Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
The Prime Minister needs to be there.
yeah, 'cos the cops and the many others that will be allocated to this visit have nothing better to do. Official Prime Ministerial visits absorb resources and can cause minor chaos in the best of times....
Wandering around disaster zones with TV crews seems to me to be less than helpful
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Danielle,
Wham! may
let me finish that sentence:
own the best bassline ever in pop with Everything She Wants. (12" mix natch)
The Francois K dub mix of Wham Rap was not only an eighties killer but an underground club anthem in New York and Chicago for large parts of that decade.
History, kids, history.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Kumara Republic,
and Greece
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that effectively gives the finger to US foreign policy
And if something worthwhile does eventually come from this - not just a transfer from one authoritarian regime to another which still seems possible, you would hope some of it tumbles down the continent as well as sideways through the ME.
This, courtesy of wikileaks, perhaps illustrates the self serving US disconnect in the region which certainly seems less than helpful:
A U.S. diplomat called Equatorial Guinea's dictator of 31 years one of "the good guys" in leaked diplomatic cables and urged Washington to engage with its third largest oil supplier or risk endangering energy security.
In 2009 cables published by WikiLeaks, Anton K. Smith, the ranking U.S. diplomat at the time, described a country beset by foreign and homegrown predators, "sharks ... buccaneers and adventurers," since U.S. wildcatters discovered oil in 1994.
"There are good guys and bad guys here. We need to strengthen the good guys - for all his faults, President Obiang among them - and undercut the bad guys," Smith wrote in a May 9, 2009 cable.
President Teodoro Obiang is accused of making his family and a small group of people fabulously wealthy off oil, while U.N. figures show child mortality has increased and a third of children do not finish primary school.
FDR's 'he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch' retort in 1939 still seems to ring through Washington.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Am I the only one that finds it irritating that the media seems fixated on what foreign leaders (particularly those in the "West") have to say?
No you are not. And isn't that part of what this has all been about - a frustration with leaders who are there at the whim of the 'west'.
And, more, a world that is structured at the whim of the 'west'. Those times are passing.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Laurence Millar,
Can someone put the show up on YouTube
It's podcast on iTunes
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Rich Lock,
As the PAS freelance wire reporter on the spot, what can you tell us about the background to this?
I think wiki gets it fairly well, although diplomatically sidesteps the bigger issue of ancient national enmity, and as Angus says, Thaksin sitting in Phnom Penh in 2009 didn't help the relationship .
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Rich Lock,
Thailand is facing massive internal dissent and a traditional remedy for that is to cook up an external enemy.
The internal dissent is there, but I don't think that's it. And the scale of societal breakdown and supposed drift to civil war was largely a creation of offshore sub-editors demanding a story from acquiescent reporters.
I think Dismal Soyanz, has it:
600 years later
In Asia as in the Middle East these things simply don't just fade into history.
And how do you feel (obviously)?
Bizarrely the border closure is now just in a very small area and the trans-national tourism, and normal flights continue elsewhere. Here, in BKK, you almost read about it as if it was in another country. It's not a big deal day to day.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
but I used to find that they missed quite a few of the on-the-ground subtleties.
Another thing to throw into the mix - the common wisdom in Indonesia is that much of the Islamic trouble in recent years comes via Malaysia, which is a route for the Arab money and the training camps in the Southern Philippines (although these seem to have more recently shifted to Aceh).
The Indonesians tend to blame the Malaysians for anything they can't lay on the Dutch though so I take that with a grain.
I agree that the Malay peninsula, despite the repeated vocal concerns in Singapore of recent is hardly likely to erupt into an Egyptian scenario or anything close. However the inequity in the social, political and economic strata is, to use my earlier word, festering and festering badly.
Of more concern to me right now is the fact that Cambodia and Thailand have just closed their borders.
Talk about a fracas that has no point....
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Protests of 3-5,000 where the Klang Valley has a population of 7+ million
What number do you reckon constitutes a tipping point into 'massive', noting of course that it was you who introduced the word massive into the text, replacing my 'festering' - and that I said 'I don't think we will see Egyptian level protests in the near future'.
Myself, I tend to think that the government using tear gas and water cannons on a large peaceful opposition protest, not once but several times in an 18 month period (up from none in the previous 18 months) may be an indicator that all is not well. I guess we disagree on that.