Opinion

The disconnect between the hype and reality of Thailand’s world-class bureaucracy hit new lows Friday when telecom DTAC, the new Digital Economy and Society Ministry, and our friends at The Nation hosted a talk on cryptocurrency and the blockchain revolution.

Dictatorship is about control. They control you through propaganda and fear. Dictatorship is most effective when it makes you obey without questioning its lack of legitimacy.

She cleans your house, sews your clothes and cooks your food. He catches the fish you eat, builds the house you live in and polishes the shoes you wear. These labor intensive occupations are often the vocation of one group of people – migrants.

Today is Constitution Day. To many it means just another day off work despite the fact that for two decades after the 1932 revolt, it was celebrated with a festival that two years later even added a beauty pageant.

As a child in the ‘80s, I would vent my anger and frustration with the family warfare going on at home skateboarding with my friends. Like most kids from that era, we got into it watching cats like Tony Hawk hot dog around Southern California in Powell Peralta’s “Public Domain” (1988) and other videos. The skating skills were impressive but what really took a hold of our lives was skateboard culture.

What is happening in Myanmar’s Rakhine state to the Rohingya people is nothing short of abject failure by many Burmese who regarded themselves as Buddhists to be compassionate. Buddhism preaches tolerance, not the opposite. Wrongly clinging to one’s ethnicity, nationality, religion or the past can tragically make us regard others as less than human and undeserving of empathy, not to mention equal rights.

For some, love and reverence is a performance that must be repeatedly displayed to prove one’s love and reverence to others. Love and reverence which requires repeated performance is essentially insecure and fragile, however.

CANBERRA — Whether or not US President-elect Donald Trump behaves better once in office than he did on the campaign trail, America’s global authority has already taken a battering, not least among its allies and partners in Asia.

Trump or no Trump, Prayuth or no Prayuth, the relations between the people of Thailand and the United States shall endure, and hopefully positively when we look beyond the narrow mindset of nationalism.

Junta supporters are using the images of anti-Trump protesters burning objects, including one defecating in public, as proof Americans are no better than Thais at respecting democracy.