Importantly on a personal level however, currently the situation in defending migrant worker rights for me and others who act as human rights defenders in similar situations has rapidly deteriorated in Thailand with significantly increased risks and aggressiveness evident. As a result, I want to ensure time for existing tense situations of conflict to reduce as well as provide time and space for the many parties to these existing disputes to fully understand the importance of migrant worker rights and the necessity for human rights defenders like myself to have their work increasingly promoted and protected. Only if such a positive situation is developed can people like myself work genuinely and most productively, free from threats and intimidation and without endless prosecutions that prevent our work from proceeding effectively.
I’ll take that as a refusal to provide any support for your argument beyond appeal to authority.
Your (ab)use of D&G to find yet another way to throw the word “fascist” at the junta is as relevant as the last time you did so under an altogether other rubric.
People responded then with arguments questioning the validity of your choice of “fascism” as an analytic term and you didn’t respond adequately then either.
So an academic makes accusations he won’t defend with reasoned argumentation against a government that denies all charges without appeal to reason or anything other than simply saying so.
As I’m sure any Deleuzian reading would find, the similarities are far more meaningful than the differences. Hence the relevance of “micro-fascism” to Taylor’s own practice.
You have opinions that may well have some merit if one prefixes with the statement: ” Thailand is unique in World affairs…”
The uniqueness I refer to is the fact that you now inform us Thailand has a Regent in spite of no monarchy. This status cannot be achieved in any other country where are Regent only acts on behalf of a monarch not on his own behalf.
The second most significant difference is that RTA’s existence is to enforce the partnership with the monarchy and to suppress the Thai population who live mainly outside Bangkok. The skirmishes you refer to with Laos and Cambodia were very minor events compared to the massacres against the students at Thammasat University,the Red Shirts in Bangkok and the Malay Muslims on too many occasions. By its own history the RTA is constituted to control the population on behalf of the King or Monarch.
Your mention of courts laws etc is just time wasting, Thailand has no laws or courts in the conventional sense. If they did it would be unlawful to overthrow a popularly elected govt. If they did there would be no need for the great human rights defender, Andy Hall, to flee Thailand in fear of his life this morning, if Thailand had proper laws and courts the 2 Burmese scapegoated for murders on Koh Tao Island would not be in jail, they would be free as they deserve to be and finally if Thailand had laws the disgraceful road toll would be much less and some of the very rich perpetrators of that shocking toll would pass through court on their way to jail, to refer to courts and laws is to refer to myths and fairytales. When you are older you will no longer believe.
Andy Hall : Prominent UK rights activist, fearing for safety, leaves Thailand
Hall, who has worked on the rights of migrant workers in Thailand for 11 years, has recently faced defamation lawsuits by companies he has accused of labour violations.
“The situation is not good right now,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone on Sunday before his flight, speaking from Mahachai, a town near Bangkok and the centre of Thailand’s seafood processing industry.
“It’s rapidly deteriorating. It doesn’t feel safe. There are people who are intent on wearing me down. I’ve worked with so many companies in Thailand, and it’s rare to have a company that is so irrational and so vindictive. It’s enough to wear anyone down.”
snip
“No one dares to say anything about anyone doing anything wrong in Thailand. They just say it’s ‘a factory’, or ‘a company’ in Thailand,” he said.
michael (sounds like he is chasing me across NM?) likes to divert attention from the core argument and has some pleasure in twisting my logic without reading clearly the underlying argument. you should not take small bites out of D&G without comprehending the whole terrain of their thinking. I have spent many years working with all their individual and collective works in English. your comment on D&G in this context is misleading. I am happy to povide an explanation if you wish to write to me at the university.
Michael, no, but in fact many Western academics were linked with Thai academics who actually were (yellow), as became evident in 2008; and also a heavy reliance on English language Thai media & information sources, which we now know were in the pay of the amaat. I was teaching in the Faculty of Pol Science, Chulalongkorn U. at the time and know what was going on, and indeed why, in the case of the broad front to bring Thaksin down. I think Michael you need to read wider, and also consider changing your informants in Thailand…you sound like the fable of the blind man who is asked to describe the elephant, (readers know the story).
And what about all the research that was done and published BEFORE the 06 coup?
Perhaps you could find a pomo theorist who supports the notion of proleptic propagandizing to prove that, say, Baker and Phasuk and McCargo and Ukrist were actually influenced by the royalist-military propaganda that came years after their once-influential books were published.
Chris there might be lots of guns in Isaan but most of them are not in the hands of your nascent Lao nationalists or at least not to the best of my knowledge. In relation to Buddhist fundamentalism are you sure Isaan people are quite as fundamentalist as you suggest? I think you have to more clearly define what is Buddhist fundamentalism. And are you sure there is a IsaanExit on the cards up there is Isaan? Thailand, even with the Generals in charge, is still an easier society to live in than the Lao PDR. Although I suppose after quite a bit of “lao-lao” all of this might be blurred.
This debate is getting like Syria, Russia, Trump debates – accusations, truths and half-truths. Who has the truth on Thaksin? I am not sure. Recently there was debate on extrajudicial killing – 2,500 was suggested to be too higher a number (mainstream sources?). Well under a 1,000, and many more or less justified, was the ‘academic’ or official researched argument. But to associate Thaksin with ‘separation of powers with checks and balances and independent institutions’, if that was the intent, seems to be a bit far fetched.
Since Taylor seems to uphold the value of reasoned discourse in taking and defending positions, I would ask him to provide some sort of support for his contention that what Deleuze means by micro-fascism is “no choice but to comply with an imposed normalisation because the alternative carries risks”.
Micro-fascism is about desire, the desire of individuals, and not about state imposed norms. It is about blocked lines of flight, failed attempts to escape from the rigidities of capitalism that turn into the demand that others follow “rules” that these frustrated desires create. Micro-fascisms are diverse; fascism is monolithic.
Taylor can’t deal with these elements of Deleuzian analysis because his whole defense of Thaksin and fantasy about what Thaksin’s electoral authoritarianism represents appears to be little more than a perfect example of a blocked line of flight.
And we know where they lead.
I’ve quoted this before in response to Dr Taylor and it remains relevant to his refusal to defend his misuse of Deleuzian terminology:
“It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” D&G
I can think of no legitimate reason why SEK WANNAMETHEE should not have responded to Mr Taylor’s article. There are two sides to every story after all, and I think we are all better off for having heard both of them.
I don’t think Thaksin was a threat to “democracy” at all. It was and remains his only route to power, taking his money and connections for granted.
Liberal democracy is something altogether different from “democracy”, no matter how much American propaganda would like to obscure the fact, and no matter how much people who prefer “discourse” to reality regarding Thailand’s politics cling to the dream of one automatically meaning the other.
All you need to do Chris is read books and articles written about Thaksin and his administrations BEFORE it became “politically correct” to refashion him into the very model of Thai liberal democracy.
Or you could check that mythical dictionary where instead of a definition of “electoral authoritarianism” there is just a picture of Thaksin and a pile of dead drug dealers posed much like a hunter and the deer he killed.
The 97 constitution eliminated some 90 to 95% of the Thai electorate from eligibility to run for parliament and included the usual phrase encouraging state actors to continually educate the people as to the meaning of “democracy”. It was more liberal and paternalistic than “liberal democratic”.
The problem for people coming to Thai politics for the first time in the post-06 coup period is the predominance of voices whose absolute insistence that any elected PM is better than any junta, even if that PM set up death squads and shut down media left and right.
It’s a form of ideologically induced blindness and indifference to the lives lost, probably because they were just poor people anyway.
I did not compare Abhisit and Trump. I compared the Republican party with the Democrat party in Thailand. Abhisit would be a moderate republican, and Suthep is maybe similar to someone like Gingrich. Trump is in a league of his own.
A misdirected and mischievous comparison. Post 2006 coup attempts were made by the (corrupt) elite-military regime to discredit Thaksin and find fault on corruption charges. They invested a significant amount of money and politically biased legal investigators over many months and were unable to find serious fault according to the law. That was disappointing and would have been neat, but it did not stop the intent of the royalist-military propaganda machinery to justify the (unjustifiable) coup…More (balanced) research is needed by the author before making sweeping generalisations.
A core tenet of Singapore’s state propaganda is that the state operates as a meritocracy. This article shows that, beyond personal anecdotes, there is a wealth of solid documentation that proves that claim false. This comment seems to be claiming that the article might have benefited from adding speculation on possible reasons why the state chooses to operate as an ethnocracy, while claiming to be a meritocracy. That seems quite far off-topic. Before investigating the cause of phenomena, there first must be agreement on the existence of the phenomena. Unlike the case of Malaysia, there is no general acknowledgement that Singapore has a state-privileged ethnic group. So it’s premature to start speculating on causes until that acknowledgement is established.
Would be interesting what other interpretations have been given by others from within the traditions. One should’nt belittle new interpretations , one can look at the same equations in many ways and might see it in entirely new perspective.That is part of Human creation of knowledge, part of what makes knowledge a discovery and an invention. It makes better sense to note where that new perspective has come from instead. I am interested in knowing whether this has been the only interpretation or were there any other interpretations as well. And to take it forward how exactly does karma tally with our day to day interaction, our day to day behavior. In short, what was the understanding of human psyche and causality and how has it changed with time . In this case I would be grateful to the author if he can say whether there have been different interpretations from with the tradition before say 17th century AD and whether he can guide to material reagarding say buddhist understanding of psyche and causality (especially buddhist atomism) ? Thank you
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Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
Statement on leaving Thailand: Andy Hall
Importantly on a personal level however, currently the situation in defending migrant worker rights for me and others who act as human rights defenders in similar situations has rapidly deteriorated in Thailand with significantly increased risks and aggressiveness evident. As a result, I want to ensure time for existing tense situations of conflict to reduce as well as provide time and space for the many parties to these existing disputes to fully understand the importance of migrant worker rights and the necessity for human rights defenders like myself to have their work increasingly promoted and protected. Only if such a positive situation is developed can people like myself work genuinely and most productively, free from threats and intimidation and without endless prosecutions that prevent our work from proceeding effectively.
http://www.prachatai.com/english/node/6698
A response to the Thai government
I’ll take that as a refusal to provide any support for your argument beyond appeal to authority.
Your (ab)use of D&G to find yet another way to throw the word “fascist” at the junta is as relevant as the last time you did so under an altogether other rubric.
People responded then with arguments questioning the validity of your choice of “fascism” as an analytic term and you didn’t respond adequately then either.
So an academic makes accusations he won’t defend with reasoned argumentation against a government that denies all charges without appeal to reason or anything other than simply saying so.
As I’m sure any Deleuzian reading would find, the similarities are far more meaningful than the differences. Hence the relevance of “micro-fascism” to Taylor’s own practice.
Thailand’s peculiar interregnum
as aptly explained by Hugh , the only folks Thailand is fooling are themselves …………………..
Thailand’s peculiar interregnum
@Bkk lawyer.
You have opinions that may well have some merit if one prefixes with the statement: ” Thailand is unique in World affairs…”
The uniqueness I refer to is the fact that you now inform us Thailand has a Regent in spite of no monarchy. This status cannot be achieved in any other country where are Regent only acts on behalf of a monarch not on his own behalf.
The second most significant difference is that RTA’s existence is to enforce the partnership with the monarchy and to suppress the Thai population who live mainly outside Bangkok. The skirmishes you refer to with Laos and Cambodia were very minor events compared to the massacres against the students at Thammasat University,the Red Shirts in Bangkok and the Malay Muslims on too many occasions. By its own history the RTA is constituted to control the population on behalf of the King or Monarch.
Your mention of courts laws etc is just time wasting, Thailand has no laws or courts in the conventional sense. If they did it would be unlawful to overthrow a popularly elected govt. If they did there would be no need for the great human rights defender, Andy Hall, to flee Thailand in fear of his life this morning, if Thailand had proper laws and courts the 2 Burmese scapegoated for murders on Koh Tao Island would not be in jail, they would be free as they deserve to be and finally if Thailand had laws the disgraceful road toll would be much less and some of the very rich perpetrators of that shocking toll would pass through court on their way to jail, to refer to courts and laws is to refer to myths and fairytales. When you are older you will no longer believe.
A response to the Thai government
Kudos Dr JL Taylor .
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
Turning the tide on Thailand’s human trafficking
Andy Hall : Prominent UK rights activist, fearing for safety, leaves Thailand
Hall, who has worked on the rights of migrant workers in Thailand for 11 years, has recently faced defamation lawsuits by companies he has accused of labour violations.
“The situation is not good right now,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone on Sunday before his flight, speaking from Mahachai, a town near Bangkok and the centre of Thailand’s seafood processing industry.
“It’s rapidly deteriorating. It doesn’t feel safe. There are people who are intent on wearing me down. I’ve worked with so many companies in Thailand, and it’s rare to have a company that is so irrational and so vindictive. It’s enough to wear anyone down.”
snip
“No one dares to say anything about anyone doing anything wrong in Thailand. They just say it’s ‘a factory’, or ‘a company’ in Thailand,” he said.
http://in.reuters.com/article/thailand-rights-activist-idINKBN1310XA?rpc=401
A response to the Thai government
michael (sounds like he is chasing me across NM?) likes to divert attention from the core argument and has some pleasure in twisting my logic without reading clearly the underlying argument. you should not take small bites out of D&G without comprehending the whole terrain of their thinking. I have spent many years working with all their individual and collective works in English. your comment on D&G in this context is misleading. I am happy to povide an explanation if you wish to write to me at the university.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
Michael, no, but in fact many Western academics were linked with Thai academics who actually were (yellow), as became evident in 2008; and also a heavy reliance on English language Thai media & information sources, which we now know were in the pay of the amaat. I was teaching in the Faculty of Pol Science, Chulalongkorn U. at the time and know what was going on, and indeed why, in the case of the broad front to bring Thaksin down. I think Michael you need to read wider, and also consider changing your informants in Thailand…you sound like the fable of the blind man who is asked to describe the elephant, (readers know the story).
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
Yes Jim.
And what about all the research that was done and published BEFORE the 06 coup?
Perhaps you could find a pomo theorist who supports the notion of proleptic propagandizing to prove that, say, Baker and Phasuk and McCargo and Ukrist were actually influenced by the royalist-military propaganda that came years after their once-influential books were published.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
Chris there might be lots of guns in Isaan but most of them are not in the hands of your nascent Lao nationalists or at least not to the best of my knowledge. In relation to Buddhist fundamentalism are you sure Isaan people are quite as fundamentalist as you suggest? I think you have to more clearly define what is Buddhist fundamentalism. And are you sure there is a IsaanExit on the cards up there is Isaan? Thailand, even with the Generals in charge, is still an easier society to live in than the Lao PDR. Although I suppose after quite a bit of “lao-lao” all of this might be blurred.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
This debate is getting like Syria, Russia, Trump debates – accusations, truths and half-truths. Who has the truth on Thaksin? I am not sure. Recently there was debate on extrajudicial killing – 2,500 was suggested to be too higher a number (mainstream sources?). Well under a 1,000, and many more or less justified, was the ‘academic’ or official researched argument. But to associate Thaksin with ‘separation of powers with checks and balances and independent institutions’, if that was the intent, seems to be a bit far fetched.
A response to the Thai government
Since Taylor seems to uphold the value of reasoned discourse in taking and defending positions, I would ask him to provide some sort of support for his contention that what Deleuze means by micro-fascism is “no choice but to comply with an imposed normalisation because the alternative carries risks”.
Micro-fascism is about desire, the desire of individuals, and not about state imposed norms. It is about blocked lines of flight, failed attempts to escape from the rigidities of capitalism that turn into the demand that others follow “rules” that these frustrated desires create. Micro-fascisms are diverse; fascism is monolithic.
Taylor can’t deal with these elements of Deleuzian analysis because his whole defense of Thaksin and fantasy about what Thaksin’s electoral authoritarianism represents appears to be little more than a perfect example of a blocked line of flight.
And we know where they lead.
I’ve quoted this before in response to Dr Taylor and it remains relevant to his refusal to defend his misuse of Deleuzian terminology:
“It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” D&G
A response to the Thai government
I can think of no legitimate reason why SEK WANNAMETHEE should not have responded to Mr Taylor’s article. There are two sides to every story after all, and I think we are all better off for having heard both of them.
A response to the Thai government
Good on you Prof. You say what I wanted to but unable to.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
I don’t think Thaksin was a threat to “democracy” at all. It was and remains his only route to power, taking his money and connections for granted.
Liberal democracy is something altogether different from “democracy”, no matter how much American propaganda would like to obscure the fact, and no matter how much people who prefer “discourse” to reality regarding Thailand’s politics cling to the dream of one automatically meaning the other.
All you need to do Chris is read books and articles written about Thaksin and his administrations BEFORE it became “politically correct” to refashion him into the very model of Thai liberal democracy.
Or you could check that mythical dictionary where instead of a definition of “electoral authoritarianism” there is just a picture of Thaksin and a pile of dead drug dealers posed much like a hunter and the deer he killed.
The 97 constitution eliminated some 90 to 95% of the Thai electorate from eligibility to run for parliament and included the usual phrase encouraging state actors to continually educate the people as to the meaning of “democracy”. It was more liberal and paternalistic than “liberal democratic”.
The problem for people coming to Thai politics for the first time in the post-06 coup period is the predominance of voices whose absolute insistence that any elected PM is better than any junta, even if that PM set up death squads and shut down media left and right.
It’s a form of ideologically induced blindness and indifference to the lives lost, probably because they were just poor people anyway.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
I think the 1997 constitution was a bit step towards a liberal democracy. It couldn’t have happened without liberal forces.
I’m not an expert on Thaksin, and especially not why he became a threat to democracy. I would appreciate if you could help to understand it better.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
I did not compare Abhisit and Trump. I compared the Republican party with the Democrat party in Thailand. Abhisit would be a moderate republican, and Suthep is maybe similar to someone like Gingrich. Trump is in a league of his own.
Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
A misdirected and mischievous comparison. Post 2006 coup attempts were made by the (corrupt) elite-military regime to discredit Thaksin and find fault on corruption charges. They invested a significant amount of money and politically biased legal investigators over many months and were unable to find serious fault according to the law. That was disappointing and would have been neat, but it did not stop the intent of the royalist-military propaganda machinery to justify the (unjustifiable) coup…More (balanced) research is needed by the author before making sweeping generalisations.
Confronting ‘Chinese privilege’ in Singapore
A core tenet of Singapore’s state propaganda is that the state operates as a meritocracy. This article shows that, beyond personal anecdotes, there is a wealth of solid documentation that proves that claim false. This comment seems to be claiming that the article might have benefited from adding speculation on possible reasons why the state chooses to operate as an ethnocracy, while claiming to be a meritocracy. That seems quite far off-topic. Before investigating the cause of phenomena, there first must be agreement on the existence of the phenomena. Unlike the case of Malaysia, there is no general acknowledgement that Singapore has a state-privileged ethnic group. So it’s premature to start speculating on causes until that acknowledgement is established.
Unpopular facts about one of Buddhist philosophy’s most popular doctrines
Would be interesting what other interpretations have been given by others from within the traditions. One should’nt belittle new interpretations , one can look at the same equations in many ways and might see it in entirely new perspective.That is part of Human creation of knowledge, part of what makes knowledge a discovery and an invention. It makes better sense to note where that new perspective has come from instead. I am interested in knowing whether this has been the only interpretation or were there any other interpretations as well. And to take it forward how exactly does karma tally with our day to day interaction, our day to day behavior. In short, what was the understanding of human psyche and causality and how has it changed with time . In this case I would be grateful to the author if he can say whether there have been different interpretations from with the tradition before say 17th century AD and whether he can guide to material reagarding say buddhist understanding of psyche and causality (especially buddhist atomism) ? Thank you