{"id":326,"date":"2021-07-09T05:58:20","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T05:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/?p=326"},"modified":"2022-05-14T05:58:32","modified_gmt":"2022-05-14T05:58:32","slug":"a-14-day-lockdown-and-oscar-wildes-the-picture-of-durian-grey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/2021\/07\/09\/a-14-day-lockdown-and-oscar-wildes-the-picture-of-durian-grey\/","title":{"rendered":"A 14-day lockdown and Oscar Wilde\u2019s The Picture of Durian Grey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Even in quarantine, there\u2019s no stopping General Prayut Chan-o-cha from empty rhetorics that smell like passing gas.<br>To prevent the smell from seeping through your screen, we shall not quote the general from the 7 July PR stunt, but discuss the psychology of the setup.<br>In a video conference, national leaders prefer the background of a bookcase filled with pages to demonstrate that a well-read person is a knowledgeable person. But General Prayut is always going to General Prayut, therefore the background consisted of three things:<br>A portrait of himself to demonstrate self-love.<br>A Buddhist statue portrait facing backward to demonstrate the Thai idiom \u0e1b\u0e34\u0e14\u0e17\u0e2d\u0e07\u0e2b\u0e25\u0e31\u0e07\u0e1e\u0e23\u0e30 (placing gold on the back of a monk), which means to do good deeds without wanting recognition. This is from a dude who ended up in quarantine because of a selfie with someone who has COVID-19, at an event (opening of Phuket Sandbox) that should not have been held due to the pandemic. But it happened because he wanted PR.<br>A portrait of galloping horses that one could buy from MBK.<br>Meanwhile, starting tomorrow 10 July, Bangkok will be in a 14-day lockdown but without measures to combat the COVID-19 virus or to justifiably compensate the people.<br>While the virus mutates and spreads, a lockdown would surely lower the number of the infected. But when we open back up again, the infection will eventually spread again. As happened before.<br>Why?<br>An effective lockdown comes with aggressive action against the contagion.<br>Through rapid testing, hunt down the virus as if it\u2019s a student calling for democracy. Inject mRNA jabs into citizens to combat the mutated Delta variant as if smacking activists with lese majeste charges.<br>But we neither have the test kits nor the vaccines, not even the mindset or know-how to obtain them quickly and effectively.<br>So here we are again, staring at a possible clueless and pointless lockdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even in quarantine, there\u2019s no stopping General Prayut Chan-o-cha from empty rhetorics that smell like passing gas.To prevent the smell from seeping through your screen, we shall not quote the general from the 7 July PR stunt, but discuss the psychology of the setup.In a video conference, national leaders prefer the background of a bookcase [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,12,14,13],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thisurpt","tag-prayut-chan-o-cha-2","tag-thailand","tag-thisrupt","tag-whatshappeninginthailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisrupt.co\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}