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Time to check up on our Lusotropicalism enjoyers.
The Brazilian Presidential election ended yesterday, featuring a run-off between Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, had won the previous round. Prediction markets placed his odds of winning at roughly 80%.
But Lula ended up winning, and not without controversy.
Apparently, a Supreme Court justice, and a former personal attorney of Lula's, added two extra hours to the voting period in a last second decision. There have been claims that voting in Bolsonaro-friendly areas had already been finalized and could not been restarted. One person on X claimed "it's as if voting restarted, but only in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore". I am not sure how accurate this claim is.
Bolsonaro is not accepting the results of the election. There are calls for the election results to be annulled, especially if it turns out the extra voting period was decisive. The situation is perhaps mitigated by the fact that conservatives now control a large majority of the legislature and may be able to immediately impeach Lula and, more importantly, his judges.
Perhaps someone who understands the situation can weigh in. From my outsider's view it seems that, in Brazil, individual Supreme Court justices wield nearly unchecked power and can make last second Banana Republic type decisions like opening the polls for an extra two hours. Brazilian politics feel like American ones, just more so.
The Brazilian stock market is down by 25% overnight.
Context: Reuters reports that Brazil's Federal Highway Police conducted widespread roadblocks specifically targeting public busses in the (left leaning ) north-east of the country. After being explicitly ordered not to stop busses on voting day. The highway police is apparently obviously pro-Bolsonaro.
Several sources (as of yet only in Portuguese) also report irregularities with public transportation (~50% of busses being ordered to stay in their depots on voting day in - left leaning - Salvador and São Paulo), with the secretary of transportation in Salvador now having an order of arrest on him for his role in this instruction.. Public transport officials claim the busses were stickered with pro-Lula messages, and they just wanted to prevent being accused of illegally running political ads through the city...
But it seems like the the extended voting time was specifically ordered to compensate for perceived voter suppression. The courts also ordered all busses to be released from their depots, stickered or not.
Better scenario for dangers of adopting public transport, and abandoning cars, can hardly be imagined. In fact, were one claim it as possible con, he would be considered to have succumb to conspiratiorial thinking.
Blocking roads as a form of political ratfucking works just as well in the world of mass private car use - with Chris Christie being the most famous recent culprit in the USA.
Messing with traffic light timings to cause gridlock in the suburb whose votes you want to suppress would be just as easy as stopping the busses, and harder to detect.
In any case, something is wrong if significant numbers of people who don't actually live on a farm are not within walking distance of their local polling station.
Optimizing for traffic congestion is a hilarious thought. Like digital price tags in the supermarket, changing thousands of times per day, right when the direct deposit hits, to fuck over shoppers, I can just imagine a hidden, city-wide algorithm that causes all the traffic lights to flicker or maximize highway and 4-way delays to reduce turnout in red districts.
The earliest example in popular culture (and arguably the first movie to feature a computer hacker) is the classic 1969 British movie The Italian Job, where a gang of British criminals shut down the traffic in Turin in order to hold up a bullion van, and then get the gold out of the gridlocked city in a Mini Cooper which is small enough to drive down narrow pedestrian streets and even through the sewers.
Most of the tropes of the computer geek are already in place, including the fat lecherous incel computer programmer done so crassly that it is hard to remember that the film wasn't parodying a pre-existing trope.
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That was just pointless pettiness. You could do the same thing with better deniability just by playing games with permits or construction timing. Even worse, it backfired a millionfold. It's been too long to remember the specifics, but there were stats being thrown around like "Network news spent more time talking about BridgeGate in a single day than they did Obama's IRS targeting scandal ever."
Very much agreed. The point I was making is that, once the population density is high enough that heavy rush hour traffic is the default, private cars are not immune to ratfucking. Chris Christie got caught because he chose a particularly obvious and stupid form of ratfucking, probably because this was mafia politics where you need to make sure the victim and any onlookers need to know who kneecapped him if you want them to respect and fear you going forward.
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Possibly a good reason to distrust the claim in the first place. Did this even happen or what it simply a pretext to execute the pre-arranged plan? How many busses were stopped? Where?
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