Bold promises
Re: "Phumtham vows drug blitz", (BP, July 5).
News of Phumtham Wechayachai becoming interior minister in the new cabinet brings hope for a crackdown on narcotics and local mafias.
Whenever a new cabinet is formed, the interior minister plays the same broken record.
In the end it's business as usual, as local police ignore shops selling illicit drugs under the cover of fake pharmacies, and so on.
We will see if Phumtham will really act tough (if he is allowed to do so) or if he will act like Thaksin Shinawatra, who only acted against petty drug pushers on the street rather than the main drug cartels.
One thing the new minister can do right away is improve security to protect citizens who give tip-offs to police on drug activities. Usually, reports are offered via hotline numbers in which the identity of the caller and phone are recorded. Citizens are scared when they make reports to police -- officers could be moles planted by a drug lord at the local station.
The narcotic report system should include email or other safeguards to ensure samaritans will not be tracked by drug dealers. Last but not least, the Bangkok Post and other media must follow up on whether promises by the new minister bear fruit or are simply just more hot air.
Jayut Jayanandana
Manic moments
Re: "Booze not a narcotic", (PostBag, July 2).
Jason Jellison's contributions to PostBag are becoming more bizarre by the day.
With all this talk of various mind-affecting substances, I'm tempted to wonder if Jason is on something other than the odd beer.
I can agree that Felix Qui waffles on to the point that he sometimes gets lost in his own earnest insistence that alcohol does more damage to society than pot (with which I agree 100%), but none of that begins to addle the brain like Mr Jellison's ability to jump from marijuana to home-brewed hooch to crack cocaine to a glass of milk.
A bit of light-hearted commentary never goes astray, but I can do without Mr Jellison's almost manic attempts to amuse us with these incoherent streams of nonsense.
Ray Ban
No basis to compare
Re: "Double standards", (PostBag, July 3).
In his latest letter, Eric Bahrt writes that you are not called anti-Muslim if you are critical of Hamas, but you are called anti-Jewish if you are critical of Israel.
There is no comparison. Hamas openly calls for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews, something which has already taken place in most of the Arab world. If the world is looking the other way, it is this fact that is being ignored. As to Israel's "cruelty" in Gaza, a biased media has been talking of nothing else for the past 21 months.
Frank Scimone
Cultural treasure
Re: "Protecting culture is key", (Editorial, July 5).
One wishes this editorial had been much longer because it addresses such an important and almost universally overlooked subject. Culture, in certain ways, resembles science. We would not have seen the surface of Mars if Newton's Laws of Motion had been forgotten. In the West, culture often owes its preservation to the methods commonly used to record it.
An original manuscript score for Beethoven's 9th Symphony when posted online received this comment: "Every time in my life that I lose my reason, my conscience, the motivation to even live, I can never help but hear the Ode to Joy echoing. And although I don't express it, I always break into tears of happiness remembering every word and every letter that the choir makes great".
I consider the greatest example of Thai culture to be perhaps the most intangible and difficult to preserve. Particularly among rural Thais, the norm when people gather in friendly groups is for people to speak about themselves in the third person.
They eschew the word "I" and instead use their own nickname. Avoiding argument, Thais prefer to cooperate to achieve a consensus view or decision. Such cultural behaviours and values pertaining to social interactions form the foundation of a rapidly changing society which is being overwhelmed by the West.
Of course, it is important to preserve exemplary old buildings, especially ancient temples. But how will the roots of Thai tolerance and harmony, something the West desperately needs to learn and actively embrace, be preserved?
Where is the record of it that brings one to tears of joy? Is Ms Paetongtarn, with her MSc in hotel management from the UK, capable of preserving the treasure that is Thai culture when her stated goal is to "commercialise" it?
Michael Setter
