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Thai Activist Jailed For the Crime of Sharing an Article on Facebook (eff.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Thai activist Jatuphat "Pai" Boonpattaraksa was sentenced this week to two and a half years in prison -- for the crime of sharing a BBC article on Facebook. The Thai-language article profiled Thailand's new king and, while thousands of users shared it, only Jutaphat was found to violate Thailand's strict lese majeste laws against insulting, defaming, or threatening the monarchy. The sentence comes after Jatuphat has already spent eight months in detention without bail. During this time, Jatuphat has fought additional charges for violating the Thai military junta's ban on political gatherings and for other activism with Dao Din, an anti-coup group. While in trial in military court, Jatuphat also accepted the Gwangzu Prize for Human Rights. When he was arrested last December, Jatuphat was the first person to be charged with lese majeste since the former King Bhumibol passed away and his son Vajiralongkorn took the throne. (He was not, however, the first to receive a sentence -- this past June saw one of the harshest rulings to date, with one man waiting over a year in jail to be sentenced to 35 years for Facebook posts critical of the royal family.) The conviction, which appears to have singled Jatuphat out among thousands of other Facebook users who shared the article, sends a strong message to other activists and netizens: overbroad laws like lese majeste can and will be used to target those who oppose military rule in Thailand.
While you have tinpot dictators like Rouhani in Iran and Maduro in Venezuela actually persecuting people at large who're not opposing the regimes but just going about their daily lives, and in Iran's case, doing it on the basis of religion, who the Left actually lionizes, you have the same Left getting into the Right for attitudes on Putin, Duterte, potentially Maha Vajiralongkorn, who only go after either their critics, or criminals like drug dealers or terrorists.
I think I've figured how the Left picks its hated dictators. If those dictators are opposed by Muslims anywhere, like in Chechnya, Mindanao or Yala (in these 3 examples), the Left hates them. If these dictators are supported by Muslims or Muslim countries, like in cases of Iran or Venezuela, they love them. Exceptions being cases where the dictators are pro-US, like al Sisi or King Salman, where their being Muslim gets trumped. It explains why the Left was fine w/ Morsi doing a power grab in Egypt, but are furious at al Sisi keeping the Muslim Brotherhood reigned in.