Alien Thoughts
3 Mar 2021
So before we have to appear at this UPR thing at the UN, …
What’s UPR?
Ah yes, being police you wouldn’t know. Universal Periodic Review. Every member of UN comes up every 4 years or so and gets questioned on their human rights record. We’re up soon so we want to be able to respond to the inevitable questions about crowd control.
None of their business. Our internal affair. As true Thais we will not be lectured on …
Yes, yes. But it’s part of being in the UN. We have to do it and embarrassing as it is, we have to be ready with some plausible answers.
14 Dec 2020
In a verdict whose twisted and bizarre reasoning surprised no one, the Convolutional Court yesterday ruled that the punishments meted out by schools against students who refused to wear school uniforms were permissible.
23 Nov 2020
Equal Justice Under Law
(Phrase engraved over the entrance to the US Supreme Court. No Thai equivalent has been identified.)
“It is necessary for the government and security agencies to intensify their actions by using all laws and all articles to take action against demonstrators who break the law and show no respect for the rights of other people.”
Uncompromising statement by Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha, Prime Minister of the land of compromise, 19 September 2020.
17 Aug 2020
Years ago, someone suggested a clever linguistic trick.
At the time Nelly Mandelly was being locked away in apartheid South Africa, and Martin Luther King was getting assassinated for having a dream. Skin colour, then as now, was a big thing in politics.
9 Jul 2020
Richmond Enquirer
Verité sans peur
July 5, 1862
Govt backs ‘slave business’
The government of the Confederate States of America, cotton farmers and slave traders have dismissed claims by a human rights group that black slaves used to pick cotton are maltreated and announced plans to take foreign diplomats on a visit to see the slaves at work for themselves.
17 Mar 2020
Some stories that probably won’t be appearing in the next few weeks.
2 Mar 2020
The government is coming under increasing criticism from its conservative elite supporters for its failure to contain the outbreak of a new virus in Thailand
17 Feb 2020
Harrison George on Gen Apirat Kongsompong's statement that the Nakhon Ratchasima mass shooter is "not a soldier anymore".
11 Dec 2019
This week in Alien Thoughts, Harrison George talks about what could happen once military conscription is abolished.
12 Nov 2019
On Nov 5 another climate change report came out. Yawn.
But this one made the news. Not because of the information it contained. This was just a distillation of countless earlier papers, many of them compilations of yet more reports.
But there were 2 newsworthy features in this report.
28 Oct 2019
The sorry situation facing the Kurds in northeastern Syria needs a radical re-framing.
So far the political situation in the region has been reported within the framework of simple-minded dichotomies between good hats and bad hats and Trump-friendly nostrums like ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
18 Oct 2019
Harrison George unpacks the talk/rant delivered by Army Commander-in-Chief Gen Apirat Kongsompong on 11 October 2019.
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