re: "The winds of change are blowing" (BP, Opinion, August 24, 2020)
Dear editor,
It is welcome to see the Post's Veera Prateepchaikul backtracking from his previous lapse of judgement in seeming unduly sympathetic to the coup that in 2014 overthrew Thailand's supreme rule of law that had defined the Kingdom as having a democratic form of government under a constitutional monarchy.
However, when Veera writes that "The revered institution has been with Thailand for centuries and is respected by millions of Thais," he makes a factual claim that manifests signs of being another lapse of critical judgement. As the intelligent, critically astute young protestors could doubtless explain to Veera, like all factual claims about the way the world really is, a claim about what a group feels and believes must be supported by solid evidence for that claim. Does Veera have the solid evidence required to back up his claims about the thinking of the Thai nation, or is he merely repeating a traditional shibboleth, like Catholic Popes dogmatically asserting, when confronted with the radically new ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and other scientists, that "everyone knows the Earth is the centre of the universe and that the sun and everything revolves around the solid Earth at the centre of all things"?
Veera presents precisely zero evidence for his claim about what the Thai nation in fact thinks and feels. And nothing really is not good enough evidence for any factual claim. Veera might of course be entirely right in the claim he repeats about the Thai people's feelings; however, the recent polls done do in fact show solid majority support for the students protesting out of love for and loyalty to their nation. This gently suggests that Veera could also be as correct as the Renaissance popes resorting to dogmatic insistence and violence, even unto torture and execution, to hold back the Enlightenment progress in all areas based on knowledge, reason and a commitment to secular humanist morals for human persons and their human societies.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on August 25, 2020, under the title "Backtrack welcome" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1973967/backtrack-welcome
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