Thailand

We went to Singapore afterwards and the contrast was that the people looked the same but eyed you suspiciously (at a Pizza hut, they tried to make us pay in advance.. like we were going to run off. That's my mild 'racism' experience)..

Heck, a good question, and its called Thailand and it's by c-man. Go figure.

Continuation of a few of my travel photos here:

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand1.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand2.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand3.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand4.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand5.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand6.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand7.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand8.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand9.jpg

Ants!

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Thailand11.jpg

!

oh sea sweetness <3

Happy mems!

isn't that cambodia in some of those shots?

That temple looks like Angkor Watt, but seems to be quite a bit smaller.

well theres like a million dif temples @ ankor but also the khmer empire extended into thailand so..

(If you count those roadside ones, a million is about right!)

Doesn't Ayutthaya have some Khmer-style buildings? I regrettable didn't make it that far north when I was in Thailand.

cambodia

http://i30.tinypic.com/32ztmc5.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/snjsyg.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/ege747.jpg

http://i28.tinypic.com/fvz6tj.jpg
http://i29.tinypic.com/21n0i2t.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/1zvegox.jpg

i might aswell pile em on too:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1298/1120591922_bc168e155f.jpg?v=0

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1439/1110120644_af21e674e2.jpg?v=0

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/195/476462891_a48b0f4aa8.jpg?v=0

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/198/476449768_bc8cee9681.jpg?v=0

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/224/445789357_d7f5ab477e.jpg?v=0

http://flickr.com/photos/dysign/428891849/in/set-72157594353232638/

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/180/428891849_9a1238ff62.jpg?v=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_i3YkI0CWA

what's interesting to me is how fake the blood looks, obviously ironic because in all our lives, all we've ever really had contact with is fake blood as seen in movies etc.; feel like I need to make some reference to baudrillard or sumthin

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/1029/t0522901465.jpgSource.Sad, this was before the killings started...

if I don't make it back by tuesday I want ILX to have all my belongings

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/17/2901928.htm?section=world

shit is grave :(

sorry if there's discussion elsewhere

I was in Phuket about a month ago - things seemed peaceful & quiet there and my friend who hosted me told me that the insurrection was mainly limited to Bangkok. no idea if it's spread outside the capital yet as of the present moment.

My SO's parents were set to go for a 10-day vacation and they just cancelled it.

http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/thai_05_19/t17_23466815.jpg

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/crackdown_in_bangkok.html

A friend of mine who is visiting family in northern Thailand, away from this unrest, just posted about this on Facebook:

Dear Friends, thank you for your concern. My family and I are all safe in Northern Thailand, but I hope to shed some light on the situation here. The western media is not reporting the story accurately.

The Red Shirt protesters in Bangkok are supporters of Thaksin, the very corrupt Prime Minister who was ousted in 2006. Thaksin and his pals embezzled and stole billions of dollars from Thailand. Since he was removed from power, Thaksin has been hiding out in Dubai, Montenegro, Cambodia, rather than return to Thailand to face charges of corruption and a prison sentence. He has continued to fund his party: his brother-in-law served as Prime Minister in the interim and there have been a several turn-overs of government since 2006.

The current Prime Minister, Abhisit, has been trying to unify and stabilize Thailand, while there are still pockets of support for Thaksin (among them high-ranking police officers who received great financial "bonuses" from Thaksin).

Thaksin came to power by extending "loans" to the rural farmers in exchange for their votes. These are poor people from the countryside who were not aware of his swindling. All Thai people revere the King, the longest reigning monarch, over sixty-years on the throne, who has done great things for his people.

Thaksin and his cronies (who include George W., no joke) are funding the protesters, many of them Cambodians and Burmese who have crossed the border seeking citizenship and money. The Red Shirt leaders hold all the ID's of their protesters so that they can be tracked and can't leave the "service" . Also, if any Cambodians/Burmese among them are arrested, their nationality will not be found out.

The Red Shirts are calling for the dissolution of Parliament and a reversion to Thaksin's constitution so that he can return to power and end the monarchy. Even those who voted in Thaksin still love the King, so many of the protesters do not know what they are fighting for...besides money.

They are destroying government buildings and private property, banks, televisions stations, shopping centers in an effort to destabilize the situation.

Abhisit has been trying to end the protests peacefully and until recently soldiers have not been using live ammunition. The Red Shirts have been attacking reporters and killing civilians. Soldiers are not engaging unless fired upon. Many soldiers have been killed by the Red Shirts who are attacking them with live fire. The government has resisted using deadly force, but it may become necessary to prevent further escalation.

CNN is bullshit. Don't believe what you read in the media.

Pray for Thailand.

Abhisit has been trying to end the protests peacefully and until recently soldiers have not been using live ammunition. The Red Shirts have been attacking reporters and killing civilians. Soldiers are not engaging unless fired upon. Many soldiers have been killed by the Red Shirts who are attacking them with live fire. The government has resisted using deadly force, but it may become necessary to prevent further escalation.

find this hard to believe

apptly there is a hardcore sub-element to the redshirts that answer to this one disgraced general??

like, I don't have any trouble believing that there's corrupt/questionable politics on either side of the conflict, but this idea that the police are non-violent upstanding nice guys... that just runs contrary to how confrontations between armed soldiers/police and armed protesters usually play out, regardless of the country or politics involved

this is largely colored by your belief that everyone who becomes a policeman is a vindictive asshole

sure

well it's more like the job turns people into vindictive power-tripping assholes - whether they were before is kinda immaterial

but really, you found that last paragraph perfectly reasonable?

i know approx 0 about thai politics so i dunno what the unrest means or what it hinges on. none of the news reports seem to mention any kind of ideological bent to anyone at all? even though they're calling themselves "red shirts"? i mean, is it that obvious?

the old PM thaksin is bankrolling the uprising apparently, according to BBC/NPR last night

well the affiliation with the color red does not denote anything remotely socialist, as far as I can tell.

I don't much, but it seems mostly class based.

I'm only reading CNN and Yahoo but Dan's buddy's summation seems to jibe with it in general - it's primarily a sectarian political conflict between a deposed strongman who bought off the rural poor and a duly elected government that is no longer all that popular. Ideology doesn't seem to have much to do with it.

mostly sad but kind of lol that we revived a c-man thread for this

brief history from gwynne dyer, more sympathetic to Thaksin:

It’s quite possible that there will be a massacre in Bangkok this week, and that the military will end up back in control permanently, riding a tiger from which they cannot dismount. Then the whole country would start down the road that leads to Burmese-style tyranny, isolation and poverty.

Thailand wouldn’t get there right away, of course. It took forty years of repression to transform Burma from the richest country in South-East Asia to the poorest, and Thai generals are not ill-educated thugs like their Burmese counterparts. But they would find themselves in essentially the same position: condemned to hold the whole country hostage at the point of a gun forever, lest they be punished by some later government for mass murder.

The protesters in central Bangkok are already being picked off by army snipers: five or ten a day killed and dozens per day wounded. (The army insists it shoots only “terrorists” hiding among the protesters, but there is ample footage that shows unarmed people being shot down.) The death toll now is in the sixties, and almost all the dead are civilians.

The roots of this crisis are in the military coup of 2006, when the Thai army overthrew the elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin, an ex-policeman who became a telecommunications billionaire, was not an ideal prime minister: his “war on drugs” involved thousands of illegal killings of dealers and addicts, and his response to unrest in the Muslim-majority far south was clumsy and brutal. But he endeared himself to Thailand’s poor.

Thailand has been a democracy since 1992, but Thaksin was the first politician to appeal directly to the interests of the rural poor rather than just bribing their local village headmen to deliver their votes. He promised them debt relief, cheap loans, better health care, and he delivered – but that was not how the urban elite wanted their tax money spent.

A “yellowshirt” movement seized control of the streets of Bangkok, seeking Thaksin’s removal and demanding strict curbs on the voting rights of peasants because most rural people were too ignorant to make wise choices. After months of confrontation in the streets, the army took control in 2006, ejecting Thaksin from office – but it was not unequivocally on the side of the “yellowshirts” either.

The soldiers allowed a new election in late 2007 – and Thaksin’s supporters won again, of course. His opponents used the courts to dismiss two prime ministers drawn from the pro-Thaksin party for “conflict of interest” (in one case because the prime minister appeared on a television cooking show), and ultimately simply had the whole party banned and its members ejected from parliament.

The rump of the parliament, cleansed of most representatives of the rural poor, then voted in the current prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva. The “redshirts” are demanding his resignation and a fresh election, and their demands may yet be met. Abhisit almost gave in last week, mainly because the urban elite are not certain that the army will act on their behalf.

Thai army officers are not usually from the privileged Bangkok elite that sponsored the “yellowshirts”. Many are from humble backgrounds, and most of their troops are country people, just like the “redshirts” behind the barricades. So Thai generals are doubly reluctant to give the order to clear the city centre: they do not want a massacre that would trap them in power forever, and they cannot be sure that their troops would obey the order anyway.

There is still some hope, therefore, but the situation is very grave. People are being killed every day, and there are predictions of civil war if the protesters in Bangkok are massacred. Nobody knows for sure which way the army will jump, but if it “restores order” in the way that the elite wants, then a long, dark night will fall on Thailand.

xp to shakey: no? city vs country is plenty ideological. i mean, that's like saying that american elections aren't ideological because it's one pack of rich lawyers vs another [winky face]

here's another roundup

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Whats-Driving-the-Violence-in-Thailand-3596

i have to say that Dan's friend's version of events doesn't fit with what I've been hearing? Admittedly this is mostly from a v strident leftist i follow on twitter who has been rage-blackouting and linking to things like this for a few days now, but the stuff i've read in newspapers has suggested that at least some of it is about wanting an election.

city vs country is plenty ideological.

yeah I can get with that. I was thinking more in terms of conventional western ideological left/right, socialist/capitalist sorta divides

also worth reading is the guardian liveblog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/may/19/thailand-crackdown-redshirts

I have to say that Dan's friend's version of events also sounds slightly racist/xenophobic with all that "furriners are messin up mah country" stuff

dan's friend sounds like a fucking asshole

sorry i thought i'd just join in.

discussion of thaksin and red shirts from local expats: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Thai-Court-Approves-Arrest-Warrant-t367072.html

and here: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Bangkok-Gripped-Looting-Arson-t367021.html&st=175

not a lot of love

they want to kill the monarch? sweet

google ad on that first thaivisa link:

Ads by Google
Retiring In Thailand
Why Not Move To Penang Instead? 10-year Retirement Visawww.PenangMyHome.com

this is why ilx should have google ads

a v strident leftist i follow on twitter

Perrin: It's clear that Thai protesters despise the American model of citizenship -- sit on your ass and "hope" something happens.

Shinawtra didn't really do the country a whole lotta favors when he was PM iirc

My friend is a child of French and American parents whose father moved to Thailand after the divorce; she is not actually Thai although she has lived there off and on over the past 12 years.

Shinawtra didn't really do the country a whole lotta favors when he was PM iirc

there's a rat pack joke in here somewhere

btw Shakey, sorry that someone else's experiences of actually living in and interacting with people in a country doesn't jibe with your preconceived notions

apology accepted lol

Shinawtra didn't really do the country a whole lotta favors when he was PM iirc

yet people keep voting for him. In an actually democratic country that would make him Prime Minister.

you can have my ten cent's woth after 11 years. It was a blast, learnt the language, got a lot of badly paid work. but suddenly I am in my mid 30s, drunk and wondering where I went wrong. (of course I know, all expats do).
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=740
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=3086
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=1946
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=2651
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=13942
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=1424
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=4880
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=7216
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=7219
http://completelyinthedark.com/main.php?g2_itemId=7396
These were all taken before I could be bothered with photo shop et al.. Just the ones I had at hand, I have better pics I swear.
It is a good place and the people are lovely, just do not stay here longer than planned.

thanks for posting these

Well it seems to have been a landslide victory. Worrying in many ways, but let's see what happens.

climate change, flooding in Bangkok with 20% of the city under water...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/thai-pm-hopes-for-faster-drainage-of-floodwater-through-bangkok-now-worst-tides-have-passed/2011/10/31/gIQA1qVAYM_story.html

My comment upthread about not fancying Thailand as a holiday destination - I am such a dick!

my theory now is that Thailand would be great place to visit if you want somewhere functional with cheap food and interesting stuff to see.

And if you like soggy things

oooh yeah.

My fighting office. Work 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours a day. A rifle is for snakes and rats. Luger 11/22 use for a day time. Night time, I use a Shotgun for crocodiles. Remington 870 tactical with a good surefire flashlight. So far, there is no crocodile to shoot at yet but many snakes and rats.

The King of Thailand is an asshole.

Thai Court Gives 10-Year Sentence for Insult to King

A Thai court on Wednesday sentenced a labor activist and former magazine editor to 10 years in prison for insulting Thailand’s king, the latest in a string of convictions under the country’s strict lese majeste law.

The case of Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, 51, was different from previous lese majeste cases because Mr. Somyot directly challenged the law itself, saying it violated the right to free expression.

Thailand’s constitutional court swept aside that challenge last month and laid out the justification for the law, saying the king deserves “special protection” under the law because he is the “center of the nation.”

I first learned about how the Thai King was an asshole in 2008, when I took a short trip over to Bangkok and the surrounding rural areas for a class. There were pictures of the king everywhere, in every restaurant, ever public place. Everywhere we went we were advised to not make any jokes or references about the King. "Thai people love their King very much". During his 2005 birthday speech, Bhumibol invited criticism: "Actually, I must also be criticised. I am not afraid if the criticism concerns what I do wrong, because then I know. Because if you say the king cannot be criticised, it means that the king is not human", he claimed. "If the king can do no wrong, it is akin to looking down upon him because the king is not being treated as a human being. But the king can do wrong." A widespread barrage of criticisms resulted, followed by a sharp rise in lèse majesté prosecutions. Lèse majesté cases rose from five or six a year pre-2005 to 478 in 2010. (Narcapedia)

one of my first gifs was an attempt to incite a rebellion in Thailand:

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/rebelyouth.gif

that effort has failed...so far

i would like to live in bangkok, i think.

can someone (lagoon?) who's been there tell me abt it? what do young people do for fun? how are westerners thought of? how "safe" is it?

what's your attraction to it?

have a friend who lived there for a couple years and loved it, also have been listening to a bit of thai music (classical and modern), reading some texts on theravada buddhism by phra payudh, and also just reading a bit about the culture and history. it just seems like a really vibrant city but not as westernized as other east asian metropolises, but this is just the impression i get from reading.

also the language is beautiful and i'd like to study it eventually

my best friend moved there in 2006 (and lived there from 1998-2000, as well). when i lived in china, it was a relatively inexpensive direct flight to bangkok to visit him.

life in bangkok is too varied and complex and i don't know it well enough to say anything perceptive about it but i am going to make some sweeping generalizations anyways: i feel like modernity and the west as imagined in bangkok is less special and indigenized than in other asian metropolises; the character of asian cities as a western visitor experiences them has a lot to do with the people that came before them, and thailand had a different history of interaction with western visitors than taipei or shanghai or kuala lumpur. in other asian cities, the forces of westernization or modernity have been absorbed and expressed in ways that confront a foreign visitor as exotic or strange but i don't think that's the case in bangkok. i want to say that its "westernization" feels really familiar. my point here is that there are a lot of irish bars.

but it is vibrant! one way that it beats most other asian metropolises is the 24 hour always a new place to check out vibe. japanese influence is positive: good izakaya, hipstery cafes. and recentish influx of an under-55/non backpacker semipermanent expatriate population. hot as fuck. decent weed. traffic jams.

the japanese influence is interesting, i didn't know about that.

useful and interesting post as usual, thanks

i believe the japanese are still #1 in expatriate population in bangkok, unless the chinese have quietly taken over.

my three days in Bangkok as a jetlagged tourist were really, realy fun but I have zero answers to any of cloud's questions

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/thai-military-declares-a-coup-detains-key-political-leaders/2014/05/22/5da6a6ca-e1a0-11e3-8dcc-d6b7fede081a_story.html?hpid=z1

Thailand is notorious for its political instability and periodic military takeovers. Since the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1932, there have been 12 successful coups and seven attempted ones. But Thailand now finds itself at a particularly dangerous moment, and some analysts warn that its intensifying divisions could lead to armed clashes or, in the worst case, civil war.

I had a bit of a lol-sigh when the military had said yesterday explicitly said it wasn't a coup, and changed their minds today. Whoops, it was a coup after all!

My uncle lives in Chiang Mai and is currently cautiously optimistic the military are genuinely attempting to restore some stability to the country.

stability

NY Times:

The move was the culmination of months of maneuvering by the Bangkok establishment to sideline a populist movement that has won every national election since 2001.

nytimes today:

So far, the junta seems to have drawn the wrong lessons from the 2006 coup, which failed because it was an ill-conceived attempt to change Thailand’s political landscape: The goal was beyond the capacity of the coup makers. Democracy can always be improved, but in a society with Thailand’s traditions of openness and popular participation, it cannot be reversed.

The 2006 coup did not fail because the generals were not tough enough. Acting aggressively is always a poor way to win people over, not least in Thailand; it will not work now.

How to proceed? Thailand needs a timetable for a return to political normalcy. These arbitrary detentions and the ghastly sequence of draconian junta pronouncements — which would be laughable if they were not so serious — must end. Discussions about political reform should not be monopolized by conservatives, and any major changes proposed should be ratified by a popular referendum.

is anyone doing an actual good job of reporting this

a couple of days ago they had:

BANGKOK — Thailand’s military junta said Monday that it would stay in power “indefinitely” and that its rule had been endorsed by King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the monarch for nearly seven decades who has semi-divine status in the country.

Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, who overthrew the elected government on Thursday, said during a news conference that the military would create a “genuine democracy” but gave no time frame for doing so. “It will depend on the situation,” he said, before hastily leaving a podium as he was questioned by reporters.

"genuine democracy" has a great potential to be doublethink in the region iirc; it's the sort of rhetoric the anti-populist side were using in 2006

the guardian was reporting the anti-yingluck protests as if they had absolutely no doubt they were a genuine organic protest movement originating in the thai people

like -- where is there reportage on this that actually addresses the idea that thailand might be in trouble here, that this might be a long term restriction on ppl's freedom, that there actually is some chance they might backslide from a "genuine democracy" as we understand it

their stock market has recovered, the north doesn't as of yet appear to be marching on bangkok

grauniad doing a slightly better job the past week i guess

sadly i don't know how you can possibly even get an "accurate" reporting of the situation on the ground for the past several years

It also seems like that because of the number of coups there over the years, that the mainstream western US media is like "whatever, they always have these, no need to write about it again"

andrew macgregor marshall
กลียุค — Thailand’s Era of Insanity
a brief summary of recent events
focusing on what the succession situation has to do with everything

haha 'brief'

thank you, though, that looks incredibly helpful in terms of background

good god it's a long article. reading it with fascination, though as with everything it's hard to trust anyone, and this article is certainly pro-Red

you know what, never mind that, i'm finally getting to the second half of this article

A couple I'm good friends with - who spent a year in Bangkok a decade ago and three months there in 2011 - ended up on a fullbright in Singapore and my wife and I went to visit them with side trips to Phuket and Bangkok. The latter going to be with these friends and their 2 and 5 year old kids.

While in Phuket the declaration of martial law came out, and we panic booked tickets back to Singapore the next day just in case. After a bunch of skyping we decided to to Bangkok as planned but only one friend would come, leaving the wife back in Singapore with the kids more for logistical reasons than safety ones. He figured this was probably almost safer than the past six months as the army basically told everyone to back down and chill out for a while.

The first full day we were there was when they declared the coup which was a trip and a half - a super busy part of town just shutting down at 10pm with only a couple hours warning. We (and a bunch of other people) stocked up on water, beer, and snack foods and just watched everything stop from our balcony. Ended up moving our flight up by one day so went spent the first coup day roaming around where nothing seemed out of the ordinary at all but were always vaguely prepared to get to the embassy and hoped the airport didn't get shut down.

I loved the place for the 48 hours I spent there and really want to go back. Our friend spoke enough Thai and knew it well enough that we saw way more than I'd be able to process on my own, but it's so much larger than I expected it to be.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/thailand/12072271/Thai-kings-favourite-dog-dies-days-after-man-arrested-for-insulting-her.html

kl/ms