Docno

On the contrary, more blurred then pixelated would have been better. In fact, a simple vague description would have sufficed. I'm willing to trust the mainstream media on such things 🙂

Guess you must think you win every argument ... "if there's no evidence for my claim, there must be a cover-up"

Consider your words 'marked' ... now how do we verify if your prediction/assertion is true?

You don't understand what 'domesticated' means. These are captive elephants. They are not domesticated. Domestication is a long process that involves selective breeding over many generations. That's how we turned wolves into dogs ... over thousands of years. Elephants have not been selectively bred long enough (if at all!) to be considered 'domesticated'. [Also note that true domestication usually also results in incidental changes to physical features ... we don't see this in captive elephants].

The 'Uzbeks' are probably Russians. I've been to Uzbekistan. The ethnic Uzbeks are Muslim, with all the baggage that goes with that. But many Uzbekistan citizens are ethnic Russians, and that's where you get this sort of thing.

Did you ever think that maybe he was just a prick from the start and the weed turned him into a reasonable human being? And yes, I'll take science over 'one guy in the towing business'...

Well, at least the money is going to 'The State', which clearly means it will be used for the betterment of Koh Samui and the well-being of its people... WAIT - wrong forum (wrong reality?)

The Chinese government is no doubt guilty of severe human rights abuses in Xinjiang, but the Chinese have had (an imperial) presence there for more than 2000 years, and the area was fully 'absorbed' into China in 1759. That's just 52 years after Scotland lost its independence in the Acts of Union. It's actually the same year that the French were cut off from Quebec in Canada, and the Canadiens were 'absorbed' into British North America. Many of Russia's non-ethnically-Russian republics were absorbed into Russia in the 19th century (and many willingly). Hawaiians were forced to join the US in that century as well. There are many instances around the world of peoples of different ethnicity/religion/culture being absorbed into larger nation-states, willingly or not, and many of the ones we don't question happened more recently than Xinjiang.

Many years ago, my gf (at the time) and I went to Siem Reap with another couple and had some 'happy pizza' there. My gf ended up throwing up (bit of a buzzkill for me), but I was otherwise very happy. The other girl felt absolutely nothing. But the other guy had a strong paranoid reaction, believing there were Khmer Rouge guerillas prowling outside his hotel rooming window. It was his first time trying this, so maybe he just wasn't ready for it. He didn't mix with any prescription meds and he wasn't much of a drinker. Just goes to show different people can have very different reactions even when other meds aren't in the mix. I wonder if this was the first time for this lassie too...

Yep ... Filipino and Indonesian is sometimes a challenge because they are both Austronesian, but they can still often be distinguished (without hearing their accent). Cambodians, Thais, and Burmese all come from very different ancestral lines that are more distinct than those of western European nations. Then again, after being in SE Asia for 25 years, you pick these things up. At least throw in a Vietnamese and a Lao to make it more challenging!

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.