Comments

Ashley,
You mentioned eating dog meat as a way of regaining your strength.
Was there other traditional/local medicines you used?

It seems to boil down to whether people are mature. As a Thai, I consider most of my fellow-countrymen as being a long way from being mature. By being mature I refer to such qualities as justice, honesty, integrity, and compassion. In spite of Buddhism being predominant in Thailand, Thais merely pay lip service to the Buddhist Dhamma and act counter to Buddhist principles. Unless the national policy is to train people toward the goal of maturity, the present trend will continue on and on.

Great story! I’m glad you came to the realization you didn’ t have to kill yourself. As KV notes, this just shows how devastating malaria is for populations around the world.

I was rolling up my sleeves and getting ready to take a swing at some idle foreigners who know nothing about Singapore but who are so ready to portray it as some kind of Orwellian monster state that sucks the life-blood of her hapless people. Then Sean spoke and it seemed redundant for me to say anything else! But because I’m something of a windbag and because I’m still full of indignant energy that needs to be released, I will speak “a little”.

Some of you people from so-called Western democracies are so bloody arrogant and full of yourselves. You think only *your* version of human rights is the right one. Let me tell you … human rights means more than the right to free speech. Human rights also means the right to security, the right to freedom from gang and political violence, the right to having a roof over one’s head, the right to eat at least two good meals a day, the right to education etc. Sometimes a country’s situation is such that you need a government with an iron will and autocratic control to get the country into shape so that her people can have a shot at achieving all of those above-mentioned rights. If autocracy was what was needed to get young fledgling tumultuous Singapore into shape, then that’s the mantle that any responsible government should assume, for the sake of the people. Lee Kuan Yew and his cadre recognized this and did what was needed. In so doing he exchanged certain less pressing rights for others that were more urgently needed at the time. I for one think he did the right thing. If he treated one individual more harshly, it was to give a thousand others a greater chance at success. True leaders don’t consider the fate of one man to be more important than the fate of a thousand others under his leadership. If someone needs to fall on the concertina wire and be sacrificed so that others may breach the barrier, so be it. A leader that balks and gets squeamish at violating the rights of an individual ultimately pisses away the success of the entire group. Whould that have been better?

Today my parents are retired and living in comfort. I went on a full government scholarship to study in the United States. All of this was possible because the “autocracy” that Lee started built a stable foundation for Singaporeans, regardless of whether the same beneficiaries recognize it or not. True it is that in this day and age the government could stand to loosen up a bit and be less uptight about things, but honestly, in the big scheme of things, life is good for the average Singaporean. But all you Westerners can say and do in your prissy prattling ignorance is to gripe and condemn and refuse to give credit where credit is due. In truth, the Singapore government has managed Singapore better than most Western governments have managed their own countries. Many Western countries mollycoddle their citizens, doling out taxpayers money to indolent and undeserving people, robbing them of the incentive to be industrious and to take personal responsibility for their own lives, robbing from people who are hardworking and using their hard-earned tax-contributions to support losers. So this is what YOUR human rights have achieved? To make wimps and lamers of your people? Give me a stiff spine and an autocratic whip-wielding government any day!

Frankly, ANU and Australia can keep that honorary doctorate. Lee’s and Singapore’s achievements should not be sullied by so much worthless trash.

Actual history is the fragile thread of modernity, the need to appeal to universals, however hard we try to get past them, that ties us all together. The only worthwhile thing about postmodern approaches to history is their critique of, and yet continued implicit appeal to, modernist notions of history writing. We have to believe that there is something outside of the text for the text to have any meaning. That is what actual means. History has to be actualised or it isnt history.

“Second, as the hybrid ‘Pali-Sanskrit’, it’s the language of derivation for names of all kinds.”

At the White Lotus booth at last year’s book fair at Sirikit convention center, I met a young female German Sanskrit student who was doing her intern at a Thai language commission whose function was to coin new words based on Sanskrit, or so she told me. Never seen anything written about this.

“it’s the sound of chanting”

Also the basis for Yantras, Mantras, and tattoos which use yantras. Yantras are exhaustively listed in this recent Siam Society arrival:

Filliozat, Jacqueline (2004) “Un Outil de Reference Pour Dechiffrer les Mantras et Yantras dans les manuscripts en Pali de la Peninsule Indochinoise,” in Du corps humain, au carrefour de plusiers savoirs en Inde.

Yantras came up in the online Pali study group at Yahoo Groups when someone asked about Pali calligraphy. Actually, I’m still not sure exactly what Yantras and Mantras are, but Bizot and Lagirarde have certainly written a lot of interesting books that deal with the subject. Skilling sure seems to have thoroughly explored protective chants in two Pali Text Society papers.

Steven Collins work Pali Imaginaire actually makes Pali literature interesting, but the only volume I found was at Chiang Mai Uni library. I donated a copy of Justin’s dissertation to the Siam Society a couple of weeks ago. Pali literature is a research area waiting to happen.

What is “actual history”?

I emailed a few news editors as to why the silence in Australia when the story was first published in the bangkok post.

I recieved no reply.

I would like to respond to Artisi , taking this comment seriously: “I think a check of the facts and truthful comment would be worthwhile in relation to PPP and its right to rule. It (PPP) didn’t win the election outright and therefore doesn’t have the mandate to rule in its own right – it only came to power with the help of other minor parties.”

I take it that this comment means that Artisi considers that only a party that wins a majority of seats in parliament can claim a mandate to rule. The comment is a bit unclear, so I am interpreting a little. If it is the case that an absolute majority makes a legitimate government, then Thailand has only had one. And that was TRT in 2005.

I’m not about to debate the second point on vote-buying as that has been done at length elsewhere, including within the Election Commission, by academic researchers and independent observers of the election.

Artisi it’s simple to figure out who won the election PPP received 233 seats it’s nearest rival the Democrats received 165. This was not an outright majority but it was a win especially when you count in the smaller parties. Now the Constitutional court broke up the TRT and some factions formed their own parties. Phracharaj (RPP) was a faction of the old TRT with 4 seats, Phak Matchima Thippathai was also formed out of the TRT with 7 seats, Chat Pattana (17) was formed after the breakup of the TRT with TRT members and Pua Paendin (8)is comprised of half old TRT members.

Most of the small parties broke away from the TRT but still comprise the old TRT members. If you look at their platforms in the last election they are all surprisingly similar to the PPP and the old TRT. If you look at it this way the old TRT actually won the election, sort of poetic justice after their attempted eradication.

So who won the election? Who knows but it’s easy to see who lost it, the Democrats did even with huge help from the junta the majority of Thai’s, you know Chamlong’s stupid uneducated rural people that shouldn’t be allowed to vote, voted for who they wanted PPP. The democrats even ran on a modified TRT platform, the problem is they only show up north of Bangkok at election times and the people remember they didn’t even get table scraps from them when they ran the country. It will be a long time before they make inroads in the north.

Buying votes is never fair but by using the statement the way you do shows me you don’t understand what it is about. Vote buying was introduced by the Military not by Thaksin, the TRT or the PPP. It’s not money for a vote it’s to show the voter that the candidate appreciates his support. The democrats were giving away movie tickets, is that any better. In the north and northeast it shows the voter that the candidate is worthy of the position and the prestige that comes with it and that he appreciates the support of the voter. The practice of showing support is deeply rooted in the northern culture long before there were even elections.

The EC, who was appointed by the Junta remember, singled out the PPP for election fraud. The last election they, and their small coalition partners, had almost 70% more complaints than in any previous election. Normally complaints are even across the board party to party. From what I saw there was actually less money changing hands because in the north and northeast Martial Law was in effect during the election process and the PPP candidates were all closely tracked by the military.

We are not talking about the same third hand. I feel it is a group of individuals, not a single one, that want to usurp power from the government and put their own system in place so they can control things again.