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julia rhodes

Rooting for Wrong Cricket Team? That's Sedition, Kashmiri Students Learn - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...students-sedition-cricket.html

cricket students sedition debate ukraine nytimes history politics

shared by julia rhodes on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The police in northeastern India have filed sedition charges against 67 Kashmiri students after some of them cheered for the Pakistani cricket team during a televised match with India on Sunday night.
  • “I believe what the students did was wrong & misguided but they certainly didn’t deserve to have charges of sedition slapped against them,” Mr. Abdullah wrote.
  • Indian news media reported that a delegation of leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-of-center Hindu nationalist group that polls suggest will soon dominate India’s central government, met Mr. Ahmed and demanded stern action against the students. A group of students associated with the Hindu party also burned an effigy of Mr. Ahmed, local news media reported.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Cricket is a national obsession in India. Some Kashmiris root against the Indian team because of resentment from decades of national policies there, including routine arrests of pro-independence figures and thousands of disappearances.
  • India and Pakistan, once part of the same country, violently divided in 1947 and have since fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, a region divided between the two countries. Pakistan has been the source of repeated terrorist attacks in India, including one in Mumbai in 2008 that killed more than 160 people.
criscimagnael

Lavish Projects and Meager Lives: The Two Faces of a Ruined Sri Lanka - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anka-rajapaska-hambantota.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The international airport, built a decade ago in the name of Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa family, is devoid of passenger flights, its staff lingering idly in the cafe. The cricket stadium, also constructed on the family’s orders, has had only a few international matches and is so remote that arriving teams face the risk of wildlife attacks.
  • As Sri Lanka grapples with its worst ever economic crisis, with people waiting hours for fuel and cutting back on food, nowhere is the reckless spending that helped wreck the country more visible than in Hambantota, the Rajapaksa family’s home district in the south.
  • This enormous waste — more than $1 billion spent on the port, $250 million on the airport, nearly $200 million on underused roads and bridges, and millions more (figures vary) on the cricket stadium — made Hambantota a throne to the vanity of a political dynasty that increasingly ran the country as a family business.
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  • With Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president, then at the peak of his powers, he did what many nationalist strongmen do: erect tributes to himself.
  • That’s now all gone. Sri Lanka is an international basket case whose foreign reserves — which once stood at over $6 billion under the Rajapaksas — have dwindled to almost nothing.
  • The collapse is partly a result of the loss of tourism during the pandemic, a problem made worse as war has kept away many of the Russians and Ukrainians who used to visit in large numbers. But the family’s economic mismanagement and denial of festering problems have also contributed mightily.
  • With food prices rising, electricity often cut and lifesaving medicines scarce, protesters have pushed Mr. Rajapaksa, 76, out of his latest position — prime minister — and are demanding that his brother Gotabaya, 72, give up the presidency.
  • Just outside the private residence of Mr. Rajapaksa, the Carlton House, they tied ropes to a gold-colored statue of his father, D.A. Rajapaksa. When they couldn’t drag it down, they dug under its feet until it collapsed. And around the corner from the family’s sprawling ancestral estate, they torched the museum memorializing the resting place of the patriarch and his wife.
  • “Whatever the politics, they shouldn’t have done this to their parents’ resting place.”
  • Before the economy crashed, she would sell 30 to 40 pots a day. That number has since dropped to about 20, as people have saved for other necessities. Most days in recent weeks, she has come back with half of her stack of 15 unsold.
  • During her grocery trips, she can buy only half of what she did in the past.
  • She was clear about who was to blame: the Rajapaksas.
  • “If you are investing in debt, you should really be looking at return — and quick return. You can’t do all your long-term, hard infrastructure projects on debt,” said Eran Wickramaratne, a former banker turned state minister of finance. “We completely overleveraged ourselves, and the returns are not there.”
  • With their power consolidated, they announced broad tax cuts — rapidly undoing the work of aligning Sri Lanka’s spending more with its means — and made a disastrous decision to ban chemical fertilizers in hopes of turning the country toward organic farming.
  • At the airport, which for a time was used to store grain, the only outsiders are the crews of occasional cargo flights, or groups of curious villagers on tours to see the complex. The cricket stadium, where the scoreboard clock is stuck in some afternoon past, was at one point rented out as a wedding venue to produce some revenue. It has a capacity of 35,000, more than the town of Hambantota’s entire population, 25,000.
  • “But these megaprojects were meaningless,” he said. “This region still has elephants crossing the roads, and people are still cultivating paddy as a livelihood. So these projects were unnecessary.”
  • “They did a lot — they won the war, they built roads,” Ms. Niroshani said.
  • But what about economic hardship, Ms. Wijeyawickrama asked.
  • “In a few days it may be that we have nothing to eat.”
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan and the Narrative of the "MSM Narrative" - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...rew-sullivan-and-the-narrative

mainstream media defenses sullivan Culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • This is nonsense. Let’s unpack all of it.
  • “We” and “They”
  • The “mainstream media”—I’m going to stop putting that in quotes, but keep imagining that I’m saying it sarcastically—is probably made up of several thousand individuals and then a three-figure number of institutions. At any given moment, on any given story, some number of these people and institutions will communicate facts that are eventually understood to be misleading or incorrect. Some of these people and institutions are better at their jobs than others.
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  • The point is that the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that “they” are feeding “us” false narratives.
  • We have had a robust conversation about whether the inflation we’re seeing is transitory, or not. There are different signals pointing in different directions. Of the thousands of people who make up the MSM, some give more credence to one view, some to the other.1
  • The same is true for literally every other example Sullivan cherry-picks. Jussie Smollett was not an “MSM narrative.” It was a crime-blotter case that the media reported, and then continued reporting on, even as the subsequent reporting took Smollett’s story apart.
  • Surely some people in or around the MSM were more credulous than they should have been. Some people were skeptical from the start. There was no “narrative” except the one that exists in Andrew Sullivan’s head.
  • And of the dozens of thousands of meta-stories the MSM has covered over the last five years, much of the reporting has added real value to our world, yes?
  • For instance, if you only relied on reporting from the MSM about COVID, you would have been much better informed than if you’d relied on, say, Facebook, or conservative media. Reporting on the 2020 election lawsuits and allegations of fraud in the MSM were, in the main, very helpful.
  • What’s the Alternative?
  • Remember: It wasn’t a faceless blob called “the media” that published the UVA story. It was Rolling Stone. And it was a collection of reporters at various “mainstream media outlets” who took the Rolling Stone story apart.
  • I mention this history not to damn the mainstream media, but to show that what Sullivan laments isn’t new. There is no golden past. People in the media make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Bigger, even, than the “narrative” on the Covington kids.
  • Undergirding Sullivan’s essay is a notion that someone ought to do something.
  • Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.
  • Well, we tried that. “Conservative media” in its modern incarnation—the Washington Times, Fox News, the Federalist—was created as a corrective to the endemic flaws in the mainstream media.
  • The conservative broadcast ecosystem—Fox, OAN, Newsmax, talk radio—is so untethered from reality that their legal departments occasionally force them to air libel-remedy hostage videos condemning their own “reporting.” They air anti-vaccine nonsense and false-flag theories.
  • The Federalist publishes snuff fantasies and COVID death-cult nonsense.
  • And conservative media criticism is so nakedly partisan that on occasions when conservative media makes a mistake—for instance, the Washington Examiner’s Muslim prayer-rugs-at-the-border story—the response from erstwhile “conservative media critics” was . . . [crickets].
  • In conservative media, there is no self-corrective outside of the legal system.2
  • Any Club at Hand
  • Why has Sullivan recently become so exercised about the dangers of MSM narratives? I suspect because we often write what we know.
  • In recent years Andrew Sullivan has been othered by parts of the MSM for sins against current political orthodoxy. To him, these recent developments feel like a big, all-consuming story. Because for him, personally, they have been.
  • someone has to defend the honor of the dreaded mainstream media. Because here is the very boring truth about “MSM narratives”:
  • The media is a vast space where actors and institutions are interconnected, but operate semi-independently, according to a variety of incentives. Sometimes independent actors make good-faith mistakes. Sometimes they make bad-faith mistakes. But in most cases—in nearly every case, actually—the marketplace of ideas eventually wins and the truth outs.
  • The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. Jonathan Rauch talks about this at length in The Constitution of Knowledge—that the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation.
  • the Rolling Stone case is actually a proof of concept for the media.
  • By its diffuse nature, the media can’t be optimized. There will always be flaws and inefficiencies.5
  • I’d argue that the mainstream media’s continued openness to self-correction over the last few years is evidence of its overall reliability and health—even in the face of our democracy having hit a real-deal constitutional crisis.
  • We are on the cusp of a media crisis that no one is talking about.
  • As we move toward 2024, the big concern should be how the media would cover an openly anti-democratic presidential candidate. Would they treat said candidate as a danger to America? Or would they attempt to remain neutral and pretend that he was just another generic politician doing normal political things?
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