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.
I think our disagreement here is pretty narrow, about how covert the coverup really is. But when you say you “have a pretty good picture of how it works,” I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthy’s sexual entertainment. If you don’t know, if it’s not generally known, then I think that means there is a covert network that does its best to stay hidden.
If you think that’s somehow no longer happening any more, then I think you really don’t understand how the world works. People like that do not give up their indulgences easily.
You may simply think I’m ascribing more planning and coordination than I really am, and that would just be a miscommunication. However, I do think there are definitely some small number of people who put a lot of thought into how to get away with this, and they’ve largely succeeded for decades.
A journalist could get to the bottom of the coltan mining trade and expose one chain there, but how do you think they’d fare exposing the latest Epstein-style network? Do you think they’d live through it?
Honestly even that’s ambitious.
Yeah, that’s true, but my point was even in the worst-case scenario that consequences really did happen to someone, it would be a middleman, and that’s by design. Epstein was no different in that respect.
Sure, it scares them, but do they really viscerally believe it’s not just a thing on TV?
There was a guy on some news network around 2020 when people were panicking about Bernie Sanders and his nefarious communist plot to destroy America, and one guy was talking about how there was a time when he was really scared the communists would come in and kill all the rich people and he might’ve been one of those people strung up in Times Square. He certainly sounded terrified to me. Like I’m sure it was partly crocodile tears, but also you don’t pull that story from nowhere. That’s obviously something he thinks about.
I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m always actively terrified of being hit by a train, but I take steps to avoid it. That’s what I mean - they know it’s a threat.
If you want poor countries to get on the development path, this is the deal basically, and slavery and other awful things tend to slip in along with that.
This is tangential, but it’s my biggest issue with what you’ve said. Poor countries all over the globe are made and kept poor by colonialism which rolled into modern capitalist imperialism. Africa in particular has been particularly brutally invaded, pillaged and oppressed for centuries. The most recent mechanisms by which this is done have been the World Bank and the IMF sucking them into predatory loans with structural adjustment policies that are calculated to keep them poor and strip them of vital infrastructure.
The cheap labour isn’t some natural transitional state between “undeveloped” and “developed”. It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries “develop” and improve their station is when the working class organises and forces change to happen. It is never handed down from above or a natural outworking of wealth flowing in from the market. The market is structured to ensure that any wealth that flows in from the exploitation of cheap labour is kept in the hands of a few and siphoned back out as quickly as possible.
This is very similar to the way that the working class is kept in a state of poverty by capitalists within their own countries, and oppressed by the state and the legal system. This is the situation that allows wealthy people to prey upon the children of poorer people with relative immunity. The girls are often plied with money, and if they do go to the police, what do they say? “Trump raped me on Epstein’s private jet?” The cops won’t touch that, and the wealthy know they won’t touch it. We know it because that testimony exists and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Even if a detective took the case, he’d wind up at the bottom of a river before too long.
I’m not saying this is a “conspiracy” in the sense that this entire situation is engineered just to get young girls, it’s evolved over centuries to maintain power, and the powerful will take advantage of it every way they can.
I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthy’s sexual entertainment
I don’t expect there is such an open practice, to be clear. I don’t really buy the pizzagate stuff.
It’s not impossible there was a third coconspirator that got away. It’s possible Epstein had competition, too, and of course it’s possible someone has taken his place. I don’t know which drug dealers billionares use, either, although I’m pretty sure they don’t sit around discussing how to hide their collective drug use.
The cheap labour isn’t some natural transitional state between “undeveloped” and “developed”. It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries “develop” and improve their station is when the working class organises and forces change to happen.
I basically just disagree. The conventional economic interpretation makes plenty of sense, matches the figures and my anecdotal experiences, and places like South Korea have made this exact trip already.
There’s neoimperialism too, but the difference it makes from our end amounts to pennies. If we can crush the corruption Africa will develop a bit faster, not overnight. When someone over there wants a computer, they go to the West to buy it, not because they’re forced to but because they don’t have the infrastructure and institutional experience to build such a thing themselves.
It’s fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. That’s literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.
You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? That’s going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. That’s not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.
And every single worker’s benefit we enjoy today was a function of labour activism. 8 hour days, the weekend, child labour laws, OSHA, I could go on. And all of those benefits are actively fought against by the ruling class because they erode their power over us and raise our wages.
Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. It’s not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.
Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent goes into this in some detail, about the forces that act to ensure that the dominant media narrative caters to the ruling class on all levels, and he has talked extensively on how this process works in academia as well. I forget if the academic discussion is a large part of the documentary, but it’s well worth watching anyway. It’s free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60
Also… if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three people… I mean wow. You know authorities seized a bunch of blackmail from his island, video of rich people with kids, and it has never surfaced since? Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because they’re doing their best, honest, but they just can’t seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious. Was that the one guy arranging that too?
I’m not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, that’s what I’ve literally been saying they don’t do. The difference is if they got caught actually doing the deed, if would be a very different matter, because you physically cannot do that via proxy. That’s how the blackmail can exist, and why it was covered up.
Oh and to answer your question about who their drug dealers are, they have middlemen for that as well. Personal assistants who are on call for anything the client needs, who will readily break the law rather than disappoint a client, and whose instructions are generally vague enough that any legal risk falls on the assistant. Again: diffusion of responsibllity.
Don’t kid yourself, the society of the wealthy and powerful is rotten to the core, just as it was in the days of monarchy. They just have better cover for it nowadays. It’s no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.
It’s fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. That’s literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.
You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? That’s going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. That’s not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.
It was a right-wing dictatorship up until that date, with the main union loyal to them. There was a reason so many sided with the North. Struggle against it later on took that shape of labour activism, which is interesting and new to me, but to say that industrialisation, which happened starting in the 60s, is due to labour organisation can’t be and isn’t correct. South Korean work hours are still famously insanely long, too.
Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. It’s not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.
As someone who actually understands a good chunk of it, no. It’s a strong theory with strong predictions. Maybe you should try it before you knock it. That magazine is just magazine, not a journal or anything related to the field.
Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because they’re doing their best, honest, but they just can’t seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious.
I’m not familiar with the law of the area, but don’t they have to be able to prove it in order to rule it a homicide? I don’t believe in conspiracy theories in general, and doubt I’ll believe the one you’re proposing in specific until that changes.
