Thursday, February 23, 2017

Visa and Democracy?

Today's song is: All of Me  .. John Legend


Thavorn, Jaidan and I are still awaiting a decision on Thavorn's visitor visa. It has been 16 days since it was submitted, which is well over the listed 7 working days for processing. We hope to hear anon (WOTD - word of the day).

Last night I had dinner with my visitors from Canada who have returned from the wilds of Myanmar. They are here in Bangkok until Friday when they fly to Phuket for a week's rest at a Marriott resort. John and his mother Margaret joined us for dinner as well. Margaret will be visiting until may and flew to Bangkok from Canada by herself. Margaret is in her mid 80's so shame on all of you who say it is just too far to visit.

Is democracy at risk? When 51% of the population wants something and the other 49% want something else, can a government function effectively. It is not unusual for political parties to take turns governing as familiarity breeds discontent. It used to be that voters waiting for their chance to turf out the exiting political party.  However, it seems now, the opposition does not even want to give the ruling party a chance to govern.

The media seems to have set themselves up as the moral compass for the nation. I am not sure what gives them the moral authority to do so other than they all seem to think their shit doesn't stink :-)

A future democracy needs a better voting system. I would suggest that governments should use bio-metric data such as finger printing and retinal scanning to record a vote. All registered citizens would be in a voter bank (no names, just the bio-metric data, eligible, voted fields). That would ensure that a person can only vote once and only is authorized.

Of course we would know almost immediately the results of an election if we had the voting ballots online as well. We could even use the system to poll the population on something as important as Brexit.

However,, that would not solve the problem of poor losers who are not willing to wait 4 years to give the winning party a chance. Here in Thailand, there are no stop signs at most intersections. Everyone just takes their turn and their is very little horn honking. Maybe if North America got rid of their stop signs people would learn to get along with each other.

As always, no answers, just some random thoughts on a topic.

TTYL

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