Tag: Monarchy

Aftershock follows earthquake as Thai king stops his sister entering politics 10 Feb, 2019 11:37am 4 minutes to read A Thai political party swore loyalty to the king, a day after its stunning decision to nominate the monarch's sister as its candidate for prime minister backfired when the king called the move inappropriate and unconstitutional. The statement of fealty comes as the country ponders a whirlwind in which Princess Ubolratana Mahidol broke with tradition proscribing the monarchy's involvement with politics to become a candidate for the Thai Raksa Chart Party. Then her brother, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, invalidated her action with a late night order. Thailand's March 24 election will be the country's first since a 2014 military coup put in place a junta determined to reshape the political system to eradicate the influence of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose allies have won every national election since 2001. Thaksin was ousted by the military in a 2006 coup, and the country's establishment has spent more than a decade trying to neuter his political machine through court rulings, constitutional rewrites and other changes to the electoral system. But Thaksin's popularity made the country's Bangkok-based establishment uneasy and some saw his popularity as a threat to the monarchy itself. Vajiralongkorn's order stressed that Thailand's constitution insists that the king and those around him stay above politics, and the principles of democratic government also put politics off-limits. It directly addressed the point that his sister was a member of the royal family even though her formal royal titles had been lifted decades ago when she married a foreigner. Her association with the monarchy was seen as making it difficult for royalists in Parliament, which picks the prime minister, to vote against her. Prayuth had been considered the front-runner, because changes in constitutional law and election rules were implemented by his government to make it difficult for political parties without military backing to capture the post.

Image The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum wants Americans to get in touch with their feelings; not in a fit of self-indulgence but as a righteous act of civic duty. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis,” she writes against a (mostly male) tradition of philosophical and political thinking that minimizes emotions as merely a source of irrationality and embarrassment. With more than two dozen books to her name, Nussbaum has been here before. But the 2016 presidential election made her realize she “hadn’t gone deep enough.” A self-described “liberal social democrat,” she was so shaken by Donald J. Trump’s victory — having been “reasonably confident that appeals to fear and anger would be repudiated” — that she felt an overwhelming sensation of alarm. She believed fear was what had gotten Trump elected, and here she was, so scared that she was momentarily incapable of being “balanced or fair-minded”: “I was part of the problem that I worried about.” An elegant and precise stylist, Nussbaum has always seemed a peculiar spokeswoman for bringing unruly emotions into the fold. She writes about gut feelings like envy and disgust with an air of serene lucidity. She has spent decades parsing the role of negative emotions while resisting their seductive pull. Once she realized she might be able to wring some insight from upheaval, she “went back to sleep with a calming sense of hope.” Since we’re talking about feelings, I’ll confess to experiencing pinpricks of irritation when I came across that self-satisfied line, which appears on the second page of Nussbaum’s preface, before she has even started to make her argument. “On the one hand, I am helpless, and the universe doesn’t care about me,” Nussbaum writes. When the vulnerability of children becomes less a reason for protection than an opportunity to do harm, perhaps some fear really is in order.