by extension, we’re [those non-experts and I]) not an expert in Malaysian law.
You don’t have to be an expert on Malaysian law. If you are then your opinion is relevant and admissible in a court of law.
You need to know the law. You don’t need to be an expert on the law. If you don’t know the law then you don’t know what you’re talking about.
See what I mean undergrad,he never misses any opportunity to display his prowess at sizing everything globally.Bloviating? Of course he will use his inductive reasoning,syllogistic arguments or maybe Boolean algebra that you are wrong.In simple language which only ordinary mortals like us know he has become a pain in the a_ _ to quite a few people in this blog,and I don’t mind telling him so straight in the face!
You seem to have conflated ‘relevant to our discussion here’ with ‘relevant to or admissable in a court of law’.
Whether my opinion and those of all the non-experts on Malaysian law here are admissable in a court of law will of course have bearing on the question of whether these opinions are reliable. If they there are admissable in a court of law, we have good reason to think that they are reliable. If they are not admissable because we are not lawyers, then we must find out from experts whether these opinions are reliable.
However, whether these opinions are reliable or not, they are relevant to our discussion here, though they are not relevant to or admissable in a law of court.
AhPek,
Some straight talking is in order.
“Whether my opinion and those of all the non-experts on Malaysian law here are admissable in a court of law will of course have bearing on the question of whether these opinions are reliable” Lee
Relevancy and reliability are two different things entirely. Heresay evidence is irrelevant and hence inadmissible. But in many cases they are very reliable.
Lee,
You’re once again bloviating!
Like I said earlier, your attempt to inject a philosophical twist to the discussion relating to an issue which is one of law is hilarious.
If you read my previous two posts, you’ll find that I’m making exactly the point that relevance and reliability are two different things entirely.
I say in those posts that whereas you may be right in challenging the reliability of my opinion given that I’m not an expert, you cannot say on this basis that it is irrelevant, since (as you have rightly pointed out) relevance and reliability are two different things entirely.
I don’t read Undergrad2’s comment “in all these issues your opinion is not relevant”as meaning (personal) to denigrate the opinions of non-experts in Malaysian law or non legally trained persons.
Put it in another way even even if it were opinion of a lawyer specialising in criminal law, his opinion may or may not be relevant (in what I think is Undergrad2’s sense), depending ultimately on the judge whether he agrees that that opinion really represents the law as promulgated and intended by Parliament, which it is his task to adjudge and decide (including whether it is “right” to treat the woman as suspect ….)
Right here means what is right in law. If the law requires reasonable or probable cause (on the circumstances) to link the woman to the offence before treating her as suspect to be released on bail, then thats it : her being treated as suspect is wrong (legally) if on the facts it is unreasonable, in the judge’s view, for the police to so link….never mind whatever else persons whether laymen or trained lawyer may have different opinion whether on moral or legal or common sense grounds.
It may be a legal fiction but when it comes to adjudicating what is relevant law or fact, there is only but one reasonable man – the judge, a fiction for the system to work!
Our lawyers are trained to focus on that which matters – what is the law (as interpreted accurately ) to divine Parliament’s intent, whose job through the people’s reprsentatives is to make laws for the people (that wh y g overnment of the people for the people).
Therefore our opinion of what morally or legally ought to be the case whether we be legal experts or laymen is, from this “restricted” perspective, irrelevant when one is working through and interpreting the rules and the laws- often a jungle of words, that fail to give mathematical precision – as to what Parliament intended, when making the law.
Thats looking at the micro picture.
Macro-wise, although laws and morals don’t necesarily intersect (for example, it is immoral but not unlawful not to save or lend helping hand to a person drowning or committing suicide), yet ultimately all laws and rules must repose on a moral/ethical foundation that provide the legitimacy for their adherence by the people and enforcement by the state.
I shall not dwell futher in this, a field called “jurisprudence” (philosophy of law) (which students of philosophy as well as Law study).
As I say and defend in a previous post, this issue involves both legal and ethical (and thus philosophical) aspects
Neither do I read it as a denigration. And whether it is a denigration is not an issue for me at all. I’m only interested in showing that he is wrong to claim that my opinion is not relevant to the discussion here: while opinions of non-experts may not be reliable and may not be admissable to a court of law, they are nonetheless relevant to the discussion here.
Relevancy and reliability are two different things entirely. Heresay evidence is irrelevant and hence inadmissible. But in many cases they are very reliable. undergad2
Seem beautifully said. But are you also saying most court systems are baloney and lawyers liars – sometimes they admit irrelevant evidence; sometimes they throw out reliable evidence – all based on some archaic technicality? NO wonder most wannabe lawyers here argue with no common sense and mostly devoid of reality.
Jeffrey says:
‘Put it in another way even even if it were opinion of a lawyer specialising in criminal law, his opinion may or may not be relevant (in what I think is Undergrad2’s sense), depending ultimately on the judge whether he agrees that that opinion really represents the law as promulgated and intended by Parliament, which it is his task to adjudge and decide (including whether it is “right” to treat the woman as suspect ….)’
I think it is more accurate to say that ‘his opinion may or may not be accurate/reliable’ rather than saying that it may or may not be ‘relevant’.
Suppose two lawyers A and B are talking about a legal issue in a court of law in Malaysia. A has an accurate understanding of Malaysian law and thus provides an accurate opinion on the matter. B provides an inaccurate opinion on the matter because he doesn’t have adequate knowledge or understanding in that aspect of Malaysian law. The judge decides to accept A’s opinion. But that does not mean that what B says is irrelevant. It is just inaccurate.
This argument also shows that we shouldn’t treat ‘admissable in a court of law’ as a synomyn to ‘relevant to a court of law’. Thus, I shouldn’t have followed Undergrat2 in assuming this synonymous relation in my last two posts.
Of course all of us have the right to give our piece, whether in this forum or elsewhere. It is our democratic right to express an opinion, esp a considered on what we think the law is or ought to be but whether opinion based on logic, common sense, ethical points count at the end of the day, that’s an other story.
For ultimately it is the law, the rules and their internal logic and interplay/interaction between multiple legal precepts (as viewed by the judge or past judges in precedents) that count and make the difference, more than our opinions, which, though well thought out and even logically infallible, may (or may not necessarily) depict law as it stands.
Jeffrey says:
‘…but whether opinion based on logic, common sense, ethical points count at the end of the day, that’s an other story.’
I think what you mean by ‘whether these count’ is ‘whether these are accurate’. On this interpretation I completely agree with you and Undergrad2, as shown by my previous posts.
What I disagree is to take ‘whether these count’ as ‘whether these are relevant’.
Thus, while Undergrad2 can question the accuracy and reliability of my opion on that particular issue, he shouldn’t have said that it is irrelevant.
oops… ‘…my OPINION on that…’
sorry
The issue involves both legal and ethical aspects. Note that I’m not saying that the both legal and ethical considerations are relevant to the legal aspect of the issue and that both legal and ethical considerations are relevant to the ethical aspect of the issue.
Only legal considerations are relevant to the legal aspect of the isuse, and only ethical considerations are relevant to the ethical aspect. This is the sense in which both legal and ethical aspects are involved in this issue.
” But reasonable grounds to ask someone to assist in an investigation are different from reasonable grounds to treat someone as a formal suspect or to arrest someone as a formal suspect (in this case, arrest seems to be implied by her release on bail).” Lee
This is so convoluted that this line of reasoning is not worth pursuing more than to say that there is no such thing in law as “to arrest someone as a formal suspect”.
To arrest or detain someone, the police must have probable cause or reasonable ground that a crime has been committed. Once arrested, he is of course a suspect because of the presumption of innocence. He is alleged to have committed the offence. He is not guilty of anything at this stage. You need to be a suspect before you could be lawfully arrested. Whether you will have to be released shortly after would depend on the evidence i.e. whether the evidence against you rises to the level of prima facie evidence. Suspects do get released afterwards because there is insufficient evidence to continue detaining them.
It is interesting this argument about “relevance” and “accuracy”.
I believe we know what this word “relevance” to an issue is in its ordinary grammatical meaning.
However legally trained persons talking about law speaks a relevance with a nuance that it means what according to the rules of evidence is admissible to be considered in a court, when making judgment of wh at law is.
Supposing there is a piece of evidence (a weapon) directly connecting somebody to a crime. Better still his wife expresses an opinion that the suspect husband has said something very bad about the victim murdered (before he was murdered).
Now to all of us (common sense) these are all “relevant” considerations pointing to motive and guilt.
However if the rules of evidence say the weapon traced from torturing a person is inadmissible or a spouse like wife cannot give evidence to incriminate the husband, then al l these facts that are common sensically relevant are no more relevant or “irrelevant” in that they cannot be admitted in court for consideration under rules of evidence.
Before we condemn such a law (evidence) it is structured such to prevent torture/duress as a means of getting evidence; it is also to prevent spouses not trusting each other when intimate confidences may be used against the other in court of law.
True it is society’s interest to catch and punish wrong doer but society does no t operate on a single axis of objective/imperative but multiple competing imperatives requiring weighing and balance.
As much as punishing guilt is important, so are the method of extracting evidence that must not violate human and civil rights or the confidences of husbands/wife i n order to buttress family institution, an important block in society stability and foundation.
Hence these rules on evidence that make what is relevant to us as laymen neither relevant nor accurate in law to a person like Undergrad2 of legal training and aspiration.
“Seem beautifully said. But are you also saying most court systems are baloney and lawyers liars – sometimes they admit irrelevant evidence; sometimes they throw out reliable evidence – all based on some archaic technicality? NO wonder most wannabe lawyers here argue with no common sense and mostly devoid of reality” limkamput
No bloviating please! That is the job of the professor.
Well, even if we accept that ‘what is relevant to a court of law’ is equivalent to ‘what is admissable in a court of law’, my contention that Undergrad2 shouldn’t have said that my opinion is not relevant is still right. This is because what matters here is whether my opinion is relevant to the discussion we’ve been carrying out here, not whether it is relevant to a court of law (if we assume that synonymous relation)
One may call it legal speak but we talk at cross purposes with lawyers because to us our frame of reference is logic, commonsense of what is true…but to the lawyer, it is a different frame of reference this word “relevant”, and th e lawy er is entitled to ask, what is the point when such relevant “truths” are not allowed by the law of evidence to be considered such in the court? It is as good as saying they are “not relevant” because when they are inadmissble by techical rules, they cannot be considered in the trial, which practically is as good as they are not there…. (I have earlier explained in simplified terms the reason for such evidential rules based on balance of competing objectives).
“Hence these rules on evidence that make what is relevant to us as laymen neither relevant nor accurate in law to a person like ….” Jeffrey QC
There is no better system than the adversarial system that we follow.
There are rules of evidence, and there are rules of procedure which must be followed. Relevant evidence is sometimes excluded because it is more prejudicial than it is probative. Reliable evidence is sometimes excluded because it goes against the common law rule excluding hearsay.
In our search for the truth, innocent people are sometimes convicted. Guilty ones sometime walk free.
Nevertheless, the adversarial system is still the best we got.
In my last post I say that EVEN IF we assume that ‘relevant to a court of law’ is synonymous with ‘admissable in a court of law’.
Now, let’s discuss whether they are synonymous.
According to Oxford Dictionary, ‘relevant’ means ‘connected with something’. I presume that ‘admissable’ means ‘acceptable’. Now what is acceptable as a piece of evidence in a court case may or may not be connected with that case. Whereas a piece of evidence obtained through torture is inadmissable in the court case being discussed in a court of law, it is still connected with that case in the court of law. So these are different notions. It’s better to keep the distinction between what is admissable in a court case being discussed in a court of law and what is relevant to a court case being discussed in a court of law.
Yes I agree that your’s mine and others opinions on the matter are relevant to discussion. As I said it is our entitlement to express an opinion. It is not a monopoly for legally trained persons to discuss legal issues – we to have our merits- though because of their training, I will pay more attention.
Undergrad2 is/was a person of specialised training, so when he said our views are “irrelevant” I don’t think he meant it personal as meaning that we don’t know what is right or wrong, logical or or illogical, or even know some law, but relevance in terms of the actual and speciic law on police powers raised in this blog thread, and whether we could challenge in law the police action relating to the woman’s accountant’s case.
Or at least that’s what I think he implies.
As to why admissibility of evidence in court is often garbled up, mixed and jumbled with the other word (relevant) as defined in Oxfort Dictionary is because if one reads through the laws/books on law of evidence, just about every page, chapter, heading and paragraph has this word, relevant, not relevant, relevancy no relevancy often ( not necesarily in every instance) synonymous with admissibility or non admissbility in court. It is such influence on choice of word different from the rest of us. I t is almost a technical jargon if I may use the description.
So in this context how lawyers speak – their term “relevance” has a specialised meaning by the way they are trained.
Neither do I take it as a personal criticism. I take his statement as referring to my comment not being relevant to the discussion here. Criticising someone’s comment as irrelevant to the discussion is not a personal attack. I’ve also critised others for making irrelevant points. I don’t think these criticisms are personal attacks. They are just criticisms of an aspect of the merits of one’s argument or point (other aspects are validity, soundness, etc).
So I did not respond to this particular criticism of him because I take it as a personal attack. I responded to it because I think that the criticism was unjustified and wrong – i.e. while my opinion may be unreliable and inadmissable in a court, it is still relevant to the discussion here.
Since I don’t think that ‘admissable in a court of law’ is synonymous to ‘relevant to a court of law’ (see my explanation in my previous post), I don’t think his criticism should be interpreted in terms of ‘irrelevant to a court of law’.
Of course, I agree with him that my opinion may not be reliable and may not be admissable to a court of law. But that is irrelevant to whether it is relevant to the discussion here.
It had been mentioned that the law gives wide discretionary powers to the police, and it seems difficult to prevent this law from being abused.
This law, together with the ISA, must have had its origins from the days of the Emergency when communist insurgency had threatened the peace.
Together with ISA, this law should be ammended because there were cases where the suspects were detained or remanded for an unnecessarily long time until it was found that the investigation could not find sufficient evidence or when the judge threw the case out of the court due to poor prosecution.
More emphasis should now be given to ‘innocent until proven guilty’. The police should only arrest a suspect after they have sufficient evidence to prosecute, not before. Then, there will be less chance of wasting time and the taxpayers’ money in trying to prosecute someone who turns out to be not guilty.
I’m not sure whether ‘relevance’ is used in such a techincal sense in law that ‘relevant to a court of law’ is synonymous with ‘admissable in a court of law’. We need to consult experts or some citations from the legal literature to find this out.
“Before we condemn such a law (evidence) it is structured such to prevent torture/duress as a means of getting evidence; it is also to prevent spouses not trusting each other when intimate confidences may be used against the other in court of law” Jeffrey QC
In the olden days prisoners were routinely tortured to get the truth out of them. These confessions are admissions adverse to their makers and so they must be true. So goes the reasoning. That’s the common law position. Today we do not encourage torture and so we introduce legislation called statutes that excludes such confessions although relevant and reliable. Otherwise confessions are admissible into evidence.
Sometimes the prisoners are tricked into confessing. That too has to be excluded.
It has nothing to do with common sense.
According to one source (which I don’t know whether it is reliable), ‘relevance’ is one of the criteria to determine whether a piece of evidence is admissible. Other criteria include ‘reliability’. If this is correct, then relevance is not equivalent to admissability, since it is one of a criteria to determine admissability.
Undergrad2 says:
‘…Today we do not encourage torture and so we introduce legislation called statutes that excludes such confessions although relevant and reliable. Otherwise confessions are admissible into evidence.’
Undergrad2 seems to imply by this that what is inadmissable could be relevant and reliable. Thus, he seems to think that admissability is not equivalent to relevance.
Husbands sometimes confess their crimes to their wives. This is evidence if it is relevant to the issue. But it is excluded at common law to preserve the sanctity of marriage. It is made admissible only by statutes.
Lee,
The first rule of evidence is that it must first be relevant (to the issue) BUT not all evidence that is relevant is admissible.
Thanks, Undergrad2,
That’s exactly my point. I have been saying that relevance may not be equivalent to admissability, and you have just confirmed to me that they are not equivalent.
I did not claim that whatever that is relevant is admissable. That I did not make this claim should be clear from my suggestion that relevance is ONE OF the criteria to determine admissability. A piece of evidence must also satisfy other criteria besides the criterion of relevance to be admissable.
“….from my suggestion that relevance is ONE OF the criteria to determine admissability..” Lee
No. Not one of the criteria! It has first to be relevant before it could be admissible. The precondition.
There is not one but two barriers – (1) ‘relevance’ as synonymous with admissibility in court in jargon of law of evidence and (2) even after admissbility, there’s second barrier “reliability”, whether how mush weight (in Undergrad2’s technical jargon probative value) one (the court) gives to evidence admitted. An illustration : evidence of an accomplice, he was going along to steal but he didn’t expect one of his 2 other partners to pull a knife on the victim…So his evidence is “relevant” synonymous with admissiblity, how much can we believe him, if so in whole or in parts when he points fingers to mitigate his own wriong doing ? After all he’s an accomplice with past criminal record of telling lies and cheating, quite different for first offender/accomplice with a good and responsible job and references…
The point is the existence of two barriers (1) and (2) does not negate the importance of (1) (the criterion of relevancy synonymous with admissibility in evidence) failing which consideration of “reliability” under (2) does not arise.
In passing on (1), if one googes anyway on evidence, one would find a plethora of references to “relevancy”, “relevant” and the like.
To be evidence it has first to be relevant to prove an issue. But not all relevant evidence is admissible.
‘It has first to be relevant before it could be admissable.’ That’s the meaning of ‘one of the criteria’.
One of the criteria to be an assistant professor at a particular univeristy is having a PhD degree. This is the same as saying that ‘one has to first obtain a PhD before one can be hired as an assistant professor at that university’
My source and Undergrad2 seem to have confirmed that relevance is not equivalent to admissability in law jargon.
Of course, we need expert opinon on this issue (of whether relevance is equivalent to admissability in law jargon)
Once it is admissible then it is a question of weight. In a jury trial that is an issue of fact for the jury – not law for the judge.
Lee,
Put it this way. Relevance is the basic component of admissibility. Evidence is not evidence if it is not relevant. To be admissible it has first to be relevant but not all relevant evidence is admissible.
When I say ‘relevance’ as synonymous with admissibility in court in jargon of law of evidence, I do accept as accurate statement by Undergrad2 that it does not mean all that are relevant are necessarily admissible as evidence in court (“first context”) but it does mean to me all that are admissible in court is necessarily “relevant” as a condition precedent (“second context”).
So I have to qualify the synonymous connection between relevance and admissibility to refer to the second context, not the first…
Undergrad2:
Today at 11: 46.42 (1 minute ago)
‘Lee,
Put it this way. Relevance is the basic component of admissibility. Evidence is not evidence if it is not relevant. To be admissible it has first to be relevant but not all relevant evidence is admissible.’
I agree with you completely. And this is perfectly compatible with my claim that relevance is one of the criteria of admissability.
So you guys think you understand the law of evidence?? In the London Bar Finals, only one out of three would pass. Be it at Trinity or Michaelmas. Good luck.
undergrad2: “… admissions adverse to their makers and so they must be true …”
I thought you almost managed to get back to the topic.
So far we have discussed use of the word “relevance” in terms of “legal” relevance, if you will, within the framework of evidence law relating to admissibility in courts etc – not to be confused with the ordinary use of the word “relevance” as it pertains to legal or public issue that we’re all entitled to comment.
Over to you, OrangUtan!
The fact that A is a necessary condition of B implies that A cannot be synonymous with or equivalent to B, whatever context you take it. You can say that something that is B is necessarily A. (In this case, B entails A). But the fact that what is A is not necessarily B does not allow one to take A and B as synonymous with or equivalent to each other.
If someone says that my opinion is admissable to a court of law, you can claim that my opinion is relevant to a court of law, since the fact that relevance to a court of law is necessary to admissability to a court of law implies that admissability entails relevance. i.e. something that is admissable must be relevant.
But the converse is not true – it is not true to say that something that is relevant must be admissable.
Thus, if someone says that my opinion is irrelevant to a court of law, it cannot be taken as equivalent to the claim that my opinion is inadmissable to a court of law.
Also, the claim that my opinion is inadmissable to a court of law cannot be taken as the claim that my opinion is irrelevant to a court of law, since the negation of B does not entail the negation of A even when B entails A.
As I say, my source and Undergrad2 seem to confirm that ‘relevance’ as used in law jargon is not equivalent to admissability.
Of course, we need to consult experts on this
Yes I agree with Lee Wang Yen that “it is not true to say that something that is relevant must be admissable : for some relevant facts are not admissible in court. Hence it is t rue that admissibility is not synonymous with relevancy as above outlined.
I am trying to understand the following next statement “thus, if someone says that my opinion is irrelevant to a court of law, it cannot be taken as equivalent to the claim that my opinion is inadmissable to a court of law”.
Matter of interest, does this statement tally with what I think – that (1) what is admissible has, to my mind, to be relevant, (2) I am not aware or find it hard to grasp how facts that are irrelevant may however be admissible in evidence?
undergrad2: “Over to you, OrangUtan!”
Hey! I resemble that remark!
undergrad2 Says:
Today at 09: 07.40 (2 hours ago)
“In some jurisdictions, the police is understandably slow in arresting or even declaring a person to be a person of interest or worse a suspect, because once they do, then the person arrested need not answer any question asked of him by the police. If he requests counsel then one must be provided to him.”
Undergrad2,
Perhaps you would need to put a qualification to the above statement which you made. In the past practice, an ISA detainee would usually be denied a counsel even if he/she did request for a counsel when the detainee was detained under ISA 78(1). The present IGP might have already changed the standing instruction but I am not very sure about it now. Perhaps DAP people would know about it much better because I saw YB Teresa Kok had been denied a counsel also at the initial stage of her ISA detention in 2008.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
from New York City!!!!
Lee Wang Yen Says:
Today at 12: 14.21 (1 hour ago)
“As I say, my source and Undergrad2 seem to confirm that ‘relevance’ as used in law jargon is not equivalent to admissability.
Of course, we need to consult experts on this.”
Dr. Lee Wang Yen,
I believe your debate with others in this blog will have accomplished nothing in the end if you do not set an outline on whether you want to discuss the matter of facts either in the philosophical perspective or in the legal perspective within the Malaysian legal context. All kinds of statements in relation to matters of facts presented in the discussions will most likely be denigrated into matters of opinion simply because both parties involved in the discussions are not having a set of common references. For instance, Dr. Lee and Jeffrey cannot even reach a consensus on the meaning of “relevancy” in the discussions. I will not be surprised that any facts presented in good faith will eventually be twisted and distorted into irrelevant comments and hence the true/correct conclusion will never be drawn.
I sincerely believe all kinds of academical discussions must be accompanied with the prerequisite of academic honesty. Otherwise, the discussions will only end up with name-calling which is either inconsistent, unsound or incomplete in the sense of formal argument.
I’m aware that this dispute between Jeffrey and I involves the factual question of whether relevance is used in a sense that is equivalent to admissability in law jargon. That’s why I say we need to consult experts on this question.
I wonder why someone says that I’m not interested in the relevant factual issues.
Of course, irrelevance entails inadmissability. But irrelevance is not equivalent to inadmissability. Irrelevance is only equivalent to inadmissability if there is a bicondontional relation between irrelevance and inadmissability or between relevance and admissability, i.e. if irrelevance entails and is entailed by inadmissability or if relevance entails and is entailed by admissability.
Thus, you should just say that irrelevance entails inadmissability. Entailment is not sufficient for synonymity. So you can’t even say that there is synonymity in your context 2.
Wang Yen, thanks for taking the trouble to elucidate.
Mass pertubation on Wall St. has given way to intellectual masturbation on Main St.
oooops perturbation
The debate about relevence, evidence and admissibility reminds me of the debate on the saying: white horse is no horse, a thought which originated thousands of years ago. How interesting.
Per Loh’s posting 16: 49.03, the common sense view is white horse is a horse….
However a 1000 years ago Kung Sun Lung (also spelt Gongsun Long) took the paradoxical and elliptical view, a horse denoted a shape of a kind of animal, white a colour : therefore describing a colour, one did not describe a shape of that animal! The idea of a horse includes colour (whether white, brown or black), but not a specific colour like whiteness.
Western philosophy has already attempted to cover that paradox by studying definitions versus description, with Bertrant Russell bifurcating further the latter into definite and indefinite descriptions.
The earlier debate on “relevance” or “admissibility” might have first started along lines relating to definitions/descriptions but soon it was no more, once clarified, as no one disputed meanings/definitions of the words “relevance” or “admissibility” (in legal or grammatical sense).
It had become more debate on syllogisms. Like for example, if “r” denotes relevance and “a” denotes admissibility, is “r” the same as “a” when:-
1. all that is a is also r but as far as r goes, only a part of r is a and not the rest of r (r being larger boundary than a); or
2. if some of each of r and a are similar whilst rest of r and a are different from each other.