Monday, October 30, 2006

In which I revert briefly to my wonkish academic self...

Here's a great article from the New York Times Magazine on the progressive weakening of Islamic legal standards prohibiting the killing of noncombatants, and the implications thereof for an Iranian nuclear bomb. It combines two of my great academic loves, terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation, so it surely holds more fascination for me than for most others. But if it's your cup of cocoa, I highly recommend giving it a read.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

In which I offer a minor cultural tidbit...

In most Southeast Asian languages, polite speaking requires that you put an honorific at the end of many phrases, which depends only on the sex of the speaker. For example, in Thai, a man would say "Thank you, krep" and a woman "Thank you, kaa" - regardless of who's listening.

Now that they're learning English, my most scrupulously polite students have carried this habit with them into their new language. As a result, many male students are refering to everyone as "Sir" - both male and female. The female students, predictably, are calling everyone "Ma'am" with a similar disregard for the sex of the listener.

It is proving very difficult to break them of this habit.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

In which I celebrate...

I got a 92 on my thesis! Joy!

Now I am the proud owner of a Master of Arts (with "Distinction") in International Peace Studies. Yay me!

I have successfully completed the UPeace chapter of my life - now make a go of the Thailand chapter.

Moreover, now I must see if I can chisel my thesis into publishable (and comprehensible) portions. I'm fairly certain that the fine oflks in my department gave me the grade at last because they couldn't stand to read the damn thing again...

Sunday, October 22, 2006

In which I respond to emails both concerned and curious...

Fear not, all my bits are still attached. After my menacing post a few days back - which I feel adequately conveyed my then-foul mood at Thai traffic - several kindly folks feared that something worse than ill temper had befallen me, and emailed inquiries of worry. All's well - in fact, I have yet to so much as skin a knee in Thailand, despite the abundant foolishness of buying a bicycle rather than add to the ubiquitous throng of motor scooters.

Yet my good health is no thanks to Thai drivers (expect undue generalizations to follow), whose contagious friendliness and impeccable manners elsewhere in life is not carried with them onto the pavement. Mistake me not, Thailand has far from the worst traffic I've seen. It's certainly a step up from Egypt, where the rules of the road were mere formalities except when (literally) clarified by the barrel of an AK47. It's thankfully not Botswana, where the generally sparse traffic was made occasional nightmare by the fact that many locals considered drunk driving a legitimate competitive sport. And the modern, well-maintained road surface is a world away from the disintegrating asphalt that rattled my skull in Costa Rica or (shudder) Mozambique.

By these measures, this seething stew of cars, trucks, scooters, tuk-tuks and the damnable song-taew minibuses seems almost... civilized. In fact, Chiang Mai drivers actually obey stoplights and even use their turn signals from time to time - treasured luxuries for a jaded developing-world pedestrian such as myself. Nor are their technical skills sub-par. Thai drivers display preternatural reflexes and a surgical talent for threading their varied vehicles through whatever minute pore has opened in the motorized pandemonium.

But they marry these individually laudable traits to a white-knuckled appetite for relativistic speeds and all the high regard for personal space you'd expect from an ecstasy-popping labrador retriever. The result is a weaving, careening body vehicular in which lane boundaries frequently disappear and scooters are ever shrieking through the capillary-like spaces between the cars. No inch of roadspace is wasted. In the midst of all this, for a half hour each morning and each afternoon, is wee me on my silly farang bicycle.

I've long since imprinted to the drive-on-the-left customs of Thai traffic. I hug the outer left edge of the road whenever vaguely possible, and I've gotten quite adept at spotting the viable gaps in traffic for that bewildering odyssey known as crossing a street. But no amount of road sense could adequately prepare me for drivers who think a thumbs-breadth is adequate clearance when they zip by at 100 km/h. Much less was I ready for the ultimate traffic nightmare - scooter and tuk-tuk drivers who hurtle directly at me in the wrong direction while I naively cling to belief that as long as I remain in my left-hand scooter lane, no harm can befall me. With only a "what the hell is your problem" stare betraying their intentions, these drivers, a dozen a day at least, prefer to pass a block or five the wrong way to the (admitted) conundrum of crossing the street and driving the non-insane way.

The end result? I've been run off the road (though thankfully never off my bike) a handful of times in the last week, and never once has it brightened my day. I'm glad I ignored CUSO's absurd penny-pinching strictures and bought a $400 bike that can handle being occasionally thrust over broken pavement or outright grassland. I'm sure that decision has saved me much heartbreak.

And how now do I cope? Mainly (and counterintuitively) by going faster and riding far more aggressively than I would have dared back home. If I can keep up with the scooters, I seem to earn their grudging respect, and I can apparently outwit the cars by more boldly (yet carefully - don't worry, Mom!) exploiting the gaps therebetween. I spent the day riding this way through the worst of downtown Chiang Mai, and felt safer than I have all week. I'll get the hang of this yet... and, with any luck, I'll still have all my fingers when I'm done!

PS - Chiang Mai, though lovely and welcoming, is surely the most pedestrian-unfriendly city I've ever seen... more on that to come.

Friday, October 20, 2006

In which I follow up...

... on something other than the traffic.

Looks Like the North Korean nuke was the real thing... though I'm astonished that they managed such a minute yield yet still had a nuclear detonation. Usually if a plutonium bomb fizzles, the surrounding explosive triggers blast it to smithereens before any criticality occurs (as I recall, anyhow).

Whatever the technical details, this is by far the very best take on it I've seen.

(Seems almost too easy to link to The Onion - as though I should feel guilty for discovering such wit and wisdom online with so little effort).

More to come on the bicycle life here...

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Paul's number one rule about riding a bike in Thailand:

Don't.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

In which my brain hurts...

Writing a necessary (and necessarily unpleasant) presentation on fascism for my students tomorrow has proven surpringly emotionally corrosive. Now I'm miserable from looking at pictures of Hitler, and I still have a ton of work to do. Oh well, that presentation's wrapped up - maybe two hours of writing about theocracy and anarchism will lift my spirits.

Monday, October 16, 2006

In which I give notice...

My job, which I can't ever write about online, is consuming my life completely this week. Posts will resume after Friday.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

In which I cheerfully await this afternoon's class...

... namely because my students are hung over. Last night, they and I and the rest of the staff of my to-remain-unnamed organization tromped out to the Chiang Mai German Microbrewery. If that sounds eclectic, you should imagine to cognitive dissonance provoked by eating tom kha gai, pork schnitzel, seafood fried rice, and German sausage, all the while dousing it with generous quantities of brewed-on-the-premises German lager.

Very generous quantities, in fact. Unaccustomed to the strength of Bavarian brews, and moreover quite eager to partake voluminously since they spend most of their days tucked away on our tiny compound, several of the students indulged waaaay past their limits. Grudging smiles and unfocused stares seem to be the order of the day today.

And I rather doubt they finished the homework I gave them yesterday...

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

In which I don't know what to think...

So did it work or not?

Reliable sources are saying that the explosion detonated in North Korea had a force of about half a kiloton - the explosive power of 500 tons of TNT, set off simultaneously. That's awfully small for a nuclear test, but much too large for an outright dud. And here's a peculiar fact: building ultra-low-yield nuclear bombs is actually technically much harder than crafting their larger siblings.

So if those yield estimates are right, that leaves two options. Either North Korea's nuclear weapons scientists are actually much, much better at their jobs than anybody suspected (not bloody likely), or North Korea blew up a thousand tons of conventional high explosive underground in an attempt to fakea nuclear test (entirely in keeping with the character of the textbook Stalinist regime). North Korea has been awfully insistent that no radiation was leaked - a coverup, perhaps? Either way, the detection (or not) of bomb-produced radioactive isotopes will be the key to understanding what went on.

C'mon, I wanna know. If this was a fake, then much of what I said yesterrday is moot. Except the part about Bush having driven the world off a cliff - tht part still stands.

Monday, October 09, 2006

In which I'm dismayed...

Well, this is just no good at all.

The news that North Korea has tested a nuclear bomb is, at some level, no surprise at all. But it's a startling reminder of how much more uncertain the world has become under six years of Bush's stewardship. Yet another harrowing failure to add to the long litany...

I did my honours thesis, way back in 2003 on North Korea's nuclear program, so don't get me wrong - North Korea was almost certainly already a nuclear power, and has been since the early nineties. But in those comforting days, they had only one or (at most) two bombs - not enough to test one, and certainly too few to put any on the open market. That they were actively seeking the means to make more became clear in 2002, when it became clear that Kim Jong Il was testing the limits of the porous restrictions he accepted from the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1994.

And in response to this news, Bush and his cabal neocon thugs did... nothing. They offered only rhetoric as Pyongyang acknowledged and then, with growing bellicosity, accelerated its nuclear programs. The DPRK took the wraps off its then-sealed plutonium production facilities and openly resumed the construction of new plants. The current best guess is that the bomb detonated today was built with plutonium from just those facilities - facilities that might still be decommissioned if the US had shown genuine global leadership. But instead Bush launched a war of choice against another backwards power that had no WMDs whatsoever, while comprehensively ignoring a grave strategic threat in North Korea.

Could this have been prevented? Maybe not - the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (I still chuckle at that name), more isolated and fearful than any state on Earth, had compelling strategic motives to seek nuclear weapons. It's possible that they might not have been dissuaded by any threats or temptations - perhaps not even the diplomatic recognition and security guarantees that they so desperately crave from the US. But what can reasonably ascertain is that the path Bush took - a toothless, provocative combination of belligerent rhetoric and diplomatic neglect - was the one formula absolutely guaranteed to facilitate Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Why does this matter so much? Isn't North Korea too isolated, too purposeless and frightened to ever use its bombs? Perhaps, but there are other consequences almost too nightmarish to contemplate. First and most ominous is that North Korea sells every thing it can get its hands on - rockets, nuclear technology, small arms, drugs, and so much more. The hundreds of millions of dollars that a nuclear weapon would fetch on the market will seem mighty tempting to one of the world's poorest countries - particularly as their new reactors at Taechon and Yongbyon come online, enabling North Korea to build dozens of nuclear bombs every year. And the DPRK is not known for its discretion in selecting customers - a terrorist group's money is just as good as, say, Iran's. Anybody think this is alaramist fantasy? Think again.

It's no less disturbing to think that this could provoke an arms race in East Asia. China's already armed to the teeth, but the governments Japan and even South Korea are certainly reappraising their non-nuclear status today. If you share my opinion that every new nuclear power results in a substantially more frightening world, then you'll be as distressed as I was by an unsettlingly middle-of-the-road assessment of how long it would take Japan to build its first nuclear bomb if it so choose. 48 hours. That's not even the lowest estimate.

This has also left the world without feasible strategic options for disarming North Korea. If Kim's paranoid regime has enough bombs to test one, then they surely have enough to build a credible strategic deterrent - at least half a dozen. Any military action against North Korea would surely be reciprocated with a fission explosion in Tokyo Harbour. The world's diplomatic leverage has been similarly neutered, consigning the North's long-suffering 23 million people to another eon of poverty and repression. And I'm dreading, without a touch of facetiousness, the not-far-off day that the Republicans begin to argue that a nuclear North Korea only demonstrates the need for airstrikes against Iran. We're going to be decades repairing the damage that the Republican Party has done to the world.


P.S. On the plus side, I've just taught my first class in Government and Politics - I'll write more about that tomorrow, by which time I should have stopped scowling at today's news.

P.P.S. This is a fine reference on North Korea's nukes.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

In which food remains the center of my life...

Warning: minute details of eating in Thailand follow - none too fascinating unless you're as food-obsessed as I.

Thailand is a culinary mecca, with an endless variety of hyper-local cuisines and edible oddities to terrify the traveler. But I’m nothing if not a slave to ritual, so in keeping with my personal travel tradition, I went to McDonalds for lunch on my first day here. I do this foolish thing not because I so desperately crave their cardboard burgers, but because it always seems to tell me two things: one, a McD’s cheeseburger changes not one whit anywhere on Earth, and second, that the peripheral menu items give a surprisingly accurate picture of the culinary tastes of each new home. In Japan I found the teriyaki burger (delicious!) and the au gratin burger (which I never tried, to my boundless shame). In Costa Rica, the Mac Shack had a rice-and-beans Gallo Pinto breakfast and unappealing fried chicken drumlets. Here in Thailand I was aghast at their hot pie flavours – no apple or cherry to be found here. Instead they’ve filled that fine pastry with your choice of pineapple, corn, and taro root (a potato-lke starch, for the uninitiated). I know I have to eat one of those latter two at some point, but I choose to procrastination until I’ve had a short stretch to acclimatize myself to the Thai palate.

Going to McD’s on my first day serves another purpose – it provides a not-too-intimidating stepping-stone into the frightening world of foreign-language commerce. I’m not a very good traveler in a couple of really important ways. The foremost in my mind right now is that I’m terrified of speaking to people in another language unless I’ve got a reasonable certainty that I’ll be understand. Whereas other travelers are quite content to wildly gesticulate and spit out a charmless yet functional approximation of the local phrase for “green curry noodle soup”, I tend to freeze up and avoid conversation altogether. More problematic, I tend to get hungry since I don’t have any idea how to order food. In my first few months in Japan I ate half my meals from the local 7-Eleven rather than stumble through a conversation without functional Japanese. This mistake I refuse to repeat.

Lonely Planet redeemed itself once more for it oft out-of-date info, by directing me to another ideal stepping stone for lunch the next day: the immense MBK Food Centre in Bangkok. This cavernous, wondrous creation occupies a substantial portion of the seventh floor of one of the capital's major malls with stall after stall of food vendors of every conceivable variety. Lest mall food be seen as cultural heresy, Lonely Planet accurately described the MBK as having all the roadside food stalls in the city crammed into one place, with the glorious addition of English signage and without Bangkok's foul street-level air. All I had to do was exchange 200 Baht (about 6 dollars) into stall coupons, and had one of the happiest afternoons in recent memory. Though overjoyed to see that Indian, Arab, and various Western cuisines were available, I piously dedicated myself to Thai food with a slavish rite newly designed to maximize my culinary joy. I ate a meal, wandered the mall until marginally hungry again, ordered anew, and repeated the process. This availed me of wonderful servings of pad thai (fried rice noodles and a notoriously popular farang dish), tom yam gung (citrus seafood soup), a huge steaming bowl of pork leg stew, and an indescribable, unrelatable, untransliterateable noodle soup piled high with fried balls of ground fish.

I tried to phase it out with a bowl of durian and sticky rice for dessert, but cultural incompatibilities reared their foul heads. Durian is a peculiar fruit beloved by Thais and many elsewhere in East Asia. Having never tried it, I gamely dug in and learnt the first real lesson of my tme in Thailand: never eat durian, no matter the circumstance or reward. It reeks of ammonia, imparts a curious texture I imagine to match a mouthful of talcum powder, and tastes powerfully of pure evil. Unwilling to end on a low note, I ate around the remaining deathfruit and returned for a bowl of always-reliable sticky rice with mango, which did not disappoint. Four delicious lunches + two desserts - six dollars = one day very well spent.

Now that I'm in Chiang Mai, my Thai hasn't improved but my willingness to order food surely has. Thailand caters far more frequently to foreign tourists than Japan, and in a major city like Chiang Mai, many restaurants have English menus. I'm also suppressing my urge to clam up when talking to Thai speakers, and so have nt yet starved. I've taken to eating most of my lunches at a tiny hole-in-the-wall a few kilometres from the school where I work, and the place lacks menus in any language, so I've been ordering delightful Pad Thai and Pad Kapow (KAPOW!! It's like a Batman episode!) in mangled but comprehensible Thai. I've discovered, as well, that smaller though fully functional food courts like the MBK centre are scattered around the city. One sits a few seconds walk from my new apartment (the subject of a near-future post), and provides a large chunk of my daily sustenance.

The cuisine of Chiang Mai, 800 kilometres north of Bangkok, sports a number of regional peculiarities, some very charming, and some less so. I've become absolutely infatuated with Khao Soy, a coconut-curry soup served with tender chunks of chicken, soft egg noodles, and a joyful handful of crunchy fried noodles and shallots on top. It's the finest addition to my core diet since I discovered Hon's hot and sour soup a few years back. I fear terribly that, like the engawa-zushi I so prized in Japan, it will vanish forever from my life when I return to Vancouver.

Other local specialties will not be missed, nor even attempted. At one of the night markets near my home (also the subject of a future post) countless food stall appear between dusk and 10PM every Friday and Saturday. One of these sports a dozen dictionary-sized baskets, each heaped high with a different multi-legged delicacy. Grasshoppers, cockroaches, silkworms, spiders - all the things you never wanted to eat are here. I like to consider myself pretty flexible as regards new foods, but I draw the line at insects - and somehow I feel like a lesser traveler as a result.

I'll have content myself with bowl after bowl of khao soy, pad thai, and whatever non-crawling food gets put in front of me. Pretty healthy stuff all around too - despite eating four meals or so every day, I've lost 10 pounds since I arrived (thanks in no small part to my bike, the riding of which will amusy and terrify in a future post). Great food, good health, and rock-bottom prices... all told, a damn fine foundation on which to build a good year.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

In which I excuse myself...

I'll be in Bangkok for the next couple of days for a meeting with CUSO, hopefully filling my spare time eating khao soy and perusing the electronics supermalls. See you in a few days!

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Disbelief ensues...

Today Thailand's ruling military junta announced the new interim Prime Minister, the respected ex-general Surayud Chulanont. This keeps the schedule the junta enacted during the takeover less than two weeks ago, and I suppose that Mr Surayud ex-military status might qualify him as the "civilian" leader the army promised. The Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy (CDRM) (the junta's unwieldy public name) is proceeding with extensive investigations into allegations of corruption and vote-rigging under the prior regime. Other new agencies have been set up to ensure economic and political stability in the next year leading up to the free elections the government has pledged. The coup, in short, is going as smoothly as could possibly have been hoped for.

So why am I more uneasy about Thailand's future than when the coup first occured?

Several reasons, methinks, all of which are painfully rooted in a thousand historical examples. The first: the CDRM has been quietly issuing a series of pronouncements restricting unauthorized political activities: public protests, grassroots meetings, and other foundations of functional democracy. Though last week's media blackout has inevitably ended - the junta couldn't have perpetuated it even if they'd tried - and no troops have (to my knowledge) been enforcing the new restrictions, I am not reassured. I can't shake the feeling that these pronouncements are meant to create a sort of semi-legal "Hey, we warned you!" foundation for a future crackdown. If the junta were truly dedicated to (re)building a civilian democracy, shouldn't they be encouraging a noisy public debate right now? I've seen no word of expiration date, so there's no way to know when these restrictions will be lifted. Moreover, the army promises to "assist" the new government and ensure its smooth and clean function, a menacing proclamation they apparently consider reassuring. Protests and politics will come - they always do - and these measures put the lie to the CDRM's stated determination to return their power to the people of Thailand.

The second ill portent is the foul feeling I get every time I read the newspaper's opinion and letters section. One writer to yesterday's Bangkok Post argues that "General Sonthi and his troops [the coup's leaders, naturally] should be commended for a job well done", while another proclaims the coup "a wonderful opportunity... to achieve a better democratic climate for the entire nation" and decries the disheartening "global condemnation coming from world leaders". The opinion pieces are, with few exceptions, similarly glowing, as they have been for weeks. More than eighty percent of polled Thais profess approval for the coup, and even the most thoughtful criticism has been muted and damn hard to find.

Shouldn't I be reassured, since the Thais have a far better grasp of their country's politics than I do? You'd think so, but I keep coming back to one of history's ugliest lessons: democracies become tyrannies with the full consent of the governed. From the Roman Republic to Nazi Germany to Bush's America we see the same pattern - the public, riven by fear and frustration, welcomes new overlords who promise security and stability. Even George Bloody Lucas had it right in Star Wars Episode III (obligatory nerd reference) "So this is how liberty dies... to thunderous applause." In this I'm appalled by the Thais' terrible grasp of history - especially their own history. Thailand has seen twenty-three coups in the last 80 years, none of which restored democracy or devolved power to the people. The Economist informs me that during the last coup, in 1991, the public responded much as they have this time - by welcoming the troops in the streets and thanking them for overthrowing a corrupt and unpopular government. As time wore on and the military clutched the reins long past their due, the public mood soured, leading to a wave of unrest that culminated in the slaughter of hundreds of Bangkok protesters. Yet no one in Thailand seems to be drawing much attention to those ugly days.

Which brings me, after a very lengthy post, to my third and final point. Men who take power by force do not willingly relinquish it. I know that, as a good political scientist, I shouldn't make such generalizations, and there are a handful of marginal examples that prove me wrong. But there have been thousands of coups and other military takeovers throughout history, and vanishingly few have returned the power back to civilians without a fight. This is precisely why the line between civilian and military power must be so rigid, and the military always under civilian control. Thaksin, the ousted Prime Minister, was a foul and corrupt leader despite his few good policies, and he deserved to be turfed from office. But the political wheels were turning, however slowly, and there was little to justify crossing the line into outright military control. It's immensely disheartening to see that the Thai public seems not to have learned this critical lesson, and each new fragment of press coverage diminishes my hopes for a peaceful outcome.

Will there be bloodshed? I think so. It's no sure thing - depending immensely on how the junta conducts itself in coming weeks - and it won't happen now or next month, but it's getting increasingly hard to see how this will end without violence. It's a very sobering thought.