A little Professional objectivity would have been nice. This type of hyped up hatred is almost as unbecoming as the over the top Royalism that it seeks to discredit.
He’s been divorced! Oh my God, off with his head and that Charles guy in the U.K. as well!! His possible 4th bride may have given birth to a boy child!!!! Dear lord, how will Thailand ever survive????
When you’ve been online as long as I have, you know that once your interlocutor regresses from “haters gotta hate” to “I know you are, what am I”, it’s time to leave the schoolyard and go catch a movie. So…
I never said that you reported there were WMD. I said “you all” in reference to MSM journalists.
As someone who in your once-frequent social media spats has a tendency to use the “real journalist” label as support for whatever argument you happen to be making at the time, I didn’t think you would mind sharing the load that comes with the label.
And you’re quite right, of course, I should have googled the interviews I was remembering. Now that I have, I have a much clearer idea of how they struck me at the time.
In the CJR interview you defend media performance in reporting the war in Iraq.
The interview has you giving a text-book “left” critical reading of how media operates to distort and suppress news and information.
It is precisely the same criticism I have of you, your social media phuak and the lads who cover Thailand with the same narrative and the same inability/refusal to think outside the box it creates.
“There is a certain discourse that becomes normalized, in which certain views are acceptable and others not. And if you make obvious statements, you know, like about the role of banks or global superpowers, and about the disaster that’s befallen the world in many areas in recent years, you are often marginalized as some sort of loony figure.”
Or you get dismissed as an angry white man trolling.
As to my use of “bad words” on Twitter, I can only say that by using my real name on my account I really thought I would get away with it without anyone knowing and thus avoiding the shame that discovery would entail.
Not.
One of the main purposes of my Twitter account is to let me watch journalists as they rub stories up against each other until enough consensus has been reached and enough hard edges removed that it is OK to go ahead.
Narrative achieved… no jobs on the line… go, Rangers!
My published poems, as few as they may have been, are not available online (I actually checked a year or so ago) and I didn’t bring the fading yellowed copies of the journals they were in with me when I moved to Thailand.
So you’ll have to get one of your cohort in Canada, if you have one, to cruise used book stores for copies of The New Review, The Fiddlehead and Poetry Canada Review from 1984-85.
A couple of them are quite good.
And I’d love it if you would provide a link to a piece of your “real journalism” circa early 2003 wherein you proclaim your disbelief in the WMD lie.
Something like that, as opposed to taking phantom swings at Thai monarchism, might actually make me think you did have some sort of commitment to using your platform for “good”.
In an ideal condition, a strong SOE can prevent price gouging from private sector. Notice how the US with a completely private telecommunication industry, has more expensive price for broadband compare to Indonesia in some of its parts. Notice how the US with a completely private pharmaceutical industry has more expensive price for medicine than Indonesia (for medicine available in both country). This is even true if you use purchasing power parity price comparison.
The same goes for other sector like banking, natural commodities, etc. So ideally, SOE can be the stable old guard while the private sector can be the innovator and take more risk.
Obviously, what Indonesia have right now is not at all ideal. There are plenty of corruption in SOE. “Outdated” and stoic way of doing things that prevails in SOE also contributed a lot inefficiency.
I think for infrastructure, the answer is joint operation between SOE and foreign company. Like how MRT is build (Shimiz is a partner for that project). SOE can provide manpower and capital, and the foreign company provide a more efficient operation. For a completely private contractor, it is hard to bid for infrastructure project due to the immense upfront cost.
For other sector, especially banking and telecoms, what Indonesia has is good enough. I think the reason Indonesia did get hit as hard in 2008 is because of SOE banks. They didn’t do risky investment and therefore stabilized the economy then.
Yes great point! The donations thing is the same as a lot of other non-Dhammakaya temples I’ve seen. I really don’t understand why people only single out Dhammakaya on that regard.
Oh come on everyone! Surely the delay could simply be the result of a sort of ‘pr campaign’ for the new king – ie give everyone time to get used to the idea of the succession and show him as properly wanting to mourn and grieve with the rest of the country. A quite sensible move given the much-talked about dislike and distaste for the CP. Rather than debate this delay endlessly I am much more interested in considering just when and how his new wife will be publicly introduced!
Ho! Ho! Ho! In spite of all the hubris about what is or is not happening in Thailand or will happen I think I will leave it up to the Thais to decide for themselves. NM is not going to sort out the challenging and interesting issues that Thailand – indeed any transitional society – is currently facing and will continue to face. As an “uninvited” guest in The Realm for a long time I would rather not outstay me welcome or lack thereof. Back in the numerous countries I have passports for people can say what they like and of course that is great but one has to be circumspect in Thailand like one has to be almost anywhere in this part of the world. However, before I sit down to plow through dreary reports that have no impact on the world except my wallet I love to read the ego posturing on NM. It is far more interesting and entertaining than the crap I have to put up with. Cheers
‘If I stole money and put some of it in a church box would the pope be liable?’
Yes, if he knew that the money was stolen and decided to keep it. That, presumably, is what the case will turn on.
Agree on power manipulation through leverage. Do come to west papua and see why more and more young west papuans are increasingly taking to streets. It’s not about human rights violation caused by big investments prying on natural resources. It’s on something else.
Wat Phra Dhammakaya is an odd regional variation of Thai Theravada Buddhism, which would have been perfectly normal prior to 1902. It has a charismatic leader, amulets, a few weird millenarian doctrines and a unique and wacky meditation technique. Hundreds of temples across Thailand were once just the same.
The Dhammakaya doctrine of merit-making is a bit mechanical, rather like Chinese Buddhism. This is probably because so many Dhammakaya supporters are Sino-Thai. Another innovation is to have well trained monks, fluent in Pali and with university degrees. The DMC Buddhist satellite TV channel is also excellent.
Wat Phra Dhammakaya has never left the Mahanikaya order so in the future it will simply be re-absorbed bringing with it Buddhist children’s cartoons, graduate monks and a vast new collection of amulets.
‘…Thais whose concept of Buddhism was otherworldly and self-sufficient.’ The Buddhism of the Bangkok intelligentsia may be like this but ordinary Thai Buddhism is decidedly ‘this-worldly’ and interwoven with folk religion. I also take issue with ‘…the fraud allegations deserve a serious and professional investigation…’ If I stole money and put some of it in a church box would the pope be liable? The charges are ridiculous, a cover for a simple extortion attempt on the part of the junta.
Kruba Srivichai was also heavily persecuted by state and Sangha authorities for not following orders, in his case mainly for ordaining novices without permission from Bangkok. He followed ancient Buddhism tradition instead of the unnatural, quasi-scientific and totally moribund version of Buddhism foisted on the Thai people by Prince Damrong and (Prince) Phra Vajirañana.
The Sangha Council, national curriculum, monk ranks and titles and every other tentacle of the Thai state that is throttling the life out of Thai Buddhism should be immediately removed, and the independence and ancient practices of the Sangha should be restored.
I would also like to ask if there is any work that documents the roles of two major historical issues in Thailand’s capital accumulation:
1. The U.S. presence as it pursued a major war in Vietnam; and
2. The massive increase in exports from Thailand in the 1980s to meet the sudden increase in demand created by refugees from that war.
These two factors make my experience as an English teacher all the more puzzling. After all that, why is English proficiency so poor in Thailand?
I’m afraid you are totally wrong Michael. I never reported that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and indeed I never believed there were any there. I never reported that things were “going well” in Iraq during the US occupation, and indeed Reuters was frequently attacked by the US military for saying how awful things were. I never wrote any “mea culpa” in the CPJ, as you would have discovered if you even spent 30 seconds googling it. It’s true that as a result of my experiences working for Reuters in the Middle East, I came to the conclusion that mainstream media reporting rarely makes a positive difference (as we are witnessing right now with the unfolding tragedy in Aleppo) and that’s why I left mainstream journalism behind, and I tried to focus my attention on one area where I think I can make a difference — challenging the official narrative about Thailand. I’m trying to do something good. Clearly you don’t think I am doing good, and indeed you think my work is counterproductive and misguided, and that’s fine, it is a valid viewpoint and you may be right, and I welcome it. But instead of being able to express your views in a civil manner and have some kind of constructive debate, all you can do is vent exaggerated bile.
It’s interesting that you are trying to make some kind of connection between me and Donald Trump, as it I somehow was partly responsible for his rise (as well as apparently being a racist orientalist middle-class bottom feeder who failed to prevent the Iraq war and is responsible for the persistence of dictatorship in Thailand, and whatever else you accuse me of). It seems to me that you are the one who behaves like Trump, with your aggressive mansplaining and your absurdly over-the-top denunciations of anyone whose opinions you disagree with. It should be obvious to everybody who reads what you write that you are not some kind of call-it-as-I-see-it no-bullshit straight shooter whose bluntness sometimes causes a few bruised egos. You are a gratuitously offensive troll who is incapable of debating in a civil way. You are like this with everybody, not just me.
Anybody who doubts this can just take a look at your Twitter feed (27,670 tweets, 305 followers), although be warned, it is an extremely distasteful experience. A random sample of your tweets just from the last two days alone shows you denouncing people as (among other things) “a fuckwit of the first order”, “a stupid person”, and “asswads”. You also clearly have a tendency to write multiple abusive tweets every day to people who almost never reply. After looking at two days worth of tweets I stopped scrolling further back because it was just too sad and depressing to read any more. It is textbook angry white male trolling.
Here on New Mandala you don’t just write abuse to me, you troll almost everybody. I find your abuse of Christine Gray particularly distasteful because again, you seem unable to disagree with her in a civil way, you just heap vitriol and derision upon her for having the temerity to think religious symbolism and the monarchy are important in 21st century Thailand, when you don’t think they are important.
All I can say is, I hope this behaviour makes you happy, because it certainly doesn’t make anyone else happy. Along with a few others, your interventions make New Mandala an uglier and less intellectually stimulating place.
I’m going to go back to ignoring you now, life is too short to do otherwise, so I won’t make any more interventions in this discussion. But one last point: I would be intrigued to read the poem you were paid $15 for, if you don’t mind sharing it. Namaste!
Excellent, clear piece. Thank you. Purity (unity) in the Sangha indexes the barami of the king.
There’s a new sheriff in town, so what next?
Sangha politics are always an excellent indicator and complement to what’s going on in the Thai “political” domain. One cannot criticize or make any direct comment on a ruler, but one can start a new religious movement, as Mongkut did while a monk to undercut his older half-brother, Rama III.
By making explicit the connections between money and merit, do you think the Dhammakaya was implied satire of the Thammayut and its relation to the throne?
Let me start with your invitation to correct you, since you are wrong regarding what I know about your work in Iraq.
You had an article up on the Columbia Journalism Review a few years back in which you did the classic “media culpa” for not having taken your journalistic responsibilities seriously enough in Iraq.
You suggested you had made a mistake.
You did the same thing in an interview with a guy who made videos and had a website or some such thing.
You made a mistake.
“You” in this case presumably meaning yourself and your colleagues. You talked about knowing that what was going on did not match what you were reporting. And then as now you made much of having had colleagues that died.
This of course is the paroxysm du jour in media circles as we speak. Journalists and their pundits are admitting they “made a mistake” with Trump.
This is standard practice in the so-called 4th estate: absolutely buy a line from some “authority” and pump that line so hard and so loud that it becomes “truth” for a post-truth age.
You and your mates in Iraq failed to call the US military on the reality and instead pumped out the line that things were going well, just as you all did the same with the WMD lies, and with the big lies that get told every time the US or the UK decides it’s time for a little war.
You “make mistakes”.
But they really aren’t mistakes.
Not when they get made in the same way by people in the same positions each and every time one of the western powers needs a blast of propaganda.
It’s what MSM does. It has become its primary raison d’etre. The odd bits and pieces of genuinely critical journalism out there just serve to put a nice face on the actuality. It’s nice that we have at least that now and again, but it loses out to the other.
So that is another sad, some might say tragic, development of the past couple of decades. The very people who are meant to promote awareness and provide essential information to democratic publics “make mistakes” and facilitate the creation of what those who indulge in media buzz-words as a substitute for thought are now bleating about being a “post-truth” world.
As to your cliched troll-style “psychoanalysis” of the angry white man as a way of deflecting attention from your own marked tendency to never deal with disagreement when a carefully phrased insult will do, I can only say, lay on MacDuff.
I must admit I preferred it when the kids used to say “haters gotta hate”. It had all the relevance with fewer wasted words. And it was funny.
As I have made clear on a couple of occasions, I don’t just “disagree with your views on Thailand”. I think that your thesis is utterly unproven, and the more ridiculous it looks with each passing day the louder you become in your insistence on some version of the narrative without ever acknowledging how wrong and wrong-headed it is.
A false narrative, even a “post-truth” narrative, that is popular because it serves the media need for a black-and-white, simple story to feed the folks at home, complete with evil oriental despots and passive and perverse “orientalized” victims.
Like so many of the sadly all-too-common simplifications and falsehoods that pass for “reporting”, yours creates a distorted and frankly ugly picture: not only of the “yellow peril” at the top of your portrait but of the subdued masses at their feet as well.
I of course believe in free speech and would never suggest that your work should never have been published.
I do, however, think it needs to be critiqued, as it has been on New Mandala, and I think that people who have a tendency to go around calling you “courageous” for sharing your orientalist vision of Thailand from behind a keyboard in various safe-spaces around the world need to be called on the nonsense.
There are people, some are journalists from outside western MSM, who die trying to get truth out.
Sitting at a computer and Tweeting pics, say, of a locally famous woman, and making fun of her lips or how “odd she is looking these days” as you do and have done relentlessly at times is really not that, Andrew.
It’s playing to a particular choir and it has hints not just of orientalist racism but sexism as well.
And it is your tendency to play to your social media choir, especially the overseas Thai middle-class segment that really gives the lie to your “courage” and your commitment to Thai democracy, as they would have it.
Your vitriol, in Tweets and on your Facebook page, causes glee and excitement in your followers and I suspect many of them feel that just reading your “blasphemy” is a kind of political act.
Like voting for Trump was for many of his “supporters” a finger given to an indifferent elite, your angry trolling provides people with a substitute for political activism and in fact does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.
It supports what you purport to revile because it gives such blatant misdirection to political action and analysis.
What you call my vitriol and my anger are usually nothing more than a tendency to call bullshit when I see people just wallowing in it.
And from my point of view, your book, but even more your social media “troll project”, is a huge sticky wallow full of the lowest kind of tabloid muck.
And I know that books like yours don’t make money, Andrew. I worked with small publishers in Canada and even got the odd fifteen dollar cheque for poems published back in the day.
You mistake me for someone who thinks self-promotion is essentially an economic undertaking.
I’m not. I see your self-promotion in an altogether different light.
Dhammakaya beliefs, from people like its founder Luang Pho Sod at Wat Phasii Caroen in Thonburi and the phiksunii and once nun Woramai Kabilsing, who wrote a great deal about the process and content of Dhammakaya wibasana, is not simply money=merit. Their version of Dhammakaya presents a simplified method of meditation and prayer that is shaped to encourage a sense of rapid spiritual advancement. The meditation emphasizes the passive visualization of a Dhammakaya object; the more frequently that object is captured in ones meditation, the further one moves along a spiritual path; the further one moves along that path; the more potent are one’s meritorius acts, the more merit they accumulate; on and to enlightenment or Arahant-hood or, in Woramai’s case, Boddhisat-hood.
I don’t have experience with the Dhammakayas in Prathumthani, Dhammachayo’s group, but I recall a summary by Justin McDaniel from some years ago that described something similar in relationship to their initial success, which came from urban Bangkok university students, not their current demographic. He described an attraction based on scale of effort — Dhammakaya allowed one to feel oneself an active Buddhist while pursuing academics and a career.
I’m also not familiar with Prathumthanii fund raising, but what I have seen at other Dhammakaya temples with regard to fund raising and the encouragement of contributions as a way of making merit, is no different than what one sees at non-Dhammakaya temples. No one discourages contributions to the temple, no one turns down contributions offered for advice or healing or the opportunity to divine hints about future events. Nobody denies that more is better or suggests that a large contribution is not highly meritorious. The larger sacred images carry a higher suggested donation than the smaller. But there is no overt equivalence, money=merit.
Well, yes, exactly, that is the point. Those in power pretend that this is following some kind of agreed protocol and/or ancient tradition, and it totally isn’t, they are just faking it and making it up.
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Henry VIII of Thailand
I think Vajiralongkorn is more like Britain’s King Charles The Second, than Henry The Eighth. But ultimately Vajiralongkorn is his own original.
Henry VIII of Thailand
A nice one Paul. This hideous crew (i.e. the RF and its lickspittle entourage) richly deserve every bucketful of dung flung their way.
Henry VIII of Thailand
Wow, the anti-christ is enthroned.
A little Professional objectivity would have been nice. This type of hyped up hatred is almost as unbecoming as the over the top Royalism that it seeks to discredit.
He’s been divorced! Oh my God, off with his head and that Charles guy in the U.K. as well!! His possible 4th bride may have given birth to a boy child!!!! Dear lord, how will Thailand ever survive????
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
When you’ve been online as long as I have, you know that once your interlocutor regresses from “haters gotta hate” to “I know you are, what am I”, it’s time to leave the schoolyard and go catch a movie. So…
I never said that you reported there were WMD. I said “you all” in reference to MSM journalists.
As someone who in your once-frequent social media spats has a tendency to use the “real journalist” label as support for whatever argument you happen to be making at the time, I didn’t think you would mind sharing the load that comes with the label.
And you’re quite right, of course, I should have googled the interviews I was remembering. Now that I have, I have a much clearer idea of how they struck me at the time.
In the CJR interview you defend media performance in reporting the war in Iraq.
Clearly you are responding to the criticisms from the right that suggested the media were unfairly ignoring the progress being made by the US occupation. http://www.cjr.org/the_water_cooler/andrew_marshall_on_security_in.php
9 years later in an interview with Andre Vitchek, clearly a man of the left, you sound an altogether different note.
The interview is now up on RT and the headline reads “What we’d done in Iraq had been fairly useless”. https://www.rt.com/op-edge/185360-reuters-chief-iraq-useless/
The interview has you giving a text-book “left” critical reading of how media operates to distort and suppress news and information.
It is precisely the same criticism I have of you, your social media phuak and the lads who cover Thailand with the same narrative and the same inability/refusal to think outside the box it creates.
“There is a certain discourse that becomes normalized, in which certain views are acceptable and others not. And if you make obvious statements, you know, like about the role of banks or global superpowers, and about the disaster that’s befallen the world in many areas in recent years, you are often marginalized as some sort of loony figure.”
Or you get dismissed as an angry white man trolling.
As to my use of “bad words” on Twitter, I can only say that by using my real name on my account I really thought I would get away with it without anyone knowing and thus avoiding the shame that discovery would entail.
Not.
One of the main purposes of my Twitter account is to let me watch journalists as they rub stories up against each other until enough consensus has been reached and enough hard edges removed that it is OK to go ahead.
Narrative achieved… no jobs on the line… go, Rangers!
My published poems, as few as they may have been, are not available online (I actually checked a year or so ago) and I didn’t bring the fading yellowed copies of the journals they were in with me when I moved to Thailand.
So you’ll have to get one of your cohort in Canada, if you have one, to cruise used book stores for copies of The New Review, The Fiddlehead and Poetry Canada Review from 1984-85.
A couple of them are quite good.
And I’d love it if you would provide a link to a piece of your “real journalism” circa early 2003 wherein you proclaim your disbelief in the WMD lie.
Something like that, as opposed to taking phantom swings at Thai monarchism, might actually make me think you did have some sort of commitment to using your platform for “good”.
Ciao, bello!
Jokowi wakes up the leviathan
In an ideal condition, a strong SOE can prevent price gouging from private sector. Notice how the US with a completely private telecommunication industry, has more expensive price for broadband compare to Indonesia in some of its parts. Notice how the US with a completely private pharmaceutical industry has more expensive price for medicine than Indonesia (for medicine available in both country). This is even true if you use purchasing power parity price comparison.
The same goes for other sector like banking, natural commodities, etc. So ideally, SOE can be the stable old guard while the private sector can be the innovator and take more risk.
Obviously, what Indonesia have right now is not at all ideal. There are plenty of corruption in SOE. “Outdated” and stoic way of doing things that prevails in SOE also contributed a lot inefficiency.
I think for infrastructure, the answer is joint operation between SOE and foreign company. Like how MRT is build (Shimiz is a partner for that project). SOE can provide manpower and capital, and the foreign company provide a more efficient operation. For a completely private contractor, it is hard to bid for infrastructure project due to the immense upfront cost.
For other sector, especially banking and telecoms, what Indonesia has is good enough. I think the reason Indonesia did get hit as hard in 2008 is because of SOE banks. They didn’t do risky investment and therefore stabilized the economy then.
Can Thailand tolerate more than one form of Buddhism?
Yes great point! The donations thing is the same as a lot of other non-Dhammakaya temples I’ve seen. I really don’t understand why people only single out Dhammakaya on that regard.
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
Oh come on everyone! Surely the delay could simply be the result of a sort of ‘pr campaign’ for the new king – ie give everyone time to get used to the idea of the succession and show him as properly wanting to mourn and grieve with the rest of the country. A quite sensible move given the much-talked about dislike and distaste for the CP. Rather than debate this delay endlessly I am much more interested in considering just when and how his new wife will be publicly introduced!
Henry VIII of Thailand
The best quote came from the very lady whose eyes filled with tears: “Change will lead us to a bright future.”
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
Ho! Ho! Ho! In spite of all the hubris about what is or is not happening in Thailand or will happen I think I will leave it up to the Thais to decide for themselves. NM is not going to sort out the challenging and interesting issues that Thailand – indeed any transitional society – is currently facing and will continue to face. As an “uninvited” guest in The Realm for a long time I would rather not outstay me welcome or lack thereof. Back in the numerous countries I have passports for people can say what they like and of course that is great but one has to be circumspect in Thailand like one has to be almost anywhere in this part of the world. However, before I sit down to plow through dreary reports that have no impact on the world except my wallet I love to read the ego posturing on NM. It is far more interesting and entertaining than the crap I have to put up with. Cheers
Can Thailand tolerate more than one form of Buddhism?
‘If I stole money and put some of it in a church box would the pope be liable?’
Yes, if he knew that the money was stolen and decided to keep it. That, presumably, is what the case will turn on.
The east is red
Agree on power manipulation through leverage. Do come to west papua and see why more and more young west papuans are increasingly taking to streets. It’s not about human rights violation caused by big investments prying on natural resources. It’s on something else.
‘Proxyphobia’ in Indonesia
you’re not Indonesian people,
criticism and your views unmasked of the actual..!!
Can Thailand tolerate more than one form of Buddhism?
Wat Phra Dhammakaya is an odd regional variation of Thai Theravada Buddhism, which would have been perfectly normal prior to 1902. It has a charismatic leader, amulets, a few weird millenarian doctrines and a unique and wacky meditation technique. Hundreds of temples across Thailand were once just the same.
The Dhammakaya doctrine of merit-making is a bit mechanical, rather like Chinese Buddhism. This is probably because so many Dhammakaya supporters are Sino-Thai. Another innovation is to have well trained monks, fluent in Pali and with university degrees. The DMC Buddhist satellite TV channel is also excellent.
Wat Phra Dhammakaya has never left the Mahanikaya order so in the future it will simply be re-absorbed bringing with it Buddhist children’s cartoons, graduate monks and a vast new collection of amulets.
‘…Thais whose concept of Buddhism was otherworldly and self-sufficient.’ The Buddhism of the Bangkok intelligentsia may be like this but ordinary Thai Buddhism is decidedly ‘this-worldly’ and interwoven with folk religion. I also take issue with ‘…the fraud allegations deserve a serious and professional investigation…’ If I stole money and put some of it in a church box would the pope be liable? The charges are ridiculous, a cover for a simple extortion attempt on the part of the junta.
Kruba Srivichai was also heavily persecuted by state and Sangha authorities for not following orders, in his case mainly for ordaining novices without permission from Bangkok. He followed ancient Buddhism tradition instead of the unnatural, quasi-scientific and totally moribund version of Buddhism foisted on the Thai people by Prince Damrong and (Prince) Phra Vajirañana.
The Sangha Council, national curriculum, monk ranks and titles and every other tentacle of the Thai state that is throttling the life out of Thai Buddhism should be immediately removed, and the independence and ancient practices of the Sangha should be restored.
Ritual and the demise of Thai democracy
I would also like to ask if there is any work that documents the roles of two major historical issues in Thailand’s capital accumulation:
1. The U.S. presence as it pursued a major war in Vietnam; and
2. The massive increase in exports from Thailand in the 1980s to meet the sudden increase in demand created by refugees from that war.
These two factors make my experience as an English teacher all the more puzzling. After all that, why is English proficiency so poor in Thailand?
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
I’m afraid you are totally wrong Michael. I never reported that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and indeed I never believed there were any there. I never reported that things were “going well” in Iraq during the US occupation, and indeed Reuters was frequently attacked by the US military for saying how awful things were. I never wrote any “mea culpa” in the CPJ, as you would have discovered if you even spent 30 seconds googling it. It’s true that as a result of my experiences working for Reuters in the Middle East, I came to the conclusion that mainstream media reporting rarely makes a positive difference (as we are witnessing right now with the unfolding tragedy in Aleppo) and that’s why I left mainstream journalism behind, and I tried to focus my attention on one area where I think I can make a difference — challenging the official narrative about Thailand. I’m trying to do something good. Clearly you don’t think I am doing good, and indeed you think my work is counterproductive and misguided, and that’s fine, it is a valid viewpoint and you may be right, and I welcome it. But instead of being able to express your views in a civil manner and have some kind of constructive debate, all you can do is vent exaggerated bile.
It’s interesting that you are trying to make some kind of connection between me and Donald Trump, as it I somehow was partly responsible for his rise (as well as apparently being a racist orientalist middle-class bottom feeder who failed to prevent the Iraq war and is responsible for the persistence of dictatorship in Thailand, and whatever else you accuse me of). It seems to me that you are the one who behaves like Trump, with your aggressive mansplaining and your absurdly over-the-top denunciations of anyone whose opinions you disagree with. It should be obvious to everybody who reads what you write that you are not some kind of call-it-as-I-see-it no-bullshit straight shooter whose bluntness sometimes causes a few bruised egos. You are a gratuitously offensive troll who is incapable of debating in a civil way. You are like this with everybody, not just me.
Anybody who doubts this can just take a look at your Twitter feed (27,670 tweets, 305 followers), although be warned, it is an extremely distasteful experience. A random sample of your tweets just from the last two days alone shows you denouncing people as (among other things) “a fuckwit of the first order”, “a stupid person”, and “asswads”. You also clearly have a tendency to write multiple abusive tweets every day to people who almost never reply. After looking at two days worth of tweets I stopped scrolling further back because it was just too sad and depressing to read any more. It is textbook angry white male trolling.
Here on New Mandala you don’t just write abuse to me, you troll almost everybody. I find your abuse of Christine Gray particularly distasteful because again, you seem unable to disagree with her in a civil way, you just heap vitriol and derision upon her for having the temerity to think religious symbolism and the monarchy are important in 21st century Thailand, when you don’t think they are important.
All I can say is, I hope this behaviour makes you happy, because it certainly doesn’t make anyone else happy. Along with a few others, your interventions make New Mandala an uglier and less intellectually stimulating place.
I’m going to go back to ignoring you now, life is too short to do otherwise, so I won’t make any more interventions in this discussion. But one last point: I would be intrigued to read the poem you were paid $15 for, if you don’t mind sharing it. Namaste!
Can Thailand tolerate more than one form of Buddhism?
About the same thing the Bible has to do with the Catholic Church.
Can Thailand tolerate more than one form of Buddhism?
Excellent, clear piece. Thank you. Purity (unity) in the Sangha indexes the barami of the king.
There’s a new sheriff in town, so what next?
Sangha politics are always an excellent indicator and complement to what’s going on in the Thai “political” domain. One cannot criticize or make any direct comment on a ruler, but one can start a new religious movement, as Mongkut did while a monk to undercut his older half-brother, Rama III.
By making explicit the connections between money and merit, do you think the Dhammakaya was implied satire of the Thammayut and its relation to the throne?
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
Andrew:
Let me start with your invitation to correct you, since you are wrong regarding what I know about your work in Iraq.
You had an article up on the Columbia Journalism Review a few years back in which you did the classic “media culpa” for not having taken your journalistic responsibilities seriously enough in Iraq.
You suggested you had made a mistake.
You did the same thing in an interview with a guy who made videos and had a website or some such thing.
You made a mistake.
“You” in this case presumably meaning yourself and your colleagues. You talked about knowing that what was going on did not match what you were reporting. And then as now you made much of having had colleagues that died.
This of course is the paroxysm du jour in media circles as we speak. Journalists and their pundits are admitting they “made a mistake” with Trump.
This is standard practice in the so-called 4th estate: absolutely buy a line from some “authority” and pump that line so hard and so loud that it becomes “truth” for a post-truth age.
You and your mates in Iraq failed to call the US military on the reality and instead pumped out the line that things were going well, just as you all did the same with the WMD lies, and with the big lies that get told every time the US or the UK decides it’s time for a little war.
You “make mistakes”.
But they really aren’t mistakes.
Not when they get made in the same way by people in the same positions each and every time one of the western powers needs a blast of propaganda.
It’s what MSM does. It has become its primary raison d’etre. The odd bits and pieces of genuinely critical journalism out there just serve to put a nice face on the actuality. It’s nice that we have at least that now and again, but it loses out to the other.
So that is another sad, some might say tragic, development of the past couple of decades. The very people who are meant to promote awareness and provide essential information to democratic publics “make mistakes” and facilitate the creation of what those who indulge in media buzz-words as a substitute for thought are now bleating about being a “post-truth” world.
As to your cliched troll-style “psychoanalysis” of the angry white man as a way of deflecting attention from your own marked tendency to never deal with disagreement when a carefully phrased insult will do, I can only say, lay on MacDuff.
I must admit I preferred it when the kids used to say “haters gotta hate”. It had all the relevance with fewer wasted words. And it was funny.
As I have made clear on a couple of occasions, I don’t just “disagree with your views on Thailand”. I think that your thesis is utterly unproven, and the more ridiculous it looks with each passing day the louder you become in your insistence on some version of the narrative without ever acknowledging how wrong and wrong-headed it is.
A false narrative, even a “post-truth” narrative, that is popular because it serves the media need for a black-and-white, simple story to feed the folks at home, complete with evil oriental despots and passive and perverse “orientalized” victims.
Like so many of the sadly all-too-common simplifications and falsehoods that pass for “reporting”, yours creates a distorted and frankly ugly picture: not only of the “yellow peril” at the top of your portrait but of the subdued masses at their feet as well.
I of course believe in free speech and would never suggest that your work should never have been published.
I do, however, think it needs to be critiqued, as it has been on New Mandala, and I think that people who have a tendency to go around calling you “courageous” for sharing your orientalist vision of Thailand from behind a keyboard in various safe-spaces around the world need to be called on the nonsense.
There are people, some are journalists from outside western MSM, who die trying to get truth out.
Sitting at a computer and Tweeting pics, say, of a locally famous woman, and making fun of her lips or how “odd she is looking these days” as you do and have done relentlessly at times is really not that, Andrew.
It’s playing to a particular choir and it has hints not just of orientalist racism but sexism as well.
And it is your tendency to play to your social media choir, especially the overseas Thai middle-class segment that really gives the lie to your “courage” and your commitment to Thai democracy, as they would have it.
Your vitriol, in Tweets and on your Facebook page, causes glee and excitement in your followers and I suspect many of them feel that just reading your “blasphemy” is a kind of political act.
Like voting for Trump was for many of his “supporters” a finger given to an indifferent elite, your angry trolling provides people with a substitute for political activism and in fact does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.
It supports what you purport to revile because it gives such blatant misdirection to political action and analysis.
What you call my vitriol and my anger are usually nothing more than a tendency to call bullshit when I see people just wallowing in it.
And from my point of view, your book, but even more your social media “troll project”, is a huge sticky wallow full of the lowest kind of tabloid muck.
And I know that books like yours don’t make money, Andrew. I worked with small publishers in Canada and even got the odd fifteen dollar cheque for poems published back in the day.
You mistake me for someone who thinks self-promotion is essentially an economic undertaking.
I’m not. I see your self-promotion in an altogether different light.
Have a good weekend!
Can Thailand tolerate more than one form of Buddhism?
Dhammakaya beliefs, from people like its founder Luang Pho Sod at Wat Phasii Caroen in Thonburi and the phiksunii and once nun Woramai Kabilsing, who wrote a great deal about the process and content of Dhammakaya wibasana, is not simply money=merit. Their version of Dhammakaya presents a simplified method of meditation and prayer that is shaped to encourage a sense of rapid spiritual advancement. The meditation emphasizes the passive visualization of a Dhammakaya object; the more frequently that object is captured in ones meditation, the further one moves along a spiritual path; the further one moves along that path; the more potent are one’s meritorius acts, the more merit they accumulate; on and to enlightenment or Arahant-hood or, in Woramai’s case, Boddhisat-hood.
I don’t have experience with the Dhammakayas in Prathumthani, Dhammachayo’s group, but I recall a summary by Justin McDaniel from some years ago that described something similar in relationship to their initial success, which came from urban Bangkok university students, not their current demographic. He described an attraction based on scale of effort — Dhammakaya allowed one to feel oneself an active Buddhist while pursuing academics and a career.
I’m also not familiar with Prathumthanii fund raising, but what I have seen at other Dhammakaya temples with regard to fund raising and the encouragement of contributions as a way of making merit, is no different than what one sees at non-Dhammakaya temples. No one discourages contributions to the temple, no one turns down contributions offered for advice or healing or the opportunity to divine hints about future events. Nobody denies that more is better or suggests that a large contribution is not highly meritorious. The larger sacred images carry a higher suggested donation than the smaller. But there is no overt equivalence, money=merit.
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
Well, yes, exactly, that is the point. Those in power pretend that this is following some kind of agreed protocol and/or ancient tradition, and it totally isn’t, they are just faking it and making it up.