It's beyond reason

re: "Civic groups press for relocation of bizarre statue" (BP, August 17, 2023) 

Dear editor,

The Artists Council for the Promotion of Buddhism of Thailand demonstrates a flawed understanding of the Buddha's teachings if they think that merely because something "went against Buddhist teachings" could be grounds to abolish or suppress it. Bangkok and the rest of Thailand is full of churches, cathedrals, mosques, meat selling markets and restaurants, and no end of other things that are at least as "against Buddhist teaching" as is the rather ugly, bizarre in fact, statue of the deity Khru Kai Kaeo. The Artists Council for the Promotion of Buddhism of Thailand might find more constructive ways to promote Buddhism than an intolerance that seems itself to contradict the Buddha's ideals of reason and example rather than brute force, including brutish legal force. 

The statue and its prescribed worship are no more superstitious than any other bit of religious teaching or practice touching on supernatural matters. When it comes to the supernatural, every religious claim is, without exception, exactly as well-evidenced as every other such claim. The teachings attendant on Khru Kai Kaeo are as sacred as any and on that score as deserving of the same respect accorded any other equally well substantiated sacredness. Why wouldn't they be? The sacred is, after all, the sacred, however scary of visage and divine command. 

Those who find such things distasteful are free to ignore the crimson manicured Khru Kai Kaeo or point out that it's all a bit beyond reason, but that is as far as their horror may justly go. Those finding it a source of comfort for whatever reason should be allowed to exercise their faith provided they not cause or threaten actual harm to others, including innocent puppies, or pigs, neither of whom appreciate being sacrificed to human desires for blood-soaked self-indulgence. 

Meanwhile, those who are "gripped by fear" should get a grip and take a more rationally informed, more Buddhist, approach  to such nonsensical beliefs as ghosts, spirits, demons, gods and other such perfectly unsubstantiated fantasy. 

But before this latest god on the block is cast into the darkness whence all such derive, what sacrifice does  Khru Kai Kaeo require to deliver Thailand from the curse being cast by Pheu Thai, the senate, UTN and the rest of that most unholy alliance against the will of the Thai people as manifest on May 14 and since? Those gargoyles being gathered into the warm embrace of the Pheu Thai family are the truly scary ones stalking the land. 

 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 19, 2023, under the title "It's beyond reason" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2632127/its-beyond-reason

Free speech in full

re: "Denmark on heightened alert after Koran burnings" (BP, August 4, 2023) 

Dear editor,

Some pieces of inked paper bound together in a book called the Koran have been peacefully burned in Sweden and Denmark under the protection of the laws of those countries. That book is a potent symbol to some, so the deliberate desecration is understandably upsetting, but like those who suffer with mature restraint the burning of their national flag, the $100 bill, the Bible, a revered poster of Barbie or any other cultural emblem, the followers of the Koran now have a chance to prove the true worth of the faith that each paper copy of the Koran symbolizes. By responding to the rude outrage with peaceful, reasoned rebuttal rather than bullying violence or threats thereof, they will show that their religion upholds good morals. They can demonstrate that, being firmly based on reason and objective reality, it need not lash out in desperate fear at those who question its verities.  

Denmark and Sweden have responded correctly to the extremely offensive but nonetheless peaceful expression of opinion that is the burning of the Koran. If we fail to insist that the law not only allow expressions of speech that we find utterly repellent but actually protect the peaceful exercise of such deeply offensive acts, then we do not in fact respect the fundamental right of free speech, which does not magically stop at my or your most revered or sacred things. Free speech really does mean that others have the right to peacefully express ideas that we, and perhaps a large majority of our society, find offensive in the extreme. Anything less debases claims of free speech to a worthless platitude allowing only already accepted ideas. Islam should take this opportunity to show a moral maturity that accepts that others will think differently about what it deems of supreme importance. 

 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 9, 2023, under the title "Free speech in full" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2626029/tip-for-mfp

Aim to reduce harm

re: "A gruesome reminder" (BP, Travel, May 25, 2023) 

Dear editor,

The certainly gruesome, and hopefully disturbing, piece by the Bangkok Post's Pattarawadee Saengmenee revisiting the historical reality of Thailand's relatively recent prison systems, complete with officially prescribed torture, was an ever timely reminder of how much more barbaric and cruel our not so remote ancestors were; nor do I exclude my own and other nations' law enforcement systems, which were also officially far more brutal than today so recently as only one hundred or even less years ago. 

They might have been doing their best to make progress, but along with the abundance of documentary and other historical evidence, the material artefacts they have left behind attest, as clarified by Ms Saengmenee's article, to how far less morally developed those dear ancestors truly were in practice. We can and should do better than the last generation. We should do far better than those of 100 years ago, let alone of centuries past when cat baiting was as popular a sport throughout Europe as was the entertainment, complete with presiding Christian clergy, of the public torture of dubiously convicted heretics and lesser criminals. 

Contrary to authoritarians preaching law and order to excuse their lust for legalized brutality, harsh criminal punishments, including draconian prison sentences out of all proportion to any actual harm done anyone, are no sign of good morals. They testify only to a viciously cruel character. 

 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 May 27, 2023, under the title "Aim to reduce harm" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2579401/legacy-politics

re: "Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right"

re: "Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right" (The New York Times, May 7, 2023)

One problem is that many Christians prefer the version of their religion forged by the warrior St Paul in his letters laying down the law with perfect intolerance and disdain for human decency to the version of Christianity promoted by Jesus, the street protestor who died by the political machinations of the conservative religious establishment, the Sanhedrin, of ancient Judea who piously persuaded themselves that any means were OK to maintain their position in their beloved hierarchy.

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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/2023/05/07/opinion/tucker-carlson-christian-right.html#commentsContainer&permid=124930746:124930746

re: "In the Face of Tragedy, Petitioning God Is an Act of Faith"

re: "In the Face of Tragedy, Petitioning God Is an Act of Faith" (The New York Times, March 29, 2023) 

While prayer might indeed comfort those now suffering the loss of loved ones, no god will. Perhaps that does not matter: the value of prayer is directly in its balm for they who pray. 

But unfounded hope that militates against effective action does matter. Honest realism, however unpleasant, is a healthier prerequisite for assessing and responding to an appalling situation than is hope or faith that is not solidly grounded in reality. 

Mr French speaks not only of hope and faith, but also of courage, specifically, of moral courage. That courage in the face of an ugly reality is a more productive response. Courage, as the author says, to do what is right to oppose what is wrong, however hopeless it might seem, and there is much that is wrong in a nation that has such an appalling record of gun violence, amid a hopeless fetishization of guns that goes hand in hand with boastful anti-wokeness to oppose even allowing a courageous facing of the reality in which we humans, including Americans, must live. 

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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/2023/03/29/opinion/nashville-shooting-prayer.html#commentsContainer&permid=124090288:124090288

Level the playing field

re: "Trans women banned from female athletics" (BP, March 24, 2023) 

Dear editor,

The unhappy decision by World Athletics that "transgender women will no longer be allowed to compete in female track and field events regardless of their levels of testosterone" again confirms that common sense is indeed common, typically meaning crudely populist, and not particularly sensible. 

There was a much better solution to this contentious sporting issue borne of improving technology and respect for individuals. World Athletics has squandered that opportunity. Instead of perpetuating the ancient obsession with biological sex, the focus could instead have been put on relevant physical criteria, such as the cited testosterone levels, and allow athletes to compete in categories according to which set of those relevant physical criteria they met, irrespective of genetic sex. How could that be unfair to anyone competing in such a category? This solution to it would have defused the controversy without perpetuating inherited notions that focus on judging women differently to men merely because they are biologically women.

In what other area of human contest is such sex-based discrimination still an accepted norm? Are women managers kept carefully sequestered from male managers, or do both compete in the corporate field on the same set of relevant criteria, with their sex being irrelevant? Are women doctors, and now transgender doctors, kept from competing on equal terms with doctors born male, or are they judged according to their competence as doctors, with sex properly deemed irrelevant?

The sensible resolution to the new biological and social realities made increasingly common is to get over separating humans according to whether they have a Y-chromosome or not and instead judge each individual according to actually relevant criteria. In the case of athletics, those criteria would include things like testosterone level, height, weight, lung capacity, and so on. Why, after all, should weaker women be forced to compete against stronger women merely because they happen to be in the category of biological female?  

When other playing fields are moving past it, why does sport remain determined to discriminate on the basis of sex? Why the refusal to treat individuals impartially according to relevant criteria for ability? 

 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 March 26, 2023, under the title "Level the playing field" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2536289/level-the-playing-field

Myanmar viewpoints

re: "Dialogue: A step in the right direction" (BP, Opinion, March 21, 2023) 

Dear editor,

When Kavi Chongkittavorn writes of the conflict resolution regarding "the Myanmar quagmire" itself remaining conflicted that "It's nobody's fault," does that mean he thinks committing a coup against your own people to overthrow your own nation's popular form of democratic government, and to thereby massively regress the economic, social, political and moral well being of the people and their nation is not an act with appalling consequence for which its perpetrators are at fault?

Kavi's piece, however, might leave readers a little perplexed: Was Myanmar's National Unity Government (NUG), one of those "dialogue partners" present for the "unfiltered exchanges" that most recently confirmed the divisions? More or less perplexing, the author later opines in the same piece that "besides Nay Pyi Taw, other participants understood full well who the main troublemakers were and the sources of all the troubles that preceded the current quagmire." That does sound as though the author might well suspect who is at fault for "the Myanmar quagmire."

Naturally, the State Administrative Council (SAC) likes ASEAN's Five Point Consensus; since it was promulgated in April 2021, they have used it as a convenient tool by which to put off any substantive move to restore the governance of the Myanmar nation, and its natural wealth being plundered, to the Myanmar people. 

 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 March 24, 2023, under the title "Myanmar viewpoints" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2535069/little-to-smile-about

re: "The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs"

re: "The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs" (The New York Times, December 28, 2022)

100 years ago, before the wonders of modern technology made the world a vastly better place for almost all in liberal democracies, the only way for the state's lawful authorities to get information about what someone had said to another was for that other, perhaps a spy or perhaps just a conscientious citizen, to report the speech or hand over the correspondence. 

This has not changed with the arrival of Signal. 

The content of conversations on Signal can, unless burnt like a handwritten letter, be recorded and shared by the parties involved in that conversation. If someone has a Signal record discussing, say, child sexual abuse, they are as free as a priest, bishop, reverend, imam, monk, pope or police officer to share that information with law enforcement when lawfully ordered to or when their conscience dictates they do so. And the fact that Signal cannot be easily hacked greatly strengthens the worth of such documentary evidence handed over.  

Tools such as Signal merely restore the option of having a conversation as private as could be had 100 years ago by walking down the road 100 yards from potentially eavesdropping others. 

Meanwhile, for those not blessed with living in liberal democracies, it is essential to support such powerful tools for privacy against abusive surveillance states, which states  are all to real and numerous. 

Mr Blackman's arguments in this opinion piece are lame at best, and his proposals likely a dangerous threat to many.  

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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/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twitter-signal-privacy.html#commentsContainer&permid=122264118:122264118

Wrong assumptions

re: "The opposite effect" (BP, PostBag, December 24, 2022) 

Dear editor,

Jason A Jellison is correct that "there is nobody alive today who had anything to do with decisions made centuries ago" concerning the Netherland's solidly attested historical involvement in slavery. It is equally certain that no one alive today was involved in any way with America's War of Independence from England. It would therefore follow, according to Mr Jellisons's argument, that no living American should be celebrating the Fourth of July as though it mattered today. And as for that event that some allege to have happened in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago, that is so far beyond living memory that it can't be deemed, on Mr Jellison's reasoning, to have any particular connection to anyone now living.

Mr Jellison's mistake is twofold. First, he fails to understand that nations are entities, typically recognized as juristic persons by the law, whose life times are not limited to the life spans of any particular generation. What Americans celebrate with due pride on July 4 is of central importance to their nation, which is in essence the same nation that has existed since July 4, 1776. The Netherlands also has a historical continuity that means it can and should admit the mistakes that it made as a nation, as well as celebrating what it did right. Christmas is a similarly enduring celebration that inarguably remains central to the lives of many, even though neither they nor a single traceable ancestor was ever involved in the events that some sources uncritically report as having occurred around the time of the birth of a carpenter's son 2,000 years ago who went on to become the most famous street activist and political radical of them all.  

The second, and more substantive mistake Mr Jellison's popularly specious argument overlooks is that historical events have consequences today. African Americans are worse off than white Americans for historical reasons that at least in part trace back to two hundred years of slavery in what was to become the United States. The ancestors of white Americans accrued wealth, education, and other advantages unjustly, and they passed those advantages on to their descendants, whilst bequeathing to the descendants of slaves and Native American Indians lower education and material means. Those facts from 300 or 200 years ago, and also the more recent Jim Crow and later eras, have real world consequences today. Distributive justice requires that those suffering the depredations of past wrongs and those enjoying the fruits of a comfortable life based on historical wrongs, which were not recognized as at all wrong at the time, do require corrections today.

The Netherlands, in the person of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, is right to begin by admitting it (not any individual, but the nation) committed grievous wrongs for which it should apologize. And after apologizing, it should look to ways to make substantive amends for the wrong it previously committed against some groups.

You cannot reasonably celebrate your nation's good unless you are also willing to honestly face its bad, however many venerated generations ago that good and evil was perpetrated or by which condemned or revered figures. 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post. In an earlier draft, I had followed Mr. Jellison in mistakenly writing "Denmark" rather than the correct "the Netherlands". 

The text as edited was published in PostBag on MonthDate, 2022, under the title "Wrong assumptions" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2468900/wrong-assumptions

re: "Donald Trump Is Now Forever Disgraced"

re: "Donald Trump Is Now Forever Disgraced" (The New York Times, December 23, 2022)

Trump may well "be disgraced in perpetuity," but that ugly reality is unlikely to weaken the adulation of the solidly faith-based, whose absolute devotion to their idol is, being purely faith-based, immune to objective reality, which they dismiss with the same pretension to infallibility as their master as nothing but fake news. Thus does religious conviction undermine not only every decent moral value, but reason itself. 

Will those who care for the well-being of the Republican Party, let alone of the United States of America, allow their deplorably faith-based element to force another Trump presidential candidacy to the (secret) joy of the Democrats? 

_______________________________

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

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/opinion/donald-trump-criminal-referral-insurrection.html#commentsContainer&permid=122174031:122174031 

An old precedent

re: "Germany foils bizarre coup plot by far-right group" (BP, December 8, 2022) 

Dear editor,

Who would have thought that a right royal prince, Prince Heinrich XIII Reuss himself no less and wrapped in all his famous benevolence and righteousness, would be involved in a violent plot to commit a coup against his own nation's popular form of democratic government. Could such antique evils yet happen in the 21st century? 

That such an effort to overthrew the rule of law is right wing, regressive and violent need hardly be said, those being the defining characteristics of such conspiracies against justice. Had those enemies of the German people succeeded, they would presumably have also followed the hallowed precedent of promptly criminalizing saying anything rudely honest, however peacefully, about themselves or their newly installed and incontestably universally beloved father-in-law of the nation. 

 Felix Qui  

_______________________________

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 December 10, 2022, under the title "An old precedent" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2457290/lets-try-composting

Dictatorial disputes

re: "Anti-hate hating" (BP, PostBag, November 10, 2022), re: "Reflecting on a century of Fascism" (BP, November 7, 2022)

Dear editor,

It is not clear exactly which of Jason Stanley's "own words" manifest, as Sam Wright alleges, "anti-democratic views [with] dark dictatorial promise." Mr. Wright usefully reports the professor's points that fascism is both rotten and that it does tend to be beloved of Christian conservatives peddling their perfectly unsubstantiated fantasies as all-justifying fact, fake claims if ever there were. He also helpfully summarizes Prof. Stanley's analysis of the threat that Trump poses to US democratic institutions and principles. But there is nothing in all this that is manifestly anti-democratic or fraught with dictatorial promise of the sort that continues, for example, to afflict Thailand, another nation where religion plays a conspicuous role as a pillar loyally propping up glorified tradition opposing democracy that respects human rights. 

Mr Wright has more solid grounds for his observation that Prof. Stanley fails to also rail against much else that is rotten, such as the "left-wing authoritarianism" cited as absent. It must be agreed that the ideology of left-wing authoritarianism, such as exemplified in Xi Jinping's China, if that is what is to be understood by "left-wing authoritarianism", is also rotten. But since Mr Wright does not trouble himself to indicate what he might in fact mean by the undefined term "left-wing authoritarianism", with neither explanation nor a single example being given, we can only speculate as to whether or not Xi and that ilk qualify.

There are, nonetheless, equally authoritarian tendencies than those inspired by fascist authoritarianism with its love of simple final solutions to complex social issues, typically of the "kill them" or "lock them up" type, as Prof. Stanley also discusses with regard to the modern United States with its extraordinarily high rate of imprisonment, most disproportionately of the less-white demographic.

Mr Wright might also have pointed out that Prof. Stanley could have broadened his comments beyond Christianity, since at the very least the world's other monotheistic religions, with or without the multiple personalities of the Christian god, are every bit as repressively immoral and morally stunting in their primitive authoritarianism as are the religions of the God of Abraham, with His famous Ten Commandments, the first of which explicitly dictates in Exodus 20:3 absolute intolerance of other ways of thinking, living or being. But wait, what was that we read in Prof. Stanley's essay about the political acts of Hindu nationalism in India?

Perhaps a closer reading by Mr Wright would have suggested that Prof. Stanley chose to focus on one acute threat to democracy in the West today, not to analyze every political ill, such as seen in the never-democratic likes of Iran, where religion also naturally allies itself to viciously anti-democratic violation of basic human rights, nor was he analyzing the decline and fall wrought by "left-wing authoritarianism" of Chinese democracy under Xi's rising Maoification. Perhaps that dissection of "left-wing authoritarianism" over the past century will come in a later piece, or perhaps Mr Wright could write that essay for us. 

 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 November 12, 2022, under the title "Dictatorial disputes" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2436077/grim-logic

Gracious wisdom

re: "Loss of a great monarch" (BP, Editorial, September 19, 2022)

Dear editor,

The Bangkok Post rightly quotes my late queen's honest wisdom that "There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No institution -- city, monarchy, whatever -- should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't." Bluntly and unequivocally well said Queen Elizabeth II.

Nor need more be said, save perhaps that Queen Elizabeth welcomed the benefit of knowing to a percentage point the publicly varying degree of her own personal popularity and that of the institution which she graciously headed for seven decades. Could any prefer ignorance to such highly pertinent knowledge of reality? 

It is fitting that the world's nations send their heads of state, irrespective of their own varying political systems and opinions, to show respect for her achievement as leader of the monarchy she worked to keep honestly open to a world rapidly evolving both domestically and globally throughout her long life. 

 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, 2022, under the title "Gracious wisdom" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2395733/gracious-wisdom

Open inquiry

re: "Bombshell UN Xinjiang report lists litany of rights abuses" (BP, September 1, 2022)

Dear editor,

If China sincerely believes as reported that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet's report on "the so-called Xinjiang issue is a completely fabricated lie out of political motivations", the solution is simple and obvious: invite a variety of independent observers in to freely travel around, freely talk to people and freely discover what is the case to be more accurately reported. Such open and transparent discussion is always, without exception, the best, perhaps the sole, way for truth to be discovered and false claims exposed as the lies they are.

Censorship, in contrast, including the criminalization of peaceful speech that contradicts official stories, is resorted to solely to enforce ignorance lest ugly facts come to light, which censorship of dissenting opinion must, therefore, itself constitute prima facie good reason for suspecting that the glowing myth so viciously protected by draconian prison sentences and like violations of human rights, all according to unjust law, is largely fake. 

 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 4, 2022, under the title "Open inquiry" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2383803/power-to-him

Patriot games

re: "Myanmar court jails more celebrities" (BP, December 30, 2021)

Dear editor,

After the self-serving in uniform "overthrew an elected government," Myanmar's celebrities did the right thing: they stood up and spoke out for the good morals of democracy against the enemies of their nation's people. Good people, especially those who will be heard, do speak out against bad people who, under fake claims of various incredible lies lamely presented as excuses, plot, commit, collude in, sign off on, or profit from coups that overthrow a people's popular form of democratic government.

The patriotic Myanmar people now being unjustly imprisoned in strict accord with law made up to pervert justice are an example to the rest of ASEAN, too many of whose nations also suffer under the repressive, anti-democratic regimes that pervert the rule of law to criminalize peaceful calls for openness, transparency, accountability and the other good morals of democracy. Those so imprisoned by morally corrupt law are the true patriots of their nation and the people whose nation it is.

 Felix Qui

_______________________________

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 January 1, 2022, under the title "Patriot games" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2240575/conjugal-confusion

Sticks and stones

re: "Nobel winner Ressa decries 'toxic sludge' of social media" (BP, December 10, 2021) 

 
Dear editor,

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa of the Philippines is correct that much, but certainly not all, of Facebook and like social media are "toxic sludge" that spreads lies, hate, and the like. But it also connects people, and can spread truth, concern and community. But that one-sidedness is Ms Ressa's small mistake in the exuberance of her rhetoric.

Far more serious is her attack on democratic principle under the guise of opposing violence. It sounds cool to boldly assert that "Online violence is real world violence.” But calling someone whatever vile name online, or in a newspaper, or on the phone, or over the back fence with your neighbour, or on the schoolyard playground, is not in fact "real world violence." It might be disgusting, base and a lie, but it's not remotely in the same league as breaking someone's arms, chopping an outspoken critic into pieces in a convenient embassy, or locking a young protestor up in prison for years on end. The latter are real world acts of violence. Name calling is not violence. Even deliberate, outright lying is not actual violence.

Worse, the hyperbole that falsely equates anything fake or vile said on social media with actual real world violence plays immediately into the schemes of dictators and  authoritarian populists, who delightedly take it up. Claiming the same enlightenment that Ms Ressa is propagating, the real bullies in power argue that free speech must, therefore, be restricted because it is an act of violence. That way lies laws that ban any and all speech deemed offensive to dictators, military thugs, and authoritarian populists of all stripes, from China's Xi Jinping to Thailand's Prayut Chan-o-cha, from Russia's Vladimir Putin to Hungary's Viktor Orban. Such enemies of democracy argue, like Ms Ressa, that speech in favour of, for example same-sex rights or women's rights or land rights, or institutional reform for accountability and so on, are acts of "violence" against their nation's people, whose traditions such speech would smash. And being "violence," the law must naturally criminalize it to protect the nation and its people from the threat of violent overthrow by such speech on social media, traditional media, or any public speech deemed a threat.

The Nobel Peace Prize recipient has proved her courage in the face of real world violence and certainly means well, but is nonetheless wrong. Speech that incites real world violence is about the limit of what may justly be banned by law. In equating a much wider range of merely vile, offensive, hateful, false or otherwise repugnant speech acts with actual real world violence, it is a dangerous weapon Ms Ressa would hand such enemies of human rights and democracy as the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, one they will be only too happy to take up from her hands and use to justify very real violence against their people.

 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 December 18, 2021, under the title "Sticks and stones" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2233943/who-blinks-first-
  

Unacceptable law

re: "Cambodia jails critics deported by Thailand" (BP, November 22, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

Can Cambodia's official apologist Chhay Kim Khoeun really believe that anyone will believe that he or what he represents is sincere when he asks of Thailand's deportation of political refugees to imprisonment in Cambodia: "How can this be a human rights violation when living in Thailand illegally? I don't understand. Thailand enforced its law and we enforce our law"? Such blind reverence for law irrespective of justice is as touching as the unfettered faith that fires the burning of witches and heretics.

Do Cambodia's masters therefore also hold that everything Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge did was right and proper because in accord with the law made up by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge? It sounds most like a coup committer lamely repeating the mantra: "It's the law," as if merely being the law could ever make anything just or right or morally acceptable.

Other than fascist or communist totalitarians and their brutish ideological ilk, are there any who believe with the perfection of blind faith that a law, however grossly it perverts justice, is to be revered merely because it is the law?

 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 November 25, 2021, under the title "Unacceptable law" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2221103/not-neighbourly
  

Human fictions

re: "China's Xi warns of 'grim' Taiwan situation in letter to opposition" (BP, September 26, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

More humans need realize that countries and nations, along with cultures, customs, and traditions, are all at heart only human fictions, as historian Yuval Harari correctly explains them in his justly famous book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (2015). Mindless faith in blind nationalism or spurious ethnic myths notwithstanding, what might once upon a time have been some region's past political or cultural history is and should be irrelevant to its right to self-determination today.

If the people on the piece of land called Taiwan, or Tibet, or Texas, or Catalonia, or Australia, or whatever do not want to be Chinese, or American, or Spanish, or British, or whatever, that is for them to decide today constrained only by just contractual agreements entered into. Should they wish the people currently occupying some piece of real estate to remain within the same fiction that is a nation, it is for China, or the United States, or Britain to persuade those citizens to freely remain in that organizational structure. Force or threats of force already betray any pretence to respecting the rights of the people on the piece of dirt in question.

 Felix Qui
 

_______________________________

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 28, 2021, under the title "Human fictions" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2188751/investigate-thai
  

Curse of religion

re: "Care needed in Sajat case" (BP, Editorial, September 24, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

In the sad case of the wholesome Nur Sajat, we yet again see zealous ideologues preaching love and peace and morality hounding those cursed to live under their despotism, intolerance, and rejection of moral decency. Religion, one of the most common causes of hell on Earth these last few millennia, is merely one subset of ideology. Like its more honestly political sister ideologies such as communism, fascism and rabid nationalism, religion, as this case plainly demonstrates, demands mindless subservience to and blind faith in its extravagant claims of omnipotence allied to moral perfection. There exists no evidence or reason for those fantastic claims, hence the ruthless suppression of liberty and freedom of peaceful expression that hints at dissent from the dictated orthodoxy.

Islam is, it must nonetheless be admitted, every bit as enlightened and morally decent and founded on truth as are its sister religions that also hold the Bible to be a sacred text direct from the gods. And each member of that subset of sister religions is in turn every bit as reliable as a guide to reality and good morals as every other religion on Earth ever has been, from village shamans, to the Egyptian pantheon, to the Olympian gods, to the high religious traditions of the devout Aztecs, and to sacred Phoenician Ba'al and to every other religion still living or long dead. But that ideology-based insistence on being believed contrary to reason and evidence alike is also a textbook definition of a fake claim.

Whilst respecting the right to religious freedom in private. Whenever religions seek power in the real world, especially political and legal power over the bodies of real, living people, perhaps it is right to be reasonable and to hold the factual and moral claims of such publicly intrusive religions to exactly the same standards applied to claims about Covid, police use of torture, and the sums of the squares of the sides of right-angled triangles. Is there any sound reason not to be so reasonable?

 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 25, 2021, under the title "Curse of religion" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2187435/vaccinations-for-all
  

Toxic Apple 'candy'

re: "Apple defends child protection features over privacy concerns" (BP, August 14, 2021) 

 
Dear editor,

It is so comforting that "Apple was adamant it would not accede to any government's request to scan for anything other than images showing child sexual abuse." And of course, in a future with the scanning ability firmly in place, Apple will not get new leaders who might extend it just a little; or if China bought in, they would not comply; or if the US government tended more to the totalitarian end of authoritarian law and order, Apple would not extend the scanning just a little to monitor for other criminal activity, like communist tendencies, or conservative tendencies, or perhaps the wrong attitudes towards those of different skin colours or ethnic origins. Of course Apple will never comply. It is touching that they have such absolute faith in their prognostications for the future use to which the tools might be put by persons as yet unknown with causes as yet unknown.

Healthy institutions assume that the humans who compose them are or can become corrupt, that great evil can be committed by authoritarians sincerely believing themselves to be doing god's work or some other noble cause, such as Mao's in China. It is similarly the great strength of democracy to trust not in mythically angelic persons, but in strong, widely supported institutions founded on sensible suspicion of all persons. It is prudent to assume that all with power are human beings subject like all of us to the same temptations to do evil, especially in the name of what we wrongly believe good.  It is idiotic in the extreme to imagine that any group of human beings, whether politicians, priests, professors, poets, publicans or whatever are now and always will be only angels.

Are there some out there childish enough to take the candy Apple is offering?

 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 18, 2021, under the title "Toxic Apple 'candy'" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2167011/toxic-apple-candy