OPINION

Hazing solutions

Re: "End student hazing rituals," (Editorial, March 16).

Some might say that hazing is not uniquely Thai, that it is, in fact, a tradition taken from Western university systems and still occurs there.

This is true but overlooks the salient differences: deaths from hazing in the United States and other nations are typically from overdosing on alcohol or the result of accidents that occur as a result of intoxication with that drug; they are not a result of vicious, deliberate physical assault.

The same violent beating of freshmen might still characterise the Russian army and universities, but that equality of abuse there cannot excuse its continuance in Thai institutions, military or civil.

Ending brutish hazing requires more than exclaiming loudly about the latest death and promising zero tolerance of hazing: that non-remedy has been tediously repeated after every such killing for decades.

Like eradicating the usual forms of corruption, ending the culture of bullying dressed up as rap nong requires a change in mindset.

If Thai society and institutions are serious about ending Thailand's traditionally abusive rap nong initiations, they must begin by encouraging dissenting voices that can expose to critical review real defects in traditional social mores and mindsets.

A good place to start would be to stop using the violence of imprisonment in strict accord with an unjust law against peaceful protesters calling for the honesty of openness, transparency and accountability.

One half-baked theory put forward by certain people regarding the current Ukraine crisis is that Western democracies are somehow responsible for the invasion.

Nato is a defensive alliance. The states of the former Soviet Union would not have wished to join this alliance if they had not felt threatened by Russia, and we are now seeing the perfect illustration of why that feeling of threat was not misplaced.

Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine because of the various sins, some real and some imagined, of America and the West.

He invaded Ukraine because he is a sociopathic and an increasingly deranged despot sitting on top of a pile of rusting nuclear missiles in a crumbling kleptocracy, with delusions that he might soon be crowned the new Tsar of a Russian empire.

Putin is responsible for Putin's actions, and his rapacious, 19th-century tendency to devour smaller nations must be resisted.

Re: "Not our fault," (PostBag, March 15) and "No saviour," (PostBag, March 12).

The website co2everything.com obtained their so-called carbon footprint data from a paper by J Poore et al published in the Science journal in 2018.

The figures they give for the carbon footprint of fruits and vegetables, nevertheless, are extremely misleading.

That is because the carbon footprints listed in this data originate entirely from packaging, transport, chemical fertiliser use and mechanised harvesting, not the plants themselves.

Fruits and vegetables are the product of photosynthesis, the fundamental process whereby energy from the sun facilitates the sequestering of carbon from CO2 in the air in the form of everything from algae to trees.

Water is the principal byproduct of this process. All life on earth depends entirely upon photosynthesis and therefore it is good to have plenty of CO2 in the air.

These production activities should be energy-optimised, but not because we are creating climate change (a nonsensical, politically-driven hypothesis) but to keep food prices reasonable and thereby feed everyone, including those who do not have enough to eat.