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Letters from Thailand

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Botan

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“I love Samui in the wee small hours. I especially love it on nights like this when the white moon stares down from the blackness like the pockmarked eye of a blind god. At such times, when the island’s bright signs have paled to grey and the broom of sleep has swept the revellers to their beds, my mind’s cynical crust cracks open a little, and some fanciful poetry leaks in. Then the dark hills appear to me as slumbering prehistoric leviathans, the clouds assume the air of restless ghosts, and the moon-dusted sea murmurs in some long forgotten tongue of the divine.”

Thailand
Book:Everyone Burns
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“Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man’s breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts.”

PhilosophyThailand
Book:Everyone Burns
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“He wasn't like some of the hippies in England, where the qualification to rebel is planted by the guilt raised from being a spoilt child with a good education. He was a real hippy born from being forced to kill for his army until he was twenty one. He had long hair because the army made him shave his head. The army made him shave every day too. Now he had a beard. His face for a long time was not his own. When this guy said he was all about peace he wasn't talking about peace because his mum never got him the horse he wanted for his eighteenth birthday, he was talking about peace because he’d seen war. He talked about love because he knew hate: hate for those above him, hate for those he had served with, hate for enemies not born his but who became so and, lastly, hate for himself for how his mind had been controlled.”

LifeArmySoldierJungleThailand
Book:Life Knocks
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“The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before those two eighty-year period of temporary Western ascendance. The stock market crash in Hong Kong and the devaluation of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia took only 80 seconds to make themselves felt in the London City and on New York's Wall Street. How much of a cultural lag do we still need for popular perception and social theory to catch up with global reality?”

IndonesiaThailandWall StreetEast AsiaSocial TheoryLondon CityGlobal Economic CrisisPopular Perception
Author:André Gunder Frank
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