I don’t know that this bigotry is particularly soft. I mean, it bears out the “can’t tell them apart” thing in a dangerous manner, like John McCain easily confusing Shia with Sunni. On a scale of ethnic evaluation, maybe like if Pranab Mukherjee kept calling Sweden Finland.

John McCain was lying on purpose. He repeated the same lie three or four times before it was reported by the press. Neoconservatives at the Pentagon are preparing the ground for an attack on Iran. Bush spokesholes lied about the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud before the attack on Iraq. Until recently many Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. That’s democracy. You can fool most of the people most of the time.

deport

Sorry, got carried away.

This is probably sampling error. The Maoists are thugs but just like Indian Naxals they required extremely corrupt/malignant rule in order to gain sympathy. If the King is “loved” it is because the bar is set low (i.e. he doesn’t commit matricide/patricide/fratricide and speed around Kathmandu running people over). The Maoists are no good but it was desperation that brought the Nepalese to this point. I’m happy that the Bhutanese king will spare his people this fate by introducing elements of democracy.

Not really. A king is chosen/loved by the people, a dictator is a self-appointed/usually hated ruler. I have friends from Nepal and they have no doubt monarchy worked well in Nepal and the people loved the king. According to them maoists are a bunch of hooligans using the democratic platform for personal gains and not for equality.

I use it in a descriptive sense – a ruler unconstrained by a constitution. You can be a benign dictator or a malign one, but the point is that such a ruler is (a) non-democratic and (b) non-constitutional.

I was trying to draw attention to the fact that neither country (Tibet nor Nepal) is governed democratically, nor do its citizens have civil-rights protected by a constitution.

Their descent from Vishnu was not the basis for their rise to power. The myth was never very strong in the country except among a few royalists, and was never strong enough to sustain them.

I agree that it was never the only basis of their rule, and that at the end it was insufficient to keep him as an absolute monarch, but Nepal is widely known as being the world’s only remaining Hindu monarchy.