What the polls say
Re: "MFP closing gap with Pheu Thai: Nida", (BP, May 4).
Rarely could one praise a newspaper for better serving readers than social networks on fast facts and impartiality. The Post is that rarity as reflected in many instances in satisfying one's appetite for "what's going on", eg accused serial cyanide killer, power subsidies, cannabis trends, Indian gamblers in Pattaya, intricacies of our coming election.
Today's news and graphics on the Nida Poll blew my mind on the Move Forward Party leading the polls party-wise and leader-wise over the older Pheu Thai. These two represent an almost super-majority of 73%, and both have given words of not allying with the ruling incumbents (13%+1.28%). The rest are splinters that matter least, and many of them are in self-denial, especially the Democrats.
Then, one asks will the Senate, whose members are mostly friends of the current rulers or the military, upset the people's will if Nida Poll turns out to be a reality.
The two military-tied parties with 14%, other splinters representing 13% would not have enough to support one of the two popular parties to become a formidable government.
One, therefore, likes to ask how often Nida Poll has been wrong in its classified sampling. Should one pray for the errors on the poll for the sake of the nation's stability?
Is the instability of the future government a concern for portfolio investors like myself?
Songdej Praditsmanont
Fact-check PM?
Re: ''We will triumph'' (BP, May 3).
With growing bemusement, I worked my way through the Post's "exclusive interview" with Prime Minister Gen General Prayut Chan-o-cha.
Among the others equally unsubstantiated, one amazing claim stood out.
What evidence did the PM general (caretaker) present to support his claim that "his popularity remains high"?
His own doubtless sincere belief in his own popularity is not, in fact, evidence that he is popular.
Did the Post's political news veteran Nattaya Chetchotiros think to ask such an obvious question, or are outrageous claims no longer held to require at least some evidence before being uncritically reported?
When we read its editorial on the very same day, "Media rights in focus", the questions not asked of the PM (caretaker) by the interviewer were easily the most pertinent as Thailand prepares to vote on its commitment to democratic principles.
By the way, are we to look forward in the coming days to an exclusive interview with Move Forward's Pita Limjaroenrat? And with Pheu Thai's Paetongtarn Shinawatra?
Felix Qui
Election aftermath
Re: "Thailand: Back around in the circle again?" (Opinion, May 2).
Gwynne Dyer has put his finger correctly on Thailand's election piano. The military men who wrote their own constitution and appointed 250 paid senators to form their government are now back but in shiny civilian robes and jackets.
Gwynne is correct that the leading parties and politicians are already nervous about their fate. Once again, a mumbo-jumbo of appointed senators and the military-led coalition government is a real possibility. This election may produce a radical break from the past, but it could be the start of the next trip around the same circuit. Yes, it is a real possibility that Thailand will again have its own flavour of democracy.
Kuldeep Nagi
Language barrier
Re: "Cleaning it up", (PostBag, May 2) & "Language travails", (PostBag, April 30).
The ability of the human mind to see direct cause-and-effect relationships between remote facts is truly amazing.
Ken Albertsen (May 2 letter) takes a 10-year-old comment by one Thai student on the relative difficulty of his Thai-language and English-language classes and finds the cause to be a difference in the inherent difficulty of Thai and English.
Could it not be the way the two subjects are taught? The way Thai is taught to native speakers of Thai is well known to be fraught with problems. The PhD thesis of HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn deals exactly with this challenge. And one suspects that since the Thai language is shared with no other nation, problems of nationalism and exceptionalism are likely to complicate how teachers are expected to teach and learners learn. And could Mr Albertsen's stepson's perception of relative difficulty perhaps have been coloured by the existence of a stepdad to help with the homework?
The argument that Thai does not lend itself to board games such as Scrabble and is, therefore unnecessarily difficult is also not persuasive. Mr Albertsen, like many others, talks of the "Thai alphabet" and its "44 letters". Does it not strike them as odd that these "44 letters" all represent consonant sounds (well, one can represent either a consonant or a vowel sound)? Why not add symbols representing vowel sounds and inflate the number of "letters" even further?
This would not make much sense because the Thai writing system is technically not an alphabet but an abugida. In an alphabet system, letters represent sounds (not in one-to-one relationships such as Mr Soul and Mr Albertsen would prefer but in many-to-many relationships). They are arranged in a linear, chronological order (think of the "silent e" in English).
An abugida writing system forms clusters of symbols which collectively represent syllables. And before you jump to the conclusion that these systems must automatically make it difficult for children to learn such languages, note that Korea uses an abugida system. Now go and compare the scores of Korean and Thai children on the PISA reading tests.
And is making the teaching of English in Thailand "easier" always a good thing? One persistent feature of Thai-to-English dictionaries and English-language textbooks is the presentation of English words using the Thai writing system as a guide to pronunciation. This makes the blatantly false assumption that all the sounds of English can be represented using the written symbols of Thai. If you point this out to Thai English-language teachers, many will say that it is done to make the language easier for the students to learn. The problem is that the students are no longer learning English but some artificial hybrid that may be easy to learn but is sometimes incomprehensible.
Alec Bamford
Climate agenda
Re: "Heating oceans a climate 'time bomb' ", (BP, May 4).
We know far more about the far side of the moon than we do about the deep oceans.
"Scientists warn that humanity's carbon pollution has the potential to turn oceans into a global warming time bomb is the headline." This nonsense has the potential to scare people but has no data to support it as a legitimate scientific conclusion.
Throughout this AFP propaganda piece using narrative-driven cut-and-paste tactics, you may read such irrefutable terms as "might", "has the potential to", "with fears that the looming warming El Nino weather phenomenon could load even more heat into the climate system", "marine heatwaves which act like 'underwater fires' with the potential to irreversibly degrade", etc, etc.
Then we have "the recent record might be explained by the end of the temporary atmospheric phenomenon known as La Nina", and "projections suggest that historic ocean warming is irreversible this century", with the "ultimate net warming dependent on our emissions".
But the raison d'etre for this UN-backed fraud is "we are still not sufficiently aware that the objective is to do without oil and coal". It is all about money and control, the de-dollarisation of the world's economy, and the resulting ascendency of the UN, the World Bank, the WHO and the WMO in determining world affairs.
Michael Setter
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