• OPINION

  When in doubt, gag the dissenters

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/09/2014

  » Banning is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook, dating back to the pre-Medici, pre-Bolshevik, pre-YouTube era. It's placebo, and yet the illusion of efficiency still works like drugs among jittery leaders and strongmen who fear papers, images, testaments and sometimes truth.

• OPINION

  A glossary of 2014 Newspeak

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/11/2014

  » Constitution (noun/slang): A piece of paper torn to shreds every few years by gun-toting soldiers who perform such deeds on national TV. Usually, a new piece of paper is written shortly afterwards, invariably by a clique of handpicked Samaritans, legislative superheroes, heartbroken mavericks and all-purpose sycophants.

• OPINION

  The theory of Hawking as a parallel Thai

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/03/2018

  » Had Stephen Hawking been born here, the fate of astrophysics would likely have been different: no Theory of Everything, just a Hypothesis of Nothing. Had he been born here, the starburst of his extraordinary life would have been sucked into a black hole, a metaphorical black hole, and the proof that the universe can be so unkind to some people would have been concluded.

• OPINION

  All aboard for a 'Thai-Thai' referendum

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/07/2016

  » The word "Thai" means "free". But when you repeat the syllable and say "Thai-Thai" (with a dismissive laugh), suddenly it means "fake" -- it means we've bent whatever rule the world has to make it suitable to our temperament, emotion and impulse. For example, when you're not sure if your principle is solid, your stance firm, your democracy authentic, or your coup justified, there's a simple way to shut down the argument: just say it's baab Thai-Thai, "in the Thai way". Then, if everything is not forgiven, at least it's understood.

• OPINION

  Popping the question of hero or killer

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/03/2016

  » A hero to some is a murderer to others — how I wish the world were less tortuous.

• OPINION

  Tabloid saga and our gang mentality

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/01/2016

  » The tabloid saga of the week is a slap-fest involving 30 people, mostly women, its flurry of glorious hair-pulling captured in a video clip. The cause is a triangulated romance between a young man and his two women, one of them a TV celebrity. Love hurts, as we teach our children, or it’s not love. But let’s pause and consider: what can a catfight, the first sensational, useless headline of 2016, tell us about the state of our national politics of the past decade? That we’re in a gang war, apparently.

• OPINION

  Living in a void of white wilderness

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/12/2015

  » They look like modern art, those blank spaces in the International New York Times, an emptiness in the forest of stories.

• OPINION

  Crippling US economy is a pipe dream

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/08/2015

  » Besides sleeping pills, we need a daily dose of fantasy to make life tolerable. A fantasy that we could bankrupt the US by boycotting American products after the cocky imperialist has branded us a hotbed of human trafficking (Starbucks and McDonald’s for starters, but excluding Facebook because that would be masochistic).

• OPINION

  Going mad in March, with fear of tragedy

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/03/2015

  » The March heat is driving people crazy. Each week, news headlines just get weirder, as if we were madmen who subscribe to the newsletter of our madhouse. Don’t tell me you never experience that moment when a headline is so absurd, so improbable that you believe − I mean, really believe for many seconds or minutes — that you’re reading one of those satirical publications or websites that peddles mockery and exaggeration. Only it’s not. It’s real. And if madness is defined by the inability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fantastical, we’re all going down that path, led by the smiling Pied Piper in uniform.

• OPINION

  Our ‘saviours’ say shut up, put up, pay up

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2015

  » Death and taxes are the only two sure things in life, so the joke goes. I had a nice time at the tax office last week, three days before the deadline. It wasn’t a “fun time”, which is impossible, but nice enough in my dealings with a courteous tax lady who performed her arithmetic gifts with a pencil and calculator, smiling and helpful in her office full of paper and weary-looking taxpayers — some of them street vendors and odd-jobbers, I gathered. There’s something Kafka-esque about a visit to the Revenue Office: The mild dread (of what?), the anxious wait and, above all, the wild guess about the bureaucratic labyrinth that delivers our payment into the invisible state coffers.

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