Well, technically, he’s not, because Thailand is in between constitutions right now, thanks in large part to a coup against the democratic government that the king supported. They’ve got an interim constitution that will last until the people of Thailand agree on a new constitution. The government made it illegal for people to discuss a new constitution, so that might take a little while.
So, right now, he’s an interim constitutional monarch.
Ok, I see.
Going from memory, the Economist has indicated that Thai royalty has in fact played a role in the country’s repeated military coups and the country has become addicted to them in a way. That’s a source of dysfunction. There’s a pro-royalty case to be made as well. The problem is that there has never been a full airing of the issue in Thailand and outsiders aren’t sufficiently interested to press the case. It’s a systemic problem and Thai royal family are implicated.
Personally, I lack sufficient basis to make a judgment. I will say that there’s a real need in Thailand to bring together the interests of the countryside and city and that ISTM that the royal family has had their thumb on scales when they should have focused on reconciliation. Or even truth.
Don’t know much about thailand or it’s monarchy, but fairly sure the saxe coburg/windsors haven’t demanded people being locked up like this:
The present King is old and very weak, almost confined to hospital; the future is uncertain. My comments are specific to H.M. Bhumipol himself, and especially when he was a younger stronger man.
Note that lèse-majesté prosecutions (which are not brought by the royal family themselves) have increased only in this time of his very poor health. I do not support the lèse-majesté laws per se, but let’s point out again that disrespect for the royals is often not the real reason such prosecutions are pursued.
The idea that the Thaksin governments were populist supporters of the rural poor, while the Democratic Party is the party of Bangkok’s elite is a huge oversimplification. Yes, Thaksin got a lot of rural votes, but one is reminded of U.S. politics: people don’t always vote for their enlightened self-interest.
One of the most important ways to help rural farmers in a country like Thailand would be to provide them with legal deeds for their land. (I found it interesting to hear this same message both from the head of the World Bank and from Thailand’s small farmers.) It was the Democratic Party that worked to provide such deeds; indeed it was that issue that brought down their government in the 1990’s – denying such deeds (which also denies access to commerical bank mortgages) is one way for criminal overlords to retain power.
The American press gives a very distorted view of Thai politics. Many civilian governments, especially the Thaksin governments, are controlled by an alliance of criminal overlords. It is often governors, police chiefs, mayors, etc. who are the major drug traffickers, loansharks, etc. It is vote-buying and politician-buying that largely affect elections, not ideologies.
I don’t have simple solutions to propose for Thailand’s problems, but when the King was younger he was part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Based on reports I get, the present military government has made progress in a sincere fight against crime and corruption. The new government has been visiting villages and trying to improve grass-roots democracy. (Thailand does have some local democracy, with many decisions made by a show of hands in village meetings. Thaksin, by the way, wanted to replace elected local officials with his appointees, saying “Democracy doesn’t work at the local level.” :smack: )
The next time I read the N.Y. Times ignorantly prattling that the Thai political crisis is about “Bangkok’s elite” versus “the rural poor” I’m afraid I’ll puke.
I don’t know much about the political climate of Thailand but what I do know is that there has been some disproportionate punishment meted out to those who insult the king. Not only that, I remember some youtube videos getting removed because they put a bunch of feet on his face. This article says that youtube did remove some videos mocking the king but kept others. The article also mentions that a Swiss man received a 10 year jail sentence for spray painting graffiti over pictures of the king on his birthday, but that he was pardoned and deported.
If they want to keep that shit to their own county, fine, but WTF are they doing trying to bully youtube into removing stuff? Look at the picture of that guy in the article, he looks like the spent head of a match. If Bumblefuck Abduljabbar wants to fuck with how other countries depict him, then he can shove his own feet up his ass and so can the whole country of Thailand
I also prefer unlimited free speech, but it should seem like a minor objection. IIRC, Nazi paraphenalia are banned in parts of Europe. Do you object to those bans, and are you honestly going to suggest that desecrating an image of the King n Thailand’s culture is less severe? As I say, I don’t advocate lèse-majesté laws per se, but I can’t blame them for trying and deporting that Swiss. Of course it was His Majesty who pardoned the man, very soon after his conviction.
But the real question which occurs to me is: Why do those posting on this topic give such importance to the lèse-majesté laws? Surely these are almost irrelevant in importance compared to other issues: raising lower incomes, and improving schools, governance, healthcare and the economy. Setting aside lèse-majesté, is there some other issue Dopers have with the King?
Speaking for just myself, I find such arrogance personally annoying to the degree that I will rant about it on a board. It bothers me on some intrinsic level that a law can be made and upheld where you cannot make fun of someone. Call it a pet peeve. That the Thai law is one of the more famous examples with very public fights over it makes that particular law the target of my ire.
I don’t accord it more or less importance than those other issues you mentioned, however this is much simpler to understand and have an opinion on than income levels or healthcare. So on that level, there’s a much lower ceiling to be able to understand and provide a solution to the issue.
Also, I’m sure that psychologically, as an American, I have a special distaste for monarchs putting themselves above the people in terms of special protections like this.
Lastly, I’ve actually defended on this board European laws against positive depictions of Nazis. I don’t live in a vacuum, and some of my American opponents seem to think that US notions of free speech must be present or else that country cannot truly be free. I reject that, knowing that much of the horrors of the world wars happened in their back yard. I think if Germany wants to ban all mentions of Nazis that are positive, then they are just as free as America who allows the likes of the Nazi party to exist. They had concentration camps in their neighborhoods, one cannot imagine how knowing your friends and neighbors were taken to be gassed to death can affect someone.
But simply insulting a king? I cannot be convinced that such a thing should be banned. It should be ok to insult anyone in history for any reason
If septimus can take a momentary break from giving a blow job to the entire Thai royal family for a moment, maybe he’ll be interested in facts as opposed to his asinine rant here.
I am not ignorant about Thailand’s king and his family. I have also been to Thailand a number of time and seen how the populace holds them in high esteem. I have also seen how the royal family has basically done not a damn thing that would actually be helpful for the country.
My point is that Thailand is in dire need of not having a royal family. As it’s set up now, the royal family is a joke. And the various juntas that come into power know full well it’s a joke. That’s why they manage to have a revolving door with the type of government ruling the country. And the king certainly isn’t ruling anything at all.
No, you jackass; you made up shit and pretended that was what I said. The board rules here prohibit me calling you a lying sack of dung outside the BBQ Pit. You are a lying sack of dung.
At least one other poster explained to you in this thread that your post in the other thread was in Bizarro-Land.
Nope. You went on a bizarre defense of that joke of a family. Let me explain something to you–and given some of your posts on the subject, I do find it hard to believe that you are not aware of that family’s joke status:
The king is useless. Pretty much the only thing he’s called into play for is to grant a royal pardon. A number of those people seeking such royal pardon are in prison for violating the Lèse-majesté law. That proves the king thinks that law is hunky dory. It also proves that he’s perfectly fine with the hell that people go through in Thailand’s prison while they’re waiting–years, sometimes–for the king to decide, “Well, he did insult me, but I’ll be nice and let him go.”
Thailand doesn’t really have a constitution. Well, yes, they do have the paper and a legislature voted to have it. But, in reality, the rebellions which keep cropping up in Thailand basically piss all over it. Which constitution they’ll be using next week may very well be something you need a prophet to determine. A real king would stop that crud from happening, and he certainly wouldn’t tolerate it happening as often as it does in Thailand.
When the king does bother to get involved in stopping the violence, it’s after the constitution’s been pissed on, it’s after people have been killed, it’s after the government of the day–said government supposedly already having “royal approval”–is either in danger of collapsing and being replaced by a whole new style of government or that’s already happened. If the people in the know (such as the generals) about the king’s actual effectiveness (zero) really did honor, support, defend, and even revere that joke as much as they demand the rest of the populace to do, there would never be a rebellion in the first place.
So the royal family doesn’t actually bring the charges of violating the lèse-majesté law? Big deal. Those scum don’t have to do that. All they do is let people get charged for real or even imagined slights against them. And then they let those people rot in jail, sometimes for years. And then they pretend to be magnanimous when they pardon the poor sods. If the king wants to prove he’s not a joke, but rather is a decent person, he can announce that anyone, anyone at all, who gets charged under that asinine law is automatically pardoned.
The status of governments in other countries is irrelevant to the status of Thailand’s king. Other countries, even other countries bordering Thailand, have their own jokes in government to deal with. Thailand, though, has their royal family with a horrible law that the government enforces and the royal family obviously supports.
So, in case you missed it: the Thai royal family is a joke. I’m on vacation in South Korea right now. Tomorrow, maybe tonight, I’ll get myself some Thai baht and drop them into the toilet in the entertainment district just up the hill from my hotel as my personal protest against those scum.
Just for fun, how about a personal anecdote? On my first ship, there was a Thai immigrant to the US who joined the US Navy. He never left the ship whenever we had a port-of-call in Thailand. I asked him why he stayed aboard. His answer was that he can’t stand the royal family and doesn’t want to chance voicing his personal opinion in Thailand. Like that sailor, I love Thailand and the people I’ve met there. The royal family, though, can rot as far as I’m concerned.
As I’ve said several times already, I don’t support the Lèse-majesté law; I just don’t consider it to me a major practical issue. Many different countries have different takes on Freedom of Speech. If you want an example where “freedom of speech” has led to poor outcome in practice, look no further than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in the United States of America.
Well over 99.9% of Thailand’s prisoners were convicted for something other than lèse-majesté. I guess they don’t matter.
And please do figure out whether your complaint is that Bhumipol is an absolute despot, or that he is a fully constrained Constitutional Monarch like Elizabeth of Britain. Your post baffles on that question. Elizabeth remains the Head of State no matter the excesses of any Labour or Tory government. It sounds like you’re complaining that H.M. Bhumipol did not illegally overthrow elected governments. 
You’re freaking insane, septimus. My complaint is that that joke of a king has not prevented illegal overthrowing of the government. Or do you think that whenever the military decides the constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s written on is kosher? Your posts sure seem to support that concept.
Just to see if your elevator goes all the way up to the top floor, please post a synopsis of your views on the policies of Thaksin’s govenments. Pay particular attention to the extrajudicial executions, the slaughter in the South, and enrichment of the crime bosses allied with him. Since “democracy” seems involved in what pass for your “thoughts,” please comment on the quote about local democracy I gave earlier.
Only after this will it make sense for us to debate democracy as it applies to Thailand.
I just want ordinary Thais to be able to call their king a shithead and spray paint over his pictures without fear of punishment. Is that too much to ask?
More proof that the king is useless. (All quotes in this post refer to this link.)
Read through the article and you can see that in Thailand’s democracy, the military gets to make up both rules and punishments on the fly and apply them to the civilian populace with absolutely no oversight. Of course, if the king gave even one half of a damn about the people, that crud would not have happened in the first place, let alone be done the way it.
Let’s examine:
[ul][li]Fully clothed university students perform a dance.[/li][li]The military decides the dance is offensive[/li][li]The military decides the dancers must go through hazing administered by soldiers.[/li][li]The hazing is known as “attitude adjustment”.[/li][li]And how is the attitude adjusted?[/li][li]Telling the students at the beginning of the “attitude adjustment” that they are not civilized people.[/li][li]Forcing other students to pick on/haze an overweight student as a “hippopotamus”.[/li][li]Forcing other students to "dance like a hippopotamus in front of said overweight student.[/li][li]“Team building” exercises in which the losing teams must face a type of corporal punishment (physical punishment).[/li][li]Freaking explosives used for hazing the students.[/li][li]No actual medical care for those forced to undergo this nonsense.[/ul][/li]
And how did these students end up going through these punishments? Were they arrested, tried by a jury of their peers, and then a civilian judge levied a sentence pursuant to law? Oh, hell no!
Nice, huh? Detention (if Thailand really had a constitution, I’d say unconstitutional, but Thailand’s constitution has about as much validity as the USSR’s did) by the freaking military–not the police, interrogation and forced confession, then extra-judicial punishment. And did you notice that civilian politicians are included in these nifty summonses?
Thailand is not a democracy. It is not even a constitutional monarchy. It’s a military dictatorship hiding–and not hiding very well, at that–behind the king who is doing absolutely nothing other than hanging out in the palace like Sihanouk did all because the actual people in charge keep calling him “majesty”. Hell, he’s no different that Sihanouk in that regard.
How can anyone say that the family that is permitting this to continue is not a joke? Oh, the answer to why people like septimus is giving a public blow job, so to speak, to the rulers might be found in the very same article:
Go ahead. Tell me again how Thailand is a democracy. I live in China and there’s more freedom of speech against the government there than there is in Thailand.
Once again, Thailand is not a democracy. It’s a military dictatorship with exactly zero control on the actions of the ruling junta. The king has done nothing to help the people. The king is a joke, a convenient idol for the military junta to use to hypnotize the people. Of course those people who are not hypnotized face the risk of decades in prison for voicing their concerns.
Every single day the king does not abdicate in favor of a civilian legislature is one more day that he proves Thai royalty is not only a joke but is also detrimental to Thailand.
Go ahead, septimus; try to dispute this with actual facts.
On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being Denmark and 7 being North Korea, Freedom House offers the following rankings for Thailand: [INDENT]Thailand’s political rights rating declined from 4 to 6, its civil liberties rating declined from 4 to 5, and its status declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to the May military coup, whose leaders abolished the 2007 constitution and imposed severe restrictions on speech and assembly.
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2015/thailand [/INDENT] Cambodia has the same rankings as Thailand. Nepal and Indonesia are much better, though they are not free countries. Saudi Arabia and North Korea of course are worse.
Thanks, Measure for Measure. It’s perhaps worth repeating this from what you quoted:
A certain other poster has asserted that Thailand’s royalty is a constitutional monarchy. With no constitution, it is no such thing.
Monty, you’re a fool.
" I have also seen how the royal family has basically done not a damn thing that would actually be helpful for the country."
Belated greetings Shin Ji and welcome to the board.
I was less than overwhelmed by your link to The Government Public Relations Department of Thailand. While it’s clear that the King was involved in a number of charitable endeavors and while the page claimed that he had a certain amount of leverage with the public and private sector, there were no budget figures. Nor was there any third party review of these projects. It’s difficult to evaluate the success or net benefits of the Thai monarchy based on those webpages. Worse, it’s apparently impossible to have the proper sort of discussion or polite debate on that subject in Thailand, on pain of imprisonment.
As for Monte’s comment, I believe he was discussing Thailand’s unfortunate habit of letting its military overthrow popularly elected governments and the royal family’s alleged complicity in the same.
Your defense of the Royal family is noted though and has provided food for thought.
Well, I, for one, got a kick out of Shin Ji’s link saying the Thai king rules. That’s demonstrably false.
Monty – all you got is more misconception and ignorance? It would help if you could overcome your attention deficit disorder to even remember what the debate is about. Let me help by outlining areas of agreement. I’ll use a larger font in hopes that will help.
I do not approve of the lèse-majesté law. But surely your own recent post should make clear that, by itself, this is just not one of the top problems here. Yet some of the King’s detractors in this thread prattle on and on and on about it, as though that were the only relevant issue.
I agree that Thailand has serious problems. My heart aches that I’m raising my children here (yet in total context it is clearly my family’s best option). When I visit Cambodia and see young people thriving and intellectually curious despite their recent horrendous past, and poverty far worse than Thailand’s, I compare and am saddened for the Thais. No one disputes these problems, yet Monty has lost the thread and attacks a strawman.
Every Thai government has been incompetent. No one is defending stupid actions of the present military government. But, in Monty’s examples, they are addressing a real problem – physical mistreatment of university freshman (hazing) has been a very serious problem here, which is recently improving markedly. I’d rather a government address a real problem ineptly than focus their energy as many previous governments did – stealing from the public treasury as fast as they could. In this country the set of top criminal ringleaders and top Thaksin-allied politicians are almost the same set. Police chiefs and provincial governors have been supervising the distribution of methamphetamine, loansharking business, etc. The junta has made inroads against this. But Monty wants to focus on an anti-hazing incident. What an ignorant dolt.
Our dispute wasn’t about junta competence. Our dispute was about the King. A King who is approaching his 88th birthday, is confined to wheelchair, and has a wide variety of severe medical problems. Perhaps some 88-year olds retain youthful vigor, but not this King. With fading health, his only major public activity is his annual birthday speech. In 2013 he could barely read his speech. In 2014 he was too ill to appear in public at all on his birthday. For this coming 5th of December … we can only hope. Yet Monty insists on blaming this very frail old man for the shortcomings of the present government. I wouldn’t be able to respond to Monty’s ignorant abusive views anywhere but in the Pit.
But let’s take a random paragraph from MNonty’s linked article:
“Mandatory school uniforms” – My God! – How un-American! Monty, you say you’ve traveled in Thailand. Your parochial attitude makes me think you just stayed in tourist hotels.
The 88-year old man is too frail now to affect Thailand much one way or the other. In the unlikely event Monty wants an intelligent dialog, why not talk about what the King did or didn’t do when he was a youthful 65-year old. Otherwise … stifle!
Sheeeesh.
And where did I complain about mandatory school uniforms?