About

5 Responses to About

1. Thai American says:

   February 21, 2011 at 12:07 am

   JFL:

   I’m interested to know if you’ve developed any thoughts on our new ambassador since your initial post here. I read W. Scott Thompson’s criticisms of her when she was first nominated for the post — how she spent her time in ROP endearing herself to the public instead of being an ambassador — and I was prepared for the same. But after following her on Twitter and her blog “It’s Me, Kristie,” I think it’s worse than I expected. Does she have a clue about what the Thai government and military are really like? Does she care? Or is she just here to explore restaurants, meet children, go dancing, and go to concerts?

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   • jfl says:

     February 21, 2011 at 6:42 am

     I don’t follow twitter and I haven’t seen her blog. I don’t imagine she’ll be meeting with Prem or Anand to discuss the succession, the war on Cambodia, or anything else, do you? She seems to have prepared for a career in authoritarian South America but, the number of dictators there running low, she was dispatched to the Philippines because they’d spoken Spanish there once, and because authoritarianism was making a strong comeback.

     What’s that say about the State Department, now a wholly owned subsiiary of the DOD/CIA, and their conception of Thailand?

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2. Lek says:

   June 19, 2011 at 6:30 pm

   Hello John, do you have a facebook profile?

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   • jfl says:

     June 24, 2011 at 12:40 pm

     Hi Lek,

     I don’t. I rely on email… jfl at robinlea dot com… this site, and the 28amen.org and uspvp.org sites, for internet communications. I view facebook and other social networking sites as machines for ‘monitizing’ customers. There’s an interesting paper about facebook (pdf), and there’s an old sci-fi story (Make Room! Make Room!), later made into a film (Soylent Green), which seem to me to delineate the prototype of google, facebook, and the rest. I’ve read the paper, but haven’t read the book or seen the film.

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3. Hobby says:

   June 25, 2011 at 5:49 pm

   If Junya asked me whether I has a facebook profile, I’d probably join up just because she asked :)

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