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As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question: "Is Bangkok supposed to become Branson?"  Before we get into it there may be some viewers who don't know what Branson is. I am talking about Branson Missouri, or Missoura depending on where you come from and coming from Kansas, Branson was a place as a kid I went to quite a few times. It is very family-oriented place. There is nothing wrong with it. I want to be very clear. There is nothing wrong with Branson, Missouri. However, I remember a Simpsons episode years ago where Bart was talking to someone about Branson and he said: "Well my dad says Branson is what Las Vegas would be like if Ned Flanders ran it." Ned Flanders was kind of a goody two-shoes kind of guy. Branson is a very family oriented place. This is not a knock against Branson. 

The reason for this video is I read an article the other day that begged the question in my mind, "Is Bangkok supposed to become the Branson of the East?" So the article in question is titled, we will throw this up: Thailand Road Carnage: more booze bans and checkpoints needed - look at lockdownsuccess. The notion of lockdowns being a success, I have real problems with that notion. In any event let's go ahead and quote. This is from ASEAN NOW, aseannow.com, that is legacy thaivisa.com. Quoting directly: "Rungarun Limlahaphan of the Thai Health Promotion Foundation said that Thailand needs to look at the lessons of lockdown from last and this year when road death stats dropped 10% and more." Quoting further: "She said that measures introduced in last year's lockdown banning alcohol lead in part to far less deaths on roads." Now this is ASEAN NOW making a commentary. I don't mean to laugh but I just found this whole thing funny. Quoting further: "ASEAN NOW notes that far less traffic on the roads did not appear to be a major part of Rungarun's "analysis". What they are getting at there is I am sure road death stats dropped by 10% because no one was out. During many of these lockdowns nothing was happening so yes of course I mean that seems self-evident to me that you would presume that there would be far less road deaths if no one is on the actual road. That seems self-evident to me. Okay again and this article again aseannow.com, there is a lot more in there. I urge folks to go check that out. They also get into the alcohol thing and yeah there are going to be far less deaths from alcohol-related road deaths because no one can drink and no one was driving around. It just wasn't happening. It really all stems from this notion, 'Do we need a nanny state?' 'Are we adults or not?' I personally and I am not saying, and this notion of 'do we want to live in Branson?' Do we want to live in a place where there is no alcohol, it is all banned? And we are supposed to live the pure life or whatever. People that want to do that, that is fine. And the thing I have always loved about Thailand and I am scared of losing in Thailand is Thailand is a very conservative country. People don't really understand that, especially those that only see this country from the outside. I would say high 90 percentile, 98-99% of Thai people are very conservative. In fact I can't tell you how many people, it is a staggering number in Thailand that just don't drink, just for one example; they don't drink alcohol in their day-to-day. That is just not what they do. The vast majority of Thais are very conservative in the way that they live their life. Now at the same time, and this is something I have always found beautiful, this interesting dichotomy, is they are simultaneously some of the most tolerant people on the planet. In fact I would go out on a limb and say they might be the most tolerant people out there with respect to how other people live their life. What I am saying is "Live and let Live". That is very much inherent to the Thai philosophical paradigm if you will; just inherent to how Thais see things in my opinion that look ‘this is what I am doing, this is what I believe, but you know if you want to do this, if you want to go have a beer; I don't like beer; I don't like alcohol. If you want to drink your wine have at it but that is not for me’ and that is fine. This notion that we need to be locking down and nanny mindering everybody because it causes road deaths or whatever else, look people die, there is inherent risk in life. We have talked about this. Not to go into a lot more detail doing cost benefit analyses and stuff.

The point is, I did not move to Branson. I moved to Bangkok. I want to live in Bangkok and the Bangkok that I moved to; the Bangkok I came to and the Bangkok I love, one of the elements of that is people have the choice and the right to choose to have a drink. Do they have the right to go out and drink and drive? No and we need to do something about that. I don't disagree with that but it is like using a mallet to swat a fly, this notion that we should just keep up the alcohol ban forever and learn from the lockdown "successes" in this regard. I just disagree with that. I find that fundamentally to be the wrong way to think about these issues.