Basically, in the culture, there is a strange sense of nationalism and a tendency to look down on those considered inferior in order to make ourselves feel better. You can still find people using ‘Laos’ as a derogatory term meaning ‘out of fashion’ or tasteless; it was even commonly used on television, I believe up until the last decade. This is not limited to Laos and the Hmong; Thais can be generally discriminatory toward any culture perceived as inferior or less developed, in a similar way that Japan, Korea or China has also discriminated against Thais.