“The treatment of the Roma is a litmus test for civil society.”
–Former Czech premier Vaclav Havel, 1993
***To all my journalist friends out there: your copy desk is more open than you think. Please, if you see #gypsycopyfail, correct it. ***
Gypsy, Gypsies Capitalize references to the nomadic Caucasiod people found throughout the world. Also known as [...]
There’s a lot to talk about in the World today, so lets jump right into it. You know about Tehran and you know about Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech, so we’re skipping that and getting straight down into the stuff you didn’t hear.
GLOBE:
More than a billion people go hungry, says the World Food Program. That’s about as [...]
Recently, I’ve become obsessed by terrorist chic- not the kind defined so brilliantly by bradtriescriticaltheory – the sort that’s already been coopted and comodified to the point that Palestinians should be embarassed to wear the kaffieyeh, but things you could only hope to buy abroad or in the untouched pockets of outer borogh New York. [...]
(VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP!!!)
3rdWorldImagineer is back today with another instalment of ‘why language matters’. For the record, I am not a PC fascist, but I do think it’s critical to examine how we talk about certain subjects, particularly ones gaining steam in the media. Hence, my semi-annual beef with the AP Stylebook.
For the uninitiated, the AP [...]
*(reader note: since lots of my recent traffic seems to have an infants sense of irony, I’m marking anything I said ironic with asterisks. ****)
I was asked in an interview recently why the Sri Lankan conflict (which has about 1/2 the deaths + 1/3 of the refugees of the Darfur crisis – 95% of the [...]
I am consistantly amazed at how much i get to do whatever i want.
Chronicle of conflict
• Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948. The country has a population of 21 million, of whom about 3.2 million are of Hindu Tamil origin.
• Tamil is one of the principal languages of the Hindu Dravidian dialect, with more than 200 million speakers across India.
• Ceylon Tamils are ethnic Sri Lankans [...]
Lots o’ stuff going on in South Asia this week! Tata unveils the Nano, world’s cheapest car (cue whine-track from self-serving American environmental movement) U.N. announces Humanitarian Crisis in Sri Lanka (cue crickets). Orphanage in Bangladesh actually a terror cell? Because there’s so much to say about each (!) I’ve split the posts.
Lanka Lanka Lanka:
While [...]
We spout off a lot about human voices and narratives and shit, but I’d rather read a bunch of solid numbers behind a single, strong argument than see another Maya/Fatima/Yelena, etc propped up in front of a camera and poked with a stick until she spills her unimaginably brutal survival story for another wannabe foreign correspondent’s lede. Human beings are the ONLY way to tell a story, especially a foreign story, but only if you treat them like humans instead of units of commoditized suffering. Anything else is just prostitution, and nobody likes a fucking pimp.
*I post this out of love, because even (and often) the most earnest among us are also the most absurd.
I was trolling Facebook as I often do when i came across a friend’s photo album from a recent Gaza mish. I am sharing this in violation of my own rules to make a point about [...]
3rdworldimagineer