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Bangkok Post

Comment

Songkran must go on

Re: Songkran bans, (BP, April 2).

Those toys for Songkran have been procured, stocked and been ready for sale by all retailers of the country. You need quite a few security personnel to melt into those crazy crowds with rights of on-the-spot arrests and indictments. Let's wait and see how they do.

R H Suga

Bad air, dirty airport

Every time I fly in or out of Bangkok I notice how dirty the glass is at the airport in Bangkok ... I admit that it's a radical modern design, but if they built it they should have thought of a way to clean the windows. When you're at the gate awaiting boarding, many passengers want to take pictures out the window of their awaiting plane. The glass is so streaked and filthy/dirty I don't think it's ever been cleaned since the airport was built ... No wonder this airport never makes its name on any list of the best airports in Asia!!!

Don Moisen

Pity Israeli farmers

Re: "Golan Heights tops Arab meet agenda", (BP, April 1).

Looking downward from the former Syrian Golan Heights is the northern Israeli plain, already cultivated by Israeli farmers for many decades.

Yet from 1948 till 1967, and in spite of the 1949 ceasefire, the Syrian Army did shell Israeli farmers day and night for close to 20 years, compelling these Israeli farmers to take refuge in underground bunkers and tunnels specially constructed to resist and stay alive on that northern Israeli plain, whenever they had to!

But all that changed after the Six Days War in 1967 when Israeli fighters climbed up the Golan Heights and seized it, then annexing it in 1981. From then until now, Israeli farmers have been able to farm in peace without having to worry about being shot to death by Syrian soldiers.

Michel Muscadier

Earth trusteeship

Re: "Thailand to work 'closely' with UN over inequality", (BP, March 29).

Hope-giving signals were sent out by deputy permanent secretary for foreign affairs Thani Thongpakdi on the pledge of the Thai government, as Asean chair, to work closely with the UN to reduce social and economic inequality in the Asia-Pacific region. One of the protoypes of local collaboration he mentioned is the "Nan Sandbox", where the government, corporate sector, civil society and Buddhist Sangha work together towards landscape rehabilitation.

In a significant gesture, the UN recently launched its Decade for Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. Interestingly, in the BP editorial of March 31 entitled, "Cooperation vital to end haze crisis", emerging cross-sector collaboration is mentioned between the government and civil society, with the help of Chiang Mai University, while the urgent need for multi-disciplinary and trans-boundary approaches is recognised. That local and international initiatives may face serious legal and governance challenges was foreseen by the French government, which launched, in the slipstream of the Paris Agreement on climate change -- and initiated by the lawyers' association -- the "Global Pact for the Environment". Since then, a UN secretary-general report confirmed serious gaps in International Environmental Law (IEL), which resonates with complex legal and governance challenges at a local level.

Existing private and public ownership principles, as well as the sovereignty of nation-states, are no longer fully "fit to purpose" in the context of the present crisis. A new overarching governance principle proposed is Earth Trusteeship, meaning that "all world citizens are equal trustees of the Earth for the benefit of future generations". This maxim is rooted in the opinions of the late Judge C G Weeramantry, Sri Lanka's former vice president of the International Court of Justice. Earth Trusteeship innovates new avenues to inequality reduction, not at the income but at the property level. Being a trustee implies bearing ownership responsibilities for the benefit of others or "the common good", which includes the interests of future generations.

Hans van Willenswaard

Sexy Thailand

Re: Inconvenient truth of 'getting off' in Thailand, (Commentary, March 30).

Why does everything have to have a sexual connotation? Dirty mind, dirty thoughts, that's all. If I were on a flight with a stopover in Thailand on the way to wherever it is I as going, I would find the advertisement, "Get off in Thailand" interesting. Get off in Thailand is not the same as "getting it off in Thailand". Instead of capitalising on promoting the tourist industry, everyone has added his/her own version to the shmutz. For the uninformed, "shmutz" means dirt in a few languages.

Shmutzik

Democracy vigil

Re: "Sudarat, Hillary has-beens", (PostBag, March 31).

As the pseudonym chosen in his honour attests, Anti-Thaksinista could not be more wrong about Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin will be remembered when such bad people as the dictators who have boosted his renown by repeatedly overthrowing the supreme rule of law and smashing Thailand's form of democratic government with a constitutional monarchy are long gone. Those bullying dictators will be remembered as footnote examples of the bad people persistently interfering in politics to pursue their own self-serving agenda. Had they instead upheld and protected the constitution of the Thai nation, the democratic process could have developed to put Thaksin where he belongs, in prison for his drug war killings and other real crimes.

Thaksin might not be good, but being constrained by democratic principle, as witnessed in the failure of the sleazy Pheu Thai amnesty bill before the latest overthrow of the rule of law by bad people, he has done more good than the bad old boys with their bad old ways have ever done, even if Thaksin's motives were at heart just as bullying and undemocratic.

Unlike dictatorship, democracy is an inherently good thing: it just needs vigilance by good people to keep its principles upheld and honoured.

Felix Qui

Dangerous reading

For those expats left even more confused in the aftermath of the election than we were before, it was good to have some clarification of the situation from army chief Apirat Kongsompong.

I, for one, was not surprised to learn that much of the blame for the current confusion emanates from those who have "studied abroad" and read "foreign books" (invariably a source of trouble). There can be little doubt that certain foreign books will promulgate "left-wing ideas" and their concomitant "pretentious behaviour".

Given the "ultra-right wing" credentials of Gen Apirat, I would appreciate more detail about which "foreign books" need to be avoided to prevent one's ideas becoming more left-wing, and one's behaviour even more pretentious. (Although in my case, I fear it may be too late).

YANAWA DAVID

Saving jumbos

When Minor Group CEO William Heinecke decided to cancel the King's Cup elephant polo tournament last year, the response was overwhelmingly positive. People around the world hailed him for sparing elephants the pain and trauma of this event. Last week's King's Cup Elephant Boat Race & River Festival proves that people can have fun, and that money can be raised, without having to put animals in harm's way. By all accounts, the boat race was a smashing success.

Attitudes are changing, and businesses and the public are realising elephants deserve protection, not to be exploited, beaten into submission, and forced to "play" polo. As more companies in the tourism industry remove destinations that involve cruelty to animals from their itineraries, that message is being driven home. PETA stands ready to work collaboratively to develop future initiatives dedicated to improving the lives of elephants in Thailand -- including by relocating captive elephants to sanctuaries.

Jason Baker

Mental crippling

As a teacher here, I am dismayed at the scores of the recent O-Net. Not at the students' scores, but at those government officials who continue to torture the minds of children's intellectual liberty and only teach with tests in mind.

Judging by the dismal rate of progress concerning the testing metrics, it will take several generations before the majority pass (with a 70% standard). Why continue to promulgate such a failed programme? Who is benefiting from this purposeful mental crippling of the next generation?

There is no "one size fits all" method of teaching and learning. Educational systems must conform to the 21st century and evolve from the factory method of schooling from the 19th century.

It is time for Thailand to transition to true learner-centric methods of teaching, such as Montessori or Reggio Emilia. This is what is required for today's youth to adjust to the digital age.

There is too much information available on any subject for the standard model of memorising and regurgitation to have any relevance. I have never had to find the sine-cosine-and tangent to anything in my life! Yet trying to figure out compound interest and variable rates was never mentioned in my scholastic endeavours, even though this kind of math is constantly required.

It is time to have an honest dialogue about the purpose of education. Is it just a tool for social engineering to create "group think" among a society that is more pliable and easily managed and controlled by the elites?

Or should education be about supporting what a student wants to know and learn? The latter results in intelligent self-actualised humans who are flexible and adaptable to respond to the ever-changing world.

Is this not the supposed goal of government schooling?

Darius Hober

Hooligans with hoes

If the government showed the same enthusiasm going after hooligan farmers who are starting forest fires and endangering the health of the people in Chiang Mai, as they showed in going after political dissidents, I bet the air pollution problem in Chiang Mai would have been solved already.

Whatever happened to all these Postbag-writing clowns who said the junta was going to clean things up and makes things better?

What has improved since the junta came to power?

Eric Bahrt