Docno

Yep, this silly story, unworthy of an article, is disrupting my day when I woke up to read about the latest disaster in the Middle East.

"There's no way these biases are as entrenched in the general population as they are in sex tourism centers like Pattaya and Phuket" Fallacious reasoning. You're missing the key confound in your logic which is that it is mostly in these places where Thais will come into direct contact with these people so they are just as liable to form these impressions on their own without any prompting from Caucasians as you seem to suggest. I spend a lot of time in Singapore where there is a large South Asian worker population and only a relative handful of Caucasians, and the girls here (local, Filipina, Thai, Indonesian etc) will all talk about some of these issues re Indians (and not all Indian, mind you). So these 'stereotypes' are more the product of experience than the 'evil influence' of Westerners, as you would like to think.

I suspect this was not his first head injury...

"She noticed a black, four-door pickup truck waiting in the jam when a group of teenagers on a motorcycle approached and began knocking on the pickup's window, trying to force the driver out of the vehicle." Lesson of the day: don't jump to assumptions.

Getting things tossed out on procedural grounds is usually much faster (and easier) than trying to fight the criminal allegations themselves, especially if things are murky on either side. Of course, it doesn't clear your reputation, but that may not be his priority at the moment.

Yeah - they have to keep guns at home to protect themselves from intruders and train their kids how to respond in the event of a mass shooting, but at least they're 'free'. /sarcasm off

You do know that rape and sexual assault are very different, right? (Sexual assault is a much broader category). Also, reporting to police and reporting in the media can vary widely across countries

I doubt he asked to see her ID beforehand.... Anyway, there can be many factors at play (opportunity, drugs impairing judgment, resentment as being rejected by farang women in the past, the exoticness of someone from a different race/nationality, etc).

It is a feminist over-simplification to suggest that rape is about power rather than sexual gratification (of course, nobody has ever suggested it's about 'intimacy'). If it were just about power, we would find that 50 year-olds are just as likely to be raped as teens. But that's not the case. According to the NSVRC, "Most female victims of completed rape (79.6%) experienced their first rape before the age of 25; 42.2% experienced their first completed rape before the age of 18 years." Of course, it's complex and there are often other motives such as anger/resentment in the mix.

Lots of Thai bashing going on here. Yeah, there are Thais who are abusive to animals and there are 'industries' that need a hell of a lot of reform (though remember we're talking about a developing country here). I've seen a lot worse in other countries. And I've seen a lot of Thais who are more caring toward animals than the typical people I knew back home. Case in point: my Thai ex-gf heard a dog get hit by a car outside her shop one night and brought him in and nursed him back to relative health (including having to wipe his @ss etc) ... slept outside with him at night for several days. I bought a doggy wheel-chair for him too. She named him chokedee ('lucky') ... seems to be the name for such occasions. I don't know many people who would gone to so much trouble as her.

You must be fun at parties...

Maybe this 27 year old should consider a career other than 'yoga teacher' so that she's not living at the edge of her bank account...

India taking some well-deserved knocks here, but the US also requires a visa even if you are just transiting (unless you are from a country that gets a waiver).

Seriously? When was the last time the US was attacked BY a 'Christian' country/group? Their 'overt' wars were responses to either attacks (1 by a Shinto/Buddhist nation in 1941, and 2 by an Islamic group in 2001) or where they were called in to 'protect' an ally (S Korea, S Vietnam, etc.), even those you could argue these situations were engineered for strategic reasons. Talk about covert wars, then you get into largely Christian Latin America. The point is that the US has never attacked another country with the primary or even secondary intent of imposing Christianity on it. When Bush said that he was doing God's work, he naively meant that he thought he could bring peace and stability (not Christianity) to the region.

Yes, that was terrible. But it's easy to get caught up in the numbers game. For example, I can highlight the fact that 171 school teachers were murdered by separatists in a 10-year period at the start of this century. 85 stone-throwing protesters vs 171 teachers. Could go on and on. Also, the Tak Bai protesters were victims of criminal neglect and mistreatment but it's not clear that it was a case of first-degree murder (i.e., that the police intended for them to die); the teachers, on the other hand, were murdered in cold blood.