The truth will out

Re: " Thai big media forced to rethink unwritten rules", (BP, Editorial, September 28, 2020)

Well said Paritta Wangkiat. Thailand has been greatly retarded in every way by anti-democratic law forced on the nation with intent to keep Thai people profoundly ignorant of Thai affairs. If they never did anything else, the student protestors deserve high praise for boldly smashing the corrupt taboos that that have only ever harmed Thai society, save a selfish, self-serving elite who abused that unjust legal protection to abuse the Thai nation for many decades. As the good students know, knowledge trumps ignorance; reason beats ideology; and justice is better than injustice. Happily, the silent majority are learning from the good students.

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The above is the text that was actually posted as a quick comment on the article by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text of that quick comment as edited was published in PostBag on September 30, 2020, under the title "The truth will out" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1993303/nothing-to-share

  

Bullies in every way

re: "Stop the cyber bullies" (BP, Editorial, September 24, 2020)

Dear editor,

The Bangkok Post's timely editorial on the pressing issue of cyber bullying ("Stop the cyber bullies", Sept. 24) was much appreciated. It highlights aptly the apparent partiality of Thai authorities, whose perceived double standards in applying the law are exactly the sort of traditional moral failing of decades against which the better part of Thailand's youth are today protesting for long overdue reform.

And well done Pacharaporn Chantarapradit for standing firm on the moral high ground despite the bullying. Such a courageously patriotic act on behalf of all Thais against the traditional bigotry of the past is a light for all. Good people, including good Thais, are pro-democracy. The bullies are absolutely in the wrong. Their bullying but proves their position barren of right and reason. Worse, the abusive language that some use, speaking, for example, of "hating the nation" and labelling expressions of opinion they dislike as "an incurable disease" cast the very Thainess they pretend to champion as something fit only for the places whence their own language comes.

Some people, it appears, need to be sent back to school that they may be learned to speak politely in society. The articulate youth protesting out of love of their nation teach Thailand a far better example of respectful inclusivity and willingness to respectfully consider opposing opinions.

 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 September 26, 2020, under the title "Bullies in every way" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1991935/clock-is-ticking
  

In his own image

re: "Trump Jump-Starts Misinformation on Ginsburg’s ‘Dying Wish’" (The New York Times, September 21, 2020)

From repeating the base and baseless birther lies about Obama, it is not a big step for someone who thrives on fake claims to make up his own whopper.

May the US be saved from Trump's disinformation for the fake ideology of Trumpism.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article, where it was kindly chosen by the NYT as a Times Pick.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/technology/trump-jump-starts-misinformation-on-ginsburgs-dying-wish.html#commentsContainer&permid=109236636:109236636

  

Students wronged

re: "Point taken, but no" (BP, PostBag, September 21, 2020)

Dear editor,

Attentive Reader is to be thanked for acknowledging that a considered response was needed to the noted errors of reasoning and the mistaken claims in his previous letter. Nonetheless, the new set of specious suggestions of communist tendencies based on false historical parallels shows a questionable intent. There has been nothing remotely communist, certainly not fascist, in the students' considered petitions.

The idea Attentive Reader raises of an ideologically driven Ministry of Truth applies more obviously to the defects in supposedly traditional Thai myth that the students oppose. It was no accident that one of Prayut Chan-o-cha's first acts after unilaterally making himself prime minister in 2014 was to ban the public reading of Orwell's famously Orwellian novel 1984 in public, especially when done in the presence of sandwiches being eaten with political intent. It is precisely such dishonesty protected by morally questionable law that the students correctly identify as a serious failure of many decades, one in urgent need of reform if the Thai nation is to progress intellectually, socially, morally and economically as all Thai people deserve.

Attentive Reader makes a more explicitly false claim: it is not foist on them by oppressive others; rather, it is the LGBT students who proudly take that label for themselves. This error is then compounded. However serious a problem it might be in the US and elsewhere, the claim about cancel culture is fake for the students petitioning for a better Thailand for all Thais: Attentive Reader gave not a single instance of toxic cancel culture for the very simple reason there has been no cancel culture engaged in by the student protestors.

 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 September 22, 2020, under the title "Students wronged" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1989491/students-wronged
  

Supernatural joys

re: "Trump’s Supreme Court Pick May Need to Denounce Roe. Good." (The New York Times, September 21, 2020)

Aah yes. The ineffable  joy of supernatural beliefs infecting society.

That American moral growth continues to be stunted by this obsession with abortion, which fixation is founded solely on the alleged dictates of perfectly incredible gods from the Middle East, is as absurd as the Catholic popes imprisoning and executing for heresy those who dared dispute the allegedly divine dictate that the Earth is the centre of the universe about which all orbs, including the sun, revolve. Worse, when the Christians beholden to the alleged demands of their Middle Eastern masters opposed heliocentrism and evolution, another scientific fact allegedly contradicting the teachings of the same Middle Eastern gods, at least they could be excused on the grounds of sincere ignorance and having been educated to reject reason in favour of dogmatic faith, however despotic. US law might as rationally dictate that all homes have a chimney because Santa Claus allegedly demands such access as a condition of being a good boy of girl.

Those old excuses will not do. It is time for the US to move forward by embracing the best that Western civilization has to offer: reason, respect for honesty, fact seeking, and the solid grounding that reason, facts and honesty provide to justice and moral values.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/opinion/ruth-bader-ginsburg-supreme-court-roe-v-wade.html#commentsContainer&permid=109234634:109234634

  

Snakes in Edens

re: "Mitch McConnell Has Seen the Promised Land" (The New York Times, September 21, 2020)

Like gardens of Eden, mythic promised lands nurture such intrinsic evils in their ideological foundations that they often turn out to be less joyous than promised for all concerned.

As in the abortion debate, reality and calm reason are more reliable guides to understanding and justice than any supernatural myth pulling crude emotional levers.

Let us, therefore, pray that even the likes of Mitch McConnell and his other enablers of Trump's assault on great American institutions will pause before committing further enormities against the proud traditions of liberal democracy that had once upon a time made America great for Americans and for the world to aspire to.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/opinion/mitch-mcconnell-ruth-bader-ginsburg.html#commentsContainer&permid=109217440:109217440

  

The joy of juristocracy

re: "How the G.O.P. Might Get to Yes on Replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg" (The New York Times, September 20, 2020)

Mr. Douthat is right that decisions about the law of the land should properly be debated and made by legislators, not judges.

He is right that abortion should not have been legalized by a Supreme Court decision. Whilst the legal basis of Roe v. Wade is sound, it was a bad way to settle the abortion issue for a nation, and shows the harm of allowing religious convictions to run rampant over moral reasoning.

Douthat is wrong that abortion should not be legal. Abortion, the killing of a living human being before birth, should have been enshrined as every woman's right to have a safe, easy abortion on request by legislation enacted by politicians.

The religiously inclined are at liberty to not do what they think wrong for supernatural reasons, but until those supernatural reasons can be proved naturally true, they may not be used to as reasons for making law. Belief in souls, however sincere, cannot be a relevant reason to dictate limitations on the liberty of others to live their lives.

A foetus is as much a living being as is a pig, chicken or fish. A foetus beyond several weeks has a heart beat as much as does a cow, duck or lamb. But a living human foetus with a heart beat is never any more a person, human or otherwise, than are any of the animals we kill to snack on, so whatever the emotional pulls, there is no morally sound reason to treat the human foetus any differently than we treat any animal that we humans regularly kill to eat. 

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/opinion/republican-supreme-court.html#commentsContainer&permid=109214403:109214403

  

The kids are alright

re: "Students, not angels" (BP, PostBag, September 18, 2020)

Dear editor,

In "Students, not angels" (PostBag, Sept. 18), Attentive Reader helpfully points out two serious failures besetting traditional Thai schools that my letter, "Students in the right" (PostBag, Sept 17), had overlooked: bullying and cancel culture. A closer analysis shows that here, too, the protesting students are deserving only of praise.

First, Attentive Reader speaks of all Thai students, not the subset of protesting students that I had discussed. That some statistic is true of a larger group does not logically entail that it holds for any subset of that group; from the fact that 70% of adult Thais are married, it does not follow that 70% of the demographic subset of publicly out  gays and lesbians of Thailand are also married.
 
Certainly, the evils of bullying and cancel culture remain, as Attentive Reader's reported statistics show, all too common in Thai schools in general. However, their explicit welcoming of all groups, including, for example LGBT students, shows that the students protesting for a better Thai nation have consciously chosen respectful inclusivity over bullying. If that were not enough, the student leaders manifest traits that might well earn them the status of "nerds": they are, in short, more likely to be bullied than to bully. Nor have their actions shown them inclined to repressive cancel culture that seeks to silence those with whom it disagrees, unlike some opponents of the students who demand that they shut up and not speak, however politely or rationally, on issues some deem provocative. Indeed, the students have welcomed the Minister of Education to sit down and speak with them. They have shown in their respectful hearing of dissentient voices the same excellent virtues demonstrated in their inclusive welcoming of all students.

What Attentive Reader should have concluded is that we must hope that all Thai students will also follow the excellent lead set by the student protestors to end traditional bullying and cancel culture.

 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 September 20, 2020, under the title "The kids are alright" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1988451/history-repeats-itself
  

Students in the right

re: "No more than 20,000 at rally, predict security agencies" (BP, September 16, 2020)

Dear editor,

Yes. As the officials admit, the protesting students are peaceful. They are not "professional demonstrators", whatever that is: they are the young-adult children of comfortably off, middle-class Thais at the nation's leading high schools and universities. As intelligent young adults, they much prefer discussion and reasoning to violent confrontation. Thailand is lucky in the extreme to have such patriotic young citizens coming up to help the Thai nation better understand Thai affairs about which Thai law traditionally seeks to enforce ignorance in direct opposition to the foundational principles of democratic good governance. Contrary to the unjust law being protested, Thais do deserve to understand Thai affairs as well as foreigners have always been able to, and to each have an equal voice in determining the form of those public affairs of their nation.

It is also telling that the UDD, like the obsequious, scrabbling backers of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, and like the two-faced PDRC cadres still hanging around, run with tails tucked cravenly from any true call for reform. Yet some are so foolish as to think, to falsely claim, that the student protestors are in some mysterious way beholden to the likes of Thaksin! Such bizarre deceit is hard to comprehend as flowing from any decent motive. The only group of politicians with the courage of their professed ideals to publicly voice full support for the students are the straightforward women and men of the Move Forward Party, treated so unjustly in strict accord with it by the undemocratic law made up in pursuit of the traditional injustices being protested.

 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 September 17, 2020, under the title "Students in the right" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1986803/it-makes-no-sense
  

Richer for debate

re: "Protesters must show more maturity" (BP, Opinion, September 14, 2020)

Dear editor,

Veera Prateepchaikul is certainly right to say of the students that "what they are demanding, such as the 10-point manifesto for the reform of the monarchy, is considered provocative by hard-core royalists." Unhappily, what is right is often considered provocative by those who reject progress. Even basic scientific facts, such as that our planet Earth along with other lumps of matter orbiting the sun, which is but a common star among billions on the edge of one of billions of ordinary galaxies in the known universe where we are an insignificant speck, greatly upset the Christian popes, who opposed the spread of such knowledge not with reason but with the usual violence that characterizes the ideologically committed. Similarly, Darwin's discovery of the fact that we are but one transient species built by mindless nature like every other, to all of which we are related, from roses, to rabbits, to Covid-19, still provokes many, who hate such facts that contradict their self-adulating stories of unfounded superiority. Naturally, many such opponents of reason and truth resort to unjust law to suppress knowledge of the reality that so upsets their fake myths.

Veera is also certainly right that the students must consider opposing views. That would be sensible: the reason, the justice, the facts, the moral right are solidly on the side of the students, so by engaging in it, constructive discussion with the opposing arguments will further show the absolute intellectual and moral poverty of those opposing views. As every poll done, however flawed they likely are, suggests, most Thais already know or suspect that there are no sound opposing arguments to anything the students have said. 

Confirming those public suspicions of the Thai nation in peaceful, public discussion would be a wise move on the part of the students. The students should continue to invite the Prime Minister and those who oppose their voices as rational, informed Thai citizens to debate the issues on TV. Schools should encourage and facilitate students on both sides to formally debate the issues in accord with the primary rule of a formal debate that the opposing side must be listened to and responded to with reason and facts.

I am confident that the protesting students would eagerly take up such opportunities to helpfully spread reason, truth and facts throughout Thai society. Veera himself has been unable to give any cogent counter-argument to anything that the students have said or demanded on any point or in any manifesto.

 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 September 15, 2020, under the title "Richer for debate" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1985463/1509op-postbag
  

Poor law stokes protests

Re: " 'Legal war' on dissenters destined to fail", (BP, Opinion, September 5, 2020)

It is precisely because the government and state authorities are acting in accord with the law that the students are protesting. It is the unjust law that is the problem. It is the unjust law of many decades that has retarded the Thai nation in every way for generations. It is the morally corrupt law that enables, nurtures and encourages corruption and other abuses. It is the systems set up by bad law that enable such plainly partial treatment by Thailand's famously unjust justice system.

The youth of Thailand and their supporters know this. The imprisonment and other harassment they suffer in accord with the law proves the law undemocratic.

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The above is the text that was actually posted as a quick comment on the article by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text of that quick comment as edited was published in PostBag on August 29, 2020, under the title "Poor law stokes protests" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1980559/tracing-the-boss-money-trail

  

In the best tradition

re: "Anon, ‘Mike’ finally locked up" (BP, September 3, 2020)

Dear editor,

Such brave young Thai citizens: human rights lawyer Anon Nampa and activist Panupong Jadnok set the example of true love of their nation. Their chosen path of progress by peaceful street activity has an ancient, honourable history.

They are following in the long line of human rights activists.  Socrates, an icon of much that is best in the Western civilization that has today avidly been taken up as our shared global civilization, after being sentenced to death for refusing to desist from seeking and speaking truths on the streets of ancient Athens, explains in Plato's Crito why even unjust law must be suffered  by those who love justice and their nation. Similarly, Jesus, the inspiration for the Christian religion, also set the example of nobly suffering the consequences of unjust law rather than commit to morally wrong silence on the streets of ancient Jerusalem, where his peaceful speaking of truths had angered the traditionalist conservatives at whose behest he was executed in strict accord with the rule of law made up by zealous pushers of law and order who dismissed him as a rabble rousing rumour-monger. It must be wondered: Would the Buddha, the author of the insightful Kalama Sutta, have himself done other than Socrates and Jesus did? Would he not also have chosen as have these brave Thai citizens following the sacred path of truth, honesty and selflessness?

Also worth noting is that no one, least of all the brave victims now enduring prison, disputes that the judges decision to revoke their release on bail is in strict accord with the law as it exists. It is legal. It is, of course, that perfect legality of the officially imposed punishment that further strengthens the parallels with the inspiring lead of Socrates, of Jesus, of the women suffragettes, of Martin Luther King, and so on through the long history of civil rights advocates who nobly suffered legal persecution as a consequence of knowingly taking a peaceful stand for what was right, just and decent.

Those now using repressive law to silence reason, truth, honesty and moral decency do not respond with reason for a simple reason: there is no reason, no justice, no moral right with which to answer the just demands of the young Thais calling for their nation to progress as it, and all Thais, deserves.

By their considered sacrifice for it, these patriotic young Thais prove themselves beyond any doubt to have the courage of their moral convictions moved by a deep love for the Thai nation.

 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 September 5, 2020, under the title "In the best tradition" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1980199/stand-up-people