I do. The line that middle-class Thais use for any argument are as follow: “Karma and sins are real”, “You don’t know what is high or low”, “Be careful what you say about our beloved king or you will go to hell”, “If you criticize our king and his family, you will get cancer in your mouth”, “People are poor because of their past life” blah blah blah. I think Vichai is “ดัดจริต” Perhaps you should read more on Facebook that belong to the Thai middle-class and you will understand why this country has not yet moved forward despite its rich natural resources.
They can organize, brand, and market a de-commoditized product. Cambodian rice farmers are already growing “the World’s Best Rice”: Cambodian Jasmine Rice. But the thing that makes it the best — its higher concentration of 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, its main aromatic component — evaporates long before it reaches the high-value consumer. By chilling the best Cambodian Jasmine Rice ASAP after harvest and milling, and keeping it chilled until it reaches the consumer’s home, Cambodia can establish a new, de-commoditized, gourmet rice product. It would be as different from “dried” rice as frozen peas are from dried…that is, a whole new product, with a much higher price and margin.
And individual farmers can help, by growing jasmine rice for quality instead of quantity.
Not sure why you would expect anyone to “gripe”: everything in the Thai system of manners reflects the belief in hierarchical relations between people in all spheres of life.
The passive acceptance of low status by those afflicted with low status and the smug assumption of superiority and the justice thereof of you and your friends, vichai, is all the “empirical evidence” anyone needs in a discussion like this.
Of course there are educated upper-middle class Thais who will talk a good game of not believing in “this sort of thing”, especially when there are farang around or when everyone is playing at being “siwilai”, but they are simply not letting one hand know what the other is thinking.
By the time PM Thaksin’s war on drugs closed its bloody chapter, after some 2,500 dead, not one big-time drug trafficker was arrested or extra-judicially disposed of. President Duterte too, I suspect, won’t be able to jail or extra-judicially exterminate any big fish drug trafficker . . . and President Duterte had already approached or exceeded Thaksin’s murderous extra-judicial killing spree.
If global HR & Democracy celebrity DASSK gets good media bumpf from having HR celeb Kofi head up a “commission”, maybe rather than bring in Donald “The Wall” Trump for her next HR & Democracy reality show she could get ex-POTUS Obama to come in and do his “run silent, run deep” deportation special for her.
Whereas Donald talks about a wall, Obama has deported 2.5 million vulnerable people from the USA.
And still, the “liberals” of the media and its academic niche division prefer to privilege the discourse over the reality of impoverished women and children being forced to return to the hell of their own countries.
I’m sure this is something that the majority of scholars would not accept.
Of course if they did and I had 10,000 kyat I could get myself a triple tall no-whip mocha at Starbucks when it opens in Yangon.
There many opportunities to expand progressive engagement and relationships at the grass roots level where the river is wide and the current swift…”All in all, I really believe this is the best form of a cultural relationship. Culture is not only about traditional dance, food, or series of performance events. Above all, culture is the way of thinking. It’s about knowledge and consciousness that shape thoughts and ideas from which we can create art works, literary works, books, films and anything we want…” http://www.indonesia-australia.com/2016/09/australia-indonesia-literary.html
Myanmar will expel the Bangladeshi Muslim migrants within ten years. West Pakistan had no problem massacring 3 million East Pakistani Bengalis, Bangladesh (later) had no problem expelling 500,000 Hindus, and Vietnam and Burma and Cambodia had no problem expelling 1 million ethnic Chinese. In the last two instances, there was no basis for expulsion except racism and intolerance, as these were CITIZENS of their respective nations. Stop constantly bringing up TRUMP. Trump is not Burmese, last time I checked and the USA with illegals (mostly Hispanic) is NOT the same as Myanmar. I would have expected more from you than a trite comparison. Bangladesh MUST STOP using Myanmar as a human dumping ground. The fact that Bamar people have a better sense of birth control than Bengali Muslims IS NOT DASSK’S PROBLEM ! Sheikh Hasina Wajed is a coward, a liar and a blowhard, as is Khaleda Zia. They are the SAME. I repeat the Bengali Muslim problem in Rakhine is Bangladesh’s fault; it is the fault of individual Bengali Muslims who think they can get any wages in Myanmar when they got none back home (not Myanmar’s fault) and start evaluating global issues on a REAL moral basis, not an ideological one. Bengali Muslims have no rights in Myanmar simply because they happen to be there; Hindus and tribals, being slaughtered in Bangladesh, have rights because they are indigenous, and tribals predate Bengali Muslims by 10,000 years at least. This issue here is Islamic depravation, immorality, double-standards, hegemony, fascism, genocide, and inability to get along with anyone who isn’t Muslim. This is true from Morocco to Indonesia. Do NOT tell me Myanmar can’t, or doesn’t have the right to, expel all the Bengali Muslims in the nation, as no ASKED Myanmar citizens if they wanted them there. If Sheikh Hasina cares so much about Islam and Bengali culture she should be demanding them back, rather than treating her own people like animals. Where is the Bangladesh Conference of Minorities that DASSK had the good sense to initiate (Myanmar indigenous minorities). In Chittagong, next door, they simply hack them to death. I have had enough of NM bogus angst, very selective and no such
ennui ever shown for any victims of Islamic aggression.
” . . . The conception that the poor have low merit slips easily into the middle class’s biggest gripe about democratic politics . . .”
What canard you write Jory. Do you have any empirical evidence to above Dr. Jory?
I am middle class, I live in Bangkok, and all my friends are middle-class and upper, yet I have not heard any gripe about “the poor having low merit” Dr. Jory.
‘Detaining people stateless and unemployed in camps’ You mean like Australia? Since we are ‘getting real’ let’s consider the fact that in a generation or two, or perhaps even earlier, Bangladesh is GONE. The Bay of Bengal will extend far to the North and Myanmar will be faced with an influx of refugees greater than its own population.
Myanmar can’t afford to charter jets to return migrants home as Germany is now contemplating, but they can afford landmines and barbed wire. I know this appears harsh but it is unfortunately necessary. Migration across the world is currently measured in the millions but in a few decades it will be in the hundreds of millions. In the face of global agricultural collapse, water wars and repetitive natural disasters I can’t see any aid coming from the West for Myanmar let alone investment in ‘women’s rights’. Instead, I expect walls will go up across the globe, as everyone struggles to survive.
. . . upholding the principle that “no person shall be deprived of life…without due process of law”.
Duterte is a lawyer and Thaksin was a Police Colonel with a PhD. So both men would have been fully versed with what “due process” means.
But both men disregarded basic human rights to due process for expediency in their lust to be God and to demonstrate their supreme power — so lots of small fish must die plus hundreds more in collateral damage to satisfy their lusts.
Get real about the Rohingya. Leaving aside the polemics and moral considerations the feasibility of a Myanmar government of expelling these “illegal immigrants” as some above have called the Rohingya (a blanket categorisation that, I like the majority of scholars, would not accept) is nil. Like for a future President Trump’s (God help us) plan for the 11 million undocumented migrants in the US, Bangladesh, like a wealthier country, Mexico, is not going to pay for a wall and certainly, as a very poor country itself, would be unwilling to accept a new wave of refugees.
So get real. These people are there to stay in Myanmar, although some may with the help of human traffickers and the complicity of the Burmese authorities, leave for Malaysia and elsewhere. The question therefore is what status will they be given. In 2010, 1 million were given voting rights (surely a sign of quasi citizenship) which were then withdrawn for the 2015 elections. So integration in the Myanmar nation has been contemplated even in the very recent past.
To be pragmatic, given the possibilities of significant foreign aid in resolving the Rohingya issue in part through the granting of citizenship, their presence may indeed become an economic plus in itself. This is not to mention – given the necessary investment in education, training and the promotion of women’s right – the contribution that this community could potentially bring to Myanmar as a whole in the future. On the contrary, detaining people stateless and unemployed in camps – as the example of the Palestinians demonstrates – is a recipe for future problems of even greater magnitude
Asian Americans and Thai Chinese were invited into their host countries. The Bangladeshis sneaked over the border into Myanmar in the full knowledge that they were committing a crime.
I can’t think of another example where a group of migrants have sneaked into someone’s territory and then claimed that it actually belonged to them. Whatever they choose to call themselves the fact remains that are illegal aliens, squatters and land grabbers.
As for ‘constructed identities’ whilst it is true that everything is ultimately a construct, for most people their ethnic identity is very real and very important.
This is another example of liberals acting as an unwitting agent for a rather sinister agenda. It may appear that ethnic identities need to be broken or made more flexible in order to reduce discrimination and conflict but in fact these ‘gordian knots’ protect us from systems of control. Who is more dangerous to a future fascist state, a proud Scotsman or Irishman descended from generations of rebels, or some rootless, amorphous world-citizen?
We have seen such consequences of “over-hyped” Islam in Malaysia, except there Muslims are 62 % and not 15 %. I gues I will have tget used to being called anti-Islam, despite my Malaysian wife, defense of Ahmadis, and innumerable Malay and Javanese friends. These are the same armchair radical Leftists who say: “Yezidi ? Who are the Yezidi” ? Well, since I haven’t seen any recent Unitarian or Taoist acts of genocide, I can’t be as falsely and stupidly complacent as the academic deadwood, almost Jesuit-like in their conviction that we can all do bad, and therefore, don’t pick on the ones that do bad, or have that potential, because your Quaker neighbour (or in your contect, Hokkien neighbor) may hack your head off. Nah, I don’t think so.
Wouldn’t worry about the verbal pounding – does not hurt at all. There is nothing wrong with refugees and you are right. Rohingyas are refugees from the Bangladash war and the split of India / Pakistan, then East Pakistan to Bangladash. Even in Pakistan, the bangladashi refugees are called Rohingas.
It would not be so much of a problem, except (I am in danger of being called a MUslim hater now) for the fact that these Islamic fanatical types insist that the host country allow them to impose fanatical 15th century form of customs and lifestyle. (check out Europes problem with Muslims insistance of masking their faces in public and public places – destroying effectiveness of all CCTV systems, face recognition etc.)
I have no symphaty for people like these. If you run away from an oppresive country to start a new lif, then start a new one. DON’T bring your own oppresive ways into the new location…
Looks like Prayut – rather than suffer a Prem-backed counter-coup – has offered a very important olive branch in the latest military promotions. A Prem / Chulanont favourite “Red Beret” General becomes Army Chief. Thailand may yet achieve relative peace and stability – even during a difficult and very sad, regretful Royal transition. Enough to bring the tourists back.
Facebook 
Twitter 
Soundcloud 
Youtube 
Rss
The real meaning of Thailand’s referendum
I do. The line that middle-class Thais use for any argument are as follow: “Karma and sins are real”, “You don’t know what is high or low”, “Be careful what you say about our beloved king or you will go to hell”, “If you criticize our king and his family, you will get cancer in your mouth”, “People are poor because of their past life” blah blah blah. I think Vichai is “ดัดจริต” Perhaps you should read more on Facebook that belong to the Thai middle-class and you will understand why this country has not yet moved forward despite its rich natural resources.
Four hundred years of free fall
They can organize, brand, and market a de-commoditized product. Cambodian rice farmers are already growing “the World’s Best Rice”: Cambodian Jasmine Rice. But the thing that makes it the best — its higher concentration of 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, its main aromatic component — evaporates long before it reaches the high-value consumer. By chilling the best Cambodian Jasmine Rice ASAP after harvest and milling, and keeping it chilled until it reaches the consumer’s home, Cambodia can establish a new, de-commoditized, gourmet rice product. It would be as different from “dried” rice as frozen peas are from dried…that is, a whole new product, with a much higher price and margin.
And individual farmers can help, by growing jasmine rice for quality instead of quantity.
The real meaning of Thailand’s referendum
Not sure why you would expect anyone to “gripe”: everything in the Thai system of manners reflects the belief in hierarchical relations between people in all spheres of life.
The passive acceptance of low status by those afflicted with low status and the smug assumption of superiority and the justice thereof of you and your friends, vichai, is all the “empirical evidence” anyone needs in a discussion like this.
Of course there are educated upper-middle class Thais who will talk a good game of not believing in “this sort of thing”, especially when there are farang around or when everyone is playing at being “siwilai”, but they are simply not letting one hand know what the other is thinking.
Too busy washing each other usually.
The real meaning of Thailand’s referendum
VichaiN – what a self-constructed cocoon you live in. Are you sure you still live on Planet Earth ? Or is it a Parrallel Universe ?
How human rights can win Duterte’s war
By the time PM Thaksin’s war on drugs closed its bloody chapter, after some 2,500 dead, not one big-time drug trafficker was arrested or extra-judicially disposed of. President Duterte too, I suspect, won’t be able to jail or extra-judicially exterminate any big fish drug trafficker . . . and President Duterte had already approached or exceeded Thaksin’s murderous extra-judicial killing spree.
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
Your comment is inane and makes no sense in our context of dimension of time and space, whether in Yangon, Starbucks or NM.
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
If global HR & Democracy celebrity DASSK gets good media bumpf from having HR celeb Kofi head up a “commission”, maybe rather than bring in Donald “The Wall” Trump for her next HR & Democracy reality show she could get ex-POTUS Obama to come in and do his “run silent, run deep” deportation special for her.
Whereas Donald talks about a wall, Obama has deported 2.5 million vulnerable people from the USA.
And still, the “liberals” of the media and its academic niche division prefer to privilege the discourse over the reality of impoverished women and children being forced to return to the hell of their own countries.
I’m sure this is something that the majority of scholars would not accept.
Of course if they did and I had 10,000 kyat I could get myself a triple tall no-whip mocha at Starbucks when it opens in Yangon.
The real meaning of Thailand’s referendum
Khun Vichai, all of your friends are middle-class and upper ?
Digital can breach the divide
There many opportunities to expand progressive engagement and relationships at the grass roots level where the river is wide and the current swift…”All in all, I really believe this is the best form of a cultural relationship. Culture is not only about traditional dance, food, or series of performance events. Above all, culture is the way of thinking. It’s about knowledge and consciousness that shape thoughts and ideas from which we can create art works, literary works, books, films and anything we want…” http://www.indonesia-australia.com/2016/09/australia-indonesia-literary.html
The real meaning of Thailand’s referendum
http://simonroughneen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DSC_0005.jpg
The PAD view themselves as better-educated than their red shirt rivals, who they mock as ‘buffalo’ – or uneducateD people from the rural northeast.
http://www.simonroughneen.com/asia/seasia/thailand/thailands-mexican-stand-off-the-irrawaddy/
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
David,
Myanmar will expel the Bangladeshi Muslim migrants within ten years. West Pakistan had no problem massacring 3 million East Pakistani Bengalis, Bangladesh (later) had no problem expelling 500,000 Hindus, and Vietnam and Burma and Cambodia had no problem expelling 1 million ethnic Chinese. In the last two instances, there was no basis for expulsion except racism and intolerance, as these were CITIZENS of their respective nations. Stop constantly bringing up TRUMP. Trump is not Burmese, last time I checked and the USA with illegals (mostly Hispanic) is NOT the same as Myanmar. I would have expected more from you than a trite comparison. Bangladesh MUST STOP using Myanmar as a human dumping ground. The fact that Bamar people have a better sense of birth control than Bengali Muslims IS NOT DASSK’S PROBLEM ! Sheikh Hasina Wajed is a coward, a liar and a blowhard, as is Khaleda Zia. They are the SAME. I repeat the Bengali Muslim problem in Rakhine is Bangladesh’s fault; it is the fault of individual Bengali Muslims who think they can get any wages in Myanmar when they got none back home (not Myanmar’s fault) and start evaluating global issues on a REAL moral basis, not an ideological one. Bengali Muslims have no rights in Myanmar simply because they happen to be there; Hindus and tribals, being slaughtered in Bangladesh, have rights because they are indigenous, and tribals predate Bengali Muslims by 10,000 years at least. This issue here is Islamic depravation, immorality, double-standards, hegemony, fascism, genocide, and inability to get along with anyone who isn’t Muslim. This is true from Morocco to Indonesia. Do NOT tell me Myanmar can’t, or doesn’t have the right to, expel all the Bengali Muslims in the nation, as no ASKED Myanmar citizens if they wanted them there. If Sheikh Hasina cares so much about Islam and Bengali culture she should be demanding them back, rather than treating her own people like animals. Where is the Bangladesh Conference of Minorities that DASSK had the good sense to initiate (Myanmar indigenous minorities). In Chittagong, next door, they simply hack them to death. I have had enough of NM bogus angst, very selective and no such
ennui ever shown for any victims of Islamic aggression.
The real meaning of Thailand’s referendum
” . . . The conception that the poor have low merit slips easily into the middle class’s biggest gripe about democratic politics . . .”
What canard you write Jory. Do you have any empirical evidence to above Dr. Jory?
I am middle class, I live in Bangkok, and all my friends are middle-class and upper, yet I have not heard any gripe about “the poor having low merit” Dr. Jory.
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
‘Detaining people stateless and unemployed in camps’ You mean like Australia? Since we are ‘getting real’ let’s consider the fact that in a generation or two, or perhaps even earlier, Bangladesh is GONE. The Bay of Bengal will extend far to the North and Myanmar will be faced with an influx of refugees greater than its own population.
Myanmar can’t afford to charter jets to return migrants home as Germany is now contemplating, but they can afford landmines and barbed wire. I know this appears harsh but it is unfortunately necessary. Migration across the world is currently measured in the millions but in a few decades it will be in the hundreds of millions. In the face of global agricultural collapse, water wars and repetitive natural disasters I can’t see any aid coming from the West for Myanmar let alone investment in ‘women’s rights’. Instead, I expect walls will go up across the globe, as everyone struggles to survive.
How human rights can win Duterte’s war
. . . upholding the principle that “no person shall be deprived of life…without due process of law”.
Duterte is a lawyer and Thaksin was a Police Colonel with a PhD. So both men would have been fully versed with what “due process” means.
But both men disregarded basic human rights to due process for expediency in their lust to be God and to demonstrate their supreme power — so lots of small fish must die plus hundreds more in collateral damage to satisfy their lusts.
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
Get real about the Rohingya. Leaving aside the polemics and moral considerations the feasibility of a Myanmar government of expelling these “illegal immigrants” as some above have called the Rohingya (a blanket categorisation that, I like the majority of scholars, would not accept) is nil. Like for a future President Trump’s (God help us) plan for the 11 million undocumented migrants in the US, Bangladesh, like a wealthier country, Mexico, is not going to pay for a wall and certainly, as a very poor country itself, would be unwilling to accept a new wave of refugees.
So get real. These people are there to stay in Myanmar, although some may with the help of human traffickers and the complicity of the Burmese authorities, leave for Malaysia and elsewhere. The question therefore is what status will they be given. In 2010, 1 million were given voting rights (surely a sign of quasi citizenship) which were then withdrawn for the 2015 elections. So integration in the Myanmar nation has been contemplated even in the very recent past.
To be pragmatic, given the possibilities of significant foreign aid in resolving the Rohingya issue in part through the granting of citizenship, their presence may indeed become an economic plus in itself. This is not to mention – given the necessary investment in education, training and the promotion of women’s right – the contribution that this community could potentially bring to Myanmar as a whole in the future. On the contrary, detaining people stateless and unemployed in camps – as the example of the Palestinians demonstrates – is a recipe for future problems of even greater magnitude
Journeys without maps in Myanmar
what a cool, interesting reflection!
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
Asian Americans and Thai Chinese were invited into their host countries. The Bangladeshis sneaked over the border into Myanmar in the full knowledge that they were committing a crime.
I can’t think of another example where a group of migrants have sneaked into someone’s territory and then claimed that it actually belonged to them. Whatever they choose to call themselves the fact remains that are illegal aliens, squatters and land grabbers.
As for ‘constructed identities’ whilst it is true that everything is ultimately a construct, for most people their ethnic identity is very real and very important.
This is another example of liberals acting as an unwitting agent for a rather sinister agenda. It may appear that ethnic identities need to be broken or made more flexible in order to reduce discrimination and conflict but in fact these ‘gordian knots’ protect us from systems of control. Who is more dangerous to a future fascist state, a proud Scotsman or Irishman descended from generations of rebels, or some rootless, amorphous world-citizen?
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
Correct Neptunian,
We have seen such consequences of “over-hyped” Islam in Malaysia, except there Muslims are 62 % and not 15 %. I gues I will have tget used to being called anti-Islam, despite my Malaysian wife, defense of Ahmadis, and innumerable Malay and Javanese friends. These are the same armchair radical Leftists who say: “Yezidi ? Who are the Yezidi” ? Well, since I haven’t seen any recent Unitarian or Taoist acts of genocide, I can’t be as falsely and stupidly complacent as the academic deadwood, almost Jesuit-like in their conviction that we can all do bad, and therefore, don’t pick on the ones that do bad, or have that potential, because your Quaker neighbour (or in your contect, Hokkien neighbor) may hack your head off. Nah, I don’t think so.
Myanmar’s Rohingya need tomorrow’s fairer world today
Wouldn’t worry about the verbal pounding – does not hurt at all. There is nothing wrong with refugees and you are right. Rohingyas are refugees from the Bangladash war and the split of India / Pakistan, then East Pakistan to Bangladash. Even in Pakistan, the bangladashi refugees are called Rohingas.
It would not be so much of a problem, except (I am in danger of being called a MUslim hater now) for the fact that these Islamic fanatical types insist that the host country allow them to impose fanatical 15th century form of customs and lifestyle. (check out Europes problem with Muslims insistance of masking their faces in public and public places – destroying effectiveness of all CCTV systems, face recognition etc.)
I have no symphaty for people like these. If you run away from an oppresive country to start a new lif, then start a new one. DON’T bring your own oppresive ways into the new location…
Will bombs burst Thailand’s tourism bubble?
Looks like Prayut – rather than suffer a Prem-backed counter-coup – has offered a very important olive branch in the latest military promotions. A Prem / Chulanont favourite “Red Beret” General becomes Army Chief. Thailand may yet achieve relative peace and stability – even during a difficult and very sad, regretful Royal transition. Enough to bring the tourists back.