This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic “lese majeste” laws, which make insulting the royals an offence punishable by 3-15 years prison.  As this website shows, lese majeste appears to be a tool of choice for the current Thai regime for suppressing dissent and anything else they don’t like. The BBC helpfully gives us the current law:

Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of 3 to 15 years.

It seems like a fairly straightforward case of a backwards country applying antiquated laws to impose a harsh penalty for something which would not raise an eyebrow in any modern and progressive society.  Pen UK has taken up the cause.  Harry himself says:

This is an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ experience. I really believe that I am going to wake up and all of you will be gone. [...] I would like to apologize. This can’t be real. It feels like a bad dream. I respect the king of Thailand. I was aware there were obscure laws (about the monarchy) but I didn’t think they would apply to me.

However, there’s something a little odd about it.  Specifically, that the book in question doesn’t seem to be available anywhere [Edit: ok, it's here, online, but it doesn't seem to be available for purchase anywhere, and seems to be self-published].  It appears that Harry himself has done a bit of self-promoting: here, and here, for instance, wherein his novel is described as:

a trenchant commentary on the political and social life of contemporary Thailand. It is an uncompromising assault on the patrician values of the monarchy, the insidious infiltration of religious missionaries in the education system and the intimate relationship between American foreign policy and Thailand’s battle against Muslim insurrections in the south.

Furthermore, Harry seems to be somethign of a self-styled gonzo journalist – see for example this.  Misinformation and taking advantage of foreign cultural mores seem to be ‘educational’ techniques in his eyes.

Further digging turns up this blog.  Some posts there seem to be suggesting that Nicolaides may have intentionally brought his book to the attention of Thai authorities as a kind of publicity stunt (or perhaps political protest?).  Foreigners have been sentenced and then pardoned in Thailand for this very “crime” before.  Is the whole thing simply a case of appallingly bad timing, given the current upheaval in Thailand, combined with appallingly bad judgment?  I personally know nothing about Nicolaides – is it conceivable that a struggling author with a gonzo bent might tip off the Thai authorities in an ill-conceived attempt to get arrested, convicted, pardoned (or otherwise diplomatically rescued), and then take advantage of the resulting publicity?

Yet more digging shows pre-arrest discussions of Harry’s novel and the likelihood that it would get him into trouble if published in Thailand: here, and here.  For example, from the first link, on 15 June 2005 it was remarked that:

With comments on royalty like that I presume it isnt being printed in Thailand ???

to which a source allegedly in contact with Harry says:

He told me the book may be little controversial, but yes, it is being printed in Thailand.

The second link also allegedly gives us a taste of Harry’s writing, which is, er, interesting (again, please note that I cannot be 100% sure that this is his writing, as the relevant Thai websites have rapidly removed anything relating to him [Edit: see update at the end, it's real]):

June is a bargirl who works in Patong’s Soi Eric. I met her at her bar and have seen her several times over the last month…

June could have walked out of the pages of Nabocov’s salacious and controversial book “Lolita”. She was young, playful and sexually alluring. She aroused prurient thoughts of the illicit defilement of a minor.

She was petite and graceful in proportions, fleet of movement and radiated the innocent charms of a 12 year old girl.

The night of unbridled sexual passion between June and me was as cataclysmic as a tropical storm. Torrid thrusts and tussles of sweaty lovemaking ended in almost complete physical exhaustion. Breathless and sated we embraced. I wiped June’s forehead of perspiration while the small beads of sweat that formed on her upper lip belied a salty hunger for more. Her appetite for sexual fulfillment was insatiable.

The second link also suggests that Harry had plenty of critics in the expat community in Thailand – some of the discussion is downright vitriolic, and there is talk of tipping off his employer as to the anti-royal flavour of his new novel.

In the end it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if he is a good writer or not, it doesn’t matter what kind of guy he is, it doesn’t even matter whether he deliberately or recklessly got himself into this mess.  What matters at the moment is that a man is in prison for nothing more than exercising free speech and making a poor choice of travel destination, and at the moment he seems to be getting less help from our government than a certain group of convicted drug traffickers in Indonesia.

So please, consider doing what you can to bring attention to his cause – and if you’re Australian, it might (yet again) be time for an email to your local MP or Senator to try to provoke some significant government action.

Update: Wayback machine to the rescue, here are some examples of Harry’s writing:

• Love Under the Tamarind Tree
• Western Union Love (warning: descriptions of torrid and seedy tropical sex within)

Update 2: Thanks to Robert Merkel at Larvartus Prodeo for the link.

1. Bush family cat dies (possibly of shame); Bush’s nickname for cat is “Kitty”.
2. Cats commence takeover of worldwide news media with German putsch; weatherman demonstrates excellent comprehension of cat psychology.
3. Nick Cave outed as fan of cat-related artwork; meanwhile artist’s cat gives him schizophrenia and causes him to start painting demon cats.

From an eyewitness (exclusive! who says you don’t get real news on blogs):

I just went downstairs to pick up my dry cleaning, only to be confronted with a 14 year old african boy who had been stabbed in the chest by another guy, lying on the ground COVERED in blood, blood in pools all around him, blood ALL OVER the door of the newsagent, him moaning, I swear he is going to die. Then another guy comes around the corner and he is also covered in blood and has been stabbed in the stomach.

Holy sh1t it was the scariest thing ever, the police rocked up, i was choking from the pepper spray. But they caught the guy who did it. That’s a bit of drama for a wed arvo.

And the most scary thing is that I was going down to get my drycleaning from the newsagent and the brawl and stabbing happened in there about 20 seconds before I got there – can you imagine??

Looking out my window now traffic is stationary for about a kilometre across the Adelaide CBD.

No doubt Premier Rann and Mr Atkinson will use this as a pretext to introduce London-style “stop and search” laws as part of the Global War on Knives.

She parked her car, left it, and immediately found herself in boiling water.

Where would we be without news.com.au’s commitment to bringing us the stories that matter from across the world?

King is particularly appalled that evidence obtained through coercion is acceptable at Guantanamo, and he also points to the more essential problem: by acting in this way, the United States risks losing its moral authority as a liberal democracy with traditions of fairness and justice.

The United States has always stood for fairness. That’s the important thing. We were the ones who started war crimes tribunals and we’re the architects. I don’t think we should turn our back on that architecture.

Approximately 72 million people died in World War II, yet even in the immediate aftermath of the war the Allies understood the need to ensure that justice was afforded in a fair and transparent manner. What is so different about the ‘war on terror’ that requires such a radically different approach?

Some relevant details:

• the US now has two-dozen ‘forts’ established in the region
• operations include supporting the “xenophobic to the core” Ethiopian regime in hostile incursions into Somalia
• ‘foreign fighters’ under US control have been covertly fighting alongside Ethiopian and Kenyan troops

In keeping with recent US efforts abroad, a plan to push Islamist fighters out of Somalia with Ethiopian and Kenyan support has fallen apart, leading to a shambolic situation where the (UN backed) government in Somalia is disintegrating and the warlords are resurgent:

The return of the foreign fighters to Mogadishu’s nasty mix, along with Ethiopia’s fit of pique, quickly sent the situation in Somalia spiraling downward. The transitional Somali government, backed by the United Nations, is faltering, and in scenes reminiscent of America’s last misadventures in Mog, both Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers are taking fire from 360 degrees’ worth of pissed-off Somali clans determined to – once again – drive off the invading infidels. Osama bin Laden himself couldn’t have written a better ending.

Meanwhile China is in bed with the very nasty regimes in Sudan and Zimbabwe, Africa is being recognised as (finally) being of strategic importance, and Africa Command is being developed as a post-Iraq model of US foreign intervention. Read the article to inform yourself about the wars you’ll be reading about in ten years’ time.

The headline is a reference to the proposal that Australia implement a carbon trading scheme to (finally) start doing something about our greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon trading works, in part, on the basis of charging businesses for the greenhouse gases they produce. Therefore this headline could be rephrased as follows, and be just as informative:

“Making producing carbon dioxide more expensive will make producing carbon dioxide more expensive.”

Of course that won’t stop the media and others running a ridiculous scare campaign about how this will ‘hurt the economy’ and ‘hit consumers in the hip pocket’ without acknowledging that that is the whole point of the proposal, making people pay for damage to the environment so that it is regulated by the wonders of the market. Still, the ABC should probably get some sort of prize for stating the bleeding obvious and taking presenting non-information as news to new levels.

(Similar comments at AnonymousLefty here).

Of course the death penalty is not to be taken lightly and is a centrepiece of China’s appalling human rights record.

Murders with firearms per capita, by country.

Firearm-related deaths per capita, by country.

Correlation between changes in gun-ownership and changes in homicide rate across different regions of the United States.

Australia’s rate of gun-related homicides appears to have dropped significantly since gun laws were tightened after the Port Arthur massacre. In the 10 years up to the massacre there were 11 mass shootings in Australia killing 112 people. In the 10 years since there have been no mass shootings in Australia.

It is very difficult to find reliable statistics on gun ownership per-capita on a nation-by-nation basis. The United States certainly has a very high rate of gun ownership for a developed nation, with around 40% of US households owning at least one firearm (see for example the figures in this UN report on page 18) but then so do certain other nations with far lower rates of gun-related deaths, such as Switzerland. This UN study suggests that is a direct correlation between rates of gun ownership and homicide rates, although interestingly it removes the US as an ‘outlier’ from most of its statistical analysis.

Perhaps contrary to what the above statistics suggest though, there may also be an inverse correlation between the right of private citizens to carry concealed weapons and the rate of public shooting and multiple murders, as discussed in this paper from the University of Chicago Law School.
As you may have seen, a law allowing students at Virginia Tech to carry concealed weapons was rejected about a year ago.

Another view, from a UK/Dunblane massacre perspective, is here.