Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing opacity and bureaucracy here in Thailand. Yeah, for those who have ever dealt with Government here in Thailand, if you have ever dealt with legal processes; things pertaining to documentation; registration of documentation; securing of legal rights and benefits, bureaucracy is a major component of the Thai Body Politic if you will. That is just part of the system. I keep thinking of the film that is often overlooked, and seems to be almost universally panned, but it is a movie called Jupiter Ascending; I think you can even go into YouTube and just search "Jupiter Ascending, bureaucracy" and there is this scene where they go to like this intergalactic capital which is an entire planet that is devoted to bureaucracy; it is just a planet of bureaucrats and they go through this process of moving this documentation through it. I will never forget the first time I saw it. My wife I were watching it and we both just turned to each other and said "WOW", it is not exactly like how things are in Thailand, but it was humorous in that it caught the broad strokes of how bureaucracy can be. I got to thinking of this again in a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Gay marriage may be too radical in Thailand. Very interesting article. As with all the articles we cite, we urge you to go check out that article on pattayamail.com. 

This video really doesn't have anything to do particularly with gay marriage but this particular excerpt got me thinking. Quoting directly: "The Thai Cabinet has referred back to Parliament the draft Marriage Equality Bill proposed by the Move Forward Party. The move is seen as a delaying tactic by high level Government Ministers as there is an ongoing debate about civil partnerships for gays as opposed to full marriage. A Civil Partnership Bill received the support of the Cabinet as early as last year, but progress on both versions has stalled in a complex bureaucracy." This is sort of the point I want to make with this video is this quote here: "but progress on both versions have stalled in a complex bureaucracy". There is sort of to analogize it, it is sort of like traversing a mountain, when you are dealing with for example in this case passing this bill or if you are dealing with even I felt this way dealing with my citizenship to some extent. You climb up into the mountain and you get to a point where very few people have ever dealt with things up there and you are dealing with fewer and fewer people in the sense of fewer and fewer offices, things have to be processed through certain channels and it can become very opaque and very difficult to sort of navigate at that point and this article is talking about things in more of a political sense and when you are talking about politics there is far more opacity there. It is very opaque. There are competing factions, by competing I mean there are differing factions that may want or not want or oppose something becoming a law and especially here in Thailand because quite frankly in my mind especially politically, Thais can be very, very savvy to the point where it almost feels like shadow boxing it in a political sense. At least that is the way when I watch it, it is like everybody is positioning, positioning, positioning and it is almost anticlimactic in so far as it just kind of, something like this can kind of die on the vine in a political sense.

Getting back to what we are talking about, the bureaucracy itself can become this kind of well, to those who are going through and I certainly felt this way for a prolonged period of time dealing with various things here in Thailand, it can be very frustrating and it can feel interminable but I can tell you especially with things that are already laid out in law, there is eventually a way through as we have found in pretty much every case we have ever dealt with. It may not be exactly the way you thought it was going to be at the beginning and that has happened with us; a lot of curveballs have been thrown when we are dealing with various cases here but long story short yeah again unlike the political context which is what this article was talking about, in a legal context there ultimately will be a way through in the vast majority of cases we usually deal with. Sometimes it may not be the result that folks exactly want but there will be finality but it gets rather daunting again when you are kind of getting up into the higher regions of that mountain before you hit the peak and get down to the other side where you are going downhill, it will get rather frustrating trying to navigate a rather Byzantine Bureaucracy that kind of on a certain level, and I actually as a naturalized Thai understand it myself, kind of prides itself on its opaqueness.