Thai conflict with Cambodia

 

I'm writing to cover my impression of the conflict between Thailand and Cambodia.  This won't relate to setting the record straight in terms of history, or unpacking all the layers and different relevant perspectives.  This covers what I think is happening, related to hearing similar news relatively regularly over the past 17 years while living here (in Bangkok, abroad for parts of that time, but not much of it).

It's an ongoing conflict.  The root cause seemed to be that ownership of a temple area was always contested, and never completely clarified by final divisions between the countries back when the colonial era ended.  Thailand never was a colony of a foreign empire, but land division changed a bit in relation to neighboring areas that were.  When French rule ended, or their colonial oversight did, maps were re-drawn to reflect the modern status of country divisions, and that didn't always relate to as clear a status everywhere as it might.  I think the contention over an area between Malaysia and Thailand is slightly different, more about some groups in the South not wanting to be a part of Thailand, with the official border area well-defined and accepted, by most.  In this one case it's just about ownership of a small temple area.

I'm not sure how many times open conflict has erupted over this issue, but if memory serves--which is not a given--this may be the third round, or more.  It has involved actual fighting before, limited military conflict.  I'd know better what serves as a trigger if I followed the news more closely than I do.  But the underlying cause seems to be the same:  conflict over ownership of a very small area, and an old temple.

In other countries people might apply a different perspective and paradigm about how local land ownership issues work out.  In the US you can find clear markers for map lines of all kinds, and people know where they are in relation to these.  In some cases main divisions might go right through a town or city, and then it's clearly known where that division lies, often down to a few feet.  In rural areas things are different, even in the US, but perhaps all the more so in countries like Thailand.  

Some rural groups, not of the Thai majority group background, lack clear citizenship designation, per my understanding, so people could be not officially a citizen of Thailand in spite of being born here, to parents also born here.  People can also move between different countries in rural areas, especially indigenous groups, known as hill tribes, through less controlled routes.  This was said to be a main cause of Covid entering the country when people passed back and forth from Myanmar.

None of this leads to this conflict making perfect sense, but it can be a normal state of affairs, in an unusual way.  It leads on to considering if Thai people have negative feelings towards people from Cambodia (or Myanmar, or anywhere else).  Not really, but to a very limited extent perhaps.  Thais favor the best interests of Thailand and other Thais, but they seem to accept that people mix in this region.  People from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia often work in Bangkok, I suppose with or without legal rights to do so.  Probably more often without that.  The borders are generally a bit open to people moving back and forth, accepting this status, building it into policy enforcement.

To be sure this is where things get a bit hazy to me.  I'm not sure how formal process works, and how exceptions do.  I've known of people working in Thailand from other places, probably most often without the right paperwork, but I can't really draw a parallel in relation to how that is the same or different than migrant farm workers from Mexico working in the US (or from anywhere else).

Then in this one case it's especially odd how Thailand and Cambodia enter the status of officially being at war, when the conflict doesn't seem like one resembling a war (or had; it seems to be officially and in practice generally resolved now).  There is no intention of full-blown military engagement, on either side, it doesn't seem.  So what is the point?  Why start conflict, and what is the desired goal, for both countries?  Again this is where my understanding leaves off.

I've visited Cambodia, quite a number of times.  The border is quite open to Thais traveling to there, as I'm sure also works in the other direction.  The land border has a strange feel to it, versus entering by air, which is just like entering any other country by air.  The enforcement practices related to foreigners--people from other countries--coming and going has kept changing over the past 17 years, but then that's a completely different subject.

People in the US ask if I'm worried about the conflict, when it "heats up," if I feel like we are in danger in Bangkok.  Not at all.  Apparently four people were killed in minor conflict that somehow connected back to that theme, in Bangkok, but in a sense four people dying in a city of a dozen million doesn't feel like a high risk level status.  Also we have no connection to this issue, of any kind.

People died at that border area, and that's different.  Risk level in the close proximity to that border location was significant, and people died there, civilians.  I'm not sure what to make of that.  It's a tragedy, but an all-too familiar one for lots of people in other types of conflict zones.  People die in the South in Thailand regularly, I think.  It's not even an atypical news story, I don't think.  It's nothing like in Gaza, in former Palestine, but a limited number of deaths is also a tragedy, even those four.  Hundreds of people dying in a different kind of conflict is just more of one.

It might sound like I'm claiming that Thais are familiar with death and tragedy, and ok with it, but really the opposite is more true.  They don't have the terrible public shootings here (a couple, and a bombing, but that's it for the country's recent history, that 17 years).  It's not at all that "life is cheap."  Accidents might kill people for what seem like the wrong reasons from time to time, like a boat sinking, but Thais respond appropriately, with empathy and serious regret, and with varying degrees of preventative resolution.  People are less protected from themselves than in the US, restricted from hiking on a dangerous trail, for example, but that's essentially another different subject.

That said I can think of an example that contradicts the last point, and our impressions are made up of these bits of experiences.  We went out hiking on a national park trail once and it was required that we be accompanied by a park employed ranger.  We learned on the hike that this requirement came from the risk of wild elephant contact, and that a ranger had been killed by an aggressive wild elephant earlier in the year in that area.  Such a happening is rare, per my understanding, but male elephants do undergo a radical change of personality at one point in the breeding season, when some hormones are active, and are aggressive and dangerous then.  At one point the ranger with us saw elephant sign, and we ran out of that area.  

It's probably clear already, but the point is that Thai park policies and restrictions are put in place to protect people while hiking, at times.  They could have just informed us of the risk and sent us off, and everything probably would've been fine, but the extra step made for extra protection.  There was some limited fee related to this, if I remember, but it would've seem trivial back in the US, since in some contexts under $10 goes a long way.  It might seem odd that I'm claiming that people are less protected by regulations and restrictions here, given I've just cited a counter-example.  It's that the US is heavily into regulations and restrictions, which aren't always effective, but in some cases these would actually protect people.

Of course I can't project the future of Thailand and Cambodia's ongoing conflict; I can't even fully place what has happened in the past month.  But open war seems unlikely.  This sort of very limited scale conflict makes no sense at all to me, but then not everything does, especially when foreign culture perspectives and government directions are folded in.  What my family members say about perspective on neighboring countries and peoples can be a bit contradictory, but that's also how this works, that people hold varying opinions, and even any one person's full perspective may not be completely consistent.

Pig butchering scams

 

There are already plenty of Youtube video posts about this topic, which is an easier way to digest summary information, but I wanted to cover a few interesting points here anyway.

The general theme is an online scam, relating to someone using social media contact to get someone to trust them enough to make crypto-currency trading transactions as an investment, which turn out to be fake.  Sounds pretty improbable, doesn't it?  It is, but the build-up is the crux of it, how they approach it.  I received this Line message not so long ago; this works as a good example:

A common intro is a wrong-number sort of message, like this.  You wouldn't necessarily talk to someone sending a message to the wrong Line account, but you might message them to tell them they've got the wrong number.  Often the picture will be that of an attractive woman, which may increase the chances that someone might want to be helpful, to explain the "mistake," or to talk further beyond that.  That one was a bit moderate (in emphasizing attractiveness); this might be a better example:

Then whatever the starting point is doesn't matter, because the scam would relate to making small-talk next.  This particular intro opens up asking questions about travel themes, and sharing travel preferences, a good lead-in for social discussion, even with a "wrong number."  They would probably tentatively offer to pay for guide services; there would different ways to bait the hook.

Later it would switch to advice about crypto trading, which becomes kind of a stretch.  They use a script to help people running the scam bridge the gap in between topics, cutting and pasting a number of discussion messages that lead to that.  It's not supposed to make complete sense.  This is an interesting Youtube channel summary of how it all works; I'll draw more details here from this, about who is doing this, and from where.

I've talked to one person online before attempting this scam, curious about why an online stranger was talking to me (maybe from a social media contact; I don't remember that starting point).  The transition was pretty clumsy in that example; I would imagine that approach and the message steps get a bit better dialed in over time.  Another source covers a reason why you shouldn't talk to these people, to intentionally waste their time out of curiosity or malice, more or less what I was doing.  

Per that Youtube reference, and at least one other I've watched on this theme, these scams are typically conducted by Chinese criminals, set up and ran by enlisting workers in isolated residence spaces, some of whom are pretty much captives there, victims of human trafficking.  In that sense two crimes are really occurring, the scam, and a forced-labor theme supporting it, hosted out of places like Myanmar, or Poi Pet, Cambodia.  The scam employees / captives might be expected to generate a certain amount of return, and might be punished for low conversion rates, for example beaten, so it might be a mistake to try to tie up their time in order to cause others to not get scammed.

Jumping the track a bit for a tangent, I've been to one of those places, to Poi Pet, two years ago.

Poi Pet looks a bit like Thailand, but rougher

development isn't consistent, but they had built out casinos and housing

Poi Pet felt a little off; there were literally shut-down casinos there, part of boom and bust phase of them attempting to become the next Macau, and that not working out.  Surely the reasons for that were complex.  Development seemed inconsistent; there were plenty of large-scale apartment and office buildings here and there, but then also those closed casinos, and roads in between developed areas that weren't finished, at some stage in between dirt and pavement.  Apparently that business failure and connection to Chinese interests, and limitations of local law enforcement / openness to corruption, all combined to make this a viable new criminal industry there.

One video reference on this theme, not that one I've cited, here instead about a Dubai-based operation, showed how they can work around using an attractive woman's photo, when it's really more often some Chinese guy being held captive.  Instead of pulling down online photos, which would make it possible to reverse-search the images, a more sophisticated operation can employ someone to play that role, to be the photo model, and even to be able to video chat with scam victims.

That's not a job that anyone would seek out, but they could enlist such help the same way they could turn up the other workers:  make false promises about a much more valid work position, and then set it all up as a difficult situation to get back out of once someone gets started.

It's still unbelievable that this could work at this time, isn't it, decades into people running all sorts of online scams?  Even if you somehow thought that you were talking to an attractive woman, who had become something of an online friend, would you really get started on investing in crypto-currency, which typically is a scam no matter the starting point?  Hopefully not.  

But they build up to that sort of thing, using complicated deception.  The videos describe how they have people start by investing very little money, $100, and then witness how easy it is to do the trading to apparently earn returns.  It just turns out that those are fake, based on using an app created for this deception, that mirrors the look and feel of real trading apps.  If you would see the person you are talking to on a video call, supposedly, and then see how you could rapidly generate profits on a small investment (seemingly), then it might make more sense to go further.  Not for someone sensible, but one part of this is the victim believing what they already want to believe, partly tied to the attractive image part.

Back to the message starting points, the messages that I never responded to, those were identified ordinary, attractive women, just planning a trip, per the shared context.  Supposedly organic discussion would lead to the topic of crypto trading, following a script, with plenty of allowance for variation for responses, all making it seem more believable.  The context built in some cover for rough English use and slight inconsistency; from the looks of it those women would be supposedly visiting from China.

This kind of thing might work out well using a dating site or online penpals themed site to initiate it, right?  I explored an example of the latter at one point, "Interpals," but lost interest relatively quickly, in part because of drawing more contact from scammers than genuine users.  I did make one online friend there, an older Chinese guy in Malaysia, and we talked about local culture issues and changes in modern society over a number of years.  Some other contacts were at least real people, but it all went nowhere.

Someone commented on a discussion once that they could tell if a woman was a scammer online, because any female talking to them would have to be that.  Unfortunately that's kind of how you could tell who was who on that penpals sort of site.  If a random woman starts a conversation, that looks like a model in her profile photo, with very little personal background in it, that's a scam.

I'm an admin for a large Facebook tea group and Facebook is being populated by these sorts of profiles now; they're joining groups to look more legitimate.  They're easy to spot for a similar reason; the photos are almost all attractive women, and the limited details don't add up, even within the two or three background items shown for group approval.  Most go to a university like Harvard, often work for Facebook, and come from places like California City, which is a real place, but drawing on minimal knowledge of the US that would be LA instead.  Somehow more sophisticated fake profiles draw on use of obsolete or inactive and older real profiles.  That way a lot of it can actually be real, and consistent, it just wouldn't show years of recent activity, which is also the case for many real Facebook users.

There's not much conclusion here.  It goes without saying that you shouldn't send money or get started on investments based on advice from a random online contact.  These scams will keep changing form too; they'll figure out a next way to extract money from a stranger based on limited conversation under a set of false premises.  Later on chat-bots will be doing this, not human-trafficking captives.  Eventually they'll even be able to video chat.

Comparing Cambodian black tea with a Lapsang Souchong

So much slacking on the tea-blog posting that I'm writing about two teas I bought last year.  I bought a green and a black tea in Cambodia in October and took awhile to get to the black tea, which turned out to be much better than I expected.  About the lapsang souchong, guess I just never got to posting, even though the tea type is one of my favorites.

Cambodian black tea

The Cambodian tea was sold as a relatively inexpensive loose tea, in a grocery store of all places.  

There are universally accepted conventions that good tea isn't sold in grocery stores, and the less a tea costs the less exceptional it should be, so I didn't have lots of hope for it.  The green tea I bought was reasonable, much better than tea-bag tea, perhaps not as good as a lower end dragonwell (not that you could find that in a grocery store, at least outside China).

Right away I was surprised that even though it was chopped a bit it didn't look like CTC produced tea (crush-tear-curl; the machine produced tea you get if you buy low end commercial black tea).

It looked like decent real tea (orthodox processed), aside from having a bit of stick content.  I'm accustomed to packaging in foreign languages (this was labelled in three different ones) so I was happy to see some English on it, but the content made no sense.

The label picture (here, so redundant for me to say it) claims the health benefits "very good in sodium, fat, and calories, reduce cardiovascular problem, bountiful in antioxidants."  Of course the tea has no sodium, fat, or calories, but the water has that same health benefit before you add any tea to it.

Only later I realized it doesn't say how much tea I actually bought.  It looks like about 100 grams, but who knows, I didn't weigh it.  I don't remember the cost but it wasn't much, somewhere around what a Starbucks coffee costs.

The review part

The tea is good; I was shocked.  Not great, but it's real, decent black tea, the next level up from anything that would generally find it's way into a tea bag.

I was also surprised the tea had a slight hint of smoke flavor.  It seemed possible they'd smoked the tea to dry it, but then maybe it could be a natural flavor component instead.  It also tasted of leather and wood, with a faint fruit note, maybe cherry, and surely those were just from the tea.  

There was practically no astringency, which for me is a good thing.  My general impression was that it wasn't exceptional tea, with slightly muddled flavors and un-refined character, but since I'm a fan of black teas that aren't bitter it worked for me.

Comparison with a lapsang souchong

The slight hint of smoke made me think of comparison tasting it with a lapsang souchong I bought a lot of awhile back.  Of course that tea is from China, but I won't get into background since you can go and read the Wikipedia article yourself, or move onto Google searching.  

Lapsang souchong is one of my favorite types of teas due to loving black teas in general and because it's a smoked tea.  The smoke component can sort of make or break such teas; too strong and it's hard to make out other flavor (odd finding one too smoky when you love the taste of smoke, but it can happen), or sometimes the effect can be a sharp sourness versus a warm smooth richness.

Cambodian black left, lapsang souchong right

That lapsang souchong looked like they generally do, with long, slender, twisted leaves (brewed leaf comparison to the right).

This version was light on the smoke, if anything too light, but then the tea quality seemed relatively high and in the one sense good that tea flavors were predominant.  The main component was a rich malt flavor, coupled with almost no astringency / bitterness, so unusual to have the one without the other.  Some other subtle earthier tones rounded out the flavor, towards wood, maybe even cocoa.

The lapsang had more natural sweetness than the Cambodian tea.  One odd difference was the smoke flavor element was at the front for the black tea, something you'd pick up first, but at the back of the lapsang souchong, more on the finish.  That doesn't mean anything in particular to me, although it seems it might to someone else.

From looking at the brewed leaves (prior picture) it occurred to me the Cambodian tea might have been more oxidized, even though the general definition of black tea is "completely oxidized."

One of the main differences related to subtle impression of the teas, something that wasn't just a taste component, and also not exactly related to the feel or body of the tea.  Somehow the lapsang souchong flavors seemed cleaner, more refined.  It could have related in part to a taste element, since the Cambodian tea picked up an unusual undertone in later infusions, with the wood component shifting towards something earthy and nondescript, maybe peat.  But then who tastes or even smells peat.  Or maybe I just associate malt and cocoa components with a better tea.

Terroir

I've got a lot of nerve bringing this up since I've tried exactly one Cambodian black tea, but why not.  What it means seems obvious to me, the taste or character that results from a place, but as background here is a bit more on it related to wine.  It could be that I like Cambodian black teas in general but I'd need to try more to know.

I recently tried a very decent Vietnamese black tea with an interesting character (last post), and it made me wonder how much of it was distinct related to where it was made (or plant type, weather, soil, etc,), or if processing made more of a difference.  I tried one--and only one--Malaysian black tea, and a commercial one at that, and I was surprised it was unlike any black tea I've ever tried, smooth in flavor, earthy (really earthy, like that smell of fallen tree leaves in the autumn), with no astringency.

In Chinese teas questions of terroir and growing environment quickly link to those of authenticity.  It's understood that in cases when a certain tea derives from a certain region if the demand is there "counterfeit" versions from elsewhere will be sold as that.  Perhaps it's only hearsay, and false, but one hears that Thai teas can find their way to Taiwan to be sold as tea from there since the types grown and growing conditions are comparable, but the international demand for Taiwanese teas is much higher. 

Smoke and tea

It's a commonly encountered idea that any smoked tea might enable use of that flavor element to mask other shortcomings in the tea.  If you love the taste of smoke mixed with the taste of a black tea that might not be so relevant, in the same way you might not care so much if the black tea used in your masala chai would fare well on it's own; the final result is the thing.

I recently read a description of a specialty coffee vendor that reminded me of this (worst-case tea-blog sacrilege is occurring here in referencing coffee, but why not):

Roasting cheap beans to a dark smoky stage masks the bad flavors in the beans. This allows large companies like Starbucks to get away with buying cheap beans and masking their inferior quality by burning them until all you can taste is the roast.

Nice, zinging Starbucks like that; I think I'd have to try their coffee to really get the point.

That lapsang souchong seemed to go light on the smoke flavor precisely because it was good tea to begin with (all relative; "good" used loosely here), but I would've preferred they'd masked the flavors a bit more with some heavier smoke.  I only ever tried a version that was too smokey once, surprised I could think that at the time, but the tea was so smokey it took over my palate altogether, and the sandwich I ate with it tasted like smoke.

In conclusion both teas were nice, but give me an old-fashioned over-smoked low-grade lapsang souchong over either any day.