Showing 1 - 10 of 10
Thai idols fall in line with orthodoxy
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/09/2018
» Poor coup-makers, no one wants to see them on TV. At 6pm sharp when the theme song begins, there's a rush of hands to the remote control. Not that you can escape them. The true mark of dictatorship is audiovisual dictatorship: They beam their images on every TV and radio channel, monopolising your sensory reception, like a sci-fi movie, or like a spoiled child demanding your full attention. At 6pm every day for the past four years, the hands clutching the remote have reached for the only possible button. Off.
Knives are out in death penalty row
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/06/2018
» To execute or not to execute, the question weighed on Thai society in the past week with the force of righteous anger. It is a tough question, one that lays bare the complex intersection of morality, law, religion, belief, value, and even the position of the country on the spectrum along which the international norm is moving.
Hanuman help us from a 'happy' ogre
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/09/2016
» The crusader has returned to the gate, ready to crush the infidels. I thought the new buzzword was "Thailand 4.0", whatever that means, and yet this week we're still arguing if a portrayal of a mythical ogre in a music video is blasphemy, a transgression against the high culture of Siam, the culture that stares down from a pedestal, that exists like a taxidermied animal on the altar of an abandoned temple.
Novel ideas to feed a hungry dissenter
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/06/2014
» If nothing else, please permit metaphors. Please allow room for symbols, gestures, analogies, allusions, literature, metonymy, for one-, two-, three-, four and five-fingered salutes, because they’re defiant yet desperate, hopeful yet powerless. They ruffle, but they can’t and won’t change anything, not in the short run at least.
'Blue' gives us all a glimpse of possibility
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/06/2013
» On the screen, the two women made love with such passionate intensity that the whole cinema was stunned into silence. The rubbing of flesh, the whispering, the discovery of physical longitudes and uncharted territories, went on with a sense of longue duree, so long that the initial giggling from some of the audience was hushed by the realisation that this was an attempt to display love, and not just titillating same-sex sex.
Book sex row goes wacky
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2012
» A narrow escape or just stupid miscommunication? For now let's hope we don't welcome plaudits of Bangkok World Book Capital 2013 with the banning of books.
Never mind nipples, the law is an ass
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/09/2012
» The debate on free speech is heating up around the world, from the tumult of the anti-Islam video to the US boycott of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's UN speech and the tyranny of extremism laid bare in Salman Rushdie's newly published memoir.
If the TV went a breast too far, then turn it off
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/06/2012
» Ray Bradbury was right: Television destroys culture and makes us dumb. Turn on the blow-torch and burn books, because the mass hypnotism prescribed by TV is the status quo of modern consciousness. Regardless of your race or religion, your colour and your god, your sex or age, everyone has the same altar upon which daily worshipping is proffered, prime-time or otherwise. Every house has the same shrine, flickering, rectangular, sucking the hologrammed gods from space.
Triumph and the Trojan Horse
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2012
» Snap-happy revellers never learn the lesson. Photographic records of sin aren't supposed to be worse than sin itself, but sometimes they are close. The latest incident, quickly dubbed the army scandal, involved a photo showing a group of soldiers in an act that looks like an orgy with a woman. A gang rape, some charged. Mutual consent, others defended. Punishment, however, has been rightly promised by the Army Chief against the participants. To observers, the moral and philosophical debates entail: is such punishment is meted out against the orgy, or against taking pictures of the orgy and posting them online?
Thailand's idiotic mindset
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/02/2012
» The question is so absurd that it could only be real. The multiple choices are so preposterous they could only be presented in germ-free, sanitised Thailand.