Not so pretty
Re: "'White Lotus' boon yet to materialise", (Business, May 10).
It should be no surprise that White Lotus 3 is not helping Thai tourism as expected. Of course, the Thai scenery is gorgeous, but the movie paints such an unappealing picture of Thailand that it almost makes me feel embarrassed to live here. Money-grubbing girls, Russian romance scams, drug-fueled parties, snakes/lizards/monkeys... Sure, many people like movies with a lot of killing, but is this enough to make one want to come here? The hotels in Samui and Phuket need to get real about their expectations!
Randy Hurlburt
Beyond the self
Re: "The lost path", (PostBag, May 10).
Talat Kamal has contributed a benign and helpful letter regarding the errant ways of nominal Buddhists. As is the case with all the world's major religions, Buddhism is in constant need of reform due to the ever-present pressure of egoic foolishness being superimposed upon the original spiritual teachings from which these religions arose.
Although the teaching of Buddha Gautama does not promote belief in hell, such a belief is unnecessary and superfluous. What is hell if not a place of unhappiness? Our collective conditional situation is rightly comprehended as a kind of hell. The first noble truth, "there is suffering", does not mean some are suffering or that there is a potential for suffering while some are happy and have somehow already escaped from this hell. It is not a relative statement. It applies to everyone who presumes to be an "I", a separate self, in other words.
Liberation from suffering is not a conditional matter, something to be attained gradually by conventional self-effort. Khun Talat has made the error of conflating unconditional Buddhist Dharma with conditional contemporary Western social idealism when he suggests that the Buddha "taught us to pursue" the goals of "uplifting communities, thereby reducing human suffering". Realisation of truth or happiness cannot be accomplished by manipulating conditions to "reduce the suffering of others". It is only realised through the conscious transcendence of separate-self in every present moment. This is spirituality, nothing less.
Michael Setter
Pop-up problem
As a reader of the free Post digital edition, I realise that I must put up with adverts and pop-ups that help to defray the cost of offering this free service. Unlike digital "cookies", I don't have any options as to what I see or where they appear. I have gotten used to them, except for one!
As a frequent reader of and poster to the Opinion and PostBag columns, I find the lower right corner pop-up offering additional stories to be quite intrusive. In the first place, many of the stories being presented are weeks, if not months, old. This is also an issue with your "Most Viewed" and "Trending" headers, which also tend to be living in the distant past. Secondly, when reading comments from others, they cover the entire lower portion of the column, including any comment space allowed to post a comment. Closing the pop-up automatically closes the entire comment column. I subscribe to other international news publications, and many also offer reading suggestions by using unobtrusive pop-ups. The major difference is that closing those pop-ups does not affect the other items on the page.
Thanks for offering this service, but you might consider allowing the pop-up to be closed without affecting the rest of the page. This is a small enhancement that would make the readers' experience more pleasurable.
Fredric Prager
