Tuesday, June 05, 2007

missing the concrete for the garbage


this is a screenshot (click to enlarge) of google news for term 'sri lanka' sorted for 'relevance' at around 1 am june 5 sri lankan time. anyone really interested in news about sri lanka will notice straight away what is missing here; heavy fighting north of vauniya. imo that is the most newsworthy event taking place in sri lanka. however one has to search hard to find a news story about that in any major international news source.

it is missing in spite of the fact that stories about the fighting were in sri lankan news sites (sri lankan sites are in google news but for other stories) of all persuasions.

this is not the fault of google news; it merely reflects and grades news as reported in the web. (btw i am not complaining about the normal neglect of sri lanka in international media. that sort of bias is to be expected given their market audience, as i have said before. i am pointing out what is missing in what they do report about sri lanka)

all this is typical of international coverage of sri lanka in general and sri lankan conflict in particular. they miss the concrete forest for the garbage. by garbage i mean the completely false manufactured stories like 'expelling' (peaceniks going far as to say 'ethnic cleansing') of tamils from colombo.

cocoons
but some cocooned people in colombo (especially those with peacenik sympathies) swear by international news sources. (a recent post in peacenik sanjana hattotuwa's groudviews blog erroneously comparing news about darfur and sri lanka is a good example of this warped mentality. as usual the loser censored my comments pointing out the errors in the post. i will write a more detailed post on that later as soon as i have some free time).

same sort of people believe local sri lankan news to be censored even though they can easily realize their error by visiting the nearest newspaper stand ( if they are even in sri lanka, most of them aren't for most of the time) . if they do they will be able to read all points of view (even terrorist pussy point of view not to mention peacenik parrots of terrorists) uncensored (which is as it should be, this being a democracy).

typical peacenik response when their errors are pointed out is to ask us to mind our own business and not read them (see this thread). in other words, they want us to lock ourselves into a news and opinion cocoon as they have done. fat chance!

let them live in their self generated cocoons if they want, while we remain open to all news sources. let us also point out and expose their errors and their cocoons.


note
did not write for a while bc i was busy (with business, traveling, esp to east, and attending sick relative etc.). thanks for the emails.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Right you are.
Welcome back !

Anonymous said...

The defence.lk site has a busted RSS feed. They've had a broken feed since the site relaunched. I've dropped the webmaster an email informing them of the issue months ago when I was building another site that used the feed but *shrug* it's still unfixed. About 4-6 months now at least.

The RSS is broken in the sense that the dates are not RFC-822 compliant and cannot be parsed properly.
(see for yourself - here)

That could be one reason why Google News is not picking up the story as fast. The bot can't make sense of the date (a best guess parse produces a date in 2011). It isn't a problem if you only show defence.lk news - but most aggregator bots (including the one I built) rely on accurate dates/times to sort stories.

sittingnut said...

anon at 6/05/2007 5:46 am
thanks for the welcome.
do adopt a name please.( and blog too if you have the time). :-)

drac
:-)
thanks for the information. i have too much respect of your abilities to doubt that what you say about broken feed is not correct.

hope they will fix it. they are certainly stupid to wait this long.

however i am not sure google news rely solely on feeds alone. in pic above, the story at the bottom ( "india to help ... ") is from defence.lk. (recently published one too at the time )

Anonymous said...

thanks for the compliment :) It's good to know that Google News uses something other than rss feeds to grab entries; I wasn't sure if that was the case.

I had never seen defence.lk entries on Google News before, that's why I was sure it was a problem with the RSS feed. The earliest Google News entry seems to be around the start of May.

I still hope they fix the feed soon though.

Anonymous said...

Isn't it hilarious how Sanjana Hattotuwa has the temerity to accuse others of being dictators? I fell out of my chair laughing!

Anonymous said...

The common Sinhalese, Tamils etc are all good people. The problem in Sri Lanka starts from the fake leaders who are malayalee like Mahina, CBK,SWRD and Tamil mudali chetty from India like Ranil, JWRD. Mahinda hides his Christian name Percy. Solomon Wesley Ridgeway Dias is no Sinhala name who introduced the Sinhala only act.

The fake leaders wanted power. They and their forefathers were Christians so that they would benefit. Why did SWRD not give away his 1200 hectares of estate before he joined politics. How did such wealth come to them.

The Tamils Hindus worked hard and they did use the advantage they got from English education to rise up the ladder. However English is not the mother tongue of the Tamils. Hence when they took it up and succeeded, don't blame them. The fake Sinhalese leaders who prostituted themselves could not bear this and use the ignorance of the Sinhalese masses to benefit and they are still looting Sri Lanka.

In Malaysia, before the British left, most Jaffna Tamils used to dominate the government service. Top officials to the kings were also Jaffna Tamils. Fake Malays who were Indian Muslim, Indonesian like Bugis lied and brought Malay as the official language. The Chinese who were businessmen did not have a good grasp of English during colonial times. However when Malay was adopted as the official language, they started do better then the Malays in Malay. This forced the government to have 2 grading curves for Malays and Non-Malays and they introduced standardization. Malaysia have a 1983 style riot in 1969 between the Malays and Chinese.

The removal of Jaffna Tamils who were mostly government servants resulted in them moving to the private sector. This resulted in some becoming businessmen. The richest person in Malaysia and the builder of the tallest building in the world at one time is Ananda Krishnan. He is the son of Jaffna Tamils. It’s called PETRONAS Towers because the Malay government took a share as they did not want a significant icon like that to be having a Non-Malay name. Today Ananda Krishnan is buying Sri Lankan Telecoms and Power.

In Singapore Tamil is one of the Official Languages. So Tamil is in all forms like Malay, Chinese and English. When Singapore's first Prime Minister visited Sri Lanka, he wanted Singapore to be like Sri Lanka. 25 years later Jayewardene wanted Sri Lanka to be like Singapore. This shows the decline.

The Jaffna Tamils dominated the government and government services in Singapore. Rajaretnam was the country first Foreign minister and the PM's right hand man. After the first riots between the Chinese and Malays, he wrote a pledge. It reads as

We the citizens of Singapore,
Pledge ourselves as one united people,
Regardless of Race, Language or Religion,
To build a democratic society,
Based on Justice and Equality,
So as to achieve peace prosperity and Happiness.

All students in Singapore need to recite this everyday. He was also responsible for bringing Prima which is the sole supplier of Flour in Sri Lanka today.

JYM Plllai is the man behind Singapore Airline, the number one in the world. Concurrently he was the head of the Development Bank of Singapore (one of Asia's largest today). Now he is the chairman of Singapore Stock Exchange which is aiming to be Asia's best.

Dr Vijayretnam is the man behind Singapore Airport and Seaport which both were at many times number 1 in the world.

SS Retnam who studied in Hartley and whose grandfather set up the Hindu college was the first to do Sex change and Test tube baby procedures in Asia.

The first Acting commissioner of police, High commissioners to Malaysia and Britain, Speaker of House, Election Commissioner, Top lawyers, Judges, Doctors, Engineers and many others were Jaffna Tamils. The first opposition MP after independence was a Jaffna Tamil. His son today is the youngest president of the law society (a society dominated by Chinese lawyers today and the post is by elections)

The Chinese who were also not fluent in English before independence, picked it up and hold most of the senior post. However Jaffna Tamils due to their hard work still hold top positions like the present prime ministers right hand man Tharman is a Jaffna Tamil. He acts on behalf of the PM as the defacto central banker.

Intelligence has nothing to do with race. It has all to do with hard work. The Chinese is Singapore have no special mark scheme to go into University or racial Quotas. The fields once dominated by Jaffna Tamils and other Indians today are held by Chinese. They came up because of working hard. That’s how you come up in life. That’s how Japan recovered after the First World War and how Singapore overtook Sri Lanka.