Monty: What if anything is your point about Thailand's royals?

[septimus]

I’ll recap the debate.

@Monty

Thailand is the country in the most need of getting rid of royalty,

@septimus

Certainly news coverage of the Royals here is, by law, universally favorable but it doesn’t necessarily follow that a lot of bad news is being covered up. Here’s a list of awards (Stanford’s Woman of the Year etc.) given to the Queen by foreign agencies, not sycophantic Thais. Each member of the Royal family should be judged on his/her own merits and the King’s only son is widely criticised; is there some specific allegation against some other Royal I don’t know about?

Certainly there are admirable works that can be pointed to. Although, like Britain’s Queen, he’s a Constitutional Monarch with no direct governmental power, His Majesty’s resolution of the 1992 crisis was impressive.

In 1992, the King, by sheer force of his personality, forced a despised junta leader to resign. He was replaced with a widely respected civilian Prime Minister and new elections were soon called. When the King was in good health, he was surely a force for better governance.

Yet, Monty never responded to any of this. His case seems to revolve around alleged royal support for the coup against Thaksin’s sister. He’s never made it clear which “royal” he’s talking about. The frail 88-year old? The heir apparent who’s seen by some of the populace as a Thaksin supporter?

In any event, Monty’s case seems to be based on the assumption that the military government is worse (more corrupt? more incompetent?) than the government it overthrew. Yet Monty has, wisely, never pursued that debate. The corruption and incompetence of Yingluk’s government is laughably bad.

@Monty

And if the monarch had been on the ball over the years, there would never have been a military coup in the first place. I don’t care how many awards his wife gets or how many people blindly say “He’s wonderful”. The simple fact is that Thailand having a monarchy really hasn’t worked out all that well for them. The man is not capable of keeping the country from falling into disorder.

As I pointed out, the King solved the crisis (with extreme disorder) of 1992. But his efforts, in old age, to reign in Thaksin’s abuses a decade later fell on deaf ears.

There are two giant holes in Monty’s case:
[ul][li] He’s unwilling to compare the present military government with Yingluk’s government. Anyone so stupid as to defend Yingluk would get laughed off of even the ignorant SDMB. But this is all irrelevant anyway, since the debate isn’t about the present government, it’s about the King , and[/li][li] to credit or blame this frail old man for the present government is to pretend His Majesty, whatever his past greatness, is some Superman.[/ul][/li]
So Monty seeks refuge in a silly Internet article that complains about Thailand culture, giving school uniforms as an example …

@Monty

And where did I complain about mandatory school uniforms?

… and then complains when I quote from his own cite. Yes, Monty, when you’re unwilling to make your own case, just linking to others’ instead, quoting your cites is fair game.