Thai populist subsidies prices Thai rice out of competition, Thai farmers suffer

[opebo]

We can only hope they are removed from power somehow.  I don't care about the rice, but I do care about certain of their other policy tendencies (anti-fun).

[opebo]

Screw fun. It's boring as hell.

Perhaps, but the key is it is less boring than everything else.

Right now the rubes are riding high in high politics, one can only hope they will soon get a proper comeuppance.  The old man still lives and as far as anyone can tell he's in better health than he was a couple of years ago.  

[opebo]

Oh man. I wonder how this will be spun by the Thaksin defenders who kept insisting the opposition* was fascist.

*Something I noticed a couple weeks ago is that the US Democratic Party and Thai Democrat Party share something else in common besides a similar name: Both belong to the same international affiliation.

Yeah they're both standard liberal parties - liberal in the European sense.  In Thailand liberalism and social tolerance generally militates towards a somewhat anti-democratic stance, hence the friendly relationship between the Democrat party here and the monarchy and army. 

[opebo]

...but isn't democracy fundamentally all about the right of people to put in a government of demagogues?

Yes of course, and thus, I prefer other certain other systems over democracy.    

If the Democrats want to retake power in Thailand, the answer is obvious: get out there in the rice paddies and steal Thai Rak Thai and its successors' electioneering tactics rather than sneering at them from Bangkok and overthrowing the government every two years.

No, the point is they want good governance- not the populist train wreck that would be required to be elected democratically.  So, the way they have been doing it is better in context - so far.  I don't deny that the downward spiral into mass rule seems to be in the cards - after all every other ancien régime has fallen - but not yet.  In Thailand, not yet. 

1.  People elect Thaksinites, they horrify the establishment with their complete lack of knowledge about...well...anything
2.  Military overthrows civilian government
3.  Military allows civilian government back under the condition they don't elect Thaksinites.
4.  People elect Thaksinites.

We can only hope!  I mean that the step 2 can continue to be repeated (subsequent elimination of step 3 is apparently too much to hope for) forever.  Alas, that which saves us here is hundreds of years old, and I fear, will one day soon succumb as well- it is like trying to hold back dynamite with a lace curtain.