Ghandek ragun dwar il-media lokali. Il-blog tat-Times of Malta sar online chat room tal-hamalli. Xejn aktar.

Ftit tal-granet ilu kien hemm l-incident fejn miet zaghzugh mis-Somalja f’incident tat-traffiku fil-Blata l-Bajda. Il-moderaturi tat-Times ma nafx kif kellhom il-qalb ihallu certu kummenti jigu ppublikati.

Kien hemm min beda jargumenta dwar kemm swiena dan biex marru l-ambulanzi u hafna aktar.

Xejn sew!

Harry Purdie, the fact that we live so close to each other is a contributing factor to “Sunday culture”. Then there is what I read as the ‘slavery of love’. This is another terrible reality and it manages to intrude in and upset many lives.

Thank you, Daphne, for making us aware of the danger of certain customs we take for granted as being a healthy sign of strong family ties.

On the other hand, there is what I call ‘abuse’ of parents whose children believe that grandmas are there to look after their grandchildren. Mind you, some grandparents are quite happy to comply.

@ R. Camilleri. I understood what you meant by ‘bad’, and who would need help. Hence, in my first paragraph, I said, ”unless it is imperative that they are accompanied, in some way or another”.

[Daphne – This is a VERY simple concept: nobody is responsible for anyone who is over the age of 18, and who has not been interdicted or placed in care due to mental incapacity. The legal responsibility for women which is transferred from father to husband is something that went out – well, not with the ark, but in our lifetime. Believe it or not, women are now responsible for themselves. Missing person reports are not filed out of legal duty but out of normal human concern. You can file a missing person report about your flatmate.]

The internet (or rather the web – the internet is just the underlying hardware infrastructure) is value-free. It is not intrinsically good or bad but just a magnification of what we are.

Hence this is the web for most Maltese and at the same time this is our contribution to the online world community – the upload of ‘xi marc tal-festa’ with lots of colorful language, our national obsession with the ‘ewrovixin’, sublime (and not so sublime) xenophobic and homophobic messages and all that.

Fascinating for some anthropologist or sociologist, scary for a co-national.

Also, the thought of paying a ridiculous price (monthly, that is, until you’re 50 or something) to buy yourself an apartment in an overcrowded street, is not an easy one to live with at that age.

By bad, I meant things like falling unconscious or similar situations where you would need help.

How nice! Put him in a straitjacket so he can’t top himself, but never mind about his problem. So bloody kind aren’t we? Preserve human life at any cost, even when it’s a continuum of misery.

Dear Daphne, thank you for putting me right on the correct choice of terminology to describe the psychological reaction which I described as intuition.

I agree and I don’t, both with your choice of words and their connotations and associated ideas.

If I consciously and knowingly had attempted to not to do so, as she wished, then I agree it would have been passive aggression, on the other hand, although my forgetfulness to do as she wished, miffed her, this cannot be called aggressive because my omission was not meant to hit out at anyone.

I strongly believe that aggressive behaviour (passive or otherwise) must be deliberate to be defined as such.