Why don't people address "substantive issues" ?

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New Mandala blog over at Australian National University seems to be a little old school as far as open discussion of issues is concerned.

The blog is no longer allowing posts by people who disagree with them, or very few at least. Seems like their advocacy of non-censorship applies to everyone but themselves.

Anyway, I continue to disagree with them. I will just make my posts to this blog instead and promise to be way more critical of their little ongoing charade.

Why not more "substantive issues" rather than the never-ending partisan game of ping pong we are bombarded with:

Thelma Norton: "I was kind of hoping for more discussion of the substantive issues …Connors op-ed had, I think, begun the kind of useful discussion that NM called for a while back. That’s an opportunity lost." (Source: Comment)

Me: I agree, but for that details must be addressed.

For instance, there is a UDD sponsored radio station in Bangkok, presumably for taxi drivers, that provides a big list of programmes that supposedly helped rural folk. Well, did they? The analyses that I’ve seen haven’t been very convincing and there doesn’t seem to be have been much local provincial media coverage on how these rural funds were used, whether they are siphoned off as favours for the locally politically connected. A couple of foreign media stories about rural folk does not really do the trick.

There are also agricultural support programmes that are never mentioned here with important questions like who actually gets them? Do local powerful middlemen get them? Do they really use up much of the budget?

Never a mention of Auditor General Jaruvan’s work, supposedly because this would mean violating one’s partisan position.

There is also the crucial issue of central bank independence and the conflict between the current finance minister and the central bank governor who has done a very good job at keeping Thailand’s financial sector sound, but whom of course takes loads of abuse from people who have no long-term perspective as far as the economy is concerned. In light of the current world economic crisis, the capital controls that the central bank was roundly abused for, almost seem presicient.

All of this requires much more mental effort than mindlessly joining the partisan chorus on either side. (Source: Comment)

Can't see him, but he's there all the same...like a ghost, not a warm puppy dog (Chang Noi on the impasse in Thai politics)

"Nature abhors a vacuum," according to Aristotle. Something like PAD was inevitable just as Thaksin was inevitable. PAD is like the Thaksin anti-particle in the physics of Thai politics.

If the majority of a country's population is located in the demographically superior but relatively poor hinterland should this election-wise more powerful but peripheral part of the country be calling the shots at the country's center? How did Thailand get into this intractable state of affairs?

Just over a decade ago, he [Anek Laothamatas] asked a question which clicked with middle-class anxiety over the drift of Thai politics. How come the rural majority selects governments at the ballot box, and the urban minority throws them out by protest and scandalization, resulting in chronic instability? His answer was that the rural electorate was trussed up by the patronage of local bosses. The solution was to tighten up rules to keep the bad guys out of parliament, and get rural issues onto the agendas of political parties. This was not just political science but prophesy. The first solution inspired the 1997 Constitution (chief drafter Bowornsak acknowledged Anek's influence), and the second solution inspired the activists who compiled Thaksin’s rural programme for the 2001 election (Source: Chang Noi).

Good businessmen never give up, neither do good activists:

The PAD came into existence to drive Thaksin from power. It revived early this year after Thaksin returned to Thailand and appeared to be steering the Samak government to block the avalanche of lawsuits descending on Thaksin and his family. Thaksin claimed he had washed his hands of Thai politics, but this clearly was not true. After he fled into exile, he dropped the pretence altogether. In the press release on the day of his flight, he wrote: "Today is not my day. I would like to ask my supporters to be a little more patient", with the implicit message that he would stay involved. Just three weeks before the recent street battle, he told Reuters: "Politically motivated cases must be resolved by political means." In short, he sees political influence as the best way to avoid a judicial reckoning.

[Comment: A couple of years ago according to Thaksin, Thai democracy was inherently different from western democracy. Now apparently it is the same thing. Is there any logical consistency here? Only insofar as maintaining wealth, business interests, and political influence is concerned. Realpolitik, not democracy, seems to be the key force and idea here.]

Samak to Thaksin: I will not be your puppet:

In the transition from Samak to Somchai, Thaksin's role was not covert at all. PPP faction leaders flew to London to lobby his support. Party spokesmen announced that Thaksin had a role in distributing the Cabinet posts. Because Thaksin gave public backing for Samak to continue as premier, some have interpreted Samak's fall as a blow to Thaksin. That's naïve. Although Samak was hand-picked by Thaksin, once he had become premier Samak burnished his royalist and pro-military credentials, clung onto Anupong, and eased away from his patron.

Thaksin to Samak: I can find better puppets than you Samak:

In the cookery coup, Thaksin got rid of this unreliable two-faced puppet, placed his own brother-in-law in the premiership and filled key Cabinet posts with members of the northern faction or his personal followers. Sompong Amornwiwat seemed genuinely flabbergasted to find himself in the role of foreign minister, and there's really only one way to explain this extraordinary appointment. Even before the new line-up had paraded in their brilliant white uniforms, constitutional change was back on the agenda (Source: Chang Noi)

Thailand's number one Marxist is number one foreign business news source?

One very strange fact that I've noticed recently is that Thailand's most well-known Marxist intellectual Giles Ungpakorn also seems to be the most quoted source for Thai politics in UK's number one business daily the Financial Times.

Giles is a member of Workers Democracy Group an international Trotskyist organization. How did Trotsky differ from other Marxists?

His politics differed sharply from those of Stalinism, most importantly in declaring the need for an international proletarian revolution (rather than socialism in one country) and unwavering support for a true dictatorship of the proletariat based on democratic principles (Source: Wikipedia).

This sure seems like a double standard in journalism. Are British Socialist groups well-represented in the Financial Times also? I sure haven't seen any.

Perhaps British journalists apply different standards for so-called "emerging market" countries like Thailand.

Or perhaps this is just the result of the left-leaning political nature of academic focus on Thailand in western universities.

I was recently looking for academic research on the history of the Eastern Seaboard development project during the Prem era. Couldn't find anything but sure could find about hundreds works on rural farming communities and October 1976.