on-on

I just strolled through red shirt central in my best dandy outfit and it was about as calm as ever. Speakers playing of course, but the vast majority of people were sleeping through the heat of the day. The stalls were pretty empty, but that's probably because they don't set up until after dark. Folks were friendly as usual and there didn't seem to be a Jonestown air or anything. even the blackshirt guards were joking around and generally lazing about under umbrellas and coverings.

Someone may want to empty the portable toilets, they're pretty rank, heh. Other than the general feeling that the area could use better sanitation it wasn't off-putting to be around and people were pretty relaxed. Could all change in an instant.

The US government has a long time rule never to discuss or negotiate with terrorists. So why is the assistant secretary of state making an exception now? Is it because these terrorists are not threatening the US? Not only Thailand has double standards.

The term terrorist is pretty subjective and also depends which side of an issue one is speaking from, but even leaving that can of worms aside we absolutely do not have a long-time rule of not negotiating with terrorists, we have a long-time PR record of saying that we don't negotiate with terrorists. We have a long-time history of actually working with terrorists and putting them on the payroll. Like most powerful countries we're realpolitik-driven.

Now we have the DSI (like the CIA) on tele saying someone tried to bomb Wat Pra kau fortunatly it didnt detonate

the DSI's the most competent law enforcement agency in Thailand and they do actually do a good job at things from everything I understand, but they're not entirely above politics. It sounds pretty suspect that this would happen, so I'm not exactly ready to jump on the believer bandwagon regardless of what side is thought to be blamed (reds/yellows/government false flag/whatever). I can't imagine any Thai person seeing a benefit in bombing Wat Phra Keaw except to smear someone else and I can't imagine anyone who would think that smearing someone else would be worth the cost of being the guy who bombed Wat Phra Keaw. Still, who knows - but it sounds pretty odd.

The people here who think patients are being moved as a political stunt obviously do not know any medical professionals at Chula. It is a fine hospital with fine doctors, surgeons and nurses where they spend quite a bit of time and effort treating people as well as sending their professionals abroad for further training so that they can come back and give better treatment. The doctors and surgeons in charge of these patients are not <deleted>@#ing around, they are legitimately concerned for the health of patients who are being kept next to booming loudspeakers 24 hours a day and who are now being startled in some cases by armed searches of the hospital. As well, the professionals themselves cannot do their jobs effectively if at any moment they may be hectored and seized by some angry group of vigilantes. They can't come to work in safety either if they happen to be known political supporters of the other side - it's possible, whether the warped believe it, for a professional to hold personal political opinions and still have a vital, apolitical role in society. That's the case here.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but you do not screw with hospitals from either side or you can expect to see this kind of thing. The reds say this thing happened before or that thing happened before, so it's okay that we invaded the hospital. Unacceptable and with the propaganda coming from their side I have no reason to believe any of their moral equivalence arguments. I also have no reason to believe any of the moral equivalence arguments put forth by the other factions either. The yellows and the government both have their record of untrustworthy propaganda. Still, they did not do this particular thing and they are not the issue in this particular case and nothing the reds say changes that. There's nothing I've seen that justifies this kind of behavior and moving the patients is not a propaganda move, it's what you do when you think their standard of care may be compromised and you have a safer alternative - and you believe the patient can be moved safely. The people making diagnoses over pictures on a forum are a bunch of armchair expert morons. You have no idea what each individual patient's status is from a photo and only demonstrate this further with any attempt to express that you do.

If you're defending this you're defeating your own side's argument. There are legitimate arguments on the red side, none of them are helped by this event and one's credibility is only destroyed by attempting to rationalize it.

Viking, just 14 posts and your English improved dramatically...

First time a Thai person has ever used the incredibly niche internet term "flame" in English that I've seen. Also, note that the broken English features perfect tense and plurals right up until "instead of flame me" - that never happens with real Thais who have limited English. Tenses, plurals and helping verbs are the first to go.

In answer to the selfish who forget from where they are coming.....

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TO MY FRIENDS

I hear this cry coming from the bowels of the Thai country people, this long cry asking for more justice.

Who can remain insensible to the pain of the millions of men, women and children you represent? Your lives are rooted to this beautiful Country of which you are the gardeners. Generation after generation, you have been shaping the landscape, without you it will be an impenetrable jungle. Long days spent farming this rice, in the heavy rain, in the heavy sun, and when coming the dark, so exhausted that you have only one aim: to rest for working again tomorrow. You have gotten no time to take care of yourself: your wooden houses are nearly the same that those of your grand fathers’ ones and generations before. Modernity is slightly visible through a TV set, a tap water in your garden....few details: it is your life and you can be proud than during Centuries you have feed the whole Country, particularly your fellow town people.

During this time your fellow town people have worked hard also, building factories, making business and they have succeeded: day after day they are accumulating wealth. Today they have nice modern houses, nice cars and all the modern comfort going with. Today they are more and more busy for accelerating the accumulation of wealth. Today they have big projects in which they are going to invest billions and billions. They are so occupied that they have forgotten you have feed them during Centuries. They cannot disturb their activities and give you a small part of their wealth because they need it for their grandiose projects. The Cities are buzzing like beehives: the noise is so important that they cannot hear you: they are deaf to your long pain cry.

Red Shirt people you are entering in Humanity History, I wish the coming days to be Peaceful, I know you love Peace ...

Jerry

I don't think a lot of the red shirts you're talking to read Thai Visa. In fact I don't think a lot of Thai people period read Thai Visa. Most farangs can barely tolerate it, if I were Thai I'd find the ethnocentrism and the constant low level (sometimes outright) bigotry downright offensive. So, yeah, probably best to address this kind of thing to people who might actually read it instead of addressing a board full of foreigners about their "long pain cry" that isn't theirs.

did you guys see the main protest site today?

look at it!! numbers surely seem to be dwindling:

tweet photo of red shirt main stage

Yeah, it's no coincidence that this happened at the same time as the leaders disappeared, the shirt colors changed and you started seeing massive activity throughout the countryside. Seeing the inevitable coming, they've dispersed and started carrying out acts of insurrection throughout the provinces. I'm not one of these chicken little types and I really don't favor either side of this power struggle, but this recent development actually has me a bit worried. It's one thing for massive protests to seize a capital city, this isn't unheard of and most of our countries had events of a similar nature at one time or another (Hoovervilles, Bonus Army, in America, for example), but when individual cells start coordinating nationwide to challenge the authority of the state by controlling the flow of people and goods and carrying out violent acts then you're looking at a much harder to address problem. What's been done so far is penny ante, but if the trend continues things could get considerably worse and you could have an actual national insurrection. It's not like this is the first time in Southeast Asia that charismatic leaders using populist, Maoist-Third Worldism style rhetoric have rallied a bunch of rural people to action against the urban elites. It doesn't always turn out so well

The British army tried that in Northern Ireland and failed. The apartheid regime tried it in South Africa and failed. The French tried that in Algeria and failed. It doesn't work my friend.

Yes, it doesn't work because it doesn't solve the underlying problem. It *can* work if you're prepared to turn your country into an authoritarian state that violently suppresses any and all dissent, thus keeping the lid on the pressure cooker, but it can't work if you want to maintain any level of political freedom in society - and I don't see Thailand going that route (yet).

Robinson's is based out of Singapore, so clearly this is a Temasek-related Thaksin plot and the soldiers work for Lee Kuan Yew! Certainly someone must have put together this conspiracy theory by now as it's no more strained than half of what's out there (including the conflicting accounts you quoted and queried about, which I wondered about as well, heh).

As Chaimai said, "I have reached that point as well. Logic and reasoning left the scene long ago." That about sums it up. At this point all I know how to do is watch this unfold from a distance.

The claim that the grenades were fired from behind the red shirt baracades seems to be a bit iffy.

All we know was that at least three of them hit the platform area on Saladaeng BTS. So, is there really a straight shot to fire a grenade from the opposite side of the flyover where the reds are located, over ( or under) the footbridge where all the army & police are stationed, then avoiding the concrete supports of the skytrain and land of the platform? And not get lucky with this shot once but three times?

Or is it more likely that the grenades were fired from closer and from above down onto the platform and roof of the BTS?

I'm guessing Thailand won't be seeing a Posse Comitatus Act clause anytime soon, heh.

I guess it's decision time soon - close the office or not...

The whole situation makes it kind of odd that this is the first year in recent memory that the government hasn't declared a surprise extension of the official Songkran holiday period for an extra week, heh. Not that anyone but government employees paid attention anyway.

It's going to be darkly humorous if this flows over into Silom and turns into a historical event known the world over as The Patpong Putsch.

About 30 minutes ago on the UDD Facebook page we had this:

Urgent: 2 minutes ago, troops from Lumpini park have already engaged with the red shirt. Tear gas were being used and Lairds are in position. : DB

And then about a minute ago, this:

Update At silom, police block Silom entrance with soldiers at Convent soi nearby. Reds blocks Lumpini entrance with barbwires. No action yet! Sean

So a half hour ago there was tear gas, soldiers were engaging and LRADs were in position and now there's no action except a few joes stringing barbed wire around. This is what I'm talking about. Someone needs a better PR coordinator. I'm genuinely not an adherent of either side, but the complete gibberish spouted by everyone at any given time without any respect to what they may have said just previously makes it impossible to pay much attention to the boy who cried wolf. Not that I'm surprised, having lived here for a while, but it is still annoying when you'd actually like to know a fact.

EDIT: I know some Englishman is going to post "WHAT'D YOU EXPECT?!?!" but that's not the point. All movements and governments use propaganda. What's particularly disappointing about Thai propaganda is that it's not even internally consistent! At least back home they keep their lies in order, heh.

Currently it seems that the biggest thing going on at Ratchaprasong is the argument between Twitter user Andrewspooner and everyone who is insulting his wife.

0453 น. สถานการณ์เปลี่ยนด่วน...!!ตอนนี้ทหารด้านสวนลุมกำลังดันเข้ามาพี่น้องเสื้อแดงแถวนั้นมีกำลังน้อย พี่น้องเสื้อแดงที่อยู่ใกล้โปรด ไปช่วยเสริมกำลังด่วน ,,ตอนนี้ปะทะกันแล้ว มีการขว้างแก๊สน้ำตาใส่แล้ว ,,มีรถดับหู(Laird) จอดที่โรงแรมดุสิต ระวังกันหน่อยครับ.ติดต่อใครได้ โทรตามกันด่วนเลย

Oddly enough, with all the phonecams and linked up image sharing apps in the world, there's never a picture posted along with this stuff. Clearly something's going down, but I'm completely desensitized to the urgent tone because everything's said in the exact same tone and about half of it from everyone on any sides turns out to be complete hogwash. It'd be handy for them to post a picture here or there along with all their Facebook posts and tweets so people could get an idea of what's actually happening.

You can follow updates on Twitter at #redshirt for what it's worth, which isn't much on a signal to noise basis:

http://twitter.com/search?q=%23redshirt

Still, yeah, looks like some stuff's going down.

EDIT: A great example - "Every1 masked up. Band playing. Leaders grim faced. Many children & elderly in front. McDonalds closed" McDonald's closed, truly something wicked this way comes. The McDonald's was closed to comply with the revised McDonald's Tom Friedman rule that now says, "No two intersections with a currently operating McDonald's will go to war with one another."

Man, someone has really cranked up the music. I'm over by Ari, but I assume I'm hearing Ratchaprasong here. Good lord.

Nah, that's coming from the Army compound behind Villa - those boys have been cranking it up over the last few days.

I hadn't heard it the previous nights (been up working), but you are correct, I went to check it out and sure enough, there they were.

Sometimes I think many people don't understand that developing countries are still developing not just due to economic and HDI factors, but because the institutions of government and the political system aren't yet strong enough to support the country's operation. The Army doesn't follow this or that side of decide to do this or that based on any kind of institutional responsibility when the sh*t hits the fan because when push comes to shove it's more a self-interested organization than an institution of the government. The same goes for everything else. The guy above mentioned that when people don't follow laws, order breaks down. Yeah, that's what all of this is about. People in democracies (particularly nascent democracies) - red, yellow, whatever - don't follow laws out of fear of consequence, they follow them because of their particular interpretation of their social contract (though no one would word it that way). They follow laws put forth by a government that they feel vested in and that represents them and that governs a society in which they generally believe themselves to be participating as members. That's why people in America or the UK or wherever will stop at a red light in the middle of the night in a deserted small town and wait for it to turn green. They don't do that because they think the cops are watching and will arrest them, they do it because it's part of the system of rules that govern a society they feel benefits them. Here, the system of government is still in flux and no one on either of the political sides (who make up large enough minorities to matter) feel that the alternatives benefit them enough to invest themselves in the other's system of government. So, instead, they protest. The yellows didn't feel that way under Thaksin's people, the reds don't feel that way under the yellows' people and in the back of everyone's mind there's always that third option that's sort of a reset button allowing everyone to escape taking responsibility for forging a functional democracy. This will go on until there's no option on the table other than creating a functional government and at that point either they will or they won't and it's the "they won't" part that spooks me. We'll see. But in the mean time trying to compare the way this society and its institutions work to back home, wherever that is, with completely out of place debates about why the Army doesn't "do its job" and why the PM or anyone else doesn't "clean this mess up" is completely misunderstanding how developing countries with weak institutions of government operate and doesn't go anywhere substantive.

But the question remains why that wasn't done when the yellow shirts shutdown the airports for 2 weeks? i'll say one thing about the redshirts, their protests might be disruptive but they're not nearly as bad as what the yellows did-they sacked and occupied government house for months-vandalizing it in the process, and then the airport takeover which was only about 50 times more damaging to the economy then shuttering 2 malls and a few hotels.. i wonder if this has any real economic impact-Gaysrorn for example is owned by a rich family, and why Siam Paragon and Siam Discovery keep closing even though they are blocks away from the protest site and protesters(I was at Siam bts station yesterday) is beyond my comprehension. As far as the stock market- such political unrest is merely a bargain opportunity for many stocks, you can go buy some of them now and profit take as soon as the protest is ended, its just knowing the right day to buy.

Someone, maybe Dennis Ross, was talking about his time in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and he said Shimon Peres once told him that there were three kinds of people involved. I forget what the other two were, but the third group was "the collectors of arguments." Of course he was referring to the vocal elements on both sides who always have a definitive history of how anything they did was precipitated by the other side and who have a moral equivalence argument for every situation that shows how whatever they're charged with isn't as bad as some other thing. "Hebron!" "Deir Yassin!" Etcetera, etcetera. That's what about half of Thai Visa is like these days. Sort of an interesting break from the regular "Me missus' buffalo is sick again!" threads, though, I'll give em that.

There's absolutely no question why there wasn't a major crackdown when the yellow shirts were in charge. Everyone knows why. And as for which is worse, we'll know the answer to that when this all ends, but they're both incredibly damaging to the economy. If people want to keep this up until they can sit around the smoldering ruins of the economy going "Ya vell vhat you did vas clearly the vorst now, just look around!" then that's what they'll get. And that, of course, goes for partisans on both sides.

Twitter #redshirts government using rainmaking planes to wash out protests - have developed lightning weapons - crackdown imminent

EDIT: Seriously, I should start a parody Twitter account, it couldn't be any worse than most of what gets tweeted. REPORTS OF TANKS SHIPPED IN CRACKDOWN IMMINENT. They might as well set this stuff as a daily headline.

I dunno, if I'd spent the last month sleeping in the 100 degree Bangkok heat on hot pavement I'd probably be okay with sleeping in the cold driving rain, heh. Still, who knows. I'm enjoying the rain (from indoors).

Most news is poor to be honest, reporters usually lack in-depth on-the-ground knowledge. I usually hear stuff on twitter before it hits the mainstream media though there's the odd occasional bit of crapness like the post above. Mostly it's very very useful though.

Most of what I see on Twitter is crap, frankly. You have to pick through a lot of sh*t to get to the corn on any site where any yoyo with a computer or phone can post "news". It's like anything else on the internet. Lots of good info out there, but the signal to noise is really bad.

Man, someone has really cranked up the music. I'm over by Ari, but I assume I'm hearing Ratchaprasong here. Good lord.

Color me unsurprised if the invasion doesn't start 46 minutes ago like your link said, as well. They have those rumors daily. Eventually they'll be right, but it's irrelevant because it's propaganda on all sides. Totally useless.

I'm curious whether they might cut the internet if/when they start an offensive, in order to disrupt communications. Got a lot of work to do, which is a selfish concern, but a problem all the same!