Johpa

Anyhow. Marshbags tries to present the drug war as some sort of elitist conspiracy against the poor, which is a ridiculous misinterpretation. The drug war was popular under all sectors of society, and that includes the classes where most people who got killed came from. That is a clear fact. One of the reasons is that those classes carried also the largest burden of the massive spread of amphetamines, disabling their families. For these people the drug war improved their life, and the killings in their view were collateral damage. Don't say now that i support the killings. I do not. I try to explain why the drug war was and still is popular, and why you will not see any majority support in investagating it. And for other reasons you will also not see much support in the elites, beyond a few symbolic convictions that won't damage the enabling system.

What a few farang (including me) on an internet board say here, has no relevance whatsoever to Thai reality. You are grasping for straws if you believe that the investigations that you read here in newspaper articles posted will lead anywhere substantial. It's a slow news day, nothing else.

It has become rather rare here to see a voice, such as Cybertosser, combining both understanding of the Thai reality and reasoning. In my wife's native neighborhood (tambon) the war on drugs was, and is still today, celebrated as a good thing. Yes, a few people lost a distant relative (nephew) including my wife, but all were still overjoyed at the results that included the disappearance of the meth dealers out of the local schools and the almost immediate drop in local crimes such as theft, burglary, and domestic violence that had become truly epidemic. All of those social ills still exist of course, but back at the lower levels that existed before the drug epidemic had become commonplace.

But to suggest that local eating was enough to kill them, but no one else around the same area, is silly.

Again, my personal experience from food poisoning occurred on a kibbutz in Israel where a few hundred people ate from a commonly prepared meal eating in a common dining room. Two of us had significant symptoms, several more had minor symptoms, and the vast majority of people had no symptoms at all. Rest assured that I was not laughing at the silliness of the situation at the time.

The commonality of repeated vomiting does not seem to fit with the 'harmful microbes' theory, but does fit with the speculation, by some on this forum, that chemical poison was part of the equation.

I was once laid out flat with food poisoning. I had a very high fever, I was hallucinating (my first thoughts were that someone had given me some electric kool-aid), and I am not 100% certain that I would have survived without the combined assistance of a nurse and a former Vietnam vet combat medic. The direction of my particular distress was not in the upward direction and I had to literally crawl on all fours to the commode. In a hot and humid environment such as on Koh Phi Phi, the rapid dehydration I experienced would haved become an immediate health issue. So I do know with certainty that food poisoning, a generic term for a host of more particular afflictions, can be deadly. The odd thing was that there was one other person in the larger group who had eaten from a common dining room who had slightly less severe symptoms, and a few others who had mild symptoms. The majority of the people had no symptoms.

As I mentioned before, he feels like the farangs living here are mostly a waste of time and intends to advertise only in Thai venues. It will be interesting to see if there are enough Thais willing to pay top dollar to make the place a success.

I would imagine that the average well-to-do Farang would not have the same sense of conspicuous consumption as would the average well-to-do Thai relative to eating in an upper scale Farang food restaurant. So I think his plan to direct his advertising dollars towards Thais is a sensible plan.

"I think, given the recent experience with these things with other well-known identities, you would understand these things are never straightforward,'' he said.

A reference to Tony Mokbel?

Uh, I believe the lack of things being less than "straightforward" in the Land of Oz go beyond the relatively recent and recall other "well-known identities" such as Mr. Nugan and Mr. Hand.

there could be some empty containers soon in Sattahip -

The gulf is rather shallow, so perhaps they could finally utilize the HTMS Chakri Naruebet for something other than a symbol of corruption of the Thai military leadership, by simply anchoring her out in the middle of the Gulf as a floating prison ship.

Chaiyo!

I must say this thread takes the cake for meandering subject matter. Hard to believe it started out about some inconsequential contract for a small fake house or two for practicing hostage rescue techniques.

Chaweng circa 1983

If you can't notice a difference then and now, I just don't know what to say.

Medical mistakes and incompetence, even in my own so-called civilized country, is an absolute disgrace and tends to make one believe that choosing a doctor is the equivalent of choosing which tree to stand under during a severe lightning storm..

You clearly hold dear to your hearth the common myth that the practicing of the medicinal arts is some sort of science.

can't they think of cool things to sell which don't have a designer label? I can. So too can some of my hill tribe neighbors up here in northernmost Thailand. Some are selling very cool tote bags with beautiful patterns. When I had a used Levis outlet in California, I had bags made from the upper part of jeans - and they sold well. Maybe the crackdown will jangle the counterfitters to use a modicum of their creative facilities - if they have any neurons left to be jangled.

The group that seemingly has a neuron deficit are those withe the branded brains that feel it necessary to pay exorbitant prices for designer goods based upon the premise that possessing these goods will attest to both their imagined lifestyle and their imagined importance. These are the walking and talking brain dead. For a good read try Naomi Klein's book on the subject No Logo. As for the people selling this stuff on the lower Suk, just some poor folks trying to eke out a living.

And sorry to say, but purchasing designer fakes is a big part of the Farang tourist experience in Asia and although not the primary motivating force, it is will cause not a few swing votes in making the decision to visit the region.

As someone who has been known to use the "because that's the way it is" answer in my English classes, I'll roll with that.

Like English, Thai has borrowed words that don't quite fit the borrowed alphabet. And some of those borrowed words did not fit the Thai phonemic rules and thus those strange silent letters, sort of like the silent "k" in words in English beginning with "kn". English borrows a Roman alphabet for basically a Germanic language. Thai borrows an alphabet borrowed from South Asia via Angor (Nakorn) Wat. Thai has words that are transliterated into Thai from their Indic Sanskrit/Pali roots just as English has words borrowed form Latin leading English to have both a hard "c" as in /case/ or a soft "c' as in /cent/. And there are words that have simply been borrowed from neighboring languages, most notably Khmer. And thus the "because that's the way it is" has a rational basis as the rules that tend to govern such instances are complex and need not, and are not, known to native speakers.

Salak can be a verb for to carve or to chisel wood. A chang salak can be a wood carver or sculptor.

Isaan isn't a language any more than Tex Mex is.

You say bucket, I say pail.

Given your definition, every dot on every map in every country in the world would have its own language because they say things differently. Simply combining words and phrases from two languages doesn't yield a third.

There are some references to the use of "Tex-Mex" as an emerging Pidgin, but the jury is still out on that determination. There exists a large indigenous population in Northeast Thailand that speaks Isaan as a native language that is taught to children at birth by their parents. There is no population yet that learns your concept of Tex-Mex as a native language. And by your Texan standards of logic, English, that bizarre amalgamation of several Germanic languages mixed up with borrowed Latin words brought over by Norman invaders, perhaps English also does not qualify as a language. But again, that is Texan logic and I thank the joint efforts of Baby Jesus and the Buddha that, in this life, I was not born a Texan.

Perhaps it is also time to bring up that old socio-linguistic adage: A language is nothing more that a regional dialect with an army behind it.

Am I right to say tourists are fed up with political unrest in Thailand and choose safer destinations to spend their hard-to-get money? They are not getting much money as they used to, so they don't want to risk getting stuck in Thailand when 2 airports were closed for a week. Well, they already forget about the airport closure. Could be.

Most tourists could care less about the internal politics in Bangkok. They want fun, they want sun, and they want it to fit their budget. Thailand still has the sun and the beaches, and the good lord knows it still has enough fun that a tourist can choose any number of levels of decadence whilst paying homage to Dante. But it the budget in the home country that is suffering mightily. Here in the US the unemployment rate is far higher than the government data indicates and for many of us in the business community not connected to the Banksters, we have not only tightened our belts but have begun to let out some blood as well.

I am no expert on this type of treatment plant but I will say that the island of Phi Phi has been way over developed for the natural resources to cope with.

If memory serves me correctly, Koh Phi Phi was, back in the early 1980s, a nature reserve without any overnight facilities. One visited by boat on day trips.

Speaking of hypocrisy, do you remember that this online lottery idea was proposed by the PPP?

Hypocrisy is not the issue with the lottery. Some of us have been around long enough to remember the day the lottery machines, on live national TV, got stuck between numbers, and then soon thereafter, on that same day, a mystery wire was found leading from the lottery machine under the carpet to the adjoining room. One can only imagine the salivating going on amongst the lottery officials with the thoughts of an online digital version of the lottery.

Chinese is a pictorial written language

No it is not. This is a common erroneous belief. About 4% of the characters are pictographs. The remainder are logograms-- they represent words or morphenes, as opposed to languages where the writing represents sounds (phonemes).

Back in ancient times when I was a linguistics grad student, I remember some studies that suggested that the brain processed most writing systems in a similar manner, and although those symbols representing phonemes increased the learning rate, in the end we all tend to see whole words as individual symbols, little different than logographs. That is, when a fairly literate person is reading in English, they are not processing the letters as individual representations of phonemes or morphemes, but processing the word as a single graphic entity.

A friend of mine works for VISA in the U.S. According to him, when a vendor has a VISA terminal in their store, it is a violation of contract to charge more for credit/debit card transactions than for cash. Everyone does it though in Asia, I guess the banks thought they would climb on board that gravy train too...

Isn't it rather insidious that, at least in the US, the Mastercard/VISA monopoly contracts prohibit all merchants from assessing fees for accepting these cards but does allow their peers in the financial service sector, the banks, to accept the same fees prohibited to merchants. What you are beginning to see in the US are small merchants no longer accepting these cards, or restricting the use of the reward style cards that carry higher fees.

As for Paypal, be very careful. As others have noted, their exchange rates are very high.

Given the very low interest rates one receive from banks these days, you are actually better off just bringing over a large wad of cash.

Isaan is no more a language than TexMex spoken along the Texas border with Mexico.

It's just a mish mash of Thai and Lao. I don't see how speaking some pidgin backwater language will benefit a child in the long run.

There may be familial and cultural links that make learning it meaningful, but it certainly isn't something you'd put on a resume.

Sorta like Cajun French-English-Redneck.

This is sort of true- Isaan is not really a language so much as it is really just plain Lao... and Lao is basically just a slack-jawed dialect of Thai (r's replaced with l's, etc). Lao was once known as Tai-Noi (little Tai). Same is true of the supposed "Isaan" alphabet- it's really just a more primitive version of Thai. Contrary to what bored unintellectual central thais will say, both Thai and Lao are intelligable to either speaker if they're attentive and curious enough. Historically, Lao people didn't really have a distinguashable identity until the 1300s. Isaan people are actually mostly Khmer or proto-Mon in ethnicity, the Lao were just one of the latest in many conquerors of the region, who imposed Laotian as the language.... the central Thais just came along and did the same thing. All of this however is not to say that there are not very important distinguishing cultural and identity features between Thai and Isaan cultures.

The thaification of Isaan is indeed repulsive, but the real enemies here in the cutural dilution are the chinese bangkok thais. kohn isaan and poor kohn thai have much in common and do not see themselves as that different- however the kohn jeen of bangkok have been shunning "tai-ness" for centuries.

Well now the degradation of the other forums has reached the language forum. I am amazed at the ignorance on display here.

First, Lao is a very distinct language within the Tai language group. It is not some form of Creole such as Tex-Mex where two very distantly related languages intersect. Isaan is, for all intents and purposes, Lao. One might call it a dialect of Lao, but it is not a "slack-jawed" dialect of Central Thai. That position is just plain ignorance. I have heard Shan, another language in the Tai language family be commonly referred to as Tai-Yai, but I do not commonly hear Lao referred to as Tai-Noi.

Both the Thai alphabet and the Lao alphabet are historically derived from the Khmer script and thus from the South Asian scripts. The Lao script is no more a primitive version of Thai script that is Lao a lazy form of Central Thai. You might as well as argue that the Roman alphabet is a primitive version of classic Greek script.

Standard Lao or Isaan is not necessarily mutually comprehensible to a Central Thai speaker. The languages are closely related, and a Central Thai speaker from Bangkok can often pick up the topic of conversation of a Lao speaker, but not always the comment being made upon the topic. Most Lao and Isaan folks can understand Central Thai due to its pervasiveness in the regional media. This is similar to the situation in Iberia where the Portuguese speakers usually understand Spanish, as it too dominates the media on that peninsula, but Spaniards tend not to understand Portuguese. But unless a Central Thai speaker has been exposed to Lao, either in the home, school, or in the media, mutual intelligibility is limited.

The Lao and Isaan cultures represent the migration of both Tai people and Tai culture southwards into Southeast Asia. Clearly there has been significant genetic mixing between these Tai migrations into the region and the earlier Mon-Khmer migrations, as well as with other groups, some of whom are now lost to history. But the genetic pool in Isaan has not been ethnically Khmer or "proto-Mon" for generations, and much of that genetic pool has never been such. Just more nonsense.

Look, the languages of the politically weaker people in and around Thailand have been on the wane for the same reasons the languages of the politically weaker people of Europe have lost their languages. One no longer meets many speakers of Breton in France, or Westphalian in Germany, nor speakers of Cornish in England, nor speakers of Sogdian anywhere on the planet. People want to identify with the elites. They will shift their languages towards the language of the elite, in this case Central Thai. They will slowly shift their ethnic identity towards the elites, towards those in political power. And history has shown that people will even shift their religious beliefs to those of the elites. How else can you explain the recent success of the death cult of Jesus around the globe, or the earlier conversion of Hindu Indonesia to Islam?

The elites will facilitate these shifts by denigrating the indigenous languages by using all the propaganda tools of the State, even influencing visitors to believe the nonsense that these other languages are to be viewed as somehow inferior. Ah, but there is always good political reason not to incorporate basic linguistics into the educational curriculum. Keep the masses ignorant and keep your power.

Read the US Senate report and you will realize that Al Gore does NOT communicate a message that is accepted by the vast majority of mainstream scientists. T

Or you can read the reports issued by the World Meteorological Organization where you can access reports approved by the vast majority of the planet's mainstream scientists, although not accepted by a few shitake mushrooms for brains US senators as well as also rejected by those educated in Texas (and even the occasional Hoser), wherein you will indeed find the same message that Al Gore is attempting to communicate.

Thailand really needs to offer some big incentives if its going to bring back people in significant numbers, Thailand will always attract backpackers, but the tourists that bring the real money in are the two week package tours, and they in my opinion are the most likely to be put off coming here.

I predict some very dark economic times ahead for the Thai Tourism sector

The backpackers who stay for a month or more also spend real money, and since more of that money is spent at the local level and not siphoned off and offshore by the package tour industry, I could argue that the Kingdom gets more bang for each baat spent by a backpacker than by a package tourist, much of whose pre-paid travel money never even makes it to the shores of Thailand.

There are a few things that need to be done to bolster tourism. First, as many have mentioned, the baat needs to be devalued, it needs to climb back to around TB42/$1US. And the visa situation needs to be simplified and made subject to less whimsical change. Visitors from countries that now obtain a 30-day tourist visa upon arrival should be granted a 60-day tourist visa. And the country should also lighten up the restrictions on retiree visas. There is no easier money than having a retiree wire money over monthly to cover a modest lifestyle, money that will be spent locally and thus recirculated.

She does not want to be a Gik. She wants to be a Ho (sorry eek, but you are wrong this time).

Sounds like she wants to be a mia noi.

In a reader's comment to an article in a magazine that cannot be quoted here I found the following sentence:

"....Thailand still have castes, i.e., Mom Joa or Mom Rajawong....."

I have never heard of this before. Could someone enlighten me please?

These titles showed generational distance from "Royal Blood" usually the distance from Rama V, King Chulalongkorn, the last King with many, many progeny. So a Mom Rajawong, if memory serves me correct, would have had Rama V as a grandfather, and a Mom Luang would have had him as a great-grandfather. I think a Mom Cao is a title for a current prince or princess, although I have long forgotten such details from lack, actually total absence of personal usage. After Mom Luang the title of Mom becomes more of a social title in the highly feudal Thai social structure and shows a distant connection to Royalty, but no longer claims status as "royal blood".

Hi where (in Bangkok) can i get quality pocket water purifier,and pocket chainsaws? ( i do travel,and on my way i see a need). (the magic bamboo cutter man) hail hail...Thanks.

Uff da, those pocket chain saws would be useless for cutting bamboo. Find a machete and always cut at an angle.

[quote name='GuestHouse' date='2009-04-23 17:07:44' post='2686543'

Another view of Thai culture is that the man is incharge of the household or if they struggle with getting their heads around that idea - then remind them that in Thailand, perhaps to an extent like nowhere else... he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Within traditional Thai culture it is the woman who is in charge of the household and not the man. In the older tradition, the man moves into the house of the woman upon marriage, referred to as matrilocality in the vernacular. Even today one commonly finds clusters of sisters living in the same village with the husbands of these sorority groups getting together to drown their common woes in shared drinking sessions.