Show your face
Re: "New road safety shock", (Editorial, June 26).
Having recently spent a few weeks in England, I was struck by a clear difference in the driving experience there: fellow drivers were visible behind their windscreens and front windows.
Human touches like a thank you wave when someone lets you pass first, or making eye contact before pulling out or crossing the street, were a feature of everyday road usage.
Contrast that to driving in Thailand, where drivers are faceless, headless, completely invisible behind black-tinted windscreen. The human touches of road-sharing are impossible in this context. This does not make for safer roads for drivers, cyclists, or pedestrians, and driver visibility is seriously impaired at night.
Time to peel off the black tint and bring drivers' faces back, for a more human and safer road-sharing experience.
Diane Archer
Release the hostages
Re: "Gaza Strip pantomime ending at last", (Opinion, July 29).
In his commentary justifying Hamas' refusal to release its hostages, Gwynne Dyer regurgitates the terror organ's lies as facts. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was established in order to free Gazans from dependence on Hamas.
For years, Hamas has been expropriating United Nations food for itself as well as selling it at exorbitant prices. Hamas threatened to kill Gazans who accepted aid from this foundation. Hamas operatives routinely fire into crowds and then release statements blaming Israel.
If Israel wants to wean Gazans from depending on the UN, which cooperates with Hamas, the last thing it would do would be to kill Gazans accepting this aid.
Hamas and its supporters are again repeating the famine narrative. But there is not a single photograph of crowds of starving people. Videos from social media do not support this narrative.
Dyer forgets that Hamas started the war, butchering over 1,200 people, raping and mutilating women, and strangling babies. The group openly states that it intends to do this to all Jews living in Israel.
They must not get off scot-free. Hamas does have a choice: Release the hostages and leave Gaza. This will end the suffering.
Frank Scimone
Price of hedonism
Re: "Bangkok police raid LGBTQ drug party", (BP, July 26).
According to the news report, "the same venue had been raided multiple times but continued to operate clandestinely." Forty-four gay men [mainly] wearing only underwear, 27 gay men testing positive for illegal drugs, etc.
I, a gay man with decades of experience in the LGBTQ community, warned early in gay pride month that not just embracing, but trying to normalise and promote a gay lifestyle would kick open the door to, among many bad things, precisely the drug and sex issues highlighted in this article.
I will conclude this letter by stating that some of the most powerful tools to protect good health are monogamous marriages and the traditional family. I guess you can see in this LGBTQ drug raid what happens when those two aforementioned tools are abandoned in the name of hedonism.
Jason A Jellison
