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According to Jim Taylor, Pol. Lt. Col. Thaksin/PM had no involvement in the war on drugs & he “left it to his lieutenants

So are you saying he had no control or authority during his time as PM, or that he was merely negligent?

Are you also saying you can see no evidence whatsoever of use of nominees, maids, tax havens etc to avoid taxes, or asset concealment?

If there was no evidence of anything, why would Thaksin run?
Surely the truth would come out in court, and if the charges were groundless Thaksin should have no difficulty clearing his name, be vindicated & regain respect?

IMO, after the Pojaman verdict, he saw that he would not be able to buy the courts anymore, leading him to choose a tactical retreat and let his spin doctors go to work on his behalf.
That spin process is already in full swing.

I look forward to you addressing directly the matters I raised in post #37 above, and here’s another request: – Can you please provide a critique of why the Pojaman tax case verdict is wrong
(just saying the judiciary is stacked doesn’t cut it – you will have to do better than that!)

“You know nothing but claim to know it all. That is a dangerous position”.
🙂

Second, I don’t think the military has abandoned the essence of Ne Win’s socialism, which is the military control of all economic resources.

Supporting Aiontay’s well-founded position that the ‘socialist’ policies of exploitation through a controlled-economy have continued into the so-called ‘liberalization’ period of post-1988 is research done into agricultural policy in contemporary Burma. Koichi Fujita and Ikuko Okamoto in their 2006 paper “Agicultural Policies and Development of Myanmar’s Agricultural Sector: An Overview” state:

It is true that even after 1988 farmers in Myanmar continued to be controlled by the ‘three internal major agricultural systems’ inherited from the socialist period, namely the procurement system, the planned cropping system and the state ownership of farmland… It can even be argued that after 1988, the government tightened these systems to control farmers. (p.4)… the genuine policy objective of the government seems to consist of the following two elements: avoidance of social unrest and sustenance of the regime. (p.21)

Thaksin is not perfect- as he would say himself. Who is? Especially in politics. But we need to take a broader vision and not get blocked by personality. Those under him claimed he was a taskmaster. But those spent time in Thailand would know that during his years government worked efficiently, the economy was growing, the poor were getting benefits through decentralisation and the best public health scheme in the region. He got rid of the massive underground lottery mafia and channelled the money into higher education for poor students. This was all transparent and accountable. Thaksin knew what was wanted but at the time, especially in his second term, was at times short of consultative processes with civil society and some academics as he tried to make short cuts. He felt that people themselves should take responsibility for grassroots initiatives and funds management (though not always successful in a number of villages [I was working with CD training/workshopping at the time and know this much]) – thus taking power/funding opportunities from a number of NGOs. These same people, and senior government officials used to the old ways, many who I have been working with for twenty years since the Prem Government in the 1980s, saw their benefits and influential voices disappearing as new technocrats and people’s advisors came on board. He introduced a reform “People’s audit” system which for the first time made government accountable to the people down to the grassroots. His tackling violence in the south and drug cartels was left to his lieutenants. He took Thailand out of the Chuan Government’s inactive mess post-1997, which was riddled with controversy over illegal land dealings involving Democrat MPs and he was able to pay back the IMF. The story goes on. What you folks see is only that he was rich, very rich, and the rest you listen to is the propaganda by interests and powers that long wanted him out of the way so that they could maintain the status quo ante. You remind me of the Thai fable of the blind persons trying to describe the elephant.
As for the evidence? if the judiciary is stacked, which is clearly is, then how can even the evidence be trusted? It is a circular argument. The coup-makers spent sixteen months and many person-hours and funding trying to pin him down with hard evidence. They would have liked nothing more than to justify the coup which was starting to be criticised underground. They could find none in the end. Last year the electorate had a free choice and voted for a government that could follow a similar political and economic model to pull Thailand round after the devastating period of the coup management and its wasting away of the country’s coffers. You know nothing but claim to know it all. That is a dangerous position.

Jim Taylor: We have heard some of your opinions, so why not enlighten us further with some facts regarding:
– how the frozen 73 billion baht has already been spent
– how the coup was planned 16 months or more beforehand (by Prem?)

We’ve already heard your opinions on the appropriateness of tinkering with the institutions, checks & balances of democracy and placing obedient servants into positions of authority (something I’m sure Thaksin would never even have dreamed of doing)
🙂
so lets also hear your opinion regarding the following:
– the role of Pol. Lt. Col. Thaksin Shinawatra in the war on drugs extra-judicial killing spree
– the use of nominees, maids, tax havens etc to avoid taxes in general, and by a government leader in particular
– the appropriateness of politicians family businesses being specifically benefitted by govt policies, and the wife of a PM doing land deals with govt bodies
– concealing assets (on more than one occasion)
– the initial handling of the renewed southern insurgency

I’m all for giving credit to Thaksin where it’s due, but what purpose does blindly ignoring, or worse, defending his wrongdoings serve?

At the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta (in the other Georgia), one after another country was represented or expressed by two people dressing and dancing to the 19th century image (still not expired) of a folkloric couple. That is, all except the US reps, who were in denim-etc. cowboy and -girl outfits dancing to John Mellencamp’s Rockin’ in the USA (a late 20th century song, whereas the rest was squarely 19th c.). These shows are for fun and dazzle, and dip into various deep (unconscious?) notions of “peoples”. If one is to take this stuff at face value, then in 1996 only the US was expressed as a modern “culture”, the rest had DNA that said “19th century (meaning timeless)”. I did not copy the opening ceremony, but at the time of watching it I was pretty sure that the dance before the national troupes was “lifted” (pretty wholesale) from a Shan peacock dance.
To me, someone who may be alleged of “dining out on ethnicity”, the whole Olympics thing is and has been about embodying nationality. All the athletes supposedly embody their nations’ greatness, prowess, endurance, etc. They are as much an act as are the 56 kiddos but we are completely used to it when it comes to sports. The feigned shock rests on an idea of natural people, something that shows up in a different way in the testing of athletes for possible drug use. If ethnicity and nation are somehow natural (ahistorical, genetic, etc.), then we can all join the journalist in dismay at having been somehow duped.

I think the horse was more for himself, if I’ve got it right the Assa in his name standing for horse, Chinese surname Ma. As in, for the movie buffs, White Powder Ma.

First of all, I wish Mr. Ohdinger luck in his online business. Podcast audio/video lessons such as these represent the newest facet of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), at least when combined with the interactivity of related blogs, internet fora, and the like. It will be interesting to see how the social computing revolution of “Web 2.0” influences the development of CALL.

On to more nit-picky observations, I would like to echo some of the sentiments expressed by Harrison George, in that either this article was specifically written for laymen or that Mr. Ohdinger possesses some gaps in his knowledge of linguistics. Either way, some of the opinions expressed in this article are, at best, half-truths or plain-out incorrect.

The beginning of the article was encouraging in that it seems that it would discuss the importance of pragmatics in language acquisition, and especially the difficulties that second language learners encounter when their first language (L1) provides not only phonetic and syntactic negative language transference, but cross-cultural pragmatic negative language transference as well. However, in the middle of the article the focus switches to the role of tone and the importance of immersion.

But the question is – how do westerners learn Thai?

Well, as any neurolinguist can tell you, they learn Thai the same way as “easterners” do, with their brains. (The fabled Language Acquisition Device if Chomsky/Pinker/Krashen are to be believed.)

Most westerners enjoy a systematic approach to learning languages. This requires formulas they can use to construct their sentences and rules they can stick to.

That “systematic approach” of “formulas” and “rules” that westerners enjoy when learning languages is called “grammar,” and all languages possess one. And as an aside, eastern students enjoy a systematic approach too. No human being can learn a language without acquiring the phonemic and syntactic formulae of the language. Indeed, it is theorized that we possess a structure in our brain that is devoted to analyzing linguistic information to infer these rules. It is ethnocentric, and in my opinion harmful, to assume that “westerners” differ from “easterners” at this level. At the level of sociopedagogy, i.e. how culture influences classroom instruction, curriculum, and student-teacher interaction, then you have a stronger case for arguing differences exist.

Luckily Thai grammar is relatively simple [for westerners], while the reading and writing system is more of a challenge.

I pity the student in my Applied Linguistics classes who would ever dare to write such a sentence. By “westerners”, I assume Mr. Ohdinger means native Anglophones. It is true that, at first glance, a morphologically isolating language like Thai, might seem simple to those whose prior language learning experiences might have included dealing with le Subjonctif of French or declining a Latin noun in all six cases (sometimes seven if the word can take the locative case!). However, when a learner of Thai digs deeper into the language, he or she finds because of Thai’s morphological typology, it is capable of extreme serial verb constructions, for example. Speaking from experience, when an Anglophone encounters such everyday constructions as р╕Йр╕▒р╕Щр╣Др╕Ыр╕лр╕▓р╣Ар╕Вр╕▓р╣Бр╕ер╣Йр╕зр╕Юр╕▓р╕Бр╕ер╕▒р╕Ър╕бр╕▓, (“I’ll go to find him/her, then lead him/her back”) which literally glosses as I go find he/she done lead return come, is enough to make one’s eyes roll back in their heads and froth at the mouth. The point is, when talking about languages, qualitative statements such as “simple” or “difficult” are relative, at best.

A lot of times you have to derive the meaning of sentences from the context of the whole conversation or fill in the gaps because in everyday Thai conversations many people omit words or even parts of sentences.

That happens in every language. Furthermore, one not only has to derive meaning from the context of the whole conversation, but also from the context of the culture that the language is a part of. When you see a sign that proclaims “Baby Sale: 50% percent off,” how do you know that they are not selling babies? Taking the sentence in isolation, there is no grammatical information that would imply otherwise. We must rely on deictic (extra-linguistic) information to formulate the correct implication. This goes back to the articles original point about pragmatics. For example, Thai has an array of personal pronouns, the correct use of which requires an understanding of the relational social deixis that comes from a good knowledge of Thai social customs and mores. And, in my opinion, this is a much more difficult challenge that the mastery of tone.

A Cute Media Manipulation. He certainly didn’t get from his father.

You fell for it too! 😉

Ironically an Asavahame has been appointed to the government.

Why is the press silent? PAD too intent on getting Thaksin that they forget Vatana?

“I would challenege all readers to show the evidence against Thaksin”

Jim Taylor, the courts have produced transcripts of the convictions so far (there’ll be so much more if only PMThaksin did not flee). I will assume that your Thai is fluent as you seem so sure of what you say. THOSE ARE EVIDENCES, proven through court processes, that you can quote here and dispute for all the world to see. I will be the first to believe you if can really carry this out convincingly, well supported with your water-tight evidences. Until you do that, you are only spinning rumours/lies (like good ol’ Karl Rove).

I have my doubts you’ll even attempt it and will go on spinnin’ away (in which case, I will discontinue this conversation). Unlike previous coups, this is no kangaroo court. If that was the case, PMThaksin would have been convicted within weeks or months of the coup. The AEC painstakingly investigated and built up evidences over almost two years. In fact many senior to mid-level bureaucrats resisted collaboration with AEC for fear of PMThaksin’s return (he did and many have already paid by being removed to inactive positions).

I don’t dispute the fact (the only fact you mentioned) that PMThaksin is popular amongst rural voters who benefit from his policies (many of them certainly good and should be continued). I strongly dispute the fact that you see him as totally innocent of all corruption and abuses of power – when even the man himself has admitted making “honest mistakes” and being “not perfect”. It makes me wonder where you have been living all those years (apart from getting chummy with a “key coup maker” at a forest monastery in 2005 – if only you warned PMThaksin then!!!).