ugggh New York Times WHY
Okay, let's talk about something kind of fucked up. Every year, the travel section of the Times posts a list of places to go that year, all over the world. Now. I am a HUGE fan of the New York Times. But this year's number one place to go in 2010 is motherfucking SRI LANKA.
No one is nearly as pissed about this as MIA, as in the singer, who posted links on her Twitter to photos of dead children killed in the civil war. She is English but her family is Tamil, which was the minority in the Sri Lankan civil war. Her father was a founding member of an activist group pushing the agenda of an independent Tamil state. Over 80,000 people were killed in the 25 year insurgency, which only came to an official end in May, and now the fucking New York Times wants you to pack up your really expensive yuppie bathing suit into your Louis Vuitton luggage and head over there to ignore a traumatized nation. Now, you could make the case that tourism money is needed to get this country back on its feet, but if you think that a substantial portion (or any for that matter) of that cash goes where it needs to go to help displaced, injured, widowed, orphaned, impoverished Sri Lankan people, you are sorely mistaken. It's pretty insulting. Like okay, New York Times, instead of writing up about how everyone should go there even though Sri Lanka has fallen upon some major "misfortune" (be more patronizing please! somehow a genocide and a two and a half decade long civil war don't really sound like MISFORTUNES but a series of national crises), why don't you actually do something with some shred of journalistic integrity and write some more articles about it- like you did three days ago about a human rights lawyer finding a prison execution video go be authentic? Yeah, sounds great. Bucolic, even. Sign me up.
No one is nearly as pissed about this as MIA, as in the singer, who posted links on her Twitter to photos of dead children killed in the civil war. She is English but her family is Tamil, which was the minority in the Sri Lankan civil war. Her father was a founding member of an activist group pushing the agenda of an independent Tamil state. Over 80,000 people were killed in the 25 year insurgency, which only came to an official end in May, and now the fucking New York Times wants you to pack up your really expensive yuppie bathing suit into your Louis Vuitton luggage and head over there to ignore a traumatized nation. Now, you could make the case that tourism money is needed to get this country back on its feet, but if you think that a substantial portion (or any for that matter) of that cash goes where it needs to go to help displaced, injured, widowed, orphaned, impoverished Sri Lankan people, you are sorely mistaken. It's pretty insulting. Like okay, New York Times, instead of writing up about how everyone should go there even though Sri Lanka has fallen upon some major "misfortune" (be more patronizing please! somehow a genocide and a two and a half decade long civil war don't really sound like MISFORTUNES but a series of national crises), why don't you actually do something with some shred of journalistic integrity and write some more articles about it- like you did three days ago about a human rights lawyer finding a prison execution video go be authentic? Yeah, sounds great. Bucolic, even. Sign me up.