Thursday, November 5, 2009

NY Times columnist apologizes to Slovenians, because our netizens went haywire

You know, my country, Slovenia, is a very small country. It's a kind of a European Singapore, a bit bigger in size, but a little less people live than in the actual Singapore. We have like 2 million people. That's like a small city in China, btw. Nevertheless, our online community is big and... loud. Wherever someone will write about Slovenia, our netizens will find out and it will be reposted in blogs (same way I do now). So today I read in our online newspaper about a column in the New York Times, where Nicholas Kristof, one of their columnists, who recently wrote a lot about the current state of the American healthcare system, apologized to Slovenia, because he made too many comparisons with Slovenia and apparently our netizens went haywire and complained a lot. Here's what he wrote:


Now I don't really know, if he was sincerely serious (it sounds more like sarcastic), but it does lead me to one question: Are my fellow netizens crazy!? I mean, that's just beyond crazy. And it happens all the time. Wherever Slovenia is mentioned, there will be at least one of our netizens complaining about it. I kinda see this attitude a lot in Singapore, too (hence my comparison). But to put things into perspective, Korean and Chinese netizens are far worse, because they're even more sensitive and there's like millions of them. Stuff that happens there is scary. So my question is:

How are netizens in your country and are you sometimes ashamed of them?

[Sources: NY Times article][Nicholas Kristof on Twitter]

No comments:

Post a Comment