"Things are pretty much the same everywhere."-- Timothy Hallinan's Thai cop sidekick
This trial in Thailand seems to echo Western perceptions of vacuous Asian ethics, in a border country seemingly caught in an intersection. I have the actual AP feed bookmarked on my phone, and may refer back to it, but this seems a bit spooky, superimposed from our narrative entertainments in exotic locales. A Nail Through The Heart makes the Scandinavian television series, The Legacy, look like a picnic, and The Beach, as a film, dilutes itself with a poorly referenced plot, but why Thailand? A constitutional monarchy surrounded by a history of leftist extremes, with a big lying socialist bully up north, suffering and pleasuring civilization and savagery collide in an interesting dynamic. Hallinan's novel was so powerful it made me lie for hours in the dark, superimposing many things of my own. Timothy's American optimism perseveres through his travel detective, despite a tidal wave of genocidal deception, and mine cannot, even though he thanked me for my review when I was still with Examiner.
I have been thinking about proportionality for some time, and this case raises it in spades, whether the migrants are guilty or being set up, what possible justice is there for such a brutal attack? The British families will be haunted the rest of their lives, and what motives Zaw and Win may have had seems puzzling, as the evidence indicates there was a degree of rage to these killings. The case also is an exception to sociological studies about class and crime. The indignant do not kill the privileged, except when they do, apparently to sate some driving impulse.
I part company with conservatives like George Will about the death penalty in the US. Will acknowledges the reality of its erosion, and it is a state sanctioned cessation of life in which a percentage of innocent individuals were unjustly electrocuted, hanged, or injected, but I do not think it should be abolished. Some humans are heinous beyond incarceration, but anyway you choose to parse it, justice for these two Britons doesn't seem attainable through standard judicial procedure.
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