Published on July 23, 2005
Re: “THAI yields to MPs’ demands”, News, July 22. It really is shameful that thick-faced MPs have nothing better to do than complain and demand frequent flyer points for flights they take for free. These MPs should have some sense of pride and decorum in what issues are important.
Frequent flyer points are not worth fighting over – it’s grossly indecent considering that there are so many other issues these MPs can pursue, such as sharing the woes and uplifting the economic plight of their constituents.
I suggest they become businessmen rather than MPs responsible for serving the public. Instead they look after their own interests, fighting over mundane and insignificant “points” that they want to transfer to their family members. It really is batsii (disgusting) that such MPs exist. Joseph CB P’ng Petaling Jaya, Malaysia ------------------------------------ Heavy-handed tactics didn’t help Britain with the IRA If you come from an area which has been threatened continuously for 35 years, and you’ve witnessed a tough stance taken by a leader, you’ll know that it has contributed to the problem. Such a stance leads to civil rights abuses, miscarriages of justice, the bloody mishandling of valid protests that are later justified in the press as a response to national hysteria. There is no way then that you’d back these powers with no geographical or time limit placed on them. It took Britain another 20 years after Margaret Thatcher to get the IRA to talk, with help from Clinton (who was much nicer to people abroad than at home, interns excepted). Barnet Fair Bangkok ------------------------------------ Local participation essential if decree is to be effective Concerning the emergency decree, can the violence be stopped by applying this law, which gives greater power to government officers? This is the question that a large number of people are trying to answer before making a decision on whether to support the government. Different people have different points of view on this subject. Many locals in the southernmost provinces believe that the stronger the laws are, the more success authorities will have in controlling the chaos. It can be used as an effective tool in obtaining useful information by examining a suspected person or place at any time. Dangerous substances, such as bomb-making materials, could then be confiscated at any time from suspected shops. However senior officers in non-governmental organisations who are taking part in peaceful activities believe that the emergency decree discourages peaceful negotiation. It will definitely violate the peoples’ rights and be unfair to society if officers misuse their power. Such violations represent the main cause for present-day violence. The law may be an effective tool if it can be enforced impartially in order to gain trust from local people. If they are willing to stay with the government, any useful information will be obtained easily and the peace will be regained. Bituporn Tontavanich Phang Nga ------------------------------------ Beer-listing protests interfere with the rights of others Students, monks and others are protesting against the application of a beer producer to list on the SET, even though making such beverages, under licence, is legal. Their activities, though well intentioned, are misguided. The rights of others must be respected. For example, Muslims believe that charging interest on loans is sinful. Yet, they are wise in not protesting against financial institutions that charge interest listing on the SET, for they recognise that they have no right to stop others from buying bank shares. Likewise, the anti-beer people have no right to deprive those who wish to buy Beer Chang’s shares of the opportunity to do so. Rather, they should focus their efforts on more meaningful activities, such as helping police check for proof of age in bars or teaching youth how to handle drinking. In all that they do, they should respect the rights of others. Burin Kantabutra Bangkok ------------------------------------ Green movement a source of some convenient science Re: “Industry manufactures uncertainty to distort health risk”, Opinion, July 20. The author, a professor of public health, supports the global-warming hypothesis by accusing the oil industry of manufacturing uncertainty by hiring scientists who are paid well to “throw mud and crank up the fog machinery”. He supports his argument by citing the case of the tobacco industry. These firms maliciously attempted to create uncertainty and controversy over the claim by scientists that cigarettes are addictive and that they cause lung cancer. In the end the scientists were proven right and the tobacco industry was hit with lawsuits. The moral of the story is that scientists can be counted on to be right on public health issues and that we should simply trust them to be right on global warming as well. History does not support this view, however. It was once scientific gospel that there was a cancer epidemic in America caused by trace amounts of synthetic industrial chemicals in the environment. The architects of this movement had specifically dismissed cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer. It turned out in the end that when the effects of smoking, longer life spans and improvements in diagnostic methods were taken into account, the feared epidemic growth rate in cancer disappeared from the statistics. These statistical details were overlooked and the hypothesis became truth by virtue of momentum. As another example of science gone wrong, consider the history of DDT. When DDT was first introduced, the advertising slogan of Dow Chemical was “Better living through chemistry” and the inventor of DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize because his invention had almost eradicated malaria and other insect-borne diseases. However, the wanton overuse of DDT was shown to harm wildlife, in particular certain birds. The book “Silent Spring” presented an Armageddon scenario with no birds to sing in spring because DDT had killed them off. This marked the beginning of the swing of the pendulum from irrational chemophilia all the way to irrational chemophobia. The media seized upon this book and it became a sensational best seller. Much good resulted from it because the excessive use of synthetic chemicals, radioactivity, X-rays and technology in general was checked. However, it left the extreme ideological legacy that all things synthetic are bad and all things natural are good, although most known carcinogens today are natural. Although the author does a good job of projecting the evils of the tobacco industry upon the oil industry, he does not address the issue at hand. It is axiomatic that the oil industry will oppose a movement that faults its product for environmental catastrophes. That is no reason to support the global-warming hypothesis. The earth has been warming since 1979 and we also have data that atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in Hawaii has been going up since 1958. These data raise some important questions. Is the increase in CO2 causing rising temperatures? Is it possible for human intervention to affect the course of climate change? No clear answers to these questions exist but the answers are apparently obvious to extreme Green followers of the “Silent Spring” revolution because they have now come to stand against all human activity. It is therefore to be expected that they will find a way to blame human activity for global warming. Scientists work under a lot of pressure to get funding for their research and to publish their papers. Scientists funded by the oil industry are more likely to push the industry agenda, as the author has noted. Likewise, we would expect that those funded by organisations that are pushing the Kyoto Protocol would tend to see things in that light. It is up to the informed public to come to their own conclusions. Cha-am Jamal Phetchaburi ------------------------------------ Can we expect a ‘commission’ refund from ITO and Patriot? Re: “Bomb scanners due this month”, News, July 22. Is it not the case that ITO and Patriot have already been paid their “commissions” on the scanner purchase – commissions for doing nothing now that the purchase has been made directly? Will they be returning the funds, on the order of Bt1 billion as I remember, now that they have been caught out as frauds? John Francis Lee Chiang Rai ------------------------------------ Dictators of the present, not the past, deserve our attention Re: “Four recent murderous despots were not Muslim”, Letters, July 20. Eric Bahrt opens with, “In his letter, Dean Barrett accuses the rest of us of being ‘selective’ in our concern for human rights.” Then Eric proceeds to compare Muslim dictators of today to the worst of dictators in the West and Asia in the past. I hope most people can see the logical fallacy in this “our present is better than your past” argument. Eric also brings up America’s past regarding Natives and African slaves 150-200 years ago. What has this got to do with present-day slavery and dictatorships in the Middle East? Again, this is the same fallacy. Good grief. Even a couple of Saudi dignitaries have been caught in England and the US quite recently for keeping their staff as slaves. Eric then goes on to call Americans hypocritical, as if they knew the full extent of the atrocities Saddam was committing decades ago. Now hold your horses: the mass graves have only been discovered recently, thanks to the invasion of Iraq. Due to Saddam’s secrecy the world had limited knowledge then and only began to learn more after the Gulf War, making any such claims the result of hindsight. Sue P Chai Nat
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