I reckon I’m very attuned to events even in obscure corners of the world. But it came as a surprise to me this weekend, in the wake of the bizarre, fatal family feud in Nepal’s monarchy, that the country had a serious Maoist insurgency.
I haven’t yet found a website that tracks all the world’s conflicts, but I’m sure one exists somewhere. I do know that the bloodiest continuing conflict is in Sudan, and it receives virtually no media attention in the developed world. If you know what you’re looking for and know where to look, you can of course find information on any of these running tragedies. But that isn’t enough. How many other wars are out there that never trouble the world’s news editors?
The stinger and not the stung
A well-connected technology and computer games friend made a claim to me this weekend so bizarre that it just might be true. I was asking him what he thought the chances of Microsoft’s X-Box were against Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s GameCube. Despite the hundreds of millions that Microsoft are plowing into it, he thought it would struggle. “It’s all a smokescreen,” he said casually, “for Stinger.”
His assertion was that the really giant business that Microsoft wanted a major piece of wasn’t computer games (although that would be nice), but mobile phones. I personally don’t think Microsoft has made any secret of its ambitions in wireless, pouring scorn in particular on Symbian every chance it gets. So I’m not sure about the smokescreen theory, but it was fun to speculate.
Hi Lance,
some links to lists of ongoing wars and other conflicts on my recently started weblog http://www.freememes.com (house advertising is something even your regular readers shouldn’t consider, but, yeah, altough, ok shame on me).
X-box: The chance is there, it depends mainly on software and marketing.
Stinger: First place goes to the J2ME Platform combined with manufacturers custom made OS’, second to symbian or palm, forth may eventually be microsoft but there won’t be much of a market share left. Wireless platforms are rather tricky to realise (see NTT’s huge recent handset recalls) and i don’t think microsoft has the technical basis, yet or in the near future.
Just another opinion by
Bruno
…it came as a surprise to me this weekend, in the wake of the bizarre, fatal family feud in Nepal’s monarchy, that the country had a serious Maoist insurgency. …I do know that the bloodiest continuing conflict is in Sudan, and it receives virtually no media attention in the developed world. If you know what you’re looking for and know where to look, you can of course find information on any of these running tragedies. But that isn’t enough. How many other wars are out there that never trouble the world’s news editors?
If you were an American I would think you would have a point there — newspapers and other media in the United States (where I live) rarely give detailed treatment to affairs in other countries. Even when it comes to countries to which we are major givers of foreign aid, such as Israel, the coverage is severely dumbed down.
But the British media seem to do a much better job. For example, I did know there was a Maoist insurgency in Nepal because the BBC has covered it extensively. The BBC also does an excellent job of covering the conflict in Sudan and international events in general (compare the BBC’s international news offerings on its web site to that of, say, CNN — the BBC is light years ahead of CNN on usefulness and depth of coverage).