Oversized complaint

General news - Thursday December 13, 2007

POSTBAG

Oversized complaint

E-mail: postbag@bangkokpost.co.th / Snail mail: 136 Na Ranong Road, Klong Toey, Bangkok 10110, Thailand

It is very difficult for oversized women to travel in Bangkok because of small taxis and little seats on the skytrain and the subway. You have almost nothing in the stores for oversized women and you never have articles in the Bangkok Post that address our special needs.

Thai women all look undernourished; the way they dress is disgusting, and the cosmetics they use are cheap and tacky.

Please address these issues in your newspaper.

SUSAN SUTTON

Chiang Mai

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Chalerm may be right

I think that Pol Capt Chalerm Yubamrung is correct: "The more they talk about the PPP's dissolution, the more votes we'll get."

There's something about the spectre of an unelected government destroying its opposition in any way possible that will make people want desperately to rid themselves of that government.

And the way that ordinary politics has been crippled by the new charter forces people into the hands of the strongest of the political mobs left standing.

JOHN FRANCIS LEE

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Influenced by the West

I am a Spanish student who is working at the 24th SEA Games in Korat and, like most of my colleagues, I was surprised by the generosity of the citizens and their culture, but that is not what I want to point out here.

My amazement has grown throughout this last week on how influential the occidental world is for the oriental, and how this influence is only one-sided. You can immediately recognise this by comparing newspapers (and the media in general) from both sides of the globe.

Why is it more important for you to know that Mr Sarkozy is fighting a strike in the transport sector in France than for us to know that the insurgency in the south of Thailand has killed more than 2,700 people since 2004?

It is not. And it is not just that our culture affects you directly (positively and negatively) while we are not even aware of yours.

The value of tradition, history, culture, the value of what is newsworthy should not be based on who has more economic power, but on the intrinsic value itself.

I do believe that this is not only unjust but that it can develop into a loss of traditions and customs, of cultural identity, if that is not happening already.

BORJA DE LA MADRID MASI

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Good policies needed

This election certainly is a mess, with 61% of the electorate undecided, according to an Abac Poll. Maybe, though, in a perverse way, this large number of fence-sitters gives us hope, for at a Thammasat seminar the panellists agreed that none of the six major parties has offered sustainable platforms.

Perhaps, though 60% of voters have only a primary education, they've been able to see through the parties' sham and hot air, proving the truth of Abraham Lincoln's words: "You can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

If that's the case, what the parties must now do is focus on those points which mean most to voters, and prove that their policies are sustainable. For example, in education, given that the average O-Net score for Bangkok schools is significantly higher than for Thailand as a whole (200/350 versus 150/350), why not put funds into improving the quality of education instead of free uniforms or more years of teaching that is mediocre at best? Give us policies that are meaningful and credible, please. We're not as stupid as you think.

BURIN KANTABUTRA

Bangkok Post