Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
@yudhanjaya
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Award-winning author, data scientist, journalist. Cofounder @teamwatchdog , ex- @LIRNEasia . Amateur-general maker of ephemera. He/him Rep: @StevieFinegan
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Joined November 2011
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So I won the Gratiean Prize for my (unpublished) novel, the Wretched and the Damned.
To celebrate, I’ve returned to where I started my fiction writing career: Mintage.
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The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense
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To Indian journalists being airdropped into Sri Lanka right now:
1. A lot of us have other things to do besides giving you exhausting interviews. Doubly so when electricity (and therefore ability to work) is in flux. You may not notice it in your hotels, but it’s real.
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Between 2000 and 2007 we were broke and homeless. My aunt and uncle took my mother and myself in. They were poor (3 kids, single cop’s salary) but gave us a room to stay.
Now I’m able to help them in turn. Youngest 2 are in uni, graduating next year. Laptops. Merry Christmas.
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When I was 15 I decided that I would one day build a cottage somewhere far away and fuck off into a world where I didn’t have to worry about rent. I had Rs 200 in my account.
Yesterday we toured the land I’ve bought in Kandy. 186 perches. 13 years of saving. Beautiful.
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MP's houses being set on fire: very sus.
1. Too fast, too coordinated, too professional.
2. Where the fuck are they getting the fuel from.
3. How is nobody stopping them? Not so long ago the cops were going ham on people stopping a fuel bowser.
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This is still my favourite protest moment. Hate to say it, but IUSF tactics are good. Cops on one side of a barrier expect people to come over it or through it. Nobody expects a bunch of giggling madmen to run away with the barrier altogether.
Video- The moment Peradeniya University students took over few barricades belongs to police.
#LKA
#SriLanka
#EconomicCrisisLK
#PowerCutLK
#SriLankaCrisis
#SriLankaCrisis
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India is incredible. An estimated 250 MILLION people – roughly three percent of the world’s entire population – went on strike today across the subcontinent, protesting the government of Narendra Modi’s racist and “anti-people,” “anti-worker” policies.
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Here's an exercise.
A lot of you are watching the shit going down in GGG right now, on video.
Archive the video. Save any footage you see. Identify any public officials, any faces you can match conclusively. Share it on
#AttackonGGG
.
They want mob action, let's do mob action.
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I find that Malcolm Gladwell, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson etc are quite useful: they're easy ways of identifying the pseudointellectuals in your life.
There's a huge population of adults who're still looking for easy answers to complex questions.
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We spent school memorizing how many pagodas king X built 1000 years ago when we should have been learning how laws and economics work in the present day.
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Why are we having powercuts this bad? What catastrophic clusterfuck of events led to
#powercutlk
?
We wrote about this, digging into CEB's reports and plans. Here's exactly how much power is being produced, and why we don't have nice things anymore.
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2. The story you’re trying to ‘cover’ may or may not exist. It doesn’t matter what you pitched to your editor to get a ticket to Sri Lanka. You likely pitched it based on half-assed information (this applies to 6 of the 9 journalists I have spoken to so far since April 1)
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Whatever political party you support, surely we can agree on a very simple thing:
We should not have war criminals as Presidents.
No Gota, no Sarath.
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7. Ultimately, you’re offering ‘exposure’ for the time of people ekeing out an existence in the middle of economic collapse.
Here’s your value proposition in a nutshell. By all means do your story, but don’t be dickheads.
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This. My friends in the US keep wailing about Trump being a dictator. To which the only response is: you haven't seen an efficient dictator yet, just a loudmouth. Wait till you get someone both evil and competent.
Trump was incompetent at his brand of authoritarianism, and he lost. But this isn't a triumph: the Democrats lost almost everything else. Make no mistake, about what's coming: The next Trumpist, in 2024, will be talented, competent and not easy to beat.
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6. Credit. Your. Fixers.
Most of them can write that article better than you, but I’ve seen so few of you treat them as anything more than butlers with sources.
<This rant powered by the idiot who won’t stop texting me asking for a meeting>.
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5. Flying in to a Colombo hotel, checking in once at GotaGoGama for photos, then flying back does not make you an expert (or even more useful than Twitter). Spend more time understanding the country and the multi-decade causes that led us here.
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A sad day for Afghanistan. Even sadder days to come. Today will be a day of meaningless hashtags from people who cannot comprehend violence. And five years from now Hollywood will churn out a movie about an American veteran with PTSD from his time in Afghanistan.
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How these people conquered my tropical island country is beyond me at times
UK to be blasted by 48 hour 26C heatwave with five cities in England the hottest
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Glad Sanath Nishantha is dead. I have no pity for the thug who led the SLPP mob into a peaceful protest, beating up protestors and setting things on fire. Fuck anybody who wants to respect evil.
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The
@teamwatchdog
protest tracker is now visual! Really lets you see the
#GoHomeGota
#SriLankaProtests
movement as it spreads like fire across
#SriLanka
🔥 🔥
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By the time I’m 30, I’ll be functionally off-grid, growing most of my own food, pottling about the plants and greenhouses, rewilding my little valley and writing. I’m looking forward to reducing my dependency and interaction with the chaos of the world outside.
Milestone met ✅
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Request to those protesting tomorrow. Charge your phones, take a power bank, record footage. If shit goes down, please upload at nearest opportunity.
If possible, mention time of footage and location and tag
@TeamWatchDog
or send to Yudhanjaya [at] appendix [dot] tech.
#lka
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Watching the Sirasa and Newsfirst footage on TV, and I have to say: incredible work by those camera operators. Damn heroes. Worth their weight in gold.
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Wait, what hell? I'm a Washington Post bestseller?
-looks at bottle of moscato-
Alright, buddy, we're celebrating tonight
Congrats to
@yudhanjaya
Wijeratne on hitting the Washington Bestseller list for his incredible novel, THE SALVAGE CREW! Special thanks to the great
@NathanFillion
on the incredible narration and
@PodiumAudio
for making it happen.
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Friends, Sri Lankans, countrymen, lend me your time. We're hearing from multiple sources of a devastating shortage of medicines across the country
#srilankacrisis
We're tracking this
@TeamWatchDog
. I need your help! Please read:
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Weird how Sri Lankans at the top are assholes and Sri Lankans at the bottom are amazing. Security at BIA opened my bag. Took out my books. On learning that I was the author they actually shook my hand and wished me well. One of them loves Sherlock translations.
#lka
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So, overnight, Sri Lanka has discovered that it's perfectly possible to function in a society where some people cover their faces.
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Second request: I’m getting video footage of police brutality in the wake of
#GoHomeRajapakses
protests. Cops beating up people, harassing people going home, etc.
If you see anything, please respond here with links to footage. The more eyes on this, the less we’ll miss.
#lka
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3. Many of the sources you’ve heard about or are citing right now don’t have the credibility you think they do. Ask for credible sources from your fixers.
4. If you insist on being pushy and demanding, expect to have your head bitten off eventually.
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The difference between fake news (exhibit A) and serious journalism (exhibit B).
Ironically, same employer.
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This is what we rarely acknowledge: many Sri Lankans who migrated took their racism with them.
They live as minorities in relatively stable countries, clinging on to every little thicket of superiority and smugness they can find, and weaponising it at the slightest chance.
'
#GoHomeGota
' protestors in Australia tear up Tamil Genocide flyers
As Tamils handed out flyers they were harassed and subjected to racist abuse with at least one man tearing up their flyers – all of which was caught on camera this week.
@TRCOZ
#lka
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My back-of-the-school-notebook projections were to hit this phase by the time I was 55. Thanks to my writing, I’ve been able to beat my own deadline by 25 years, with house money to spare. The house will be finished by the time I’m 30. It will look like this:
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Have filed an RTI request asking to see precisely what order was given to
@TRCSL
to shut down social media, under whose authority, and for what reason.
Let's see how this goes.
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So I watched
#RRR
It’s the single most epic thing I’ve ever seen. The most epic superhero movie, bromance, period piece, war story, you name it.
Like we legit watched a man leap up and punch a tiger in the face with a flaming lamppost and that wasn’t even the most epic thing!
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My applause for everyone who contributed to
#AttackonGGG
. Not only have you given us
@TeamWatchDog
everything we need to map out the timeline, but also -
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Well, at least there's something positive about Trump now.
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You showed your colours last year,
@DulithHerath
. I didn't know that 'business leaders' was a synonym for 'washing machines'.
Entrepreneurs and business leaders should come to the front. Most of them are still hesitant to speak their hearts out in public.
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Guess we gotta restart that police brutality tracker.
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I’m amazed and grateful for the cooler heads at GGG who, instead of beating the shit out of Rajapaksa goons, are putting cameras on them and getting them to ‘fess up.
Well done. Well done indeed!
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Every cooking show I've ever watched is but ashes and dust. She is the future.
I just wanted to learn how to make moon cakes, but now have been endlessly entertained too. Chinese cooking production values/special effects 😘
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Day fourteen. Vegetable smugglers are the new weed dealers. "I know a guy who can get you some parippu," says one. Numbers are exchanged on a WhatsApp group. No calls. SMS only.
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Temple Trees is now a community kitchen! What a brilliant act of protest, turning the instigation point of the May 9th attack into something that serves the people instead of controlling them.
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Sri Lankans in need of toilet paper should remember that the Divaina and the Daily Mirror exist and are available every day.
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Okay, people: stop tagging Anonymous to do stuff in Sri Lanka. If they take down our half-baked government websites, where the hell are we going to get notifications of Emergency Regulations and Gazettes?
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I know university cut-off marks arrived, and a lot of A/L students are in a cycle of grief and despair.
If you didn’t get into uni, chin up! As bad as it looks right now, your story doesn’t end here.
I don’t have formal tertiary education either. Here are some tips:
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Zeitgeist summary:
0) The President won't leave
1) The UNP is dead
2) the SLFP is practically dead
3) the SLPP is dying, or at least temporarily homeless
4) the SJB are useless cock-blockers
5) The JVP is saying all the right things but doing very little
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If you think building software is hard, try working with the Sri Lankan government.
We just showed up at the Ministry of Health for a scheduled meeting with the MSD (they wanted to look at Elixir's dashboards) and they just completely ghosted us xD
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Hang on a second.
Priyanka Chopra supported the Kashmir invasion and went full-on Jai Hind when India flew fighter jets over Pakistan - a situation that many feared would go past mere saber-rattling and into war between two nuclear powers.
What are you people smoking?
BIG NEWS:
@UNICEF
Goodwill Ambassador
@priyankachopra
will receive the Danny Kaye Humanitarian Award at our
#UNICEFSnowflake
Ball this December! An incredible voice for children — including on her recent visit to Ethiopia.
More updates to come!
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Wish Sri Lankan Twitter would just shut the fuck up sometimes. Half of you aren’t grieving, you’re just using a man’s violent death to thump your own chests and feel superior over hot takes. Your five second bullshit attention span isn’t doing shit.
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Sri Lankans live on loans and leases, sacrificing the future to pay for the present. We keep buying Vezels and iPhones at exorbitant prices and then wondering where the money went. We fail the marshmallow test.
The Sri Lankan government does the same.
Why are you surprised?
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This. I failed A/Ls, taught myself programming and journalism basics while selling keyboards and dusting shelves at Majestic City, helped found
@readmelk
, studied data science, philosophy and linguistics, now a researcher and published author. No degree.
Want a job? Work for it.
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Multiple mob attacks on mosques and people. Why are these mob participants also not carted off as terrorists? The police should be throwing the whole lot in jail until everybody thinks really bloody hard about inciting ethnic tensions.
#lka
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My greatest achievement. I have a feeling I'll never top this.
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Great. Curfew at 6PM, announced at 4PM.
This country is run by childish idiots.
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I went to Isipathana, Aruni. The only real way to see the difference in “calibre of people” is to see what they do with their lives, not how young rugby players act in one photo. It’s quite sad if you haven’t figured this out already.
You can see the difference in calibre of people in these two schools. I don’t need to say more…..
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A moment of silence for everyone who seems to think that Foundation is the peak of intellectual scifi.
A deterministic universe and a prediction system thrown by a single outlier. Come on, Seldon, you oversold that shit.
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Okay so I'm late to the party but Nathan Fillion didn't just blurb the Salvage Crew, he's NARRATING IT
THE CAPTAIN OF THE FIREFLY JUST NARRATED MY NOVEL
CAREER GOALS MADE
Go to to access it!
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We need to ban this shit.
We get discriminated in embassies, passport queues, the whole lot; last thing we need is people coming to Sri Lanka and hosting whites-only parties. Fuck it. Jail ‘em.
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Hang on, this is bullshit. If Muslim families were denied the right to hold death ceremonies because of medical precautions, the same must apply for Buddhists. Those priests are so exposed it's ridiculous.
Farewell of Two Mothers!
Heart Breaking!
Mr President
If you r' incapable of guaranteeing a dignified & safe lives for d Muslims in this country, pls guarantee them to have a dignified funeral.
This targeted discrimination of Muslims is even against Buddhist Teachings.Stop this.
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We're in some alternate universe now, right next to Mr Sanderson, and Mmes Rowling and Obama.
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Colombo mornings are surreal. This is just before dawn proper, in Rajagiriya; no filters. Between the stars and the sunrise there's a layer of ink, as if the city is sketching itself into being.
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Amazing. I’m seeing people who I’d swear have just been sitting on their asses since April 1st suddenly hop on moral high horses about going to one protest and call people lazy and/or traitors.
Not to bust your little Twitter bubble, but 40% of this country earns a daily wage.
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Second confirmed COVID-19 case in Sri Lanka (see
@TeamWatchDog
) for updates. People promoting Sri Lanka as a possible safe haven from COVID-19: this is not a zombie movie. Kindly stop being stupid. Wash your hands and go away.
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Next person who sends me a terrorist's speech to 'verify' will owe me four packets of cigarettes. You have been warned. I am not the police, merely a fairly sleepy volunteer who right now just wants to drink my Halmilla and imagine a world where
@MaithripalaS
was never born.
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This is absolutely incredible news if you're even remotely interested in South Asian or Sri Lankan literature.
@_vajra
's debut novel, the Saint of Bright Doors has won the Nebula. Not only is this a first for the region, it's one of the cleverest books I've read in the past year.
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Here we go again.
@GotabayaR
has ordered the Army, Navy and Air Force ‘for the maintenance of public order’ in all 25 districts of
#SriLanka
.
These people never learn, eh?
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It's ready! Presenting the latest from
@TeamWatchDog
:
We wanted to help our readers understand how the
#srilanka
situ affects costs of living. We also have some very sobering lessons about food security. Let's go on a little tour of the situation.
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Personal decision:
1. Sri Lanka is in multiple crises (economy, fuel, meds, industries of all sorts struggling). This is backed up by Watchdog data.
2. Those who can leave are leaving or have left already
3. Food is the next big crisis. It’s coming. Urban poor are hardest hit.
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Time for some good news that I've been sitting on for months now. We've raised over $340,000 for
@TeamWatchDog
to become a proper OSINT and data journalism operation in
#lk
. Next year is going to be a wild ride.
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Guess who’s really going to the moon this year (no, not like Chichi, but for real)? In October 2022, the Peregrine mission will land on the moon. On it will be three works from me …
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I love how the JVP people are now advising against protests. Having built their entire brand on ‘people’s protests’, they’re now having a hissy fit when the people actually protest on their own.
This is rent-seeking on anarchy.
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Dear
@Rohitha_Chichi
, you want to apply this logic to explain why
@GotabayaR
lived, worked and had citizenship in the United States?
I say this as someone actively building data and tech tools for Sinhala - what have you ever done for this language? Or even this country?
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One week of not smoking; rs 9800/= saved.
The financial incentive is nice. I just want the brain fog and nausea to go away.
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Looks like they blocked
@twitter
,
@facebook
and
@whatsapp
.
#GoHomeRajapaksas
Alright, let me drop some advice for people trying to get online
1) Don't download random VPN apps. Most of them steal data. If you want the good stuff, download TOR ().
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I wonder what’s going to happen when people realize you can’t get fuel by protesting when there’s no fuel in the country.
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It's interesting to see proponents of Amsterdam urbanism making (rather blind) arguments in Sri Lanka.
My dude, cycling in the tropics is a different game. Two minutes in, you're sweating, you're overheated, you're stuck between a tuktuk, a bus and a broken bit of pavement.
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Years of playing the long game working out. Living low-rent, identifying needs vs wants, turning down loans and leases and all other enablers of a debt-fueled ‘lifestyle’. All of this is zero-debt. I don’t even have a credit card; don’t need one. Never did.
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One of the more interesting difficulties I've had lately is explaining my depression to people who care. Some get it when I say 'I feel dead/gray'; most don't. This art by Juliana Kolesova is the perfect depiction. Speaks a thousand words.
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Say not that we need to imagine how they behaved in the north and east; say instead that we knew and chose to ignore it because it wasn’t happening to us.
The police in Colombo haven’t even begun to open their North and East playbook.
This is a victim of the tear gas attack carried out by the police & STF near
@ParliamentLK
. If this is how police behave in the south we can only imagine how they behaved in the north & east.
#lka
#SriLanka
#GoHomeGota
#HumanRightsViolations
#HumanRights
#PoliceBrutality
#පන්නමු
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#lka
:
Let the name "Maithripala Sirisena" be a marker of ignorance, incompetence, and utter failure, from now until the end of days and the destruction of this world.
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I don't fucking care who becomes Prime Minister or how many seats a party has in the new cabinet. A trained chimpanzee could do better than most of the candidates.
Appoint someone already and let them step out of the way so that the CBSL governor can negotiate with the IMF.
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I’ve had these hilarious moments of people protesting that they’re not rich.
Bro, your family has land, you’ve never paid rent, and your parents shelled out millions on your UK education so you can make PowerPoint presentations for a living.
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Slightly different take:
The poor stay because they cannot afford to leave legally (see our recent article on migration).
The rich / wealthy (two very different things - one has money, the other has time) are staying because we can and want to.
The middle is fleeing.
Great article written by
@munza14
on
@NikkeiAsia
on brain drain in Sri Lanka .. and the fact that many of us are NOT leaving:
If you want to go, please go; but don't say Sri Lanka is screwed because of that.
Many of us are here until death do us part.
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Not sure I needed to see Gota’s Q-tips and buttshorts today, but now I can’t unsee them.
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Some personal good news. On my birthday last year (end November) I was diagnosed with diabetes and high cholesterol.
After a month of dieting, exercise and medication, I've lost 6kgs and I'm in the "impaired" range as opposed to being diabetic. Just a few points above normal.
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Woke up to
@rw_unp
showing his colors. Played the ‘with the people’ card until it was no longer needed.
This is a good reminder to many: just because a man puts on a suit and speaks English doesn’t mean he is any less of a tyrant if given the chance.
#SriLanka
: At Fort, Colombo right now. Media and lawyers being stopped at every entry point to Galle Face. "You can't enter the area . No one can get in. Not even media or lawyers," say cops at barricade. No access to Galle Face
#lka
#SriLankaProtests
#SriLankaEconomicCrisis
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Watchdog is also saving footage and will make everything available to a giant crowdsourcing exercise. These people are on video, with weapons in hand. Some of them will have profiles somewhere.
Let's find them.
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For those who didn't too well in their A/Ls: folks, I failed, too. And dropped out of school before the second attempt.
Here's what helped me most in life:
1) English (not just being able to talk, but to read and absorb knowledge)
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India is saving lives here. Lives that our politicians put at risk.
Next time that racist relative in your family WhatsApp group goes on about Indians, you should as them to put up 2 billion or shut the fuck up.
Sri Lanka today received Rs. 2 Billion worth Humanitarian aid including milk powder, rice and medicines from India. Our sincere gratitude to the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Hon.
@mkstalin
and the People of India for the support extended (1/2)
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