91–100 of 161 posts
The best line: “There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident.” Going way out on a limb here, but perhaps the monkey who disrupted equipment carrying enough power to mess up the entire country was most likely charred into an unrecognizable state. But hey, maybe it got lucky!
♫ This monkey's gone to Heaven ♫
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This is absolutely insane. It's almost cartoonishly monstrous. Why isn't this better known? The way the Tamils were treated is so pure a representation of evil that I can barely get through the Wikipedia page. This was the work of Buddhists, too! I've been taught that Buddhists were peaceful and non-violent by creed, but clearly not if the only Buddhist majority nation is capable of such abomination.
> Why isn't this better known? The external affair minister of India, Mr Jaishankar, recently excoriated a European politician over Indians handling of Ukraine. He said 'Europe needs to get past the mentality that Europe's problems are the world's problems, while the world's problems are not Europes problems '. And this is where that attitude comes from India has dealt with genocides at its borders in Sri Lanka and B…
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Most westerners are woefully misguided in their interpretation of eastern religions. We are still people. I'm always shocked when Europeans or Americans single out Christianity as some uniquely malevolent force. People are like this. We have always been like this. Being atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, heathen, etc -- it doesn't make you superhuman. We're all capable of this and the soone…
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.
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The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
This is absolutely insane. It's almost cartoonishly monstrous. Why isn't this better known? The way the Tamils were treated is so pure a representation of evil that I can barely get through the Wikipedia page. This was the work of Buddhists, too! I've been taught that Buddhists were peaceful and non-violent by creed, but clearly not if the only Buddhist majority nation is capable of such abomination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most westerners are woefully misguided in their interpretation of eastern religions. We are still people. I'm always shocked when Europeans or Americans single out Christianity as some uniquely malevolent force. People are like this. We have always been like this. Being atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, heathen, etc -- it doesn't make you superhuman. We're all capable of this and the soone…
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.
I don't think there is clear cause and effect when it comes to religion and irrational behavior.
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The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
As for the civil war, things could have ended differently, except Prabhakaran seemed to have been gripped by arrogance. Though he was fighting for Tamils, paradoxically, Prabhakaran also became the big killer of Tamils. He annihilated all competing Tamil militant groups ... ... it all led to [Prabhakaran's] last apocalyptic decision to fight to the last day — and the last Tamil. Through Kumaran Pathmanathan, KP, the…
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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).
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> Why isn't this better known? The external affair minister of India, Mr Jaishankar, recently excoriated a European politician over Indians handling of Ukraine. He said 'Europe needs to get past the mentality that Europe's problems are the world's problems, while the world's problems are not Europes problems '. And this is where that attitude comes from India has dealt with genocides at its borders in Sri Lanka and B…
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.
Like I get why people find it difficult to understand Mandarin. But this is English news we're talking about ...
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I heard similar but haven't found a "no, it wasn't a monkey" article yet.
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…