A Thai court has ordered the dissolution of the reformist party which won the most seats and votes in last yearās election - but was blocked from forming a government.
The ruling also banned Move Forwardās 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 Forwardās campaign promise to change royal defamation laws was unconstitutional.
Thing is they technically can be, but are they ever? Epstein wasnāt 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: āspy 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 admittingāsometimes even volunteeringāsome 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.ā
Itās the phrase āwhile still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the caseā that really describes whatās happening here.
Thatās why he was killed - they couldnāt risk a high profile person like him talking. They hung out as much as they could afford, and with someone they didnāt really care about. It looked sus, but they really couldnāt afford more, so they just killed him.
In fact, he taught the wealthyās 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 wouldnāt 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 donāt have a shot; itās all a lottery at the end of the day.
I think youāre 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 donāt know any billionaires, but Iāve rubbed up against politicians and church leaders plenty.
Somebody paid off a couple prison guards to kill Epstein. I canāt prove it, but it just seems logical. I donāt 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 āone of themā and those considered ānouveau richeā. 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 familyās wealth - it doesnāt 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 thatās intentional; they stay out of the public eye because theyāve seen what happens to the rich & powerful when revolutions happen. They canāt stay totally hidden, but they prefer privacy.
And Iām not saying the wealthy acted as a united bloc to hire him and then dump him. I said āsomeoneā might have done that. Iām sure it wasnāt all planned out by some shadowy group, but itās 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 donāt end up twisting in the wind. The fact that Epstein was crass and gauche makes him the perfect fall guy, because everyone goes, āOh yeah, that guy, he was always a creep.ā
And yes, somebody did a covert operation to kill Epstein. I canāt āproveā it either but there is no way that didnāt happen. Someone made the call and a small group wouldāve 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 donāt 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 donāt 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 wouldnāt be the shareholders of the companies who are demanding the coltan.
Thatās not a covert conspiracy, but the basic principle of putting middle-men in between you and the awful things youāre doing is still there, itās 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 itās 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 itās 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.
Thatās sort of an open secret, but also thereās obviously a lot of it being hidden. Of course itās being hidden. The wealthy are terrified of having their heads cut off. The extraordinary thing in this instance would be if there wasnāt a covert conspiracy.
Honestly even thatās ambitious. The really dangerous mines with lots of forced or child labour are artisanal ones run by small-time gangsters. Roughly speaking, they sell to some sort of local fence, who sells to a regional company theyāre connected with, who sells to a national subsidiary that can maintain a rough appearance of propriety when the guys from Apple Silicon come to visit. Every once in a while a journalist traces the chain from end to end, and the Western company says āthatās horrible, we had no ideaā with as straight a face as they can muster and cuts out all involved players immediately. Itās a big branching network, though, so thereās lots of people to pick up the slack. Maybe somebody goes to jail, but the rest will slip away and may well start up a new operation thatās the exact same thing.
The sad thing is, I donāt know if it can work any other way. Apple could never openly sign off on the conditions that are just standard in poor countries (actually, wasnāt there a scandal exactly like that?), and nobodyās about to give distant brown people free ergonomic equipment for their sweatshops. 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.
Terrified might be overselling it. Thatās like saying ordinary Westerners are terrified of nuclear warfare. Sure, it scares them, but do they really viscerally believe itās not just a thing on TV?
Iām reminded of that article where the author gets called in for a consultation with hedge fund guys about bunker planning, and theyāre asking if, like, they can force their guards to obey them with shock collars. Hopefully you can tell how dumb that is. They donāt know what they donāt know, and have had smoke blown up their ass by wannabes for so long they wonāt until itās too late.
I think it is extraordinary, but I also think I have a pretty good picture of how it works. Itās more sad than dramatic.
I think our disagreement here is pretty narrow, about how covert the coverup really is. But when you say you āhave a pretty good picture of how it works,ā I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthyās sexual entertainment. If you donāt know, if itās not generally known, then I think that means there is a covert network that does its best to stay hidden.
If you think thatās somehow no longer happening any more, then I think you really donāt understand how the world works. People like that do not give up their indulgences easily.
You may simply think Iām 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 theyāve 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 theyād fare exposing the latest Epstein-style network? Do you think theyād live through it?
Yeah, thatās true, but my point was even in the worst-case scenario that consequences really did happen to someone, it would be a middleman, and thatās by design. Epstein was no different in that respect.
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 mightāve been one of those people strung up in Times Square. He certainly sounded terrified to me. Like Iām sure it was partly crocodile tears, but also you donāt pull that story from nowhere. Thatās obviously something he thinks about.
I mean, I wouldnāt say Iām always actively terrified of being hit by a train, but I take steps to avoid it. Thatās what I mean - they know itās a threat.
This is tangential, but itās my biggest issue with what youāve 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 isnāt some natural transitional state between āundevelopedā and ādevelopedā. It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries ādevelopā 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? āTrump raped me on Epsteinās private jet?ā The cops wonāt touch that, and the wealthy know they wonāt touch it. We know it because that testimony exists and it hasnāt gone anywhere. Even if a detective took the case, heād wind up at the bottom of a river before too long.
Iām not saying this is a āconspiracyā in the sense that this entire situation is engineered just to get young girls, itās evolved over centuries to maintain power, and the powerful will take advantage of it every way they can.
I donāt expect there is such an open practice, to be clear. I donāt really buy the pizzagate stuff.
Itās not impossible there was a third coconspirator that got away. Itās possible Epstein had competition, too, and of course itās possible someone has taken his place. I donāt know which drug dealers billionares use, either, although Iām pretty sure they donāt sit around discussing how to hide their collective drug use.
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.
Thereās 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 theyāre forced to but because they donāt have the infrastructure and institutional experience to build such a thing themselves.
Itās fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. Thatās 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? Thatās 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. Thatās 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 workerās 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. Itās not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.
Chomskyās 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 itās well worth watching anyway. Itās free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60
Alsoā¦ if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three peopleā¦ 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 theyāre doing their best, honest, but they just canāt 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?
Iām not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, thatās what Iāve literally been saying they donāt 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. Thatās 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.
Donāt 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. Itās no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.
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 canāt be and isnāt correct. South Korean work hours are still famously insanely long, too.
As someone who actually understands a good chunk of it, no. Itās 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.
Iām not familiar with the law of the area, but donāt they have to be able to prove it in order to rule it a homicide? I donāt believe in conspiracy theories in general, and doubt Iāll believe the one youāre proposing in specific until that changes.
Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.
Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.
And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they werenāt just yellow unions approved by the dictator?
Even then I donāt know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didnāt say what that point is.
And I donāt know why you think Iām talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what Iām talking about. And industrialisation isnāt a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We donāt have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.
Thatās another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.
And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? Iāve looked for this information and had people try to show me, but theyāve never actually shown it. Itās a fundamental part of economics so Iām told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.
And finally, you donāt think thereās any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet itās easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.