Popularity counts

re: "Senate to play pivotal role" (BP, Editorial, August 14, 2023)

Dear editor,

Thailand's senate should perhaps heed the wise words of a great mathematician, logician, philosopher and public intellectual from last century. Bertrand Russel wrote in 1943 that "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do" (An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish). This is why, for all their possibly sincere posturing, neither the senate nor any other similarly insistent zealot dares invite open dialogue on their peculiar excuse for rejecting Move Forward's popular leader Pita Limjareonrat.

That excuse is not merely peculiar, it is not something that any rational, moral person can take seriously. To claim that a group of people revere some object, whether a person, a painting, an institution, a sacred text, a custom, or whatever, is a factual claim about the objective world. Such claims require evidence. For claims about about public attitudes or opinions, that evidence must be open dialogue and polls of public opinion conducted so that dissenting answers can be freely given. The perfect absence of any such supporting evidence for the senate's excuse is telling. 

In its reasoning as presented, the senate seems also unaware of how parliament works. No piece of legislation is enacted merely because one party proposes it. The passage of a law, any law, in fact requires that the proposed legislation win the votes of more than 50% of the people's elected representatives. With only 150 seats in parliament, it is simply ignorant to believe that Move Forward is able to unilaterally push through any of its policies, let alone more controversial ones. 

But then, those who were complicit in 2014 in the overthrow of Thailand's "democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State" (Thai Constitution, 2007 and many others), did not appoint a senate to achieve any goal of reason, of the good public morals of democratic principle, or of any similar thing.

The senate is, however, to be commended for publicly confirming for voters how urgently Thailand's welfare is in need of every one of Move Forward's flagship policies, which proposals for long overdue reform so quickly made that party so stunningly popular with the Thai people, a popularity that has likely increased substantially since it won 38% of the vote on May 14. 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on August 16, 2023, under the title "Popularity counts" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2630335/popularity-counts