Word: bangkok
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...after China announced a major offensive to combat online pornography, Thailand publicized another Internet crackdown, in which local authorities had blocked 2,300 websites. Their alleged offenses? No, not images of skimpily clad women of the kind that can be found in any one of Bangkok's ubiquitous entertainment districts. Instead, these websites were banned because of material that was deemed insulting to the country's beloved royal family...
...This ruler-knows-best attitude can make Asians act more like subjects than citizens. Militaries - the other power pole in much of Asia - can meddle in politics without much public distress from the masses. Just look at how Bangkok office ladies cheerily handed carnations to the soldiers who carried out a 2006 coup against Thailand's democratically elected leader. When Asians finally do react against their governments, it is often in extremis, anger spilling onto the streets in revolutionary-style rallies...
...about a murdered Thai prostitute, an exposé of the country's sex industry and two memoirs by foreigners who had served time in Thai jails - a genre already as overcrowded as the prisons themselves. That Singapore publisher Monsoon Books feels there is room for one more - Nightmare in Bangkok by Andy Botts - begs two more questions. Why do so many foreigners get into trouble in Thailand? And why do so many tourists seem to enjoy reading about...
...Compared to its rivals, Nightmare in Bangkok is, to lift a phrase from the classic backpacker T shirt, "same same but different." In Thailand, Botts gets jailed for heroin smuggling, but not before being incarcerated in his native Hawaii, several times, for stealing things from cars. "You could write a book on this," says a police officer, studying his lengthy rap sheet. "Please don't," is the reader's quietly muttered invocation - but Botts does...
...problem with Nightmare in Bangkok, and books like it, is that it is hard to sympathize with the narrator. Botts, who is eventually transferred to a U.S. prison and granted parole after spending less than five years at Klong Prem, is not a lovable rogue but a thief and heroin trafficker, and his time behind bars prompts little self-reflection. Seeming to sense this, he closes the book with a lame attempt to recast his dismal life as a parable about overcoming addiction, with the suggestion that he should never have been jailed. I agree with him that criminalizing drug...