• Gideon Rachman blogs about the rather anti-democratic nature of the misleadingly named People's Alliance for Democracy, aimed as it is against the poor rural majority. There's a lively debate in the comments caused by posters who argue that the alliance was motivated by massive corruption.


• Language Hat posts about the thoroughly Francophone nature of the 19th century Russian nobility. There are interesting comparisons to be made with (say) English in India and other post-colonial language environments.


• The Pagan Prattle lets us know that a sex counsellor in England has been let go because his Christianity kept him from working with a same-sex couple.

• Amused Cynicism reports on Sarah Palin's belief that God told the United States to invade Iraq. Is it wrong for me to not be especially surprised at this sort of thing anymore?


• At 'Aqoul, The Lounsbury blogs about the potentially profitable abundance of nitrogen in the Middle East and questions about the relationship of language to corporate opacity among some companies in that region.


• Greg Davis at blogto reacts to the new Metrolinx transit plan ("an answer to the question 'if money was no issue what would you do to improve transit in the GTA?'") and 34 comments follow.


• Centauri Dreams reports on a book containing some of the latest work on solar sails, spacecraft propelled by the impact of light on highly-reflective low-mass "sails."


• Daniel Drezner (now a senior editor at The National Interest) reflects how the fact that the US/EU-sponsored state of Kosovo has been recognized by 46 countries while the Russia-sponsored states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been recognized only by Russia and Nicaragua says something about the distribution of power in the world.


• Gideon Rachman reports on Thailand's People’s Alliance for Democracy, a political movement that wants 70% of the seats in the Thai parliament to be appointed because it distrusts the ability of the rural majority of the country to choose wisely. Parallels with Ataturkism and Turkey, anyone?


• Spacing Toronto says that Torontonians should be happy that we don't live in Detroit.

HAD he been president of Indonesia, not France, Charles de Gaulle might have modified his famous saying about cheeses and asked how to govern a nation with over 700 different languages. The answer, as elsewhere in South-East Asia, was to impose a “national” tongue.

As the region’s countries became independent, most wanted their citizenry to speak the same indigenous language. But choosing an acceptable candidate sometimes proved difficult, laying the ground for “language wars” that still rage.

A new collection of essays ["Language, Nation and Development in South-East Asia", edited by Lee Hock Guan and Leo Suryadinata]* from the Singapore-based Institute of South-East Asian Studies (ISEAS) reviews the region’s struggles to build monolingual nations. Several themes emerge: first, globalisation is forcing governments to reconsider restrictions on daily use of English; second, with the economic rise of China, governments increasingly see their ethnic-Chinese populations as assets rather than threats; and third, democratisation and decentralisation may revive local and tribal languages. Each of these trends may undermine the quest for a unifying national language.

Thailand's army chief vowed on Wednesday to clean up the country's political landscape and return "power to the people" as soon as possible after a bloodless coup against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Commander-in-chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who had repeatedly dismissed a coup as a way out of a prolonged political stalemate, took the reins of power late on Tuesday as head of an interim Political Reform Council run by the military.

"I would like to assure that the Council has no intention of running the country by itself and will return power, under the constitutional monarchy, to the people as soon as possible," he said in a national television address on Wednesday morning.

At the time the Bangkok protest movement began in February, Thailand was a functioning democracy, and there were mechanisms available by which unpopular or corrupt prime ministers could be replaced. Whatever may be said about Thaksin's authoritarian tendencies, he was in office because he won a free election, and there was no sign that he would refuse to respect the results of the next one. Thaksin's opponents could, in the normal course of events, have sought to remove him by defeating him at a general election, sponsoring an intra-party challenge to his leadership or submitting their corruption allegations to a public prosecutor.

The trouble, from the opposition's standpoint, was twofold. Replacing Thaksin by democratic means would take too long, and more to the point, his continuing popularity in the countryside meant that such methods were unlikely to succeed. So instead of going the constitutional route, the opposition changed the rules. The street protests, rather than being a means of effectuating democracy, were a method of replacing democratic legitimacy with a form of revolutionary legitimacy based on control of the capital city. This is the true weakness of Orange-style mass politics: that it depends on mobilization of the capital rather than any valid measurement of public will throughout the country, and that it can be abused by factions that represent a minority position nationwide but use their control of the capital as leverage.