Political Philosophy

Sometimes, You Need a King

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Over at Pajamas Media, Bill Toddler writes about the new Thai constitution, and in giving background on the military coup that overthrew the previous nominally elected government observes:

Thaksin’s real mistake might have been drawing the ire of the King. No Thai official before him had received so many public rebukes from His Royal Highness.

It is interesting, I think, to see how a monarch or other type of unelected authority often acts to moderate the extreme actions of government leaders, elected or otherwise.

In many countries only such a figure as a hereditary ruler can evade being co-opted or killed by the government du jour. It seems that only such a ruler can provide any real form of checks and balances. A monarch often seems to bring a type of inertia to the political system, that serves the same purpose as common law, precedence and distributed government do in the West.

I think the key attribute of such rulers is that they have significant moral authority but little actual political power. They cause things to happen by suggestion rather than command.

Thailand isn’t a paradise by Western standards but looking at many of its immediate neighbors it is easy to see that it could have been much worse. A lot of the credit for that goes to the Thai royal family.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Video Interview

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Via David Foster, this is an excellent video of Ayaan Hirsi Ali being interviewed by a Canadian leftist:


 

UPDATE: More thoughts about independent-minded, outspoken Muslim women here.

The Spirits Were Right!

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In my previous post, The Amazing Psychic Shannon, I channeled the great ethereal spirits and asked them what we would eventually determine about the causes of the Minneapolis bridge disaster.

The spirits said:

The engineering investigation will reveal the bridge collapsed due primarily to design or construction flaws dating from the time of the bridge’s construction in 1968.

Today, I read:

The I-35W bridge was entirely supported by two main trusses, composed of many small pieces of steel bolted or welded together like a child’s Erector Set. Though it is possible to design a steel truss bridge with redundancy, the I-35W bridge was supported only by those main trusses.

 

“A truss arch bridge is like a chain — if you try to take out one link, you lose the whole system,” said Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a UC Berkeley professor who is an expert in such bridges. “They are very vulnerable to instability.”

 

Astaneh compared a steel truss system to a house of cards, which will quickly collapse if one card is pulled out.

Spooky.

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Multiple Cultures

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After Ralph’s thought-provoking post below, I’d like to take another pot-shot at the multicultural elites who seem to value any other culture more than our own.

One of the things that persistently puzzles me about the multi-cultural crowd is that, at least when I was a TA, they shied away from intellectually rigorous activity such as studying a foreign language. One would think that actually learning to speak a non-Western tongue would do more for true inter-cultural understanding than any pastiche of factoids, half-truths and generalized misinformation about other cultures that is the general Introduction to Foreign Culture claptrap at most Universities.

The cynic in me says that most multi-culturalists don’t go in for a detailed study of a foreign language for three reasons it would take away the focus from their departments, it’s hard (non-Western languages generally come with non-Western writing systems, and in my experience, students run from those like the plague), and, to Ralph’s point, the more in-depth you study some cultures, the more you are thankful you weren’t born into them. Hardly conducive to the facile moral relativism of the multi-culti crowd.

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