That was the most simple and most powerful post I have ever read.
It does seem that the human beings are endowed with not enough sense and knowledge to be able to get what they want- usually shiny buildings preferably made of glass and bright lights of any source and opulence and comfort of one’s desire- without the ability to get it without disadvantaging one other human being (blithe exploitation)or many and worse, being able to admit that fact freely.
So, not a lot of people will agree with you or approve this post or Chris Coles’ “Noirs” preferring denial.
Fact is, all these so-called “developments” are accompanied by parallel exploitation of other human beings which people take pains to ignore or treat it as an “exception” just like all violent killers are always labelled “mentally unsound” to dissociate those from the “decent” society covering up the innate cowardice of the society.
In Burma now, we are rushing headlong exactly to be like in your neighbourhood. Only we will get there more quickly and violently like the Sicilians who took a tenth of the time of the Italians to get to killing. lynching Mafioso status in good,old New York.
Saddest thing is Burma is still at a stage that infernal fate could be averted. But not to be!
For covet-ting the “advanced” world incessantly promoted in these columns and everywhere by all “advanced” people and journalists, Chris Coles will soon have a great field day of “Rangoon Noir”, the mother of all “Noirs”.
You wrote “And unlike most of the foreign media in Thailand, I report reality and not fairy tales.”
But you’re not in Thailand. You’re in Singapore and you’ve not lived in Thailand for 11years.
So would it be better if you abandoned your own “fairy tales” and state “unlike most of the foreign media in Thailand I don’t live in Thailand and haven’t done for 11years”?
As one of the down-on-my-luck farang who has also spent much time photographing Bangkok’s underbelly, and who is also mentioned in Chris’ article, i suddenly feel a pressing need to interrupt scanning and photoshopping a few images of katoey i took recently (very considerate for street politics to have taken a brief hiatus recently), so i can express my astonishment over the quite emotional criticism of Chris’s work and the article here.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as we all know – and i find Chris’s paintings very good, especially his larger acrylics. The choice of colors, the composition, and the rawness of his style communicates something very real to me. Real enough to have one of those acrylics hanging in my house. Interesting enough – his painting does not clash with the Tankas i bought in Tibet 20 years ago – they even complement each other.
But maybe i have spent too much time in Bangkok’s bars and my vision is therefore completely skewed.
I find it quite interesting when critics here spend only very few lines on criticizing things such as visual language, choice of colors, composition etc, but go ballistic on the subject matter Chris and others (including me) chose. According to the critics, the subject matter is narrow, only a tiny section of Bangkok’s life, and therefore completely irrelevant.
Really? Is that so?
Not to me.
But even if that would would the case, i can only say: So what!
But it is not the case. First of all, Bangkok’s underbelly is quite world famous. That fame has not jumped out from the imagination of Farang reporters in need of a good story. While Patpong, Nana, Soi Cowboy and similar may only be a small section – the amount of massage parlours, number hotels and karaoke places in all neighborhoods, from urban to rural, are testimony to the widespread nature of the demimonde in Thailand (sorry, Ministry of Culture…).
Another sad fact of Bangkok has been mentioned – the so called clishee of other aspects of the underbelly: drugs and murders. While the heavily protected expat ghettos of Bangkok may be quite free of those (other than the occasional party with a plate of coke available), normal Thai neighborhoods have all that in abundance.
I have spent years with the Por Tek Tueng – Bangkok’s largest volunteer rescue organization, in many different districts, photographing exactly that clishee. One may criticize me for having gotten a skewed picture as i just concentrated on this aspect.
But as i do live not in Sukhumvit or a walled compound for the rich, but in an ordinary Thai mixed neighborhood, i have regular exposure to the violent nature of Bangkok’s life. This is a neighborhood like many (i know much worse ones). I won’t bore you with too many tales – but hearing gun shots at night is quite regular, one big gun fight took even place directly in front of my house (amazingly nobody was killed or injured during this incident), but i have had several murders in my immediate neighborhood. I even have a bullet hole in my house (i kept the bullet – it landed on the floor after passing through several wooden walls), when a neighbor ran amok and shot wildly in the air.
And lets not talk about drugs – which are everywhere. Police regularly chases and arrests people here.
Back to “Art”.
Given the enormous exposure to the demimonde – i have always found it very astonishing how little creative work is based on this. A huge disparity when compared to the decades of international journalistic work, some better, some less so. Thai local journalism though revels in reporting in the aspects of life, if you have a look at crime shows on TV, and the articles of night reporters of the newspapers.
But creative work? Even when it exists – it gets blocked at every possibility. When i was part of the ‘Foreign Familiar’ group exhibition with an extract of my night work – it took nearly a year of heavy negotiations with the organizers, sponsors and the Bangkok Art and Culture Center to allow my already heavily self-censored photos to be shown. It can’t have been the quality of my work (i like to imagine), as the project has been found already worthy enough to be exhibited during the 2006 Noorderlicht festival.
While there may not be too many people using the subject matter of Bangkok’s underbelly as a creative inspiration – there are some. Chris Moore’s novels may be placed in the genre of Pulp – but what does that say? Many of the Pulp authors of earlier eras are now cult.
Lets also not forget Bangkok based Oli Pin Fat photographing his own demons – to add another name here.
Toulouse Lautrec lived in a brothel, Brassai photographed the demimonde of Paris in the 20’s, Berlin in the 20’s was a cess pool of sex, drugs and violence until Hitler declared that all those paintings that were inspired by this life were “Degenerate Art”, ugly and to be prohibited.
Well, i like Chris Coles’ ugly paintings. But i guess i am slightly degenerate… 😉
As an academic, I usually do a little research on the writers/authors I might come across. In regard to Saphen Boy, he appears to be a Bangkok nightlife-oriented blogger with a knack for coming up with provocative and catchy subjects and titles in his quest for more hits and hit-based-revenue. Here are a few of the more recent ones:
-Bangkok Buddy and the Sex Doll
-Doom and Gloom and the Sex Trade in Thailand
-Why Stickman No Longer Matters
-Stickman: The Naughty Webmaster for Naughty Boys
-Make a Sexy Time
-Pussy Magic Flower: Roaches, Ladyboys, and the GFE on Khaosan
-Dean Barrett’s Retirement: Whips, Chains, and a Spanking
-Pussy Magic Razorblades
-etc.
He also seems to be obsessed with endlessly harassing certain people, especially one poor soul who he calls Big Baby Kenny.
Three cheers ‘Saphan Loy’. Your critique of the dishwater that some of these wannabes imagine to be art was nicely made. The Bangkok ‘Ho-lit’ you refer to is, indeed, tiresome and inconsequential in the extreme. Even less appealing or readable than a flyer from a Jehovah’s Witness. And as for Coles invoking the German Expressionists and somehow associating his own ‘werke’, or should I say ‘sheisse’, with the likes of Beckman, Grosz et al, words fail me. Give up mate, you just don’t cut it.
[…] academic men at work from Down Under over at New Mandala have given Chris Coles pride of place in a February 15th posting in which the paint-maker describes, yet again in the event that you’ve missed his […]
I think Mr Sheridan only reads the najib spin produced by APCO. Not much of an analyst if one does not try to match action with slogans and speeches.
So far I have not seen Najib’s “reformation” action, unless you call handing out a couple hundred ringgits to the poor “reformist”. BTW 80 % of the population were eligible for that RM$200/-! Shameful!
Chris Coles’ post has all the hallmarks of a self-serving, self-congratulatory navel-gazing think-piece clearly intended to revive a moribund interest in his book of the same name, and to generate some sympathy for this far-fetched idea that his work and the work of others somehow constitutes an expressionist movement unique to Bangkok’s (and by extension, Southeast Asia’s) “underbelly” of vice. There are so many things wrong with this from an intellectual perspective that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, there is something inherently artificial in attempting to broadly fabricate an “artistic” movement of expatriate “artists” (mostly down-on-their luck expatriates who also happen to spend inordinate amounts of time in Bangkok’s brothel districts while scribbling implausible stories on bar napkins), where there simply is none. Coles lumps his own paint-making efforts, the macabre neon results of which are perhaps best-suited for the interior of a carnival funhouse, with the scribbling of typists like Christopher Moore, Stephen Leather, and Jon Burdett, whose collective fictive output is largely unreadable and place an undo strain on wood-pulp processing factories as well as the digital backbone of the Internet. In fact, Stephen Leather has recently taken to giving away digital copies of “erotic” short stories on Amazon with titles like “Banging Bill’s Wife.” The most commercially popular of this sorry lot is Jon Burdett’s series, but even his Bangkok-based stories do little justice to the nuanced reality and cultural complexity of living in a place like Thailand, and they have little to no bearing on Coles’ imagined “noir” movement. What is equally distressing about this whole misguided effort is that the concept of noir, as an extension of the German expressionism that Coles so admires, is essentially being grafted onto one very narrow aspect of Thai urban culture, namely the red-light districts that cater to foreign white men. There is very little of the native Thai voice to be found in his concept of Bangkok noir (or Southeast Asian noir) or whatever; and when Thais do appear, they are merely consigned to cliched roles as prostitutes, drug dealers, or murderers or corrupt public servants. One can try, as Coles does, to will into existence some grand artistic movement until the water buffalo comes home. But if other scholars, writers, art critics, and historians of Southeast Asia are directing their gaze elsewhere, or fail to see any artistic or socially redemptive merit whatever in the examples Coles provides, then the overly ambitious Bangkok noir movement is destined to be consigned to the collective digital shrug of the Internet’s ever-shortening memory.
I am not a member of anyone’s fan club. The only reason as to why anyone actually needs to hide behind a false name is if they are in danger from the state. If anyone wants to attack anyone else then the least they can do is use their proper name and not cowardly hide behind a pseudonym. Lets just hope that the new FCCT changes its attitude and actually stands up for its principals. There are many 112 victims I disagree politically with. Do I nit pick to see who deserves to be supported or not? 112 and the computer crimes act are very bad laws and all repressive regimes around the world use similar laws to crush dissent.
So if Toecutter gave his/her real name that would then mean you would consider the incontrovertible evidence they’ve provided?
Why personalise this? Why not just look at the facts? Click on the links they’ve provided – they won’t change just because the person who posted them is using an fake name.
Given the vitriolic and personal nature of AMM’s attacks, which then mobilises his “fan club”, is it any wonder commentators want to remain anonymous?
[…] called Pitak Siam (Protect Siam) mobilised more than 10,000 demonstrators. But such protests have failed to produce the broad-based support that they did in 2005–06 and 2008 when they effectively overturned the […]
Let me tell you of a story of an Indian Family I married into. Appaduray from French Pondicherry answred a British ad for workers in 1910s. He took a chance brought 2 nephews to Malaya. He worked as bullockcart driver carrying latex. 2 nephews went to tap rubber. His son Subra worked in LLN as a crane driver. His grandson Nathan now GM of TNB. His grand daughter (my wife) legal manager of construction comp. one grandson ia a teacher graduated from UK with scholarship from govt. Another grandson officer in TNB. Appaduray has a great grandson as a lawyer and granddaughter working in HSBC Dubai. Appaduray and his descendants got a raw deal they should have remained as rubber tappers in Malaysia, that way they can fight to get handout from BN govt. Instead of working hard to pull themselves from poverty.
Andrew,
while I very much sympathise with your straight-forward position, I think this time it is you who is ducking the question. Of course, the duty of any journalist (foreign or Thai) is to report what is happening, and not “campaign” (@tom hoy).
However, as you all know, the personal consequences for this straight-forward reporting will depend on the way Thai authorities interpret it. In other words: what you might (rightdully!) deem straightforwrd reporting of the facts may alreay cross the line. And every (foreign or Thai) journalist based in Thailand is aware of that risk.
So my position is: instead of denying that risk, it makes more sense to spell out thresholds where you may cross the red line, so everyone can decide what personal risk they are going to take.
I read your idea about the “health warning” against this background, and agree that this is a good idea.
Facebook 
Twitter 
Soundcloud 
Youtube 
Rss
Southeast Asia noir
Thank you Nick.
That was the most simple and most powerful post I have ever read.
It does seem that the human beings are endowed with not enough sense and knowledge to be able to get what they want- usually shiny buildings preferably made of glass and bright lights of any source and opulence and comfort of one’s desire- without the ability to get it without disadvantaging one other human being (blithe exploitation)or many and worse, being able to admit that fact freely.
So, not a lot of people will agree with you or approve this post or Chris Coles’ “Noirs” preferring denial.
Fact is, all these so-called “developments” are accompanied by parallel exploitation of other human beings which people take pains to ignore or treat it as an “exception” just like all violent killers are always labelled “mentally unsound” to dissociate those from the “decent” society covering up the innate cowardice of the society.
In Burma now, we are rushing headlong exactly to be like in your neighbourhood. Only we will get there more quickly and violently like the Sicilians who took a tenth of the time of the Italians to get to killing. lynching Mafioso status in good,old New York.
Saddest thing is Burma is still at a stage that infernal fate could be averted. But not to be!
For covet-ting the “advanced” world incessantly promoted in these columns and everywhere by all “advanced” people and journalists, Chris Coles will soon have a great field day of “Rangoon Noir”, the mother of all “Noirs”.
Tolerating intolerance
AMM
You wrote “And unlike most of the foreign media in Thailand, I report reality and not fairy tales.”
But you’re not in Thailand. You’re in Singapore and you’ve not lived in Thailand for 11years.
So would it be better if you abandoned your own “fairy tales” and state “unlike most of the foreign media in Thailand I don’t live in Thailand and haven’t done for 11years”?
Southeast Asia noir
As one of the down-on-my-luck farang who has also spent much time photographing Bangkok’s underbelly, and who is also mentioned in Chris’ article, i suddenly feel a pressing need to interrupt scanning and photoshopping a few images of katoey i took recently (very considerate for street politics to have taken a brief hiatus recently), so i can express my astonishment over the quite emotional criticism of Chris’s work and the article here.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as we all know – and i find Chris’s paintings very good, especially his larger acrylics. The choice of colors, the composition, and the rawness of his style communicates something very real to me. Real enough to have one of those acrylics hanging in my house. Interesting enough – his painting does not clash with the Tankas i bought in Tibet 20 years ago – they even complement each other.
But maybe i have spent too much time in Bangkok’s bars and my vision is therefore completely skewed.
I find it quite interesting when critics here spend only very few lines on criticizing things such as visual language, choice of colors, composition etc, but go ballistic on the subject matter Chris and others (including me) chose. According to the critics, the subject matter is narrow, only a tiny section of Bangkok’s life, and therefore completely irrelevant.
Really? Is that so?
Not to me.
But even if that would would the case, i can only say: So what!
But it is not the case. First of all, Bangkok’s underbelly is quite world famous. That fame has not jumped out from the imagination of Farang reporters in need of a good story. While Patpong, Nana, Soi Cowboy and similar may only be a small section – the amount of massage parlours, number hotels and karaoke places in all neighborhoods, from urban to rural, are testimony to the widespread nature of the demimonde in Thailand (sorry, Ministry of Culture…).
Another sad fact of Bangkok has been mentioned – the so called clishee of other aspects of the underbelly: drugs and murders. While the heavily protected expat ghettos of Bangkok may be quite free of those (other than the occasional party with a plate of coke available), normal Thai neighborhoods have all that in abundance.
I have spent years with the Por Tek Tueng – Bangkok’s largest volunteer rescue organization, in many different districts, photographing exactly that clishee. One may criticize me for having gotten a skewed picture as i just concentrated on this aspect.
But as i do live not in Sukhumvit or a walled compound for the rich, but in an ordinary Thai mixed neighborhood, i have regular exposure to the violent nature of Bangkok’s life. This is a neighborhood like many (i know much worse ones). I won’t bore you with too many tales – but hearing gun shots at night is quite regular, one big gun fight took even place directly in front of my house (amazingly nobody was killed or injured during this incident), but i have had several murders in my immediate neighborhood. I even have a bullet hole in my house (i kept the bullet – it landed on the floor after passing through several wooden walls), when a neighbor ran amok and shot wildly in the air.
And lets not talk about drugs – which are everywhere. Police regularly chases and arrests people here.
Back to “Art”.
Given the enormous exposure to the demimonde – i have always found it very astonishing how little creative work is based on this. A huge disparity when compared to the decades of international journalistic work, some better, some less so. Thai local journalism though revels in reporting in the aspects of life, if you have a look at crime shows on TV, and the articles of night reporters of the newspapers.
But creative work? Even when it exists – it gets blocked at every possibility. When i was part of the ‘Foreign Familiar’ group exhibition with an extract of my night work – it took nearly a year of heavy negotiations with the organizers, sponsors and the Bangkok Art and Culture Center to allow my already heavily self-censored photos to be shown. It can’t have been the quality of my work (i like to imagine), as the project has been found already worthy enough to be exhibited during the 2006 Noorderlicht festival.
While there may not be too many people using the subject matter of Bangkok’s underbelly as a creative inspiration – there are some. Chris Moore’s novels may be placed in the genre of Pulp – but what does that say? Many of the Pulp authors of earlier eras are now cult.
Lets also not forget Bangkok based Oli Pin Fat photographing his own demons – to add another name here.
Toulouse Lautrec lived in a brothel, Brassai photographed the demimonde of Paris in the 20’s, Berlin in the 20’s was a cess pool of sex, drugs and violence until Hitler declared that all those paintings that were inspired by this life were “Degenerate Art”, ugly and to be prohibited.
Well, i like Chris Coles’ ugly paintings. But i guess i am slightly degenerate… 😉
Southeast Asia noir
As an academic, I usually do a little research on the writers/authors I might come across. In regard to Saphen Boy, he appears to be a Bangkok nightlife-oriented blogger with a knack for coming up with provocative and catchy subjects and titles in his quest for more hits and hit-based-revenue. Here are a few of the more recent ones:
-Bangkok Buddy and the Sex Doll
-Doom and Gloom and the Sex Trade in Thailand
-Why Stickman No Longer Matters
-Stickman: The Naughty Webmaster for Naughty Boys
-Make a Sexy Time
-Pussy Magic Flower: Roaches, Ladyboys, and the GFE on Khaosan
-Dean Barrett’s Retirement: Whips, Chains, and a Spanking
-Pussy Magic Razorblades
-etc.
He also seems to be obsessed with endlessly harassing certain people, especially one poor soul who he calls Big Baby Kenny.
Southeast Asia noir
Three cheers ‘Saphan Loy’. Your critique of the dishwater that some of these wannabes imagine to be art was nicely made. The Bangkok ‘Ho-lit’ you refer to is, indeed, tiresome and inconsequential in the extreme. Even less appealing or readable than a flyer from a Jehovah’s Witness. And as for Coles invoking the German Expressionists and somehow associating his own ‘werke’, or should I say ‘sheisse’, with the likes of Beckman, Grosz et al, words fail me. Give up mate, you just don’t cut it.
Southeast Asia noir
Phnom Penh Post piece on Coles Meta House/Goethe Institute show:
http://phnompenhpost.com/2013022161522/Lifestyle/night-vision-gives-view-of-southeast-asian-noir.html
Southeast Asia noir
Link to photos of Chris Coles NIGHT VISION show Opening night at Meta House/Goethe Institute in Phnom Penh Friday, Feb 22nd:
http://bangkok-noir.blogspot.com/2013/02/photos-from-opening-night-night-visions.html
Southeast Asia noir
[…] academic men at work from Down Under over at New Mandala have given Chris Coles pride of place in a February 15th posting in which the paint-maker describes, yet again in the event that you’ve missed his […]
Najib hailed as a great reformer by Greg Sheridan
I think Mr Sheridan only reads the najib spin produced by APCO. Not much of an analyst if one does not try to match action with slogans and speeches.
So far I have not seen Najib’s “reformation” action, unless you call handing out a couple hundred ringgits to the poor “reformist”. BTW 80 % of the population were eligible for that RM$200/-! Shameful!
Southeast Asia noir
Chris Coles’ post has all the hallmarks of a self-serving, self-congratulatory navel-gazing think-piece clearly intended to revive a moribund interest in his book of the same name, and to generate some sympathy for this far-fetched idea that his work and the work of others somehow constitutes an expressionist movement unique to Bangkok’s (and by extension, Southeast Asia’s) “underbelly” of vice. There are so many things wrong with this from an intellectual perspective that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, there is something inherently artificial in attempting to broadly fabricate an “artistic” movement of expatriate “artists” (mostly down-on-their luck expatriates who also happen to spend inordinate amounts of time in Bangkok’s brothel districts while scribbling implausible stories on bar napkins), where there simply is none. Coles lumps his own paint-making efforts, the macabre neon results of which are perhaps best-suited for the interior of a carnival funhouse, with the scribbling of typists like Christopher Moore, Stephen Leather, and Jon Burdett, whose collective fictive output is largely unreadable and place an undo strain on wood-pulp processing factories as well as the digital backbone of the Internet. In fact, Stephen Leather has recently taken to giving away digital copies of “erotic” short stories on Amazon with titles like “Banging Bill’s Wife.” The most commercially popular of this sorry lot is Jon Burdett’s series, but even his Bangkok-based stories do little justice to the nuanced reality and cultural complexity of living in a place like Thailand, and they have little to no bearing on Coles’ imagined “noir” movement. What is equally distressing about this whole misguided effort is that the concept of noir, as an extension of the German expressionism that Coles so admires, is essentially being grafted onto one very narrow aspect of Thai urban culture, namely the red-light districts that cater to foreign white men. There is very little of the native Thai voice to be found in his concept of Bangkok noir (or Southeast Asian noir) or whatever; and when Thais do appear, they are merely consigned to cliched roles as prostitutes, drug dealers, or murderers or corrupt public servants. One can try, as Coles does, to will into existence some grand artistic movement until the water buffalo comes home. But if other scholars, writers, art critics, and historians of Southeast Asia are directing their gaze elsewhere, or fail to see any artistic or socially redemptive merit whatever in the examples Coles provides, then the overly ambitious Bangkok noir movement is destined to be consigned to the collective digital shrug of the Internet’s ever-shortening memory.
Tolerating intolerance
I am not a member of anyone’s fan club. The only reason as to why anyone actually needs to hide behind a false name is if they are in danger from the state. If anyone wants to attack anyone else then the least they can do is use their proper name and not cowardly hide behind a pseudonym. Lets just hope that the new FCCT changes its attitude and actually stands up for its principals. There are many 112 victims I disagree politically with. Do I nit pick to see who deserves to be supported or not? 112 and the computer crimes act are very bad laws and all repressive regimes around the world use similar laws to crush dissent.
Tolerating intolerance
Roy Anderson
So if Toecutter gave his/her real name that would then mean you would consider the incontrovertible evidence they’ve provided?
Why personalise this? Why not just look at the facts? Click on the links they’ve provided – they won’t change just because the person who posted them is using an fake name.
Given the vitriolic and personal nature of AMM’s attacks, which then mobilises his “fan club”, is it any wonder commentators want to remain anonymous?
Voices of moderation on Burmese Facebook
[…] ьХДыЛМьзАыКФ эМРыЛиэХШъ╕░ ьЦ┤ыа╡ьзАызМ, ып╕ьЦАызИ эОШьЭ┤ьКды╢БьЧРьДЬыКФ ьГБьКдыЯмьЪ┤ ызРьЭД ьУ░ыКФ ьХЕэФМыУд ьЭД эЭФэЮИ ы│╝ ьИШ […]
Indian migrant workers in Malaysia – part 1
Mak Jun – fascinating story.
I’m not clear however on what your suggesting.
Are you saying that their success is because of government policies or is it off their hard work, or both?
Pitak Siam’s failure
[…] called Pitak Siam (Protect Siam) mobilised more than 10,000 demonstrators. But such protests have failed to produce the broad-based support that they did in 2005–06 and 2008 when they effectively overturned the […]
Tolerating intolerance
I like his chosen name Toecutter and his resson(s) for choosing that Alias is his privilege and none of my business.
Review of Gender, Emotions and Labour Markets
I’d love to have got a quick insight into why female labourers in construction is considered unremarkable in Thailand?
Indian migrant workers in Malaysia – part 1
Let me tell you of a story of an Indian Family I married into. Appaduray from French Pondicherry answred a British ad for workers in 1910s. He took a chance brought 2 nephews to Malaya. He worked as bullockcart driver carrying latex. 2 nephews went to tap rubber. His son Subra worked in LLN as a crane driver. His grandson Nathan now GM of TNB. His grand daughter (my wife) legal manager of construction comp. one grandson ia a teacher graduated from UK with scholarship from govt. Another grandson officer in TNB. Appaduray has a great grandson as a lawyer and granddaughter working in HSBC Dubai. Appaduray and his descendants got a raw deal they should have remained as rubber tappers in Malaysia, that way they can fight to get handout from BN govt. Instead of working hard to pull themselves from poverty.
Western campaigners and lèse-majesté
Andrew,
while I very much sympathise with your straight-forward position, I think this time it is you who is ducking the question. Of course, the duty of any journalist (foreign or Thai) is to report what is happening, and not “campaign” (@tom hoy).
However, as you all know, the personal consequences for this straight-forward reporting will depend on the way Thai authorities interpret it. In other words: what you might (rightdully!) deem straightforwrd reporting of the facts may alreay cross the line. And every (foreign or Thai) journalist based in Thailand is aware of that risk.
So my position is: instead of denying that risk, it makes more sense to spell out thresholds where you may cross the red line, so everyone can decide what personal risk they are going to take.
I read your idea about the “health warning” against this background, and agree that this is a good idea.
Tolerating intolerance
Why do you snipe behind a false I.D? Please identify yourself properly.