Opinion
24 Apr 2018
If there is still anyone who believes that the law banning assemblies or the 2015 Public Assembly Act is a law created for the protection of protesters, then they are probably completely deaf and blind, and cannot be compared to normal villagers who see the world more according to reality, like the gentle reflection of one villager from the area that opposed the gold mine in Loei Province who interestingly said, “Before the NCPO staged the coup, capitalists or companies were the ones who sued us, but after the NCPO coup, it’s the state that sues us.”
That is the
23 Apr 2018
Last year, something quite momentous happened as regards all of Thailand’s officially recognized 62 ethnicities.
11 Apr 2018
With all the talk about a “new” political party of the “new generation”, it is worth comparing what little we know of this party with Taksin’s Thai Rak Thai Party which was formed after the 1997 economic crisis. The reason for this is that Taksin and his team used the slogan “New Thinking, New Implementation” in their first election campaign.
11 Apr 2018
One of the regions where the middle classes are increasing rapidly is Southeast Asia. Certain countries like Singapore may be able to fully claim that they are middle-class countries, no different from England or the United States. Malaysia is following behind.
Despite that, the politics of most countries in this region have still not changed direction.
10 Apr 2018
At the end of February 2018 there were reports from the mainstream media in Thailand about the detailed plan for the safety zone and the safe house which would be located in the vast precinct of the Pattani Provincial Islamic Council [1]. These reports were based on sources from the Thai negotiation team, such as Gen Aksara Kerdphol, the head of the Thai delegation, and Maj Gen Sitthi Trakulwong, the secretary of the dialogue team.
9 Apr 2018
Everyone has been inviting me to watch the television series “The Crown”. Mr Pinyo Taisuriyatumma was the first person to invite me a little over two years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I watched the first season.
Strangely, it didn’t live up to the recommendations I’ve heard for the past two years. It could be because I’ve heard so much praise I ended up expecting too much.
It’s not because I know so much about the British royal family that excited anymore.
4 Apr 2018
Seed is often synonymous with food, while food for many people is the same as life. And yet an amendment recently introduced in Thai parliaments will take seeds out of the hands of women, farmers and indigenous peoples who have kept seeds, shared seeds and developed a wealth of local knowledge on plant varieties-- and put them instead in the hands of large corporations.
Across the world, women have bred more than 7,000 species of crops for taste, nutrition, pest resilience, drought resilience, flood resilience, and salt resistance.
13 Mar 2018
The announcement of the creation of a new “radical party” of younger activists has caused a stir and raised the hopes of many among the current generation of democracy activists. The party is the brain child of billionaire tycoon Thanathorn Juangroongruangki and law academic Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, who is a member of the pro-democracy Nitirat group. [See].
In a recent Facebook post, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul indicated that the party would model itself on the new left parties in Europe and would be opposed to neo-liberalism.
13 Mar 2018
When “people who want elections” come out and call for them as scheduled, some voices say: “even if we have elections, the same faces and the same political parties will bring back the same old problems.”
With this discourse, I think from some angles, the people who say this want to lessen the credibility of elections and say they are not a solution to the problems we complain about. But from other angles, I understand the issues that make them think in such a way.
9 Mar 2018
I kept asking
I was wondering
Who should decide
Sufficiency of living.
Yes!
8 Mar 2018
Basically, ordinary people might love to have the right to choose their own representatives to sit in the top jobs in the country. Therefore, elections matter. It is strange to see a certain group of people in Thailand has come out to show their resolve against elections, on the ground that the poll might not bring ‘good’ people into governance.
While an election would not bring good people or even democracy to the politics, authoritarians in Southeast Asia indeed need elections to justify their governance.
6 Mar 2018
In the past week, news broke that Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Thammasat University and a member of Nitirat (a group of Thammasat law professors who offer academic legal advice to society), would take a step back from academia and into politics by founding a new political party with Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit.
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