Tuckerfan, why does any country or people get its panties in a twist over any land/self-determination dispute?
In a nutshell, AFAIK, when India was partitioned, the Hindu ruler of the majority Muslim state of Kashmir decided to throw his lot in with Hindu India rather than Muslim Pakistan. All other cock-ups stem from here.
More information here, and a longer timescale with a political slant here.
Any the foreign press isn’t? I had no idea that the press in other countries isn’t concerned with making a profit.
I was wondering the very same thing just the other night while I was drunk on Bourbon Street, so I asked the Pakistani guy who was in charge of one of the gift shops next to Pat O’Brien’s. He said that even though the rift between Muslim and Hindu tends to motivate a lot of it, that water rights also play a large role. Apparently, quite a bit of the fresh water supply for those countries originates in the snow meltoff from the mountains of Kashmir, or so he said. It seemed like a pretty good answer to me, but then again, he’s just a guy who sells beads in New Orleans and I was just a drunk fool wandering the streets.
Well, you could make quite a good case for the BBC…
Bugger. Mine was in response to the “all press looking to make a profit” post.
Well to name two, the BBC (UK) and RTE (Ireland) are both state-funded bodies with supposedly no political agenda, and less profit-oriented drive than, say, Sky News.
Think NPR with a bigger budget.
I have a theory that because Sky News has to compete with the BBC and RTE, it’s not as commercial (= shit) as it could be.
I did not mean to imply that Sky News isn’t shit. It’s really shit. Its habit of making a drama out of a non-event is woeful. As was the glitch in the breaking news flag the other day that made it say “Remains found: Bush arrives in Germany”.
Just not as shit as it could have become (think ‘News Bunny’) without independent competition.
The guy with the beads pretty much has it right. There’s a lot of irrigation projects going on in that part of the world, and whoever owns Kashmir can pretty well turn the tap off for the other. Pakistan is particularly vulnerable this way.
That’s the real reason behind it, but of course the authorities of both countries don’t mind stirring up a bit of religious differences and the mess that British post-colonial partitioning left in order to get popular support.
Um…who IS this guy who is so loaded he can construct a roller coaster in his backyard? And how big is said backyard? And is he single? 
All I have to say is that they need to calm the hell down indefinitely, or at least wait until after June 13th (when my boyfriend flies out of India). I’m getting more worried every day.
Oh, and to the asshat who suggested “population control”: besides the blatantly obvious fact that taking human life = bad, many, many people in gasp! the US have loved ones in that part of the world right now, and would prefer that it not get blown the fuck up.
Not to mention all the people from Pakistan and India who have loved ones in that part of the world…