Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a local, Sri Lanka turning into Bali is one of my biggest anxieties at the moment. I've grown up around the hospitality industry all my life, it's not a good outcome for locals. Tourism should be considered an auxiliary industry not the primary industry.
I agree. Its highly volatile, and has a huge environmental impact. The ups and downs of tourism during the civil war illustrated it clearly. So did the impact of the Ukraine war (there used to be a lot of Russian tourists). I was shocked by how cheap hotels had once again become when I last went back to Sri Lanka (2023)
Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
131–140 of 161 posts
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.
The worldview of many atheists I know seems to depend on magical thinking, holding of contradictory beliefs, and blind appeal to authority when it comes to the government. I don't think there is clear cause and effect when it comes to religion and irrational behavior.
Having visited over a hundred churches (for thousands of services), they are the only place I've consistently seen people teach and accept things that what everyone can plainly see is false. Children are taught that fallacies are better than critical thinking, wherever it serves their belief system.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.
The arc of history simply does not show that. We can point to the various issues in communist states (not criticizing communism but all the communist states are undoubtedly atheist).
History's arc is much longer than communism, and religion is tied to some pretty horrific events.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that the monkey was only the trigger . But the full cause of an outage is much more than just the trigger. It's a monkey this time, could have been an operator or a storm... Digging a bit deeper, they appear to be running with very little margin, if any. Meaning redundancy and protection against cascading failures is limited. Fixing the real cause is expensive, so it's often easier to just blame the trig…
or a kite. It's not like the monkey deployed special monkey skills beyond "occupy space while being electrically conductive".
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#135The title sounds whimsical, but animals cause a significant amount of outages. Around 5-10% are caused by animals. When I interned at a power company I saw them install “squirrel guard” insulating equipment terminals
Speaking from experience as being the intern responsible for pushing through most projects in Toronto during the summer of 2016.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
The wikipedia page is one sided and only puts the case for calling iu a genocide. As a mixed race and entirely ethnic minority Sri Lankan who lived there for much of the civil war I do not think genocide is an accurate characterisation, although there were certainly many atrocities. It was also made possible by the populations fear of the other side who were extremely nasty ethnonationalists, "ethnically cleansed" ar…
Here's my understanding on the conflict.
1. The Sinhalese majority were given mandate by the British.
2. They used this mandate to apply incredibly discriminatory practices towards the Tamils.
3. Constant rabble-rousing by Sinhalese politicians intermittently led to race riots, in which Sinhalese mobs carried out pogroms and murders against Tamils.
4. Due to almost laughably blatant policies targeting Tamils, such as an affirmative action policy designed to reduce the number of Tamil students at universities, a group of Tamil students formed a league to protest the matter. These students would become the forerunners of the tamil militant groups.
5. Further barbarism from the Sinhalese majority, such as the destruction of culturally important Tamil heritage (for instance, the destruction of an important library), seeding racial tensions.
6. A rebel group carries out an ambush against the Sri Lankan army, seemingly as retaliation for the assassination of one of their commanders. The result of this was a week of rioting where innocent Tamil civilians were murdered, raped and tortured by Sinhalese mobs. This event is known as Black July. To readers: do not view the wikipedia page for this event if you're sensitive. The first image depicts a Tamil man being stripped and beaten before being murdered by grinning Sinhalese youths.
7. War starts, and the rest is history.
I don't blame the "other side" for being extremely nasty ethnonationalists. In fact, I'm very surprised they didn't become violent militants earlier by how badly they were treated. Whilst I can't condone the ethnic cleansing they carried out, I can on a human level understand why they'd carry out such crimes when they'd been so viciously treated by their victims in the past. The sexual violence that seemingly became routine for Tamils is some of the most sickening that I've ever read. I had to take a break and go for a walk after reading some of the accounts.
My job requires me to have some level of awareness to the subtleties of conflict. Having studied the aspects of international relations that pertain to war, I've learned how complex a lot of these internal struggles can be. As such, I try to be fair in my assessments of ethnic conflicts. It's usually not straightforward to charactise one side as villainous and one side as victorious. Having pored over accounts from government affiliated sources, the only consistent perspective that Sri Lankan commentators seem to provide in their support for the killing of civilians is their strong belief that Sri Lanka must be a Buddhist nation and that Buddhism has a special place in the state constitution. That's literally the only thing that they have to support themselves without circular reasoning (and is ironically a key feature of fascist polity). Otherwise, it's "We treated the Tamils like subhumans, actively discriminated them into poverty and kept murdering them and rioting in their areas. Now they're fighting back, so we're justified in committing genocide". How on Earth do you justify that without having a revisionist stance, or claiming that the clearly documented discrimination against Tamils didn't happen?
What happened to the Sri Lankan Tamils is a travesty beyond reckoning. The fact that it has been forgotten and that the Sri Lankan government that stirred this conflict is still at large is a miscarriage of justice so severe that it calls into question any legitimacy of international law and human rights.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.
The worldview of many atheists I know seems to depend on magical thinking, holding of contradictory beliefs, and blind appeal to authority when it comes to the government. I don't think there is clear cause and effect when it comes to religion and irrational behavior.
Note that strictly speaking, atheism is just rejecting the existence of any god. That doesn't necessarily make magic out of the equation. Though certainly atheism is generally associated to the rejection of any superstitious belief.
But just believing that ZFC make a sound mathematical foundation doesn't make you an advanced flawless logician. People stay mere humans, whatever they believe might be the most relevant foundation to use their more or less weak reasoning ability.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.
The big genocides and mass murders of the twentieth century were motivated by non-religious (the holocaust) or atheist (in the Soviet union, China, and Cambodia) ideologies.. Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours" were rare.
Of course, atheist compatible doctrines too can can be taken as reason to go kill those who dare to believe otherwise. But they can't pretend they have a book directly inspired by some super being that justify their actions. That is, one can also adulate Marx and kill random dudes because that's fair within their interpretation of das Kapital.
https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/10768/death-penalt...
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in the US and considered myself relatively worldly and educated, and when I started visiting Sri Lanka and India and reading papers published there and so on, when I heard US press discuss news from India or Sri Lanka, I was really shocked at the deep level of general ignorance; and I am not talking Fox here but NPR and Washington Post.
The shocking part to me is that Indian news is usually conducted in English so it's not even inaccessible. It's written by English speakers for English speakers, yet everyone seems mystified at what goes on in the subcontinent Like I get why people find it difficult to understand Mandarin. But this is English news we're talking about ...
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#140The monkey was a foreign nation state sponsored insider testing the nation's grid. Sri Lanka is in trouble, and authorities are mobilizing fast and expanding the surveillance state to thwart future threats before they are realized. They are deploying AI at scale.
I think you need to add a "/s" for mocking insane fearmongering jingoist statements nowadays. Just saying.