[OllytheBrit]

It might surprise you to find out that very many people very much enjoy doing all manner of kinky shit with their sex partners ... Without any forcing whatsoever.

And no, if the relationship is uncoerced there's nothing wrong at all if a 40-something dude from wherever meets some 20-something Thai chick and they decide to marry. People's relationships are largely their own business and their own problem .

I should be so lucky!

[Godstud]

It's weird parent issues on the part of the young person and creepy pedophilia on the part of the older person.

If they are 18+ it is not creepy pedophilia, but lucky older man. Engaging in sex with a grown woman is not pedophilia.

[KlassWar]

Agreed. Still gross. It's weird parent issues on the part of the young person and creepy pedophilia on the part of the older person.

I'm not saying it's not gross, but voluntary personal relationships between adults in the absence of coercion or duress aren't unethical on themselves. Outsiders people may well find them bizarre or gross, but they're the participants's own mess to sort out. It's Malice, harm, exploitation and coercion that make things destructive and unethical.

Rich people using their class privilege to sexually harass and take advantage of vulnerable people is despicable all right... But if an ambitious person voluntarily decides to hook up with the rich guy because it suits their plans... Then what can I say? They're most likely using each other (then again, people use each other all the time for all sorts of reasons) and it'd probably be better for them if they acknowledged the fact and tried not to do it in fucked up destructive ways, but it's their own mess to deal with.

Ultimately the only surefire way to get rid of the fucked up stuff rich people do is getting rid of rich people, everything else is bandaids for a chainsaw wound TBH.

[anarchist23]

It seems to me that the Thailand public are so disgusted with police corruption the are asking the Thailand army to help. Enough said.

[OllytheBrit]

It seems to me that the Thailand public are so disgusted with police corruption the are asking the Thailand army to help. Enough said.

We can but hope!

[anarchist23]

It seems that police corruption is getting worse, not better in Thailand. This is not a good situation at all, as there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.

[OllytheBrit]

It seems that police corruption is getting worse, not better in Thailand. This is not a good situation at all, as there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.

[Godstud]

Anarchist23, just stop. You don't know more about Thailand than what you read in a blog.

[anarchist23]

It seems that the Thai police are being offered a government bribe and being asked to stop taking bribes. Here is this weeks report.



(Reuters) - Thailand's traffic policemen will get money in return for refusing bribes, police said on Thursday, part of the junta's efforts to combat what it has called an ingrained culture of corruption within the force.

The army seized power in May after months of protests aimed at ousting Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand's first female prime minister, saying it needed to restore order after nearly 30 people were killed in sporadic political violence.

Since then, the military government has launched campaigns aimed at cleaning up Thailand's image as a haven for vice.

The junta has clamped down on taxi gangs at airports, targeted drug users by ordering more police checks and has even vowed to curb bad behavior among Buddhist monks to protect the image of the religion in the predominantly Buddhist country.

"This monetary incentive will encourage officers to look out for traffic violators who try to bribe," said Police Major General Adul Narongsak, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police Bureau, adding that two policemen were recently awarded 10,000 baht ($310) for refusing a $3 bribe.

The junta has set about restructuring the police force and ridding it of a "bribes for jobs" culture, a main demand of the protesters who helped trigger Yingluck's ouster.

It wants to depoliticise a force that has been closely associated with Yingluck's brother, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra who was ousted in a 2006 coup but remains the country's most influential politician.

Thaksin is a former police officer and placed allies in the most powerful positions in the force. He fled Thailand in 2008 to avoid a jail term for graft and has lived in exile abroad since.

Thailand has been divided for nearly a decade between Thaksin's allies and his critics.

Thai police salaries start at about 6,000 baht ($185) a month, according to 2013 data, well below the national average.

For motorists in Bangkok, where traffic snarl-ups are among the world's worst, slipping a policeman a banknote or two when stopped for a minor traffic offense is not uncommon. But motorists might soon find their offers being turned down.

"We want to change perceptions and practices and to reward those who show that they are clean," said Adul.

[Godstud]

It seems that the Thai police are being offered a government bribe and being asked to stop taking bribes.

I told you this before, but of course your memory is extremely poor... when police salaries are very low, it makes corruption inevitable. Raising their pay makes sense. There is less corruption when police are paid a decent living wage.

Some of the few perks they get are free housing, and government interest free loans.

I don't see this working very well. They'd be better off doubling the police officer's salaries to prevent corruption.

To put this in perspective, 300 baht a day is minimum wage in Thailand, so the police are only making about 200 baht a day. One "bribe" can be a day's wages.

[anarchist23]

^
Yes I agree. Wherever there is poverty you will have police corruption.
In Goa you had to pay the police £350 to put on a rave. The police then put road blocks around the rave and extort bribes from the party goers arriving. It is a massive earner for the police.

[Pants-of-dog]

We're still allowed to mock unusual relationships.

It's what Jesus would have done.

[Godstud]

Jesus had a relationship with 12 other men and a whore. I hardly think he's in any position to mock unusual relationships.

An age difference is not an unusual relationship, either. You guys sure are prudes.

[jessupjonesjnr87]

As great age difference is not usual in relationships, relationships that have great age differences must be therefore unusual. Acknowledging this has nothing to do with prudishness just common sense. It seems to be more common in places like Thailand probably due to the mix of poverty and relaxed under-age prostitution laws. If I had a 19yr old daughter it would certainly bother me if she were dating a man 20yrs+ her senior.

[Godstud]

I am sure if your 19 year old daughter was dating a 40 year old doctor, you wouldn't be upset about it, and it'd be HER business, not yours as to who she finds attractive, and who she wants to be with.

Yes a 20 year gap is uncommon, but not unusual.

Does age difference matter in a relationship?
http://health.ninemsn.com.au/sex/relati ... nd-the-gap

[redcarpet]

Tom Delay's relationship with another man is only separated by a decade and still subject to this kind of stuff. Honestly.

[Wellsy]

It's not usual for marginalized demographics to have antagonistic relationships with the police force, sometimes people step out of line but I don't believe in many cases the police force does much to help solidify a better relationship with their communities.
Putting cameras on cops actions seems realtively minor compared to what the Black Panrther's did when they "policed the police"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party#Oakland_patrols_of_police

The police themselves can have a culture that sets themselves up in an antagonistic mindset.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/248654.pdf

Beginning in the 1960s, and more recently fueled by post 9-11 fear, American policing has slowly drifted away from Plato’s vision of guardians
and Socrates’ view of guardian education as expressed in Plato’s Republic. This view of guardian education is humanistic. It takes shape through criminal justice education that is not only vocational but also stresses ethics, theory and the nature of virtue.2
As a profession, we have veered away from Sir Robert Peel’s ideal, “the police are the people, and the people are the
police,” toward a culture and mindset more like warriors at war with the people we are sworn to protect and serve.3

The police may look out for one another in protecting one another from justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence

Some speculate that the origins of the police put it in an inherently classist divide: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/

And of another concern is that even if a police officer is caught doing something, out of economic reasoning, individuals are rehired in alterantive police stations because they don't cost more in training when hired and they aren't decertified.
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=3538&issue_id=112014

By 2014, 44 U.S. states—almost 90 percent of the states—had a process for the removal of the license or certificate of a police officer who has engaged in serious misconduct, thereby preventing the officer from serving with any law enforcement agency in that state.1 In most states, the agency in charge of issuing and revoking the licenses is known as the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission (POST). In the absence of such a law, there is nothing to stop a department from hiring an obviously unfit police officer.

Without the right checks in place, it's very easy for cops to get away with a lot of nasty shit and when they can, it hurts the trust the general public will have. I put greater emphasis on the police force to stepping up to the plate from a position of professionalism, a higher standard for an institution that's said to be for protecting people.
I have greater respect for the standards of my local police force than what I hear from media and anecdotes for the US. People getting shot seems way too normalized over. Here's how Australia reacts after a few shootings on a national level.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2014/s4145574.htm

A dramatic spike in fatal shootings by police has sparked calls for increased police training nationwide. In Queensland alone, there've been three fatalities in as many weeks and there've also been police shootings this year in Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales. In many cases, the casualties have been mentally ill and that's prompting families and criminologists to call for a review of police tactics and training.

Hell, here we have news reports about abuse of pepper spray rather than people being shot by police.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/advocacy-group-wants-stricter-rules-for-use-of-pepper-spray-20110911-1k493.html

I think the increase in the US of outspoken criticism isn't so much that there's been a change in the police as much as modern social media has helped proliferate their actions, that this was always how it's been, just now it's easier to spread the story.
I don't think the cops wearing cameras does enough to address any problems likely present in the structure of the police or their standards.
http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/08/even-when-police-do-wear-cameras-you-cant-count-on-ever-seeing-the-footage/378690/

[KlassWar]

(del)

[jango1985]

The "Right" needs to learn some political correctness and the "Left" needs to learn good intentions without wisdom leads to new suffering. And don't think I am soft because the "Right" needs to learn is political correctness, that's not soft.

[Harmattan]

Three remarks

* Most high-profile liberals come from environments without violence. They are therefore easily schocked by real-world violence and identify themselves to the victims of those violence. Misplaced understandable empathy. I prefer that to the absence of empathy.

* Policemen are authorities, they have power upon you. No one should like that. The idea that people may have the right to break into my house and use violence to coerce me is an idea I instinctively deeply despise, even though I completely accept its need and desirability on the intellectual side, and rationalize it by thinking that I will probably never face it.

* Policemen show the worse of mankind everyday, they are frequently faced with violence, aggressions, insults, threats and illegal financial opportunities, from the homeless junkie that pukes on them to the 12yo delinquent that mocks them. It takes far less than this to turn a good man into a violent brute. And there are many brutes and criminals in the police. Actually it is remarkable there are so few problems.