Different sounds of Christmas

By this time of the year I imagine most of us have heard some of the same Christmas music over and over again. With that in mind I usually look for foreign Christmas music to post. I've done Japan and Brazil in the past, this year I feature the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

Above is a Christmas song and dance. Christmas dances seem to be very popular with Tamil Christians -- there are a lot of YouTube videos of kids dancing in what I imagine must be the Sri Lankan version of Christmas pageants. I must say the notion of dancing to celebrate the holiday is appropriate.

Below are a few more examples of songs and dances.

Stratfor and M.I.A.

The most recent Stratfor article discusses using social media as a tool for protest. The hot babe I've chosen to link to the article - in a shameless and transparent attempt to draw extra traffic to Flares - is the rapper/singer M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam). 

Her connection to protest and social media is admittedly a thin one: she is the daughter of one of the leaders of the Tamil separatist movement and she was one of the first musicians to sucessfully promote herself largely through the internet.

Her biography is rather strange. She was born in England, where her parents met, but her family returned to Sri Lanka when M.I.A. was a baby. Her father became one of the founders a Marxis militant group, that also welcomed radical Sri Lankan Moslems as members, called Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS). An altogether nasty group as you'll see if you follow the link.

As a child M.I.A. was estranged from her father. For what I imagine were security reasons he lived apart from M.I.A. and her mother. When he did visit her he was introduced as her uncle. Eventually the civil war got dicey enough that M.I.A. and her family, sans Dear Ol' Dad, returned to England as refugees. This is when M.I.A. learned English. 


She received a degree in fine art, film and video from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She started in graphic design, and only later moved into music. She mixed all of her early music and distributed it via file sharing. As such, she is considered on of the first sucessful musicians to use the internet to distribute her music and build a fan base.

Her music probably won't appeal to most of the older readers of this blog, but it is actually pretty good. Of course her lyrics are the usual nutty leftest flapdoodle, but her rhythms can be quite clever. She does a combination of electronica, rap, hip-hop and world music. If you're interested, here's a link to a YouTube video of her song Bucky Done Gun.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A TOOL FOR PROTEST 

By Marko Papic and Sean Noonan, February 3, 2011

Internet services were reportedly restored in Egypt on Feb. 2 after being completely shut down for two days. Egyptian authorities unplugged the last Internet service provider (ISP) still operating Jan. 31 amidst ongoing protests across the country. The other four providers in Egypt -- Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr -- were shut down as the crisis boiled over on Jan. 27. Commentators immediately assumed this was a response to the organizational capabilities of social media websites that Cairo could not completely block from public access.

The role of social media in protests and revolutions has garnered considerable media attention in recent years. Current conventional wisdom has it that social networks have made regime change easier to organize and execute. An underlying assumption is that social media is making it more difficult to sustain an authoritarian regime -- even for hardened autocracies like Iran and Myanmar -- which could usher in a new wave of democratization around the globe. In a Jan. 27 YouTube interview, U.S. President Barack Obama went as far as to compare social networking to universal liberties such as freedom of speech.

Social media alone, however, do not instigate revolutions. They are no more responsible for the recent unrest in Tunisia and Egypt than cassette-tape recordings of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini speeches were responsible for the 1979 revolution in Iran. Social media are tools that allow revolutionary groups to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training. But like any tool, social media have inherent weaknesses and strengths, and their effectiveness depends on how effectively leaders use them and how accessible they are to people who know how to use them.

How to Use Social Media

The situations in Tunisia and Egypt have both seen an increased use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter to help organize, communicate and ultimately initiate civil-disobedience campaigns and street actions. The Iranian "Green Revolution" in 2009 was closely followed by the Western media via YouTube and Twitter, and the latter even gave Moldova's 2009 revolution its moniker, the "Twitter Revolution."