Thailand Jails Dissident For What People Thought He Would Have Said 325
patiwat writes "A Thai court has convicted a man for censoring himself. In a 2010 anti-government rally, Yossawarit Chuklom said several people were against the dissolution of Abhisit Vejjajiva's government. He mentioned a few names, and then put his hand over his mouth and said he wasn't brave enough to continue. A court ruled that he would have mentioned King Bhumibol Adulyadej — thus earning him a conviction for insulting the King, who is constitutionally banned from any political role."
King Bhumibol Adulyade (Score:5, Informative)
King Bhumibol Adulyade enjoys licking my toes.
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King Bhumibol Adulyade enjoys licking my toes.
Ha, ha! You got the short end of the deal. You should see what parts of me he licks.
Re:King Bhumibol Adulyade (Score:5, Funny)
King Bhumibol Adulyade enjoys licking my toes.
Ha, ha! You got the short end of the deal. You should see what parts of me he licks.
With a username of 'drinkypoo', I'll pass on that offer, if you don't mind.
Or even if you do.
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Yeah, original jokes like HURR DURR look at what parts of me he licks!11!
Shoot yourself.
Re:King Bhumibol Adulyade (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, yeah... I mean, what if he landed in jail for speaking against himself?
Re:King Bhumibol Adulyade (Score:4, Informative)
Thailand's wealth comes from exports. Without exports, it'd be nothing much. It's not about some bad outside world supposedly trying to change the Thailand's system. It's about your customers telling you to put up or shut up, in a roundabout way. Thailand is free to ignore it at its own peril, pretty much. They are participating in global trade, with it come both benefits and obligations. You're deluded if you think otherwise.
Greece, Italy and Spain were also offering everybody a chance in exactly the same way: offering crazy wages and benefits for little productivity. See where that went? Thailand is going there if a joe random hat seller can make $2k in profits. Unless you're just saying that your GF is in a very lucrative spot and sells high-end goods, which doesn't make her representative of what's going on then, does it? Just like a $100k/year NYC panhandler isn't representative of how most jobless have it.
Never mind the fact that no matter what the King has done, everyone should be free to "shit" on him. It's a basic freedom. You don't need to trade it off for the other greatness bestowed by royalty (supposedly, as you claim). One doesn't preclude the other. There are other relatively successful kingdoms out there where such freedoms exist, duh.
How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Insightful)
But Thailand is still where a huge chunk of consumer goods in the U.S. come from? How are the communists so much worse than monarchist totalitarians?
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Informative)
Hard disks - lots of them come from Thailand. Easier to ensure that sensitive technology is kept in-house and not leaked to up-and-coming competitors.
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A lot of hard drives are made in China too these days. After the flood, it seems the Chinese factories have been commissioned to build more of the hard drives. And these aren't just taking the drive and stuffing it in an enclosure, these are the actual mechanisms themselves. From low end to top end hich capacity drives as well.
And in the end, hard drive manufa
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I know that Thai is a human or a language but not a land.
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Funny)
Remember how hard drive prices shot up a while ago? And how there was flooding in Thailand just prior to that happening?
That wasn't just a coincidence.
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:4, Funny)
It's true: King Bhumibol Adulyade caused the flooding.
Well, when you gotta go, you REALLY gotta go!
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably because people are taught from birth that communism is evil but it's okay to invite monarchist totalitarians to the barbeque? And if they're rich and likely to bring plenty booze, so much the better.
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:4, Insightful)
communism tends to be aggressive towards you.
your average monarchist totalitarian couldn't care less, as long as he lives as king and you don't piss him off.
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communism tends to be aggressive towards you.
Citation needed. Seriously.
You have got to be kidding. Kulaks [wikipedia.org], a history of the KGB. [wikipedia.org]
This is not to suggest that (so-called) Capitalism isn't every bit as aggressive [wikipedia.org], or that monarchies are any better.
Geez man, read a book!
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Insightful)
The secret police was a Russian invention predating the communists and still part of their culture.
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Informative)
The USSR was not a communist state. It claimed to be, but plain fact demonstrated it was not. Read a book.
The USSR was a totalitarian state, which fully explains the Kulaks and KGB without any need to implicate communism.
So your conclusions are based on a false premise from the start.
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Considering that communism in practice is restricted to Leninism and below, I'd say it's irrelevant if Marx wanted democracy or not.
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably because people are taught from birth that communism is evil but it's okay to invite monarchist totalitarians to the barbeque? And if they're rich and likely to bring plenty booze, so much the better.
One of the fundamental principles of communism is that it must spread and take over the entire world. Marx himself said that. Communism inherently cannot co-exist peacefully with non-communist countries, not if they are sticking to their ideology even moderately. That's why people are taught from birth that communism is evil. Because it is.
The relevant quote from the end of the Communist Manifesto (Chapter 4 if you want to find it yourself):
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
OTOH, most monarchical totalitarians are perfectly willing to let everyone else live in peace so long as their power isn't threatened. Pragmatically speaking, most countries are fine with that so long as they keep their humanitarian fouls to a relative minimum. Other countries only turn their attention towards them when they either a) expand their power by conquering other countries (or threatening to), or b) start murdering lots of people in cold blood. And even those can be ignored if it's politically convenient, since starting war over someone else's problem is... well, frowned upon, at least after the fact, when people notice the bill.
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One of the fundamental principles of communism is that it must spread and take over the entire world. Marx himself said that. Communism inherently cannot co-exist peacefully with non-communist countries, not if they are sticking to their ideology even moderately. That's why people are taught from birth that communism is evil. Because it is.
Sounds a lot like some organized religions or at least a few of their denominations...
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Just like Lenin tried to do. The failure was that Lenin didn't have the support of the people and couldn't install a communism with democratic means.
And, being a True Believer, he didn't let a little implementation detail like that stop him. No, sir!
That's the problem with True Believers. They tend to think that the ends justify the means.
Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:5, Interesting)
Florida has lots of ex-cubans who hate castro. florida is a battleground state
if a candidate supports lifting sanctions the ex-cuban population is enough to guarantee the loss of those electoral votes
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Re:How does cuba have an embargo (Score:4, Insightful)
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AFAIK the power is in the hands of the military, they just use the somewhat popular monarch to further their own goals.
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Those are americans who have seen horrors and can never forgive the communist for what they did.
That. Was. NOT. Communism.
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That. Was. NOT. Communism.
Exactly! Actual communism is impossible. What we see every place it's tried is the sort of horror, misery, death and oppression that such attempts always turn into. Because the movement's ideals require that sort of tyranny in order to get things under way, and never progress past that part because ... because they don't really want utopian everyone-gets-the-same-stuff-while-only-a-few-people-produce it wonderlands anyway. They just want someone else's stuff, and once they have that, they just want power.
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But, neither Mussolini nor the H-man were kings.
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That's a pope two emperors and one khan. Not a single king among them.
Pretty radical view of intent (Score:3)
Okay maybe he "thought about it" but clearly did not form the intent to name the rest of those names including the kings because he self censored after all.
It would be kinda like being charged with conspiracy to commit a felony here for talking with some friends about how you go about robbing a bank; in a purely hypothetical manor.
Re:Pretty radical view of intent (Score:5, Insightful)
I can easily see this sort of thing happening in the US. Imagine a group of olive-skinned young men sitting in a cafeteria talking, in a purely hypothetical manor, about potential local terrorist targets and how they would go about hypothetically attacking them.
Re:Pretty radical view of intent (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm... I typoed. Manor should be manner. A hypothetical manor is where I live.
Re:Pretty radical view of intent (Score:5, Funny)
That is completely different.
The guy in TFA was sent for a predefined amount of time to a jail within the border of the country that convicted him in a legal trial.
I'm sure none of that would happen to those olive-skinned young men in the US.
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I can easily see this sort of thing happening in the US. Imagine a group of olive-skinned young men sitting in a cafeteria
Given things like two imams pulled from plane bound for North Carolina [cnn.com] I doubt your hypothetical group wouldn't have to do much more than just sitting around before someone called the cops on them ".. because"
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They wouldn't even have to be olive-skinned. They could even be black. Or lily-white. A bunch of guys, sitting around in public discussing how to attack potential targets, would be rounded up and questioned.
Re:Pretty radical view of intent (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand but you could approach the argument the other way. Does he actually have to utter the name in order to communicate something. i.e. if I said something like, I have a strong distaste for recent versions of Windows, especially Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and *censored* then it would be pretty clear what the item was that I was referring to.
I'm not saying that I agree with this sort of law, but I think the headline is rather sensationalist. From what I gather, from the perspective of the prosecution, it should be more like 'Thailand Jails Dissident for what the dissident communicated (non-verbally)'.
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It would be kinda like being charged with conspiracy to commit a felony here for talking with some friends about how you go about robbing a bank; in a purely hypothetical manor.
The sad part about that comment is that this kind of thing does happen in the US. Try walking into any major airport and casually discussing with a friend how could "hypothetically" blow up the airport.
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The sad part about that comment is that this kind of thing does happen in the US. Try walking into any major airport and casually discussing with a friend how could "hypothetically" blow up the airport.
It just occurred to me that our country is so sensitive about that, there is a very real possibility one could find themselves in trouble simply for posting about talking about hypothetically blowing up an airport.
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It would not surprise me if Echelon has already flagged this thread.
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Thought Crime.
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Thought Crime.
Similar to Hate Crime. (i.e. we're adding a few years to the sentence because you think you're superior.)
Don't forget first degree murder, tacking on a few years to your sentence just because you put fore-thought into your crime.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The injustice here is that he's being imprisoned for expressing an opinion that involves the King and his role in politics.
Missed the point? I'm sure we all get the point. There would never have been a posting if it weren't for the point you made.
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Your reasoning is wrong.
While it is true that a court can make reasonable inferences, as in your example, that is not what the court did at all. They made a huge jump. While the court claimed to be doing such a reasonable inference, the court was in fact lying through it's fascist, censoring teeth. Only a fool believes the word of a fascist censor.
The question is not what a Thailand, fascist, censoring court would do, but instead what a fair court would do.
The main problem is that the law he is being acc
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Generally I agree, but there's one point that we may not see.
It may be a common way in Thailand to refer to the king by covering your mouth, and this may be a known way of referring to him while not referring to him. Sorta like saying "the F-word" in the US.
I don't know, but if it is,the sentence would make sense
PS: Bush hasn't been President for four years. Either use the current one in your analogy, or choose a doozy, like Millard Fillmore ;)
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No, the law says you can't actually insult or defame the king.
He stopped short of insulting the king. It does not matter that he communicated what he felt about the king, what matters is did he actually insult or defame him.
Yes it was clear he was talking about the king.
Here's where you lose me. If it was expressing obvious that he was talking about the king, whether by gesture or even simply highlighted omission, then let's look at why your next premise is or is not true: that it matters exactly what words he said and if he explicitly mentioned the king. Why? I'll grant you that if you try to objectively define the law, then it probably matters. But who says laws have to be enforced or defined objectively? I mean, I personally think they often should for several reasons,
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The injustice here is even worse. He's imprisoned for NOT expressing it but the court THINKING he wanted to.
Re:I suspect most posters will miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of us are concerned about both injustices. We've become a bit desensitized to people being beheaded for criticizing the king of Siam. Someone being jailed for /not/ criticizing him is a new development which can both bring up dormant disgust at the previous crimes and fresh disgust at the new crimes.
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Can't we just agree that both points are valid?
You should not be punished for thinking something. Period. No exceptions.
You should not be punished for "insulting" or "disrespecting" the king, or any other public figure. Period. No exceptions.
Damned (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I don't have much room to talk... as I live in America, land of the arbitrarily scheduled herbs and weapon restrictions set up to make sure that everyone has bomb making supplies or some other contraband in their homes.
What? (Score:2, Interesting)
I do not see why the court would be against his self censorship.
I can see jailing someone who was forcibly stopped from saying something that was illegal, there are tons of laws in the west where what someone thinks you would of done is applicable (even if you have not yet committed any crimes).
But it sounds like Thailand wants its citizens to self censor, so why punish it?
But that is quite logical... (Score:5, Funny)
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Look! even the Collar of the Grand Cross of the Order of a Million Elephants and White Parasol (Kingdom of Laos)
Bhumibol has received numerous royal and state orders appropriate to his status. He is the Grand Master of all twelve Thai royal orders. Foreign decorations Cambodia: Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Cambodia, 1954 Burma: The Most Glorious Order of Truth (Thiri
Re:But that is quite logical... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the king of Thailand is just as censored as anyone else. He's not allowed to speak to his people, and is always silent and muted in public and on TV. All the lese majeste laws are created and enforced by parliament. The Thai monarchy is very much a symbolic post... the only political thing the royal family appears to do occasionally is send flowers to their favored candidates, or sometimes the news media picks up on a certain color they're wearing and interprets it to mean that they support this group - which has led to some hilarity as everyone else starts wearing whatever color to associate themselves with whatever support.
The king is just some Harvard-educated jazz musician. He's probably pretty groovy, we'd never know. Some people blame the queen for starting some of the political upheavals, but I'm guessing it's mostly due to misogyny.
Re:But that is quite logical... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody in Thailand believes the King is omniscient. Nor do they believe he is the reincarnation of anybody. They are just really uptight about having him disrespected or made into a political football. Which actually isn't as irrational as it sounds, when you consider that it is about the only way you could possibly cause a civil war in this country.
But while laughing at the stupid "easterners", remember that your President and 80% of your countrymen purport to believe that after death they will be brought back to life by a magical carpenter who was nailed to a tree 2000 years ago, that a 900 year old man fit a breeding pair of every single animal species on a boat he built himself, and that the greatest ethical issue of our time is whether or not the government should issue marriage certificates to two blokes. Significantly stupider convictions than the invented ones the parent post finds so amusing.
Also check out what happened (and how many people died) when the dissidents he was addressing tried to burn down Bangkok shortly after this. Then try and tell me they wouldn't have found something to convict him for in the US too.
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I would mod your comment slightly funny, overwhelmingly ignorant. Good job playing off of broad stereotypes.
Firstly, Adulyadej doesn't enforce these rules. He has publicly stated he that invites criticism [nationmultimedia.com].
Disingenuous? Perhaps, but when you take that comment in context -- the fact that he is a figurehead without any actual power, and he has demonstrated a nobles oblige [bbc.co.uk] that, I am guessing, few contemporary monarchs have matched-- then I tend to believe he is speaking honestly.
From what I have read about hi
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Oh please, it's also true in western courts that an insult does not have to be explicit. An implied insult, or embarrassing someone in a way everyone understands without spelling the name out is perfectly liable to prosecution unless protected by free speech rights (which may not be the case if it is repeated, connected to a financial loss or just slander).
Reminds me of kids (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems some people don't grow up
Imprison the judge (Score:2)
By convicting people for insulting the king, isn't the judge implying that the king isn't strong enough to stand up for himself? If someone did that to me, I'd be pretty insulted. Throw the judge in jail!
Right? If no one is allowed to say or even IMPLY anything critical of the king (which the king himself said should be allowed, according to a quote in Wikipedia) then that should apply to the judges as well.
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It's more like a trademark: if you won't protect it, it becomes void.
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The King has pardoned many people.
I figure this is what's going to happen very shortly for Yossawarit Chuklom; it's practically traditional for the King to pardon those convicted of insulting him.
Helps cement the people's love of him, but it's still a huge pain and expense for those convicted, so it's still seen as useful by the ruling party who doesn't care if they're seen as somewhat evil.
That won't happen in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
But don't try to joke, suggest, or even imply the word "bomb" in an airport or a plane. Even mentioning a related joke on Twitter [washingtonpost.com] could give you troubles.
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"Now where did I put that thing to blow up the aeroplane?... "
Pulls out a hand pump and an inflatable toy plane.
The main exceptions to free speech protection: (Score:2)
Obscenity: The Supreme Court test for obscenity is as follows: (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
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And don't give your opinion of the latest movie, or of Windows 8, since that could invoke the B-word.
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Yeah, you can't joke about a bomb! Well why is it just jokes? What about a riddle? How about a limerick? How about a bomb anecdote? You know, no punchline, just a really cute story. Or suppose you intended to remark, not as a joke, but as an ironic musing. Are they prepared to make that distinction? Why, I think NOT.
-George Carlin
Thought crime (Score:2)
That's basically what this amounts to...
Okay, it's not exactly the same as what was in the book 1984,but they still arrested him only for what he was thinking (in actuality, really only what they believe that he thought, but even giving them the benefit of the doubt that they were right, this still amounts to arresting somebody because of what they were thinking).
Putting that aside for a moment, the point that the court really needs to consider here is that he DIDN'T.... period. Even if they are entir
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You have the right to remain silent. However anything you DO NOT say can and will be held against you in a court of law.
Shades of... (Score:2)
I can speak silently (Score:2)
It's a horrible unfair law, yadda yadda.
Quit thinking about law when you ought to be thinking about power. In this situation, you have a government so bullshit that it can make a law against insulting someone. In that context, it is ridiculous, whenever they decide to act against someone, to get bogged down in technicalities about whether their chosen victim obeyed or violated the law. What they wrote doesn't matter; the ACTUAL LAW is: "stay on my good side." Their chosen victim violated that law.
The
An old joke (Score:2)
A man is walking around in the streets of [insert dictatorial state] and loudly shouting: "What a shitty government!" Needless to say, it is not long before state security arrests him.
"I never said which government I was talking about," he defends himself.
"You said 'shitty'. There is only one shitty government," the secret policeman retorts.
This type of things will not happen (Score:2)
if every Thai citizen have an assault rifle.
I fart in King Bhumibol's general direction (Score:3)
His mother was a binturong and his father smelt of durians.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad to hear you've made the move to using only solid state drives or other non-hard drive storage in everything you buy. I still need a few hard drives until large capacity SSDs are affordable, so I'll have to be giving Thailand some of my business.
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I haven't. That doesn't mean I can't try. At the least, I can minimize what I do buy that comes from Thailand.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Funny)
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In fairness, I agree the AC was being a bit of a dick. But the point to which he is reacting emotionally does seem worth exploring.
How far should we, those outraged by this king's treatment of his people, go to do something about it?
If hard disk sales drop 2% due to every existing geek moving to SSDs, will that change the King's mind about anything?
Amazon and Google cannot provide their current level of services at anywhere near the price point that they do if they immediately abandon rotating media, and t
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a case of culture clash. I spent a year there in 1974 while in the USAF, and literally everything there was completely different than here, including the colors of the sky, dirt, and vegetation, but especially the people. In the US, hookers are laughed at, jailed, scorned. In Thailand they are respected. Flipping someone the bird is meaningless there, but point your foot at someone and you're looking at a fistfight (actually, a foot fight; Thai boxing makes extensive use of feet). I once had a gun stuck in my face for refusing a shot of whiskey; it turned out that refusing a gift is a grave insult. Funnier was the guy was cool after I drank the shot.
And they revere the king. His picture is on every coin and bill, so if you're there do NOT step on money! Stepping on money is incredibly dangerous. Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?
But if you're going to refuse to buy from Thailans because of this, you're pretty much stuck with only buying things from your own country, because every foreign country is going to have something normal to them that is atrocious to you (and vice versa). Like kings, or censorship, or guns, or burqas, or drugs, or drug laws, or something you consider corrupt where they think not having it is corrupt.
If you want a world econiomy, you're going to have to put up with other cultures' things you hate -- like guns, or gun laws, or censorship, or pornography, or royalty, or religion...
(mcgrew here, can't seem to be able to log in on this PC)
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Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?
We don't *need* them. We have them anyway. A bit like a fancy car or an iphone.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't *need* them.
Actually I disagree - we do need them for two reasons. First the monarch can break up political log jams by either dissolving or proroging parliament as required. This is a very limited power but used at the right time can keep the system flowing smoothly. Second having a monarch avoids the need for yet another clueless politician who only cares about getting reelected and will likely cost the tax payer far more than the monarch they replace.
While a monarchy may be somewhat old fashioned the only reason to get rid of something old which works is to replace it with something better. Frankly I have yet to see evidence that there is a better system out there. Given that power rests almost entirely with the elected parliaments I fail to see any gain in replacing a hereditary monarchy with, what will effectively be, an elected one.
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We don't need them, but they're good PR and make a profit. It would be daft to get rid really.
Of course, the public pomp and circumstance should be matched by utter irreverance when meeting them in private.
"Hey Liz, stick the kettle on!"
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Interesting)
And they revere the king. His picture is on every coin and bill, so if you're there do NOT step on money! Stepping on money is incredibly dangerous. Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?
Clearly you have not been paying attention to the antics in DC. If you're British/Australian/etc. when some idiot decides to bring the entire government to a halt as a negotiating tactic you can close your eyes and pretend Grandma (aka: Her Majesty the Queen) will fix it. She may not (she didn't solve Australia's Constitutional Crisis in 1975), but she could.
Sometimes she even does. Canada's Prorogation Crises was solved largely because she realized that letting the Tories get their way for two months (ie: proroguing Parliament from December 4th to January 26th) would not actually hurt anyone, but agreeing to the Opposition's demands could force a new election a few months after the old. If the Opposition actually had the votes in Parliament to govern the country in early December they'd clearly also have those votes in late January, but it they only had the votes to dump Harper, then Harper would be dumped, nobody would run the country for a few moths while they proved they had no plan (literally nobody -- they hadn't agreed who should be Prime Minister), and then everyone would have to pay for a new election. Which Harper probably would have won because a) in october he'd won, and b) would you vote for those morons?
Granted the person who actually did this crap was the Governor-General, but it was widely reported that Governor-General Jean only did those things after consulting with the Queen; and the Canadians got a whole lot of shit for that. It never seemed to occur to anyone that she's got hundreds of years of experience being Monarch of a Westminster-system Democracy (50 years ad Queen of England, Jamaica, Barbados etc. adds up), which is quite useful when something weird happens.
But if you're going to refuse to buy from Thailans because of this, you're pretty much stuck with only buying things from your own country, because every foreign country is going to have something normal to them that is atrocious to you (and vice versa). Like kings, or censorship, or guns, or burqas, or drugs, or drug laws, or something you consider corrupt where they think not having it is corrupt.
If you want a world econiomy, you're going to have to put up with other cultures' things you hate -- like guns, or gun laws, or censorship, or pornography, or royalty, or religion...
(mcgrew here, can't seem to be able to log in on this PC)
Heck, you're stuck with not buying anything, ever,
I've never met a geek who does not have significant problems with his own government, an obscure plan to fix said problems, and extreme frustration that everyone else is not passionate about replacing first-pass-the-post with proportional representation via the Condorcet method.
Thailand has it's problems. They are definitely way too protective of their King to be a good Democracy. But they don't have a debt ceiling, or a Speaker of the House who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million) despite losing the popular vote by more then a million.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Insightful)
steaming turd if he allows such crap to happen.
He doesn't "allow" it to happen, since he has no role in making or enforcing the laws. In the past, the king has spoken out against political abuse of lese-majesty laws.
One more country I'll never visit. One more country I will avoid when buying things.
I am sure the people persecuting this man will be glad to hear it, since they are part of the opposition to the current government. Your boycott makes as much sense as boycotting the USA because the a court makes a ruling that the Obama administration doesn't like. The government of Thailand is far from monolithic.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Insightful)
Thailand is actually a lovely country to visit - great beaches and diving, friendly people (just don't try to hire them to do work for you unless you understand their work ethic and speak their language), incredible culture, and some awesome things to see and do (visit the "tiger temple" where abandoned or orphaned tiger cubs are raised by humans; it's an incredible experience to go up and pet live tigers). There are also some... other... reasons to visit, ranging from "medical tourism" (dental, in particular, is high quality but orders of magnitude cheaper than in the US) to "sex tourism" (exactly what you think it is).
Their politics, on the other hand, are a complete flaming mess. Stay away from them (fortunately, this is easy; I was there for about five weeks and spent almost all of it out of the cities).
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??? They do not have a work ethic! Getting them to work is like herding cats.
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If you happen to drop a bhat, and it blows away in the wind, don't step on it. Just let it go.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't visit Thailand for sex tourism. It only perpetuates the tragedy of human trafficking, many young people are sold and enslaved for a short, disease-ridden, and trashy life, due to the wealth and privilege of those who think they can use people like objects. It is a haunting horrific thing that needs to stop. We humans should treat one another better.
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:4, Informative)
I think maybe you're uninformed. The king doesn't "allow" such crap to happen. The kind is obviously a figurehead, and a tool. I've never heard that the king accused anyone of badmouthing him. It's all the nincompoops who run the government doing it. If Kingy-Poo objects, those more powerful members of the government who enjoy using the king as their tool will set him straight.
I'd rather be a dirt-poor nobody, right here in America, than to be in Bhum-boy's position.
(Who thinks that Thailand will try to have me extradited for calling their king a Bhum-boy?)
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct. It isn't the king that is the problem in this case (I'm not sure of any cases actually where the King was the problem). His people love him dearly, much more so than we in the United States care for our current (or any president).
In fact, the King has used what powers he has to pardon those who have been arrested for bad mouthing him. It seems his majesty is actually a quite reasonable person, and I'm sure there was good intentions on the part of the government when they made the law, however, the law enforcement on the other hand....
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bhumibol Adulyadej must be a giant (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though he has no official political power, he does know people, and the populace love him. That allows him to do things, but only after he's been able to build a sufficient backing so that the ones in control won't just ignore him and sweep it under the rug.
Remember, a king he may be, but it's a title that comes with no power.
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Wow. My Little Pony fan fiction has gotten way too serious.