How Thai authorities use online doxxing to suppress dissent

Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, don't realize how their constant harping on "basic freedoms" comes across as ethnocentric. My parents are American citizens, but they were raised in Bangladesh and they don't really believe in free speech or democracy. My dad always talks about free speech with implicit scare quotes, like he’s referring to an american custom.

They revere Bhumibol, not his philandering, mercurial, and ripped son Vajiralongkorn who is de facto in exile in Germany. Everything in Thailand is de facto run by the military junta and aligned oligarchs like the Chearavanont and Shinawatra families.

And the younger generation (Gen Z) doesn't have much affinity for Bhumibol either, because they grew up in the midst of a middle income trap - their lives are better than their neighbors in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam, but CoL and the employment market is hellish, oligarchy and relations matter so if you didn't attend the right schools you're screwed, and abuses of power like the RedBull Heir running over a cop and all the extravagance around the royal family and their extended retinue grew more unpopular.

Tbf, I assume your frame of reference was the 1990s, and until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 Thailand went through a massive economic boom so satisfaction with Bhumibol was high. Bhumibol also at least tried to appear like he cared about normal Thai people.

As to democracy, that is both culturally alien to them and their experience with it has been one of failure. We have never had a stable democratic government in Bangladesh, and my parents are persuaded that it's not possible. In general, they view democracy experiments outside Europe as something of a cruel joke. My parents felt quite vindicated that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, because they expected that to happen.

Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.

Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.

Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.

South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s and become a developed country.

Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) [0] instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/14/business/from-chickens-to...

to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.

in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.

freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.

In theory, yes. In practice, see palestinian protests in western world and others (phone searches at borders, mass surveillance etc.)

So where do these universal “rights” come from? Do they reflect some fact of human biology? Of course they do not.

Thai people generally love the idea of democracy. But they’ve been under so many dictators for so long they’ve become jaded. Every Thai person has a strong political view more or less and people absolutely criticize the government, military, and even gossip about the royal family extensively - behind closed doors and with friends. Graft is rampant though, and the powerful with big last names can literally do anything they want and get away with it, the police don’t serve the people, and the individual is generally disenfranchised.

There however have been and continue to be powerful democracy movements and political dissent - see the yellow shirt / red shirt riots, the democracy protests and mass killings by the military over the last 60 years, add in it the king Rama the ix personally advocating against the power of the government over its people and the importance of basic human rights.

I’d note that human rights isn’t an American concept but a basis in liberal humanism, which has been a conceptual framework evolved over thousands of years. Most my experience talking to people about liberal humanism and the status quo in South and Southeast Asia is “yes of course it’s self evident, but” where the but is effectively a powerlessness over the social structure of society. I’d note further that Theravada Buddhism is at its core liberal humanist as well, which is specifically relevant in Thailand. This is why ultimately with the Thai people the liberal humanist movement is quite popular and there continues to be considerable internal political problems - because the eightfold path dictates a liberal humanist philosophy and the people in power prefer the prior slavery based society before Chulalongkorn.

The son however - I’ve rarely seen his picture hung in homes or shops - just his father.

The truth though is Thailand has been run by big last name power as a structural thing. While Thai people generally embrace liberal humanism due to their Buddhist beliefs, the elite social structure still tries to hold onto the slavery based society of the past. The police are the primary fulcrum of their power, in a cross relationship with organized crime. The military waxes and wanes in its control, but it’s the police and dark powers that truly control Thailand.

Also, you are mistaken when you link free speech to human beings. Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.

In the idealized abstract, it feels like free speech is a universal and agreed upon ideal. It isn't. Not between nations. Not even within nations. Even in the US, we have no set definition of free speech. Free speech spans from absolutists who believe all speech is legal to those who want to limit free speech to the absolute minimum as they define it.

Germany does not have free speech so yes it is markedly different.

> Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.

I'm not talking about any legal framework around free speech. If I was, I'd be talking about the First Amendment or about a specific law or court case.

Of course it's up for debate. Debate is what gave the notion of "inherent worth"[1] intellectual and popular credence in the first place. You forget that human beings were historically categorized according to a chain of being with the clergy and royalty (rather conveniently) at the top. One's worth to $DEITY and the world was determined by the height of the seat one sat on. This arrangement of affairs was treated as an unquestionable given for thousands of years in civilizations across the world. To suggest otherwise would have been treated as insanity or denounced as heresy.

The existence of Inherent worth thrives upon the fact that those who debate it depend on it. To suggest it's beyond questioning turns the idea into an article of faith.

> Are cultures that decide you have no worth as a human being based on your skin color, or religion, or caste, or last name, equal to those that don't?

Until midway through the 20th century in certain parts of the world, this was accepted as fact. In other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa of all places, it's still the case today.

[1] A more rigorous term for what you're referring to is self-sovereignty. Strictly speaking, the term "inherent worth" is a contradiction in terms.

Thank you for providing such a clear example of the mentality that Rayiner refers to.

It of course can be debated and @rayiner is doing a good job debating it, but IMO the worth of any individual human being is as factual and certain as 1+1=2. I'm happy to debate it but you have a hill to climb if you want to change my mind.

Don't you think a person should be able to say what they want, when they want, without fear of persecution from their government?

You might as well say heliocentrism is a western thing and Asians should be taught the earth is the center of the universe.

Then I definitely agree with you.

Over 2000 years of philosophy would say hell yeah it's debatable.

Without some belief in a "higher power", there is nothing inherent about anything to do with humans. Sure, we can CHOOSE to ascribe every human as having value and a sanctity to human life that means we should harshly react to those who take human life for granted or cause suffering, and I absolutely and emphatically take that view, that human life is important and humans have a right to things like dignity.

But pretending that it is "inherent" is a lie. It's a thought terminating language game. Pretending that such dignity or rights are inherent only plays into those who wish to remove them. They must be CONSTANTLY and AGGRESSIVELY defended and fought for BECAUSE they are not inherent.

If we do not enforce human rights, they do not exist.

Human rights are an outcome of a regulated society. Rights can only exist when a "higher power" DOES exist, so without a god to enforce things, we must make our own higher power to enforce rights. The State.

The only inherent rights in nature are physics, chemistry, and biology. They aren't very conducive to society in general, and certainly not one that wants to build smartphones or farms.

I respect the advocates who make a consequentialist argument for the norm, but not the advocates that say that free speech is a natural right or a God-given right and believe that that settles the question.

Heliocentrism is an observable fact about the universe. Can you show me democracy and freedom of speech in a telescope or microscope?

There are always royalists, Westerner or not.

"protesters were met with severe repression" doesn't really sound like those folks have much reverence, eh?

>So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.

It's not hypocrisy I'm accusing anyone of – it's selfish, indifferent tribalism and disinterest in the mistreatment of people as long as they are "other" people.

But as you say these things are cultural. Such ideas never found an audience in Asia.

Arguing with a royalist trying to pretend that opposition and non-unity doesn't exist doesn't really have a point.

Why? To what extent? There are multiple correct answers to these problems. The best universal one is allowing folks to migrate to a cultural configuration they like instead of dictating what values others should hold.

It is possible to both believe something and at the same time, recognize that the belief is not universally held.

Thank you for being open-minded and for having empathy.

They think you are wrong, because they say they are right.

e.g. many conservative religious people might agree that everyone has “inherent worth” given by God, yet disagree that implies a right to free speech, if one understands that right as including speech they view as immoral (e.g. blasphemy, pornography). Some religious people might even argue that (from their viewpoint) immoral speech inherently harms the human dignity of those who produce and consume it, and hence prohibiting that production and consumption respects their inherent worth rather than violating it

Whereas, conversely, other people might question the meaningfulness of “inherent worth” on philosophical grounds (e.g. from a positivist perspective it is rather dubious-it isn’t something you can empirically measure and it is unclear how to define it in the language of natural science), yet simultaneously favour the policies (e.g. expansive free speech rights) you seek to ground on it for other reasons-e.g. a person might support expansive free speech rights, even while rejecting the idea of “inherent worth”, simply because they find personal enjoyment in that right’s exercise