Zooheekock

I admire and respect the OP's sentiments

Yes. It seems like fair comment on the lives and attitudes of an awful lot of white immigrants in Thailand.

I didn't realise this forum was meant to be for criticising other people's competence or otherwise in English grammar. Too many people on here have an unpleasant superiority complex.

Indeed. I do it only when those who complain are themselves guilty of making the most egregious mistakes. If someone is posting on a forum and gets mixed up between their and there or thinks that the plural of Thai is Thai's, well, it really doesn't matter.

The fact that he begs for people to stop conflict so that they can progress to democracy show how little he understands.

Democracy is all about conflict at the ballot box and at the debating stand. It is about conflict of ideas under the law.

He think that if he chases unity of ideas this will make for smooth democracy. History would suggest that this unity of thought and stifling of opinion is pursuit of unity is completely flawed as an idea.

Absolutely. He's even quoted in the OP as saying that "the main principle of economic recovery is the people should have the same opinion". This complete obsession with thought control and his utterly bizarre conviction that his/the junta's views are the only right and proper views which anyone can have is a recipe for disaster. As you say, he has not the faintest understanding of what democracy is and, it seems, now has some completely insane views on economics.

"Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said he has instructed all government facilities to be accessible to the handicapped and those who require supporting equipment."

Obviously the streets aren't considered to be a government facility. Once you depart from the bus or leave the building, you are on your own.

BlockedSidewalk-449x304.jpg

Swampy has fantastic disabled services but once you walkout the airport doors you are pretty much screwed.

Yes, exactly. Having wheelchair access to all government offices would be great but it's not much use if you have to negotiate hundreds of 6-inch-high curbs, blocked walkways, aggressive dogs, and Himalayan paving stones on the way there. I really hope the government do this but you can't help but worry that it is motivated more by a desire to be seen to do the right thing than actually to do the right thing. Does anyone think that Prayuth and his advisers have been sitting in meetings with civic groups representing people with mobility problems, carefully considering their advice and challenging their own preconceptions about mobility access? It's a bit hard to imagine. Sadly, I suspect that this will added to the ever-growing list of Friday night talk which goes nowhere.

Biggest load of garbage I have seen in a while, well at least today, maybe if they learnt how to use full stops and comma's it would help

Indeed. Now, how many sentences are there in the section I quoted above? And how many full stops? And, by the way, you don't use apostrophes to form plurals. Should of lerned his grammer, innit. Better luck next time, eh.

University rankings and list making have become a lucrative industry. Mostly, it has very little meaning in substance. The case of China's "rise" is a good example. Chinese "scholars" are notorious for plagiarizing their work in some of the most basic cut and paste jobs imaginable. Large portions of their publications are in phony peer reviewed, online "open source" journals whose designation as "scholarly" contrasts with the fees they charge their authors in order to publish in them. The fact is that people who teach in universities know who is good and who is not, whose work is valuable and whose is not. Lists and rankings are for the rubes.

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-judging-research-leading-academic-fraud-looks-good-paper

I don't know about Chinese universities through personal experience but I'm sure that there's a great deal of truth in what you say and you're right that rankings can be a bit of a waste of time. However, I see a lot of papers from Thai academics (of a sort) as well as dissertations and they are regularly of just diabolically awful quality. These go into exactly the journals which you describe - publications which exist solely for a kind of academic vanity publishing - so it's not as if the same complaints can't be made against Thailand.

Well, I'm sure once the good General has finished writing the script for his soap opera, he'll put on his hard hat and hi-vis jacket and do some site inspections himself.

Just try to focus on the topic, if you're capable.

Rather than making a bunch of posts criticizing other posts, you mean? Okey doke.

A positive step forward to help the handicapped and all you can come with is an inane, anti-Prayuth comment.

Oh! I see that was you first post. Congratulations. What did you get banned for last time? Excessive use of the word 'inane' or tediously repetitive insertions of stupid little pictures at the end of each post?

This is a hoax about solar storms forcing the grid to be shut down worldwide in December. It's rubbish, though perhaps Prayuth has fallen for it. That would certainly be anything but unbelievable.

unbelievable

I think that is the operative word.

this is another big step in the right direction for government.

Another? Even a stopped-clock tells the right time twice a day so let's wait until Prayet hits a hattrick before giving him his gold star and promotion to tomorrow's milk monitor.

In Thai, they're called โทงเทงฝรั่ง thong-thayng-farang.

Perhaps next year it might win the much-coveted 'Best Destination under Martial Law' category.

If there was an easy way to learn I'd do it. But I work full-time and value my weekends and holidays. Plus in 10 years of living here I've never found having only very basic Thai a handicap.

If you had devoted half an hour a day for those ten years, you'd be at a decent level by now. And whilst it's true that you can live perfectly comfortably in most of Thailand knowing only the barest minimum of the language, knowing more than the barest minimum also opens up new possibilities.

The perennial problem with these types of threads is that everyone has different standards. What is fluency? What is 'really speaking Thai'? You need to look at standardized measures, like the CEFR levels. You might say fluency is at B2 (which is upper intermediate or, for the British, a good grade at A level). At that level you can do pretty much everything you need to do and you can engage in general conversations which don't require super-specialized vocabulary. C1 is more like degree-level proficiency in a foreign language and C2 is near-native (on IELTS I think it's 8-9). Not many are going to reach those dizzy heights but if fluency is at B2/B2+ then there are a fair few people at that level, maybe less so with writing but with the other skills they are around. One thing is that these are fairly self-selecting groups - if you're not the kind of person who is going to devote the time required to get your Thai to that level, you are unlikely to meet many people who are.

I'm able to read books written in a casual style. I'd put my Thai at around intermediate level, I guess. However, the number of foreigners who can do the following is likely quite low:

-read academic text

-understand rachasap

-fluently discuss technical problems

-give a speech using rhetorical thai

-speak with monks using ecclesiastical thai

-use idioms properly in everyday speech

-make puns

-read/write poetry

etc.

It's very unlikely anyone is going to have interests which encompass all of those but I can do some. I read academic stuff in subject areas where I'm interested and I'm learning rachasap at the moment but I doubt I'll ever be a great poem reader and my ability to read vastly outruns my ability to discuss (in writing or speech) what I have read.

There's a review of this (and some other teach yourself to read Thai packages) on the A Woman Learning Thai website. (I won't put a link in because they always seem to get removed but Google will reveal all.)

To come here on a supposedly "GAY FORUM", and find that tolerated is not acceptable to me.

Got to agree with this. Posters get told off for using the wrong font or crappy punctuation but trolling a gay sub-forum is allowed? <deleted> to that.

Propaganda nonsense post has been removed as well.

This thread - and to a large extent, this entire forum - is propaganda nonsense. I look forward to its immediate removal.

Perhaps ginjag's deranged, hateful and profoundly stupid posts can be merged with the what-Thais-hate-about-foreigners thread. That would seem to be their natural home.

what credentials did they have

Do schools no longer exist? They had their electoral mandate.

You and your elk

Elk? I guess that answers my first question.

The mere fact that one of the most important, dynamic, trendy, profitable, and successful companies in the world has been run by an OUT AND PROUD gay man could definitely be seen by the haters as gay propaganda.

It's also a company which is very easily to hate. For me, this is good news, despite his involvement in Apple. I think it's great that this has happened, but it would be even better if it were a more mainstream company. Something well known but boring and mundane without any particular image, and not something which presents itself as being so cutting-edge. Something like UPS or Boeing or Johnson and Johnson or Nestle. It might not be quite such a big news item but Apple and the other tech companies are special cases and it's still a little ghettoized and a bit show-bizzy.