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Gilligan In Drag
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Posts posted by Gilligan In Drag
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Maybe I'm just delusional but it seems a bit thin on the ground stuff to claim. This is something that the Prime Minister said, its not his job is it, to declare taxes and tax schedules and so on. Where is the revenue department on all of this? If its the Prime Minister's idea, he could be outta here, he's facing problems is he not? It could well be just an idea. Also, something I ask myself is what was the context of the PMs statement? You don't get any idea of how serious he is about this. And TIT, even if they are serious, the government branches do not communicate or cooperate well, they don't like each other and resent each others authority. My Thai wife who pays attention to the news says it seems they are putting on a lot of airs right now to save face as the military coup government begins to step back into the shadows, they don't want to look like theye were ineffectual and of little impact. There's also all the Lazada Shoppe taxation brouhaha, my wife commented tha t they don't appear together at all or even serious on that stuff. Its just them trying to appear as though they are in control and in charge. I don't know if thats true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. It would be a real first if they began actually cooperating with Immigration or even the foreign embassies well enough to say deny people visas for not paying tax. You go to foreign embassies for visas, they are not the type to want to slog through a bunch stuff from the tax department for each visa that they issue. Embassies are just there to sort of hang out and go to cocktail parties and engage in a little espionage from time to time not grunt work like sorting through everyone's taxes. They probably depend quite heavily on our visa application money and they know if they start denying people visas it cuts into their cut. It doesnt make sense to me that they would play along with this. Immigration doesn't strike me as the kind of outfit that is going to want to do the bidding of the revenue department or anyone, they are really a don't-tell-me-what-to-do bunch, they are police after all. How do you think the police would like being asked to sort through peoples tax junk in your home country? I used to work at a government university and immigration really did not like being told to give foreign profs visas. We were in there all day every year they were on the hone to my univeristy for hours and arms crossed and no, no, no! They are jealous of other government branches authority. Just by myself getting a marriage visa is no problem but if government university asks they were like, "Take a hike Mike! Who do you think you are!" I can imagine it would not be much different with the tax authority trying to tell them, "This guy clear that guy no, don't give him! Thsi one, yes, that one no way, go to his house and arrest him!"
It could have been something said to boost support for the PM or his party to get something done that perhaps opposition was saying Thailand couldn't afford like climate change compliance or whatever it is Hans Swab and Greta Toonsermuhgoochie and the globalist gestapo in Geneva want, so why not say you'll have nothing to eat and you'll be happy and that is supposed to mean something.
Or otherwise this whole tax thing is not yet really here or there. The PM said it a long time ago as well. Why hasn't anyone at a more concrete level like say in the actual tax wing of the government said anything or even sketched out a few more details since? I remember looking at so-called translations of what you will have to pay, probably cooked up at some tax law or accounting firm over a case of Sang Som it was quite outrageous as I recall. I'd be paying 30 percent of something that is poverty level income, they seemed to clearly be doing a first run to see the reaction and we've heard nothing concrete since. Then again I depend on this website alone for news about such stuff, so maybe the real enchilada has not been served up to us, but then again most of you don't like Mexican food, so there ya go.
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To add to everything else thats wrong with this backflip, this concern for people's health
and the sanity of the youth, what hypcocrisy.
How do they think being put in prison benefits anyone's health or sanity?
Or why not do something about Thailand's air pollution and lack of sanitation and general corruption?
No doubt those things affect more people and ruin more lives than being a stoner does.
Thailand has a very rate of lung cancer and lower rates of cigarette use and you have no say in the matter
if farmers in your area want to burn their fields twice a year and spray the hell out of it with pesticides
that are known to be very hazardous to people's health thers nothing many people can do, they have to just accept having their health wrecked.
Its hard to respect this healtyh minister at all when there are other reasons than wanting to protect anyone from dangers to their health, if i had to guess
it would be about protecting police rackets and big alcohol interests.
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It really disappoints me when everything goes just as my pessimistic mind
thinks it will, all I ask is for a few surprises, even if they are nasty ones!
The whole decriminalization fiasco was almost certainly the product of complete incompetence
and utter lack forthought. Of course they will eventually get back around to fixing
such a mistake and they will make it a criminal offense again.
I don't undersatnd the assertion
you hear again and again, "Ya can't put toothpaste back in in the tube!"
Yes you can put toothpaste back tube. Period.
Think about it. You put it back in the tube the same
way you put it in the first time. Maybe you personally cannot put toothpaste back
in a tube, and i cannot, but thats only because we are not willing to invest say 10,000,000 bhat
in a toothpaste tube filling machine. These people are in the toothpaste business,
they not only have that machine, they have a whole damn factory.
The other completely predictable one is that now that you have Thaksin
back in charge as police state commisioner, grabbing people's milk and cookie money
as he needs it, with him as your guy, his drug wars and vice crack downs come as part of the package,
his drug war was an important piece of his whole
modus in the early 2000's, I'm sure he was quite pleased with it as he took it to outrageous lengths,
I can't imagine you can have a Thaksin government without a drug war
or other crusade on some other minority group like the Muslims in the south,
its like his hobby to do those kinds of things
and he can;t very well start attacking gay people or something in this day and age as much as I can imagine he'd like to, so
might as well start attacking potheads as the appetizer, before you go after maybe say the entire Thai middle class.
haul off an order the police to shoot any middle management type for being an alcoholic or drunk in the office something
and then as the main course put the workers in prison camps and blame them as being a health hazard to tourists
as they had the lowest rate of vaccination against latest covid strain. "Sorry we'll have to send them to the ovens."
That MOve Forward guy seemed to have a boyscouts attitude, "Potheads bad! Go to prison! Not to the ovens though..."
But you feel sorry for him they wouldnt let him be the guy to do that.
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This is a good site for keeping track of the air quality, tens of thousands of independent air quality reporting stations feed the map that is updated every hour or two. You can get an idea if its just the people in your village in a carbon for cooking fires production frenzy or is it a wider problem, also good to decide where to go for weekend and gives you a good idea of the level of nonsense we are fed from the climate change alarmists how it is all created by the west you can clearly see day in and day out 365 days of the year China, India and Thailand lead the world in air pollution. https://aqicn.org/map/world
Smoke in the air does more than just damage your lungs, it wrecks your whole body, I have bladder cancer, supposedly a smokers disease and I have never smoked in my life, but I have lived in Thailand 24 years. Look around you, people routinely die in Thailand in their 50's and people will say that's a good ripe old age.I'm from a family of people on both parents sides who live well into their 90's, I will likely die in the next few years hardly above 60. Amazing Dieland I always call it.
the aforementioned air pollution map:
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I would not trust Thai doctors with my eyes, in fact my cataract is as a result of using medication prescribed
by a Thai government university hospital doctor/opthamologist. I was alerted to the problem and warned off the medication by a third party by a pharmacist in Bangkok who was aghast regarding the medication
I was asking to have refilled. He told me it was a ridiculously strong and dangerous medication to be using for my
problem, he asked me with visble concern in his tone,"Who asked you to take this medicine? is this your idea or something? I said no I was given it for blepharitis by an eye doctor and due to go back to see her in a few weeks. His widened, "how long have you been using it, two weeks, three weeks?" I said "Four months." he nearly jumped out of his skin, "Oh my god man! STOP! DO YOU WANT TO LOSE YOUR EYESIGHT!"
He kept asking me, "Are you sure you are still under the doctor's care and advice I said yes she keeps having me come back again and again, he
said sounds like shes running an experiment on you and you need to stop using this medication and never go back to her office, Stop now!"
My eyesight indeed was quickly degeneratingand I told him about it and he said surely its the medication. "That is the most disgusting thing i hjave heard all day, nobody uses that medication except for very serious conditions that won't clear up otherwise.
i went to check with another specialist a Bangkok Hospital opthamologist who told me I now had a cataract and that the medication was a good cadidate for what caused the cartaract. She did want to get involved I don;t think and said she had never heard of the medication I was given and recommended I get surgery.
The husband of a friend of my wife, has had his lenses in his eyes replaced and advised me "Don't do it.
You'll be going in and out of the clinic to fix this fix that for the rest of your life, they trashed my eyes.
They did a terrible job with the surgery and there's has been on and off complications for years"
I think I'd rather go blind, utterly fed up with the medical profession.
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And Merry Poppins is just the tip of the iceberg. Your just getting started with yer Merry Poppins and Dick Van Dyke and his top o' the morning to ya atrocities, and so It starts there and proceeds and before you know it you're in Shark bar on Soi Cowboy where the unspoken rule till after the fact of having ordered a drink is that a drink is actually two drinks, buy two and get only one and you have 15 minutes to drink it and get out or be charged for two more drinks and so on every fifteen minutes, but you didn't know that until you read about it 6 months later on Stickman. So what am I now, buying lady drinks for myself? Is that why I've come all the way from my turnip patch in Nova Scotia so that i can buy myself lady drinks? And then do something else they don't like, the first one being showing up anywhere near the bar in the first place, you should just leave them alone at the gogo bars in Thailand, theres plenty of supermarkets and great socks selections in the department stores in Thailand to spend your time on than to have to go to Soi Cowboy and they also have temples you can go to so leave the, alone stop imposing your culture and privilidge on them they want to be left in peace and quiet. So where was I? Oh yeah, do something else they don't like at Shark bar such as reject the two Pillsbury Dough girls who invited themselves to sit down with you initially and call someone else over who at least doesn't look angry and like they got run over by with the ugly rolling pin stick twice two many times for a drink logically leaving the only thing left to do with you is charge you for nine drinks,
buy 9 get one and you can't drink it till you cough up the 3000 baht. We don't have any change and Throw 2 thousand more baht at them as a tip and the bouncers put you in a head lock and drag you out and you're good to go. But its OK, that happens to everyone now its just a misunderstanding that happens repeatedly fo 6 months to everyone who goes in there a failure of the bar staff to communicate, to learn quickly and they'll soon be putting it on the menus that you're under the gun as soon as you step in or so they tell me on Stickman!
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I would guess the real intention is to help the big alcohol makers in Thailand create more barriers for smaller producers and importers of alcohol.
As an importer you'd have to slap a label on the imports yourself. The upshot is people with little money to
spend on alcohol are left the lowest quality stuff which is even more of a health hazard and encourages drinking for
the sake of getting drunk only because it isn't enjoyable in any other way. But that is win for the alcohol companies because
they likely invest in pharma and health care industries and piuck up more big money that way.
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What complete crap the op is. Hey Wanchai, why don't you get a job!
Or hey why don't you become a politician, you sound like one! Or here's a modest proposal, stop the thumb sucking and bed wetting and why don't write next week about how Thai people should vote for you because you are here to save them from these racist mysogynist draft dodgers! Draft dodgers?! Oh, I suppose they should just go and be slaughtered on the battlefields of Ukraine to help the Black Rock Investment group up their 13% direct control of the Ukrainian economy, right?! As MP and leader of the new Wanchai Hates Foreigners party you propose to Thai people just round up the scumbag draft dodger foreigners and put them in re-education prison workcamps, just like in North Korea that'll learn 'em! Out of the draft dodging frying pan and into Wanchais's Infierno!
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They're trying to keep Stickman out of the country.
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Not to dismiss the reality of this, as some kind of new thing, I suppose it depends on where you are from but my spidey sense is
telling me this is all not going to come to anything.
How long will it take them to actually enforce these rules, though I am not very well read on this issue,
I haven't seen anything mentioned about how they plan to make this work. Are they really prepared to get the banks in on this, which I think they will have to, are they going to provide reporting forms in English, which they should if the idea is to start taxing foreigners. How many foreigners will just give up on paying taxes if they can't read the forms? Are they really going to send you a return if you overpaid?
They are proposing to tax people who have very little income, about 3 thousand dollars a year is the starting point it looks like and you'll be paying them 150 dollars on that. If your income is 3 thousand dollars a year, you likely don't have 150 dollars lying around. And as you go up the scale, if i recall correctly, the percentage you owe increases very steeply, so I think even people earning a barely living wage will be hard pressed to pay the amount, its like 30 percent if you are making say 12,000 dollars a year. Again, on that kind of income, you won't likely be able to cough up 3,600 dollars. So have they got the fully armed with automatic weapons tax officials like the have in the United States to bust into your place and seize your asset, yes, thats singular, asset, as in a phone or a computer, if you don;t pay? I can't see that. Seems they will have to start working very closely with the banks and immigration, literally taking the amount before any money transfer arrives in your account. Thais don't like cooperating others if they feel they have significnt position or authority such as head immigration or head of a major nbank. I wouldn't think government officials would be trusted enough to be allowed near a bank and access to its files and operations as may ne needed in the case making the banks become arms of the government as tax collectors.
Maybe things have changed recently, but I seem to recall a lot of talk about the Thai Tax organization, literally a family mafia, the Wongsawats having difficulty collecting taxes from most people. A good chunk of Thais do not respect tax authorities and rightly so. If you work for the government or as an employee of a registered business OK yes, your employer will have a motive to do tax collection for the government, but most people are rather lose ends and it is purely voluntary. Yer village papaya pok pok stand will not face any consequences for non-compliance. They may have the means to stop street vendors in Bangkok but theres another 40 million people at large outside of Bangkok.
I'm suspicious that all of this is so that we don't completely forget who these people are. People on here say they are doing the right thing by paying, maybe if you are wealthy, otherwise I don't think so. You are not being left with enough to live on suddenly. You are depriving your family in lieu of handing a large chunk of your income to people who clearly are not benefiting the country and who themselves are not in any basic needs that you taxes will provide. For Thais, Education is not provided for, money for the old and disabled is a bad joke at 600 baht per month, health care for the poor is terrible, my step daughter has a serious condition, they say they will provide her meds, but they are often out of stock, and she would have a problem if she didn't pay out of pocket half the time. So I have a hard time believing, suddenly, the whole shabby mess has been whipped into shape and welcome to the machine, you will pay your tax whether you can or not, and no stone will go untaxed in Thailand.
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The way I understand it is, If your country has a tax treaty with Thailand, and many do, you still only owe tax in your country if your country like the United States taxes you regardless of where you live. I don't owe th US anything because I make less than 70 thousand per year, so now it looks I'll have to pay Thailand taxes, unless paying no taxes because nothing is owed is considered paying taxes which I am sure they are not so generous as to alllow that.
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Thailand must be getting obese, getting their snickers in a snot about fatso pants!
Its simple dumbo, if you don't like it then with a flubbery heave to make your own elephant pants
ya buncha Sponge Bobs! But noooooo, afraid of that, no easy fat bucks in any o'that so ya leave it to the
Chinaman! Its your own fault Tuskar, no peanuts for you!
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On 1/23/2024 at 10:18 AM, ChipButty said:
Have a look at this web site https://belbev.asia/bottled-products/
I filled out their form about a year ago, but they never answered.
They are probably only interested in doing business with bars and stores
which is what I'd like to know, where are these shops and stores
because i will buy beer from them, these beers on this site
are nowhere to be found anymore.
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32 minutes ago, Ralf001 said:
Thanks very much for that Ralf! Yeah there's som e good ones and a number I have never tried. The prices are low too!
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11 minutes ago, Morch said:
Problem with all those imports are expiry dates and handling. When you crack them open, disappointment is not uncommon.
As for sources, I don't know - used one of the websites above one with mixed results. A couple of the local upper scale restaurants seem to have a line of supply though, so there must be a dealer somewhere. Not cheap, though.
Yes, I agree that sometimes they are bit old by the time you get to them. When Wish Beer was good I got almost entirely still good tasting beers, but I don't think there was a fifty bottle order that I ever made that didn't have a few bad ones, as in not stored properly and a bit off.
Did you use the Oak Wine website I mentioned? They seem too good to be true and I hesitate, not to mention the nearest bank is 30 minutes away and thats the only payment they accept is a cash transfer. Still if I knew they were good I'd buy a few cases of stuff I haven't had in ten years because no one in Thailand will sell their beers despite for some people, those beers being the best in the world. I know, its a matter of taste, and you ask most Brits about Belgian beer and they respond something like "Yuck! Treacley crap!"
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1 hour ago, BenStark said:
Leffe is available at Makro and other supermarkets
I mentioned in my post that I was aware of these beers and they are OK, Makro does not carry Leffe Ruby and Cuvee or any of their others, but yes I pick up a couple bottles of brown and blonde everytime I go to Makro or Tops up here in Roi Et. Villa used to have 4 types of Leffe and now only the blond and the brown. I think my point is I am looking for a way to get access to a wider array of ales and darker beers, such as was once available.
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40 minutes ago, Lite Beer said:
They used to carry these beers but no longer, there are no Trappist beers its just what you can get at the supermrket.
They have listings of some of these beers but are constatntly out of stock, it looks as though there is no intention
of stocking them.
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I was just looking at Villa Market's web page and was glad it looks like I can order a lot of stuff I can't get
up in Isaan. However, the selection of beers was really down from what was in the brick and mortar shops
themselves say 5 years ago. To my taste buds and particular variety of alcoholism, just lots of the same beers
but with different labels, IPA's, lagers and plain wheat beers leaves a lot to be desired.
I really like heavier, darker beers, and it seems they are nearly extinct in Thailand now.
Beer Lao dark is not really a dark beer in my book but more a lager with a bit of molasses thrown in.
I was rather surprised that there were at least a hundred varieties of beer and cider listed on Villa,
but not one stout beer. I've long noticed there is a thing about stout in Thailand, it's only ever available at certain bars,
Guinness something available in corner shops just about all over the world has never been available in Thailand.
Coopers, not my favorite stout but it will do, has seemingly completely vanished.
Weinstephaner's line of beers is down to one basic wheat beer in the Tops supermarket in my town and not represented at all on Villa.
Schneider Weiss, my favorite German wheat beer alchemist/brewer, makers of the phenomenal tap #6 Aventinus, and Eis Bock disappeared 15 years ago
from Foodland, the alcohol section manager said there was a disagreement of some kind between Foodland and the Schneider-Weiss
distributor, so the manager said Foodland was cut off. You could order it from Wish Beer, but Wish Beer is completely gutted these days, very little of anything.
7-8 years ago I stopped into Villa Market Tonglor and they had a very good selection of Belgian beers from the Kasteel company.
I would be fully satisfied if I could buy those, their coffee Belgian Quadrupel and cherry quad are really pretty excellent I think.
The proper Belgian trappist beers, made by actual Catholic Churches, well, maybe that's asking a bit much,
but there were a couple of specialty shops who sold them, one European deli meats and cheeses shop on Suk Soi 19 had all the best
Belgians, even an array of matching glassware for m,ost of the beers they sold. They went out of business in about 2015 or so.
Hell, even Baccara gogo Bar on Soi Cowboy had Orval Trappist and Cactus Bar on Cowboy had a really good Belgian selection, John had
Tripel Karamaliet and some others and he'd get new things in and tell you if he knew your were keen.
There was the Roach Motel beers as I like to kiddingly call them, Rochefort 10, 8, and 6 the best of the lot at Cactus bar sometimes and
in the above mentioned cheese and meats shop on Soi 19.
But, Yes, you can get Duvel at Villa, and thats a good one. The basic Leffe's are Ok and they have the blonde and the brown, but Villa used to carry
a few others by Leffe that are better I think the Cuvee and . They have Fuller's London Pride, but not their London Porter which used to be fairly easily had in Thailand.
OK, thats about it for my sad song, "Oh Where Oh Winely Nag, Hath the Darke Beers Goneth?" Now time to ask about one seller in Thailand that I found
and ask if anyone's had a go with them. They are called Oak Wine and incredibly they seem to have just about every kind alcoholic drink
on planet earth, including most of the beers I have mentioned in this post. It seems a little too good to be true and they only accept direct
bank deposits for payments, so that also makes me wonder if they aren't
just on the take. Anyone tried them? Any other suggestions for where to buy beer for delivery, my internet searches are not yeilding anything really.
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6 minutes ago, Bday Prang said:
Nice one, I think many will also quietly continue here as they have done for centuries, My brother in law , a police inspector, confirmed a long time ago that he considered "Lao" to be the best
The people who traditionally have valued and developed the world famous so-called Thai stick, Mango Thai and Lao Gold as they are known today and among many other lines are the Phu Tai and ethnic Lao of Isaan and they hail from both countries, however Thailand has had more exposure to other regions and farmers have mixed the more inbred and unique lines they still keep in remote parts of Laos with probably indicas for better yields and faster flowering at the expense of quality of the effects. Still incredible weed has been grown here for centuries and still does, just not avaiolable in your average shop in Thailand. But You can still grow your own of those varieties. There's a pot landrace preservation society called Zomia that also sells other lines that Angus doesn't carry and they also have excellent photos of various southeast Asian drug varieties that are still grown and seeds of which they sell from Thailand, Cambodia, and India. They are based in Bangkok as well, but looks like they will have to close up and it will all disappear again and you'll have to go into the hills of Nakorn Si Thammarat yourself and get your own seeds of Grandma's Tanaosri Red Star or Meun Sri!
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1 hour ago, Bday Prang said:
Nice comment and I totally agree,, Ps what are you smoking and can you get me some
Haha! Strictly Lao and Honduran sativa! Get yourself a couple seeds from Angus who sells very reasonably priced amazing landrace and heirlooms from all over the world and probably about 15-20 different Thai, Burmese and Lao lineages, The Real Seed Company and Quick Seeds are run by him. Thailand will be stupid about all of this and illegalize pot but they wil carry on not making a fuss about it in Laos.
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There's also a pretty important consideration that gets ignored and thrown under the bus:
The dangers of prohibition.
Recreational drug use can harm some, but so do governments that propagandize their people and render them
that much more confused and ignorant in that process, or so can driving a car harm people. Supernovas explode with the power to annihilate whole local
star clusters, but also provide the material to form new worlds. Get used to it, Shiva. the god of destruction is not worshipped
by 100's of millions of people in India for no reason, its a profound and prevasive aspect of life that the polite genteel gardners
of the western world think they can get under control by spraying their gardens with pesticides. When governments embark on drug wars and prohibitions you are effectively spraying your people with pesticides adding something equally as dangerous as rampant drug abuse if not more so
to the whole mix. Its not like no one knew that even 100 years ago either and its often what you read as to why they stopped alcohol prohibition in the west: its doesn't work and and creates more problems than it solves.
Prohibition is already a long discredited way to control the harmful effects of mass recreational drug use on society if it ever
is sincerely carried out to protect society, and personally I don't think it is done for that purpose.
It is clearly useful as a political tool, social control, and for the profit of entities like colonial and neo-colonial entites and drug companies,
branches of government and criminal elites. It is NEVER done to protect you, lets not be naive, there are no governments
that exist or who have ever existed that were sincerely that interested in their citizen's welfare. It isn't their job, its your job
if you want to live your life fully as a sentient sensible adult human being and if you think the government is able to protect you
from reality even if it wanted to, realities like there are many chemical compounds and plants that change people's behavior in ways that may be dangerous,
then you have been duped into helping them very actively not help you.
As we well know from the Iran-Contra scandal in the United States in the 1980's, an illegal drug market
is a great way for rogue actors in government and military to get funding they need to run wars and other projects
without approval, public knowledge and oversight. So in our weak efforts, efforts that seem these days to have completely failed, to have representative
and transparent government that genuinely serves their people throughout the world, drug prohibitions add even more problems to the human problems with running sovereign nations that treat its citizenry with due respect and are corrosive towards those ends of an accountable
government which acts with purpose that is clear to all making for a life that without intervention and stupid nannying
is actually genuinely safer and better for everyone.
People wax all snarky-barky on the forum whenever the cannabis legalization in Thailand topic comes up, "Oh, they just wanna
make a bunch of money!" The same can be said for illegalization, just that who makes the money will be different.
If its illegal then who makes the money changes hands those in government and business who are positioned to profit from illegal sales will benefit.
making weed illegal is not to save the children and adults of Thailand, if they were interested in that, other more key things would be prioritized
such as banning toxic chemicals, chemicals banned all over the world no less,
but used ubiquitously in food, agriculture. Or working to effectively ensure people have clean air and water.
Or how about protecting people from predatory doctors and pharmacies with malpractice laws.
Or how about instilling in people good basic health and safety awareness, or tryin gto create a system
that does not run on corruption so that laws protecting people from harmful pollutants, food and medication
will be enforced and Thailand can honestly test foods and drugs for harm creating capabilities. Theres plenty
of dangerous chemical compounds galore everytime you step into a shop or market or supermarket. Really, cannabis
and alcohol are scapegoats, even though of course one must be judicious in their use. But that goes without saying
for anything.
The health of Thai people is very poor, among the worst in Asia. Anywhere you go in Thailand you are exposed to life shortening levels
of agricultural poisons, a witches brew of compounds in the air from burning refuse and exposed in the cities to clouds of
auto-motive exhausts from easily solvable traffic problems. But there is no will to solve these problems because Thailand like many
countries is hopelessly corrupt and because of that the mentality is theres no immediate gain or opportunity to be gained from
solving those problems. Apparently there is somethingto be had from this cannabis legalization re-criminalization game or it would ne all shrugged off.
In addition to providing bad actors with illegal markets and their attendant inflated prices,
With drug prohibitions in place, drugs can be used as a way for government and law enforcement to
falsely imprison, fine and smear who ever they like.
We all know in urban areas everywhere that the police can and do plant drugs
on people who have broken no laws whenever they want to target someone to be taken down or merely fined.
Someone's occasional use of a recreational substance can be a way of completely removing
them from their well earned and capable positions. So, OK go ahead, re-criminalize cannabis
and hand law enforcement another tool to abuse their positions for their own gain and society's loss.
And then there's workplace and law enforcement drug testing that prohibition gives you.
And apart from the obviosu it has the unfortunate effect of having normalized the situation whereby
people forefeit their right human right to privacy and bodily autonomy and now your boss or the government or the police can
then have some not insignificant control over your neurochemistry, its not just the big bad
government or law enforcement standing between you and your brain, its your buddy you work with and say good morning to everyday.
Prohibition via drug testing then sets up these subtly corrosive and insidious relationships
like a cancer within the society. People like to recall the old communist regimes where
social empowerment and cohesion was shattered, even down down to the family level
by snitch networks. To me it seems the drug test is another species of this found in the post communist
uni-polar world soon to become multi again.
The drug test is also a routine way that law enforcement can arbitrarily extract fines whenever they like and detain who they like.
We are conditioned by the high-techness and scientific glamor of it to carry on in the media and to each other and ourselves
as though testing were actually a legitimate means to control the problem of drug use. Its a gizmo, wow! It must be the answer
to the problem of determining whose on drugs and who isn't. It clearly is not, its very well known drug tests
do not have high enough levels of accuracy and people who do not use drugs can be subject to life ruining
consequences should a law enforcement operative run a money saving or god forbid counterfeit and completely
arbitrary drug test and get a false result.
But we now mostly accept drug testing and naively think, and you deny the flakiness of drug tests and assure yorurself well I don't use drugs I have nothing to fear and this will help create a safe world and put the druggies in jail and rehab where they belong and all will be well. Just because you have a piece of technology doesn't mean you have anything legit. It could be anything and you don;t know
how that test actually comes by its results, its all completely opaque to the average person and the agencies and the compaines that make these
tests can hide behind that. They don't even have to make legitmate tests, in most countries such as the United States that even have
supposed consumer standards checks, the outfits are wholly corrupted. Why bother with selling a real test. Just pay some
person with a science degree 2 thousand dollars and presto you have a test that without fail and in 15 minutes tells you whether someone has taken an
illegal drug. Or consider how far you are going to get in Thailand investigating and challenging whether even a fake test was conducted, all the police have to do
is say, "This is a drug test...and the drug test says you took an illegal drug...you'll have to give up your green papaya shaver manufacturing enterprise to us
because you'll be in for quite awhile." Just ask Americans about that kin dof thing, how now the government routinely seizes all of your assets
and has railroaded many innocent people, ruined them and never returned what was wrongfully seized from them because of a drug charge. there som ehorrific ironies afloat such as in one case traces of cocaine were found on crisp bank notes foun din a safe of one successful balck american business man and his defense attornies presented studies that found that because there is so much illegal drug running done by unmonitored military and government organizations in the United States, there is enough cocaine on every US dollar to incriminate and seize the assets of anyone they choose. So yeah, great, run a drug war and prohibition Thailand.
The story of this man who was run in and had yachts and homes and his business empire and assets seized because of a drug test is to be found in the highly recommended two volume memoirs, Volume 1-Phikal and Volume 2-Tikal of the discoverer of the benefits of MDMA,
and inventor of hundreds of psychoactive compunds the experimental neuro-pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin himself was an eminently thoughtful and articulate and humane advocate for human freedom and potential. He experimented on himself and his friends and chronicalled in voluninous detailed the findings of the beneficial effects of compounds he created at his home laboratory funded by royalties he'd gained earlier in his career working for Dole Pineapple and his salary as a professor and public speaker at UC Berkeley in California. His interest was in psychoactive compounds long before they were in the public eye and concern, and so he got out of working as a chemist in big agriculture as soon as he could. But despite being among the very few given license to investigate and create psychoactive chemicals by the US government, the DEA decided eventually to go in and tear his lab apart and end his activities by prosecuting him to destroy his work and even ban his book which detailed to the public the effects and methods to synthesize just about anything he found or made himself. The power of a mandate of a drug prohibition gave the DEA, the agency charged with fighting the drug war against the whole world the overeach to go in and bust up the research. The library of Alexander (Shulgin) has been burned to the ground and decades have now passed in which the befits and nature of the human mind may forever remain obscured.
And then there is the way that drug testing has opened pandora's box to use flakey technologies to be able to
predict or even read a person's mind for pre-crime and of course as we know there is much discussion
by governments and law enforcement authorities about how
a pre-crime or a test result saying you were about to commit a crime will be tantamount in the future to
having actually done the crime. To me it would seem that drug testing is a similar operation. Your crime of
having been inebriated and thus a danger to yourself and others is not otherwise apparent. So you have to
take the drug test which in effect says, you are a danger before the fact, its a type of pre-crime indicator in many cases.
And also, not to mention, that drug testing, like background checks and monitoring employee
internet activities is used as a shabby substitute for critical thinking and
evaluative skills, and distracts probably all
companies to some degree from spending time and resources and getting actually competent management
who are foscused on actually able to evaluate employee work and performance and actual behavior on the job.
The society that is on drugs and "on" prohibition, as prohibition is just as capable of creating a deluded nation as a drugs are
hallucinates as it runs the drug test, the surreptitious background check, the application gathered look at
an employee's comments and other activities on internet.
The normalization of superfluous and glamorous high tech tools with limited benefit especially in places
like Thailand where critical and evaluative skills are under developed no doubt lowers the quality of life for everyone.
Indeed ruling institutions and individuals do not want people to have the ability to evaluate performance and behavior
lest their managerial class begin to turn those well honed workplace skills against them. So, you give them the drug that is
drug tests and multi-choice personality investigation quizzes and monitor their twitter posts in lieu. its also no doubt a lot more fun
and inspiring for managers to get to play god and say lets see if Nigel was smoking dope on the weekend and ask him to submit a drug test
rather than going through the monotony of actually looking at what he is doing and having to weigh many considerations
as to whether he's helping the company or organization or govt branch that pays him. You can just save all that headache and hours of boredom
by doing a simple and fun drug test with lots of cool bells and whistles and colors and charts and then be able to proclaim with complete conviction, "Ah ha! He uses drugs! And he talks a load of crap that i don't appreciate on facebook! I knew he was on drugs! He's out of here! I don't care that he is the star developer!"
How much does it matter if your star developer tests positive for cocaine and marijuana, especially if you never ran
a test you'd never have known. Just the act of running a test for drugs is an admission that there is no obvious problem
with your employee's performance in the first place.
So thanks to drug prohibition its now acceptable for management to go through the
motions of monitoring the effectiveness of their employees, its essentially a ritual substituting for
real discernment: is the employee an asset in his actual behavior and real contributions. I have never
worked under any Thai manager, and I have worked under many, who could evaluate the quality of anyone's
work or understand the value or liability to the work environment of employees in their charge. They look at
anything but, they understand almost everything but is this work he's doing good or not.
Yet the discussion here on the threads and in media and by the government ignores the dire price to be
paid by society as a whole for a drug war or prohibition. They seem blithely unaware despite the precedent
despite the semi-detente in the west regarding recreational cannabis.
The end of alcohol prohibition in the United States left us with that conclusion, that was nearly a century ago
yet as soon as alcohol prohibition ended JD Anslinger picked up the reigns and fired the fuel of hysteria against cannabis.
But as that all begin sto end Thailand not only makes a false move to undo it but it decides to say no actually screw all that.
It really seems to doubly affirm their commitment to harming their population to using prohibition for political gain and enriching themselves
and their overlords.
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I find it hard to believe this is offensive to that many Thais, theres a certain type looking for any excuse though I suppose.
The media is maybe overdue for a Thais are offended by a foreign movie or other entertainment that has to do with Thailand kind of furor like The Hang Over II or a Lady Gaga concert being cancelled because she mentioned fake rolexes
or that old Yul Bryner movie that shall go unnamed because of forum rules.
Too bad a story isn't run how some tourist hotels run by Thais do not admit mixed race guests particularly Thai women or Asian with non-Asian guests. Thais offending Thais and Asians with racism and it creates a lot more hurt than a silly video. Its happened to me and my wife and once a freind was here on holiday with his Chinese-American wife and they were turned away from several Khao San Road guest houses.
They say they are worried how it looks to the other guests. Another reason I don't holiday here even though I live here
Considering how universally disliked Indians seem to be in Thailand, this is pretty mild payback, it really is no money no honey if you are an Indian tourist I can imagine. They should make their next video and call it Thailand Really Luv Me Jing Jing! And I Love Thailand Long Time Too Mutt!
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She got elect-oh-cuted! Yeah, elect-oh-cuted numbah 1 oafuhdonist who almost die on holiday in Thailand by duh elect-oh-cute poll and by the pole on Instahgram, ya, very good! Very cute! Yeah Thailand have electro polls too before but they cancelled by cute people don't want a general electoh-cutions, because they want to be numbah 1 cute people who say, why we need electro polls, you just buy some batteries and run solar cell and wind powah, why already you serious about dangerous electoh-polls and high voteage wires!
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I might drink a bit more, but what i want to to drink is unavailable. You cannot order beer
from online anymore, and you have to do that upcountry if you want anything more
than a Full Moon IPA or Chang or Leo. It's illegal unless you join some club, and even those are run out of Hong Kong
so no care for anything but making a buck. I like the cheaper and what I think are much better European beers than trendy craft beers and thats the only alternative to Chang-Singh-Leo as far as beer. The Thai craft beer people make beer as boring as Chang-Singh-Leo, I'm sure they wanna be them.
Really kind of a tragedy beers like Schneider Weisse's Aventinus, which was easily available in supermarkets
like Foodland can't even be had from online beer clubs that seem more interested in selling other types of alcohol.
The Thai craft breweries selling lager, wheat beer and IPA have pushed off the shelves even
standards like Duvel in my supermarket, the latest casualty to the war on alcohol. Other fine Belgian beers like Triple Karmelite, all of the trappist beers,
the Kasteel line of excellent beers much better than "craft" beer thats often easily twice the price and more, these are all nowhere to be found anymore.
I was even in a famous craft beer bar in Bangkok, I asked the bartender about whether they had any Belgian beers she just gave me this cold look
and walked away without saying anything.
There was also one OK wine that somehow dodged the series of taxation increases on wine which was available at Lotus, It was Australian and went for 380 a bottle but disappeared up country about 4 months ago never to return. So I don't just buy something else, I just simply don't drink then. I think the distributors think they can accpet some kickbacks from the major companies and push everyone into drinking Chang-Singha-Leo, not me.
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Thai-US powered operation crumbles cybercrime hacker syndicate
in Thailand News
Posted
That Dutch ex-cannabis cafe owner got stuck with 50 years and without breaking any laws
in Thailand. These gangsters only get 10 years? Sounds like they are pretty friendly
with the locals already. Should be out in a few months their watches
and sports cars returned to them, or some of them anyway, just as soon as this blows over.