This weekend the only topic in Thailand is the big rally of the red shirts protesting against the government, so I can't resist and post something vaguely related to the political troubles in Thailand of the last 4 years. Last week the website 2bangkok.com displayed a caricature map on their starting page, originally published in the Poojadkuan (ผู้จัดกวน) column of the Thai newspaper Manager (ผู้จัดการ). The caricature, draw by Buncha/Kamin and published on August 21, 2007, placed drawings of Thaksin Shinawatra and his (now divorced) wife Pojaman on top of those provinces where the majority of the voters rejected the new constitution in the referendum - which are not totally surprising areas in the north and northeast where Thaksin's party had its strongest power base.
Since the picture was a scan from the paper page, I played with Inkscape a bit and both created a map with the referendum results according to Thai Wikipedia, and overlayed it with a rendering of the drawings in the newspaper. I did not find the actual numbers for each province, so I could only render the map according to the colors I found in Wikipedia.
If you love such strange maps, there's a whole blog dedicated to them named "Strange Maps", and even a whole book derived from the blog.
To get the latest on the protests this weekend, follow the redshirt keyword in Twitter, the various political blogs like BangkokPundit, or of course the two English newspapers of Bangkok. Yet I still hope all the panic that it we see a replay of last years Songkhran riots will be groundless and all turns out to be just an albeit large rally normal to other democracies.
2 comments:
I did not find the actual numbers for each province...
Stalin said it: "It's not the people who vote that count, it the people who count the votes."
The dictatorship turned down offers of international witnesses to their "election".
I don't believe the junta's charter ever passed.
Which junta are we talking about here? I tend to think of them all as an ongoing (decades old) amorphous mass of toxic waste. It bubbles and fizzes a bit from time to time. It ebbs and flows some, but it is essentially a stagnant canal that us mere plebs are well-advised to avoid at all costs. I think New Mandala is probably a better place to discuss who knobbled which polls and which constitutions. They still have a few people over there who actually believe in the power of politics.
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