This article, subtitled "Dads support their schizophrenic daughters as psychiatrist reveals how males can be better carers" merely dresses up old gender biases in the authority and respectability of a medical study.

The article quotes a psychiatrist, and a female practitioner at that, who claims her study reveals that women are sensitive and emotional but that fathers are "more reasonable" and "have a better attitude and perception towards patients and the illness". The implication being that doctors would much prefer dealing with the fathers of sick children than their mothers!

That women are considered irrational and men are rational is hardly hard science, but the stuff of centuries of misogyny and mistrust. Moreover, it is a slap in the face of all mothers who accompany their sick children to hospital instead of their fathers.

In a hierarchical society it is difficult for a woman and a mother to be an advocate for herself or her child, particularly in a hospital. To praise a man in the role of his daughter's advocate at a woman's expense is a cheap shot. In doing so, you do a disservice to all loving fathers and mothers of sick children in this country.

So fathers take their seriously ill daughters to treatment. That's what good parents do, regardless of gender. Is a man being congratulated for it because he's seldom seen as a care-giver in Thai society? If that is the rationale for writing this article, then you are perpetuating gender stereotypes, not breaking them.

Deliberately or not, this article is complicit in further victimising women. Instead of presenting a male and a female victim of schizophrenia, the writer chose to present two examples only of women with the disease. It is as if schizophrenia is exclusively a women's disease. Doing so creates the erroneous impression among your readers that in addition to being "mentally defective" women are indeed the "weaker sex".

Shackling women to stereotypes and biases is not a celebration of fatherhood.

Jo Anne Wang

Bangkok

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Right to work guaranteed in universal declaration

Re: "Agricultural price support is only a temporary measure", Letters, December 5.

While the recommendations of Burin Kantabutra referring to the support of rubber prices are very reasonable, the premise of his later remark, "Nobody is guaranteed a livelihood for life" is not. May I refer Mr Kantabutra to the valuable but forgotten articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 22 to 27.

I quote from just two of these articles:

"Everyone has the right to work ... to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."

"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

These are the essential tasks of government, still gravely lacking in our country, rather than providing mobile phones, mega airports, and lotteries.

Danthong Breen

Bangkok

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Chiang Mai flora expo is environmentally unfriendly

I recently visited the Royal Flora Expo in Chiang Mai and was deeply disappointed. The only food I saw being sold there was ice-cream, hotdogs and hamburgers. Since the expo is supposed to be environmentally friendly, why was the food so environmentally unfriendly? For example, the livestock industry in America is responsible for wasting over 50 per cent of the water supply that is used. Yet dead livestock and ice-cream, which comes from live livestock, was the only food they had to offer.

I also got lost at the expo and it took me an hour to find the exit. I asked two other foreigners for help, but they also were lost despite the fact they had a map!

By the time I got out of there I was hungry, hot and tired. Still, I'll admit there was some pretty scenery at the expo. But the disadvantages of going there far outweighed the advantages and thus I give the Royal Flora a resounding thumbs down! Boo!

Eric Bahrt

Pattaya

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Some pleasant truths about the Royal Flora Fair

I am no expert on aeroplanes and am nonplussed by the vexing plight of non-shoppers at Suvarnabhumi Airport. But I am a gardener, and having read so many negative reports on the Royal Flora Ratchaphruek Fair, I decided to make an investigation, although with some trepidation.

Now, while I concede that the whole affair is the fruit of misguided megalomania, I have to admit to being surprised at so much excellence on display. One goes to a floral exhibition to broaden one's knowledge on new plants, new technologies, new gardening ideas; all of which the Chiang Mai Expo has to offer.

I found most of the complaints in the press to be petty in extreme. Take the tulips affair: so much fuss was made about their dereliction, I expected to see at least ten rai of devastation. To my surprise I discovered that this contentious patch was but a few square metres in area. Moreover, the substitute planting was simply delightful. Who else but the Dutch could have come up with a mixture of periwinkles, lilies, and our own silvery "Aae Nang"?

There is something here to learn about, not to complain about, surely.

Some gardens are brilliantly innovative. The South African rock garden, for instance, shows how to put pebbles to good use.

The Tropical Garden, housed under a glass roof, is stunning, as is the orchid exhibition, which I do not think could be bettered anywhere. Indeed there is so much to enjoy and admire, one may need a couple of days to do the exhibition justice.

To attend an exhibition approaching this quality, such as the Chelsea Flower Show or the Royal Horticultural Society Show in England, one will have to pay about twenty times as much.

As for the toilets, I do not know of any plant with a strong enough perfume to quell the stench of human waste, but I found the toilets at the exhibition to be plentiful, well-ventilated and a lot cleaner than in some fancy hotels.

What is thankfully missing at this expo is the usual messy roadside food stalls. All the big food chains have their kiosks selling food at regular prices, which may be expensive for some, but one can take one's own picnic, and a lot of people do just that.

I was disappointed, rather, with the "Night Parade", which looked frightful and was a real embarrassment.

The English-language leaflet giving details of the exhibits in gushing, tour-guide style is in poor taste; everything listed as being "world class". It should have been done more professionally for an event of such importance.

Anna Patihk-Danma

Bangkok

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Internet gives spies and assassins all they need

While the United Kingdom government and police continue their investigation into the death by poisoning of the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, in London, and as the United States relentlessly wages its "war on terror" around the world, it now transpires that the deadly radioactive isotope Polonium 210 used to poison Litvinenko is available for sale in the United States on the Internet.

The spokesman of the kindly firm selling it, United Nuclear, assures us that it is harmless in small doses. Is there no end to the folly of the US administration engaged in its worldwide crusade against terrorism while ignoring the sale of radioactive substances over the Internet at home?

Of course, one should hardly be surprised, knowing the abiding enthusiasm of the American population for the possession of all kinds of deadly weaponry for their self-defence.

Edward Duhigg

Bangkok

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Bombing is the answer to Mideast violence and terror

What if the US systematically bombed for a period of two weeks all 120 nuclear and nuclear-support facilities in Iran? It would postpone for 10 years or so Iran's "grand tour" of nuclear devastation against Israel, resistant Arab states, selected parts of Europe, and beyond.

What if the US also bombed all air force and ground force installations in Iran and Syria?

And for good measure, what if the US bombed the re-grouping Taleban forces in Waziristan in north Pakistan (just ceded to the Taleban), from which Islamists seek to launch attacks against Nato forces in Afghanistan?

And what if - and God knows it's about time - Israel was given the green light to launch a two-pronged attack against Hezbollah death squads and Hamas homicide bombers for the express purpose of destroying both groups, at whatever the cost?

What if all developed states agreed to an embargo on all oil imports from Saudi Arabia, until that state stops setting up schools of hate all over the world?

And finally, what if all democratic states agreed to suspend, for a period of five years, their participation in the United Nations (effectively an Islamised Mafia organisation), to protest that institution's top-down, all-pervasive corruption, and its pathological targeting of one state, week after week?

What if? As a consequence, the world's states would almost certainly see a new lease on life for the only political system, and the only economic system, that ever brought peace, prosperity and freedom: namely, democracy and free-market capitalism.

The alternative, frankly, is to suffer a tidal wave of evil. I believe there is no other way of interpreting what is happening in the world today.

Stephen Carter, PhD

Chiang Mai