Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged tamil

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

A People Without a Story - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-people-without-a-story.html

Sri Lanka india tamil terrorism

shared by Javier E on 12 May 13 - No Cached
  • The Tigers were for so long the custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an expression of a self-annihilating spirit. And it was to self-annihilation that Mr. Prabhakaran committed the Tamils. He was a man who, like a modern-day Coriolanus, seemed to lack the imagination for peace. He took the Tamils on a journey of war without end, where no offer of compromise was ever enough, and where all forms of moderation were seen as betrayal.
  • This was an added layer of shame in the Tamil defeat. It was not just that they had lost the war. It was also that the grass-roots movement they originated, and for which they had paid taxes and sacrificed able-bodied men and women, had, in the end, been more vicious to them than to anyone else.
  • the loss the Tamils feel is really the loss of a story. They are now a people without a story, a traumatized people, devastated by decades of war and migration, whose dream of self-determination was hijacked by the nihilistic vision of their leader and turned to nightmare.
lenaurick

International campaign finance: How do countries compare? - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...global-campaign-finance

international campaign finance politics US history crisis

shared by lenaurick on 29 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The Center for Responsive Politics estimates $6 billion will be spent in the U.S. elections by campaigns, political parties and corporations hoping to propel their candidates into the White House and what writer Mark Twain once called the "best Congress money can buy."
  • The projected price tag of the 2012 U.S. election dwarfs that of other nations, but corruption monitors from Transparency International (TI) say it's not just how much will be spent but where the money is coming from that threatens the integrity of politics around the world.
  • While the trajectory for spending in U.S. elections is soaring, total party spending in the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom was actually 26% less than in 2005.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • the absence of limits on the amount individuals or corporations can donate has contributed to the ongoing erosion of public confidence in the political process in the UK, according to one watchdog organization. "When donors are making contributions exceeding £20,000 ($31,000) -- and some are making donations well over £250,000 ($390,000) -- it's perfectly understandable you don't give away that kind of money without expecting something in return,"
  • n Norway, government funding accounted for 74% of political parties' income in 2010, according to Statistics Norway. And unlike in the U.S., where candidates and their supporters can buy as much television time as they can afford, political ads are banned from television and radio.
  • Corruption monitors say the lack of public funding in India, the world's largest democracy, has contributed to a staggering influx of under the table corporate contributions to candidates that has undercut the integrity of recent elections.
  • Intelligence reports received by India's Electoral Commission suggested that upwards of $2 billion in so-called "black money" will be spent to influence the Uttar Pradesh state elections this year, according to Anupama Jha, executive director of TI India."Everybody knows about black money," Jha told CNN. "Corporations are expected to donate no more than 5 percent of their profits, but they pay more than that under the table. Those who donate funds also control the politicians, and the politicians (become) more accountable to their sponsors than to their constituents."
  • ut it's not just corporate black money that's a problem, but the buying of votes in poor areas with hard cash, and sometimes with smuggled liquor.
  • In the 2009 election in Tamil Nadu, a state with a population roughly the size of France, 33.4% of voters received money from candidates' supporters for their vote, according to a poll by India's Centre of Media Studies -- and in 2011, voters were lured to the polls with blenders, grinders and other household appliances.
  • "This is why good people don't want to contest elections ... so ultimately you vote for corrupt people, because those are the only people you have to choose from."
  • While there are no limitations on the amount U.S. political parties can spend on televison ads, broadcast time in Russia is doled out on a limited basis, and is proportionate to the results of the last election.
  • "There are two sets of rules in Russia -- one set for parties who are paying out of their own pockets, and another for the party and candidates with access to public resources," says Elena Panfilova, head of TI Russia.
  • The parties try to hijack whatever they can hijack in Russia," Panfilova told CNN
  • Roughly $2 billion was spent by parties and candidates in the 2010 presidential election, according to Claudio Weber Abramo, executive director of TI Brazil.
  • Nearly 98% of winner Dilma Rouseff's campaign donations -- and 95.5% of her main opponent's -- came from corporations, says Abramo.Abramo says corporations donated 99.04% of all money spent in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, during the 2010 election -- a reflection mainly of voters' apathy and politicians' failure to form relationships with their constituents.
  • "The distribution of money reveals something deeper in the Brazilian political landscape, which is that citizens are not very much concerned about supporting parties and having a political life."While some observers want to ban corporate spending outright, Abramo says that will only make it harder to track corporate influence on politics in the country."The interests are still there even if you prohibit corporations from donating to candidates above the board," he told CNN. "They will do it in a hidden way, and they will lose visibility."
  • no reliable information exists for how much money was spent during the 2011 presidential election in Nigeria.
  • While Nigerian law gives the country's election commission the right to set a maximum spending limit for parties, the commission neglected to do so before the 2011 election, according to Magnus Ohman."Parties can do whatever they want, there's no limit to the amount they can spend," Ohman told CNN. "Candidates do have limits, but the money they get from their parties is excluded from that limit."
  • 2011 elections were hailed as a step forward in Nigeria's evolution as a young democracy, the lack of restraint on political spending is a worrying development for election monitors."It really was an expensive election not only at a presidential level but also at the gubernatorial level, especially down in the south," said Ohman. "It's an electoral system where you need to spend."
  • UK corruption monitor Chandu Krishnan says an ever-increasing amount of money in elections is a global problem."In many countries across the world, the cost of elections is increasing," he told CNN. "If parties and politicians can't find the resources from the state, there is an increasing desperation to seek them from private sources -- and that is where the corruption comes in."
Javier E

Murty Classical Library Catalogs Indian Literature - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...atalogs-indian-literature.html

India classical literature library culture

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.
  • While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.
  • to some scholars, the project also comes as a timely if implicit rebuke to the Hindu nationalists of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its promotion of a unitary Indian identity based on selected Sanskrit religious classics.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The series “debunks the myth of a Hindu orthodoxy as being the only classicism we have,” said Arshia Sattar, an independent scholar and translator in Bangalore. “In a strange way, the editors are creating a new canon.”
  • When it gained independence in 1947, India had a pioneering generation of homegrown classicists of the first rank. But today, scholars say, its universities produce and retain few classical scholars with the interpretive skills required by a project like the Murty, which has drawn its entire advisory board and most of its translators, South Asian and Western alike, from American and European institutions.
g-dragon

A Short History of Violent Buddhism - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/ory-of-violent-buddhism-195794

buddhism history Violence

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Buddhism is probably the most pacifistic of the major world religions.
  • His teachings stand in stark contrast to those of the other major religions, which advocate execution and warfare against people who fail to adhere to the religions' tenets.
  • To an outsider with a perhaps stereotypical view of Buddhism as introspective and serene, it is more surprising to learn that Buddhist monks have also participated in and even instigated violence over the years.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • For most of their history, the monks who invented kung fu (wushu) used their martial skills mainly in self-defense; however, at certain points, they actively sought out warfare, as in the mid-16th century when they answered the central government's call for aid in the fight against Japanese pirates.
  • Speaking of Japan, the Japanese also have a long tradition of "warrior-monks" or yamabushi.
  • In 1932, for example, an unordained Buddhist preacher called Nissho Inoue hatched a plot to assassinate major liberal or westernizing political and business figures in Japan so as to restore full political power to Emperor Hirohito.
  • Called the "League of Blood Incident," this scheme targeted 20 people and managed to assassinate two of them before the League's members were arrested.
  • various Zen Buddhist organizations in Japan carried out funding drives to buy war material and even weapons.
  • One example is in Sri Lanka, where radical Buddhist monks formed a group called the Buddhist Power Force, or B.B.S., which provoked violence against the Hindu Tamil population of northern Sri Lanka, against Muslim immigrants, and also against moderate Buddhists who spoke up about the violence
  • Another very disturbing example of Buddhist monks inciting and committing violence is the situation in Myanmar (Burma), where hard-line monks have been leading the persecution of a Muslim minority group called the Rohingya.
  • Perhaps, if Prince Siddhartha was alive today, he would remind them that they should not nurture such an attachment to the idea of the nation.
Javier E

Opinion | The Rise and Fall of the Palo Alto Consensus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...internet-democracy.html

social media consensus tech crisis

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The past 10 years have seen the global application of the institutional reforms that Mrs. Clinton and the tech companies pushed for — with a few notable exceptions, like China. Universal connectivity has been achieved faster than anyone thought possible. About one in three people on earth is a monthly active Facebook user.
  • We can now evaluate how this technology affects politics and the public sphere. More information has been flowing, circumventing traditional media, political and cultural establishments. But the result hasn’t been more democracy, stronger communities or a world that’s closer together.
  • Countries with weaker social institutions felt the effects of social media most violently and immediately
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • At minimum, country-specific social networks would ensure that companies actually employ moderators who speak the same language as their users.
  • In the midst of a democratic transition and still reeling from a decades-long civil war, the Sri Lankan government’s main priorities were parliamentary reform and reconciliation with the Tamil minority. But Western social media enabled an alternative narrative to capture citizens’ attention. With their monopoly on truth gone, the state and the media have been unable to address the issue of whether or not there is a Muslim plot to sterilize and destroy Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority. (There isn’t.)
  • What’s becoming clear is that there is no single optimal digital communication hardware and software for the entire world, just as there is no single optimal set of economic reforms. But there may be an optimal arrangement for each country, fit to its specific political, cultural and economic context.
  • At this point, intellectuals on both the right and the left see the Palo Alto Consensus as abhorrent. Conservatives bemoan the conceit of technologists who expect to design universal systems; progressives bridle over the concentration of power in corporate hands.
  • Both groups fret that this new power transcends mere economics to encompass social relationships that had previously been shielded from market logic.
  • The assumption was that states would be prevented from shutting down information flows about, say, corruption or police brutality. That has been a success. But everyone seems to have underestimated the demand for information about how white nationalism is good and vaccines are bad.
tsainten

India Approves Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 Vaccine and 1 Other - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...india-covid-19-vaccine.html

india covid

shared by tsainten on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • India said on Sunday that it had approved two coronavirus vaccines, one made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and the other developed in India, for emergency use, a major step toward halting the spread of the coronavirus in one of the world’s hardest-hit countries.
  • “careful examination” of both by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, India’s pharmaceutical regulator.
  • Officials in India moved quickly for a number of reasons. The country is No. 2 in confirmed infections behind the United States, and the outbreak is widely believed to be worse than the official figures suggest.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Criticism about the lack of clarity on the data that the regulator examined came swiftly after the two vaccines were authorized for emergency use.
  • has been found to be safe.”
  • Already the effort has faced setbacks. The Serum Institute, an Indian drug maker that struck a deal to produce the Oxford vaccine even before its effectiveness had been proven, has managed to make only about one-tenth of the 400 million doses it had committed to manufacturing before the end of the year.
  • The Serum Institute says it is on track to increase production of the vaccine, which is known as Covishield in India.
  • Initially, the Serum Institute signed a pact with AstraZeneca to make one billion doses of the vaccine for low-and-middle-income countries.
  • Pending approval of the vaccine by the World Health Organization, Serum will begin supplying other developing nations with doses at manufacturing cost, Mr. Sen said.
  • India plans to begin a vaccination campaign in the first three months of the year that will cover about one-quarter of the population by August. The first 30 million people inoculated will be health care providers, then police and other frontline workers.
  • India’s first mass vaccination took place in 1802, to fight smallpox. Subsequent efforts suffered from misinformation and slow acceptance.
  • government officials aimed information campaigns at religious leaders, helping to nearly eradicate the disease.
  • The government plans to use the framework of its universal immunization program for pregnant women and newborns — one of the largest and cheapest public health interventions in the world.
  • India may have to double the number of health workers from the current 2.5 million, said Thekkekara Jacob John, a senior virologist in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page