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Thai Premier Spams Nation, Prompts Consumer Outcry
patiwat writes "Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message, signed 'Your PM,' urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents). The new premier was criticized for violating privacy regulations."
Maybe we could view electoral commission letters and tax office demands as junk mail. We may not have given our details personally and they also sent mail to thousands of other people!
sudo mount --milk --sugar
He should have been honest and said: "Hi, I'm your new Prime Minister who was installed by the military and the middle classes, because the poor majority of our country finally got it into their stupid heads to get together and vote for a party that more or less represented their interests. This is not allowed. Democracy is not about having a government that gets the most votes, but about serving the interests of the middle class and wealthy."
It's the same old sad story.
This guy and his supporters deserve something more than a reply to a text message.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
It looks like 3 baht is about 8-9 US cents by the currency exchanges. But then again by the Big Mac Index which (humerously) measures purchasing power rather than exchange rate, 3 baht is 17-18 US cents. Then again, we really need to factor in local wages which means the Premier cost each person the equivalent of 96 cents(*).
(*) Start with 3 baht. Convert to Thai Big Macs at rate of 1BM per 62 baht to get 0.0484MB. Convert that to hours of labor at rate of 67min per 1 Thai BM to get 3.24min. Now convert back using US values. In the USA it takes about 12 minutes of labor to buy a Big Mac so we are now at 0.270 BM and at the price of $3.57 per USA BM this gives us $0.964. All rates taken from and .
For entertainment purposes only. All figures should be assumed wrong until proven otherwise.
I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that Thaksin (the deposed PM from two years ago) sold all his stock in the telecom and moved the money to Singapore in the weeks before the coup.
Also, the new PM is from a coalition of minor Thai parties and has nothing to do with Thaksin.
This story also appears to be a non-starter in Thailand. I went back to the 18th at thairath.co.th (a Thai language newspaper) and found no mention of this story in the political section.
Anyway, I'm not sure I would consider it spam if Obama had a message stating something like "I, the new President, invite you, the people of the U.S., to join together and help us rise out of our current situation. I welcome your comments." (The picture in the Bangkok Post is too blurry for me to make out every word the Thai PM wrote, but that's the gist of it.) In fact, I fully expect Obama to do something very similar in his first week, though it will be an announcement on TV pre-empting your favorite show. I doubt it will be quite as short or too the point, either.
Put identity in the browser.
Jeez. How many Slashdotters are there in Thailand? You're number four, I think.
Put identity in the browser.
The thing is that there are two Mobile Phones for every one Thai person.
If you've ever met a Thai you'll find that they are married to the phone. Mobile coverage is better then TV and Radio combined in Thailand.
This is just the information he would need to strengthen his power base and weaken his oppositions. If you think that American politicians are petty and corrupt, you've never learned about Thai politics, they take pork barrel spending to a whole new level. Abhisit is learning who he needs to appease to stay in power, his predecessor did the same thing.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Thaksin was the most corrupt man I've seen in Thailand. He "donated" land to a Buddhist temple to avoid taxes then built a luxury golf course on it, for god's sake, and that was before he ever got elected. There's a reason he was several times the richest man in Thailand. You don't get that way by being clean, and his level of wealth speaks directly against your "serving the rich" rant.
Since the average vote costs a couple of beers, it doesn't take much to get "the will of the majority," especially if you have the money to buy the votes and the position gives you the opportunity to triple your cash.
As I mentioned above, the PPP was suspended for buying votes.
I lived in Thailand (and watched nightly TV news) during Thaksin's establishment of TRT, the election, his first term, and part of his second. If he represented the majority, it's only because he promised enough pork to get the votes. There was no real political platform. Don't pretend that there was. Eventually, even the common man turned against Thaksin when he started claiming to be on the level of the King and sitting in his assigned spots.
I was all for the Eua-Athorn schemes (computer, loans, etc.), though. I liked pork as much as the next guy.
Put identity in the browser.
None of this is to absolve Mr Thaksin and his cronies of their sins. But even his gravest abuse -- a "war on drugs" in 2003, in which police were suspected of hundreds of extra-judicial killings -- was not entirely his fault. The dirty war against supposed drug-dealers was misguidedly supported by Thais of all social classes. Even the king, in an equivocal speech that year, sounded at times as if he approved of it.
Wrong. Thaksin explicitly gave the police in the north the right to execute suspected drug dealers on sight. No right to a trial by peers. No trial for the public record. Just a bullet to the back of the head. It wasn't "suspected." It was well-documented and widely reported.
Never mind that the police up there are just organized crime and used the "War on Drugs" to consolidate power. You didn't even need to be a low-level drug dealer because the police could just plant some heroine and be cleared. A friend of a friend was executed that way. (The army is no better. They fight the police over what part of the country to control. I know guys who have been at the meetings dividing the drug routes between the two.)
The only good thing that came out of TRT's reign was OTOP (One Tambon One Product). All the pork projects, cheap loans, and other Eua Athorn projects were just ways for TRT to buy and keep popular support from upcountry while mortgaging the country's future and lining the pockets of Thaksin and his friends.
For about forty years, Thailand was the only country in the area that had any prosperity. The only constant during that time was the king. The Economist seems to believe that people are brainwashed to follow him. They aren't. If you get close to them, they'll talk about their misgivings. They'll even talk about inbreeding. Still, Thaksin lost his popular support when he claimed to be sovereign and at the level of the king. That's because almost all of them truly love and revere him.
Everyone fears the day he dies and the crown prince becomes the new king. He doesn't have the moral backbone to lead a largely conservative and Buddhist country. He's the Prince Charles of Thailand.
It is even possible to dream of the red- and yellow-shirt movements transforming themselves into a well-behaved, mainstream two-party system with broad public participation.
The fact that the Economist wants a two-party system for Thailand just proves that they have their heads up their asses. They don't even discuss Islamic separatists. Wow.
p.s. I used to "joke" about Thailand's war on drugs being a real war and that U.S. officials should learn to use English correctly.
Put identity in the browser.
Googling for the first few words finds a transcript of the SMS here. Basically says, "I, the new Prime Minister, invite you to help bring Thailand out of its crisis. If you're interested in being contacted by me, please send your 5-digit postal code to 9191 (3 baht)."