wjthornton
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Posts posted by wjthornton
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I am constantly shocked at what people without any personal experience of Thai prisons or the so-called justice system here write about doing time in Thai prisons, so I'm writing a veritable essay, even though it may fall on deaf ears. I personally know a 24-year old university student, the recipient of awards for good citizenship with no priors, doing 20 years in maximum security for a white collar crime she didn't commit because the police were bribed to falsify the report, her lawyer didn't show up, and the judge refused to allow an appeal.
Do you know how many scam artists there are in Thai villages taking advantage of people's ignorance of the law? The so-called village lawyers may be no better than the scam artists. If you have to defend yourself in a Thai court without an attorney, how well do you think you would fare, regardless of your innocence? All it takes is a group of Thais to organize a case against you--your fine upstanding citizens think nothing of perjuring themselves for the economic advantage of their family, and I wonder if it is even a crime in the LOS.
How many arm-chair justices know that Thai law guarantees the prisoner 1.5 square meters living space, which is the absolute minimum, compared to 10 square meters in the USA? Yet Thai prisons are overcrowded 3X the legal limit so the average prisoner gets less than a square meter for living space, and there is no legal recourse to hold the government accountable.
Do you have any idea how crowded that is? Prisoners literally have to walk on each other's bodies to get to the open hole in the corner that serves as the toilet for 50 or more inmates in a 20 square meter room. Do you have any idea how hot that room gets with bodies literally stacked like sardines in a can? This is against Thai law and any kind of humane standards, regardless of whether it is women or men. Westerners often get sick and die under these conditions, but Thais accept it without complaining, and so it doesn't change.
Without a good lawyer, the court ignores first time offenses or extenuating circumstances. A person simply riding on a motorbike with a friend who has a few hits of speed can get a 10 year sentence under those brutal and illegal conditions. Poor women--single mothers in particular--are more likely to be the victims of guilt by association, given their abject poverty and the way they are condemned to subservience to whatever man will help them survive. You can talk about equal rights when a man who gets a woman pregnant is kicked out of school and forced to take care of the baby! Or when a man submits to a life of prostitution to take care of the baby and the grandmother who winds up raising the baby.
Women are obviously more likely to commit crimes of survival, especially when they have a newborn baby abandoned by a brutal alcoholic father. What legal options are provided by Thai society for them to survive? The UN seems to recognize that babies abandoned by the mother--to pay what you all seem to think are her debts to society-- are more likely to continue the cylce of crime arising from ignorance and poverty. How is that paying off any debts to anyone?
A just legal system determines the debt of the felon based on how much society has actually invested. It is hard to talk about the debt of someone who has been abused and misused her whole life. The UN mandate seems to recognize that women are more often subjected to sexual abuse and economic exploitation than men, and these circumstances should reduce their debt. In many cases it is society that owes the woman--and her baby--rather than the other way around. .
Civilization requires investing in the youth--and their families--believing in the potential of people, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, to repay that investment through creative and useful activity. It is not about "paying debts" by being tortured at public expense in inhumane conditions.
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I find myself in similar circumstances with Trembly--even to the dream of seeing education as a way to give something back rather than a way to fleece the ignorant and unsuspecting. Oh, and trying to remember to breathe as well.
I kinda decided to go with CELTA given it seems to be the high-priced spread. ECC classes seem more conveniently scheduled than IH, but if I'm going to spend a month in a room with somebody, I guess the most important thing is that they demonstrate how to create a learning environment and provide good feedback to help me improve my own teaching ability.
Does Trembly or anybody else have further experiences with specific teachers at either ECC or IH, or does that get too personal for the forum rules?
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IMHO, the real issue is that large corporations want to maximize shareholder returns, using a model that gives all profits to distributors instead of producers. That means 10 baht extra per unit to the person who does the real work means 100 baht per unit higher cost to the consumer. And the middle-class consumer struggles to pay an extra $3.00 because his or her job is being off shored to reduce his collective bargaining power and reduce his wages every year in real terms. Again the only goal is to maximize shareholder profits that go to the top 1% without regard to social health. Everyone who sucks blood from this system without producing anything of value is like a parasite getting fat like a bloated tick.
We collectively choose to create a society that encourages the growth of parasites instead of rewarding those who do productive and creative work. Recognizing the source of the problem instead of blaming the poor for being lazy and non-productive would begin to move us toward a fair system that truly rewards creativity, hard work, honesty, and productivity. Investors deserve a *fair* return. However, squeezing out every bit of profit to increase the concentration of wealth and power in a class that controls capital due to historical reasons is unjust and harmful to social health and stability. The concentration of wealth does nothing for economic growth, that is a myth promoted against all science, logic, and common sense. On the contrary it is the growth of a healthy middle class that promotes healthy economic activity.
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gr8fldanielle quotes a shocking and alarming study, but the numbers don't make sense to me. You gotta be careful with data and go back to the original sources because it is easy to misread numbers. The following link has screen shots of the original UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that seem more realistic. They still show Thailand very high in murders per capita, but nowhere near the top in absolute numbers:
http://asiancorrespo...-the-2006-coup/
In this study, Thailand had 3,307 murders in 2011, which is actually down from 2010. The rate per capita in 2011 is 4.8/100,000, which is down from 5.3/100,000 in 2010 and similar to the rate per capita for the USA. According to the UN numbers, violence is declining slightly in Thailand, even while it is being reported better. The relatively high murder rate in Thailand may have something to do with better reporting than countries that show lower rates based on the published numbers.
The UN doesn't even have figures for many countries. For example, in 2008, Burma had 4,800 murders and a much higher rate of 10.2/100,000 but no figures for 2009-2011.Without a free press, it is not going to be called murder when a poor person is killed by someone with political connections. There are probably innumerable ways those deaths get reported to avoid embarassing investigations. China reported only 13,410 murders, while India tops the list at over 42,923, but perhaps the Chinese government is better at managing embarassing data than the Indian government is.
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Why not just call crazies of every religious persuasion religious fanatics without ascribing their fanaticism to a specific faith? Why does it matter whether a fanatic uses the Qoran, the Bible, or the Book of Mormon to justify his crimes? But nobody ever called David Qoresh a "Mormon terrorist" or Jim Jones a "Christian terrorist."
The same old tired trick has been used to turn the politically disempowered against each other since language was invented. That is why governments have supported religion since the days of Zoroaster and Hammurabi. Exploiting religious differences has been the cause of more war and death and hatred than any other social factor.
A true "war on terror" would be to remove the cause of terror and fear, which is ignorance. But fanatics increase the ignorance and fear of their followers, and they all depend on each other to justify the fear and hatred they need to stay in power. But dare we ask who benefits the most from all this hatred and fear?
The real nature of the "war" and whom it is being waged against is revealed when the USA is committed without question to giving billions to fanatics in Israel to build illegal settlements, but cuts a few millions in funding for medical clinics when they provide free birth control. Ignore all the hand wringing and convoluted explanations, "by their fruits ye shall know them."
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When renewing after 1 year, I believe the 400k baht must be in the bank for 90 days. I don't know if that applies to your situation or not.
I'd been staying with an O-A visa and thought I could get it renewed with 400K because I was married, but that didn't work out. I had to come up with 800K because the 400K had been recently deposited. The nice visa officer sent me to the bank with a block about the right size for 800 x 1,000 baht notes wrapped in thick brown paper. They opened the account, registered a deposit, and withdrew it again without unwrapping the block! Very amusing. The "service charge" I paid was less amusing, but better than having to do visa runs out of the country every 90 days. This year I'll just plan to have the 800K available when my visa expires, but it is nice to know all the options.
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I wonder if they are just waving their hands around to get attention without any real understanding of the law. As I understand it, the law was rewritten rather recently so it would now be perfectly legal for a Thai woman, after marrying Warren Buffet, to buy the entire country (if Warren hadn't already remarried). Warren would just have to sign a disclaimer releasing any claim to the funds used for the purchase.
Under the old law, the Thai wife had to keep her maiden name and remain registered as a "sao" in order to maintain her right to own land. To prevent Thai women married to foreigners and their offspring from owning land, it seems they would have to go back to the old law, and even in LOS, I can't imagine them trying to enforce that retroactively.
Plus, somewhere along the line, somebody might realize that the offspring of all these Thai women are just as Thai as anybody else, given most of the leadership are of mixed Chinese-Thai ancestry and Thais are already about as mixed up genetically as any linguistic group in Asia.
Even defining what is meant by "Thai" quickly gets stupid and racist, but thinking ideas through to their logical conclusions is not such a strong Thai tendency. Perhaps they should just pass a law to confiscate the land of anyone who thinks logically if they want to preserve the rights of Thais -- and ensure that nobody questions the logic of Thai politicians.
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Thai Banks Slow Lending To Small Developers
in Jobs, Economy, Banking, Business, Investments
Posted
Did anybody notice that the article says Chiangmai has about 10,000 units selling 2,000 a MONTH and will be depleted in less than six WEEKS? No wonder Thais get in trouble with bubbles given math like that!