A Thai court has ordered the dissolution of the reformist party which won the most seats and votes in last year’s election - but was blocked from forming a government.
The ruling also banned Move Forward’s charismatic, young former leader Pita Limjaroenrat and 10 other senior figures from politics for 10 years.
The verdict from the Constitutional Court was expected, after its ruling in January that Move Forward’s campaign promise to change royal defamation laws was unconstitutional.
– Denis Diderot
– Denis Diderot
I doubt Diderot could even comprehend the idea of a billionaire. If he came back from the dead, finding out about it would kill him a second time.
Billionaires are the kings of capitalist “democracy”. The only difference is the illusion of democracy.
And they can be arrested for committing crimes, just like you or me. Think Epstein, at least until… y’know.
This kind of rhetoric cheapens how much progress has already been made and how bad dictatorships suck(ed).
Thing is they technically can be, but are they ever? Epstein wasn’t a billionaire, he was in the crowd but he was nouveau riche, not truly considered one of them. This kind of gatekeeping shows just how much the wealthy deliberately maintain the class gap.
And he was definitely a limited hangout: “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”
It’s the phrase “while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case” that really describes what’s happening here.
That’s why he was killed - they couldn’t risk a high profile person like him talking. They hung out as much as they could afford, and with someone they didn’t really care about. It looked sus, but they really couldn’t afford more, so they just killed him.
In fact, he taught the wealthy’s children and was seen to flout the boundaries with students and the dress code. He was plucked from there to start rubbing shoulders with the ultra rich and trafficking children for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone noticed his indiscretions, and decided that they could extract him from that environment, keep their own kids safe, and ply him with wealth to start exploiting children professionally. Then, if the whole scheme ever came down, they had a ready made fall guy.
Most billionaires are nouveau rich, if you meant that literally rather than figuratively. They tend to come from a kind of upper-middle or lower-upper class background, because families richer than that are rare, and families poorer don’t have a shot; it’s all a lottery at the end of the day.
I think you’re attributing way too much organisation to them, honestly. Western politics runs on open secrets and raw shitty stupidity. This is as true behind closed doors as well; I don’t know any billionaires, but I’ve rubbed up against politicians and church leaders plenty.
Somebody paid off a couple prison guards to kill Epstein. I can’t prove it, but it just seems logical. I don’t know who it was, but there were many candidates. I see no reason it would have been more than one.
Yes, it is a lottery, but within their ranks there are those accepted as “one of them” and those considered “nouveau riche”. If you look at that article I linked, he was a teacher at a prep school who lied about his qualifications, drank with the students and walked around the halls with a fur coat and gold chains with his shirts hanging open. Regardless of his family’s wealth - it doesn’t sound like it was that much - he was being gauche. He was acting like the nouveau riche that the wealthy look down on. Most of the very wealthy are people you never hear of and that’s intentional; they stay out of the public eye because they’ve seen what happens to the rich & powerful when revolutions happen. They can’t stay totally hidden, but they prefer privacy.
And I’m not saying the wealthy acted as a united bloc to hire him and then dump him. I said “someone” might have done that. I’m sure it wasn’t all planned out by some shadowy group, but it’s pretty straightforward to imagine a strategy of deniability, where he buys his way into the inner circle by taking on all the risk and doing the dirty work of trafficking minors. He might have known that his head would be on the block if the network was ever compromised, but that would be a trade he was willing to make for access to billionaire-adjacent levels of wealth and a steady stream of underage girls.
And the idea that it was just Epstein and Maxwell doing all the dirty work by themselves is laughable. There was definitely a network in place to enable their work, and powerful people above them providing cover. The entire ruling class who they were buddy-buddy with were complicit to some extent. The idea that that network simply disappeared or dissolved when those two were arrested is also ridiculous. I would bet any amount of money that the network that trafficked those girls barely paused its operation. They hung out Maxwell to dry and buried Epstein, and they carried on doing what they do. Anyone in the network who acts a little too indiscreet can probably be hung out, but anyone being smart about operating a network like that would be recruiting people to act as middle men purely to provide a buffer and ensure they themselves don’t end up twisting in the wind. The fact that Epstein was crass and gauche makes him the perfect fall guy, because everyone goes, “Oh yeah, that guy, he was always a creep.”
And yes, somebody did a covert operation to kill Epstein. I can’t “prove” it either but there is no way that didn’t happen. Someone made the call and a small group would’ve carried it out. There are any number of people who would do that and ways to get it done. The wealthy have access to private armies who hire ex-intelligence operatives, they would have absolutely no trouble with it. You don’t need a huge conspiracy for that to happen, but the entire structure of capitalism relies on diffuse responsibility and layers of deniability. The ruling class don’t get their hands dirty as a rule.
So for instance Intel, Apple, NVidia, AMD and so on are profiting off of coltan mining in Africa, where child labour is rife and the death rate is prodigious. However, if the layers of bureaucracy, corruption, bribery and corporate shell games ever allowed someone to be held accountable for how many kids they fed into a meat grinder to get their precious metals, then the person who would go to prison would be a mine operator in Africa or maybe an executive who interfaced directly with the mines. It wouldn’t be the shareholders of the companies who are demanding the coltan.
That’s not a covert conspiracy, but the basic principle of putting middle-men in between you and the awful things you’re doing is still there, it’s a tried-and-true method.
Now, trafficking children so the wealthy can personally molest them is something that inherently cannot be diffused. Those individual people are doing the molesting. So that means this particular part of the operation does have to be covert. We know it’s covert because we mostly only have speculation about who was actively molesting and who was just given a ride on a private jet. We also know it’s covert because Epstein was killed to cover it up. We know for a fact that multiple former US presidents were on the list and they were rapey kinda guys, plus there is direct testimony of Trump forcibly raping a 13-year old if memory serves.
That’s sort of an open secret, but also there’s obviously a lot of it being hidden. Of course it’s being hidden. The wealthy are terrified of having their heads cut off. The extraordinary thing in this instance would be if there wasn’t a covert conspiracy.
The 1700’s weren’t known for their economic equality, either. Less penis rockets though.
I suppose the surprise is how well wealth inequality can perpetuate itself without formal political inequality. At the time, I think everyone figured real general suffrage would inevitably mean classlessness. Yardsale theory is some shit.
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I have not heard that quote and was not familiar with Denis Diderot but wow have I been missing out!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
Thanks for enlightening me
Sure. I do admit I’ve never actually read his writings beyond a few pithy quotes like that. But I have read a fair amount about him.
I am a huge Voltaire fan, so I am not sure how I missed one of the people who were influenced by him and part of that era.
Ugh truer words have never been spoken
Thailand is basically a dictatorship then
It’s a monarchy… So yeah…
It is more like an oligarchy. The king is a figurehead for others running things behind the scenes and an excuse to keep things the way they are.
There are a lot of interests that don’t want the government that the Thai people have been voting in for the past generation.
It will end in bloodshed unless the next generation of royalty decides to go in the direction the British royal family
Yeah, but the problem aren’t the monarchs themselves. It is the state apparatus around the monarchs that keeps fighting back.
Even if you removed the Thai monarchy, I could easily see the country fall into being run by a junta or presidium of high ranking officials to “safeguard the country”.
I admit I don’t know enough to make a good opinion on it, aside from my personal feelings that monarchies that do not give up power to democracy are the monarchs that should have their head separated from their necks
It’s more likely that the military is behind this call. Thailand may be a monarchy but the monarch is not strictly speaking in charge as far as I know.