My friend at Notes from Ceylon has written a defense of colonialism. His argument seems to be that colonialism was not all bad and may have, on the whole, been a good thing. This is contrary to the Piers Brendon book he’s reviewing, which characterizes it as a global suck. My view is sort of like that towards a child borne of rape. It came from a bad place, but you can’t help but love the child.
Today, there is a new media ecosystem emerging. At the bottom there is Twitter and Facebook, effectively the global street. Above that there are blogs, semi-professional street criers. Then there are traditional journalists, the class of professional scribes. What’s interesting is that the New York Times is saying that blogs are now losing youth to Twitter, Facebook, etc (Caveats). This is also something I’ve perceived, though you have to question what is being lost.
Libya’s Gaddafi is widely known as a murderous nutter. In 1976 he collected some of his hackneyed wisdom in a tome called The Green Book. It is rambling, illogical but mercifully short, so I gave it a read. Like communism, there is some broader sense to the ideals he writes about, but the implementation his just dumb. His solution for the ills of representative democracy, for example, is local councils which elect representatives to higher councils. Not exactly a solution. Underneath the madness and lies, however, is a splinter of a bigger point. Representative democracy has problems. We might be entering the era of change.
Colombo is livable. I’m not dead. It’s just not very. Colombo has been ranked among the worst 10 livable cities by the Economist which, while not entirely fair, is mostly on the mark. Colombo is not very livable for a few reasons (IMHO). Because nobody actually lives in Colombo, because the public transit is bad, and because neighborhoods and public spaces have problems as well.
Ashok Leyland was watching the clock. As he watched, the clock ate a fly, rolled it along, and digested the living matter to make energy. There seemed to be some connection between electricity and life. Perhaps electricity was life. Perhaps in a hundred years they’d be mapping the evolution of an organism we’d call artificial intelligence and tracing its lineage down to fire and electricity via telephones and Atari. Leyland supposed that this would make as much sense as tracing his own particular lineage down to apes and rats and amoebas and transient bits of pond scum. He looked at Watson somewhat warily, wondering if the question answering machine was getting any ideas of nibbling Leyland’s toes or picking up errant skin cells. That fucking inchoate box never thought of anything it wasn’t asked, but Leyland decided to be a bit nicer in anticipation of a possible Robot Revolution.
The grandfather of the Sinhala race was generously called a lion but could more accurately be called a kidnapper, rapist and thug. He kidnapped a princess, kept her walled into a cave and impregnated her, Josef Fritzl style. When her son got old, however, he rolled back the rock and eventually killed his father. That seems to be what is happening in North Africa. Dictators like Mubarak and Ben Ali kidnapped and walled in a generation of people, but their children grew up, pushed back the rock of fear and tossed them out. It’s an interesting metaphor, the creative destruction of the young.
Holy holy shit. They did it. The Egyptian people did it. They faced obstacle after obstacle, they faced fear, cynicism, thugs, tanks, propaganda, foreign powers, diplomats, pundits, and they did it. They took back their country. They gave hope to Arab nations. They gave hope to the world. They gave hope to me. Holy crap, they did it. The good guys one. In the face of cynical ‘stability’, they brought change. In the face of physical violence they practiced non-violence and they won. It helps that their enemy was especially douchebaggy, but this is still the coolest revolution ever. Go Egypt! Your dignity is our pride.
On January 25th at some point in the future, fifteen thousand people gathered in Deliberation Square for no reason at all. Upon entry, each received $50. After hanging around for three hours, they received another $50 and went home. They had no idea what they were doing there and the condition was not to talk, besides saying, ‘down with imperium’. They all thought it very funny. The stock market didn’t. It was Friday and it just tanked. If there’s one thing markets don’t like, it’s instability. Somebody, somewhere, however, made a killing.
A friend of mine had a bit part in Sinhawalokanaya, a cricket movie starring rapper Delon. We went to see it, and it was worse than I thought. It’s not even so bad that it can be laughed at. It’s just bad. The story is basically Lagaan plus time travel, which could be great, but it’s not. While it starts fast it slows waaay down and adds a lot of boring stuff that neither cements the characters or moves the plot forward. The movie emerges as a boringly bad mix of crude racism, jingoist anti-colonialism and poor production values.
Rain makes the plants grow, animals eat the plants, humans chase animals, humans populate the world, forget the whole cycle. Until it floods. Rains have flooded Sri Lanka now, twice. In Colombo we notice this as a vague chilly patch with dampness of feet. In the north-central and eastern provinces, however, this is known as calamity. Roads submerged, and scourged. Houses flooded, fridges ruined, classes closed, paddy lost, money gone. I get SMS’s of statistics which somehow have little or no impact. After the first flood, the media is like, this again? It seems like another personal disaster, just affecting more people. That is, however, still a disaster.
