DECEMBER 16 — This week, an unfortunate man came forward and confessed to being quite literally caught with his pants down.

The 72-year-old had to sheepishly admit that he had been blackmailed by an 18-year-old Korean girl after she had enticed him to strip for her during their online chat sessions.

As the news broke, it caused quite a bit of giggling and tittering from people who wondered how on Earth he could be so stupid.

Seriously, did he think an 18-year-old girl would fall for him?

Age-difference sexual preferences aside, the likelihood of them getting together should have been a real stretch of the imagination, even for him, shouldn’t it?

Or should it? Think about it, really.

In the wild and wacky world of human relationships, human history has proven time and time again that pretty much anything goes.

I would put it to you that how many times in your lifetime of dealing with people of your particular sexual persuasion have things gone from benign to electric?

Without any prior warning innocent conversation has leap-frogged casual flirtation and rushed headlong into full-on animal attraction, with the sensibility brakes long since burnt off.

And – notwithstanding negotiating the haphazard minefield of whether your feelings are reciprocated and you’re not being led on — when the hormones return from orbit you have to ask the question: do I actually like him or her?

Honestly, how many people found “the one” at the first attempt?

Really? That many? Riiiiiight.

Some people are such fibbers.

And, well, the questions of getting your kit off for a webcam are the same as it would be for any other situation.

Modern technology has allowed couples to extend their intimacy across continents and what a couple does behind closed doors is really no one’s business but their own.

All we should do — as responsible friends and family — is make sure that they know how to close the doors online, too.

As stretches of the imagination go, the folly of an older man being duped by a nubile young lady is a tale so oft told throughout human history and pales in comparison to some things that pass unnoticed in Malaysia every day.

Here, we have groups of people who spout and spew rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth nonsense about their supposed superiority, which they pass of as “rights”.

They twist and distort religious teachings and historical facts to suit their own purposes in a manner not too far removed from Nazi propaganda.

And Malaysia gives them respectability by calling them non-governmental organisations, because calling them what they are — extremist groups — would be too extreme, wouldn’t it?

Malaysia gives them credibility through the mainstream media, which gives them a voice.

Rather than do what our parents told us was the right thing to do and ignore them, editors give them the column inches to keep peddling their nonsense to the nation and — in the business of online media — the world.

And Malaysians buy into it, in their thousands, tens of thousands even.

Moreover, just a few nights ago, I was watching a BBC documentary on the assassination of South African prime minister Dr H.F. Verwoerd – the architect of apartheid — in 1966.

He was also instrumental in its ruthless implementation.

While the world condemned the policy, South Africa continued to press it home.

Indeed, Verwoerd gave a televised address that has chilling echoes today.

He defended racial segregation by saying that it would promote the individual culture of the races, allowing them to flourish unimpeded by one another.

People in their millions bought into that policy of hate. Millions more today still do and no one bats an eyelid.

In the words of Adolf Hitler: if you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

Suddenly, that folly of the old man duped into getting his kit off for a young girl doesn’t sound so daft.

* Gareth Corsi is news editor at Malay Mail. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter @GarethCorsi.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.