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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.
Nobody in S America could ever convince me that Democracy is better than Fascism. You see huge swaths of Brazil vote on ethnic lines. Brazil at this point probably at a minimum needs to be broken into different countries. I don’t see why White Europeans should be governed by a corrupt commie because a bunch of negros voted for it.
In trading sometimes you are better lucky than good. I bought some Brazilian stuff after prediction markets were good for Bolsonaro but before the first round and I’m quite happy today that I dumped them on the big rip after the first round. Now everything I bought is 10% lower than my first buy and I’m wandering if Brazil is cheap enough to buy even with Lulu.
Actually existing Fascism ended up with their cities reduced to rubble and their countries occupied by foreigners which a way worse outcome then electing some leftist. If you just mean right wing authoritarian governments South America had plenty of those too and it's not like they had spectacular results. Chile did but it also didn't all collapse when democracy was restored and they voted for leftwing parties. Do you really think life will be dramatically different under Lula then Bolsonaro? Both Lula and Bolsonaro's father were presidents before it hardly seem like a crisis. Jetisoning democracy gives the government way too much power which works ok if they are competent in South America this is unlikely regardless of if they are rightwing or leftwing.
Modern Brazil itself is the product of a rightwing dictatorship. Which hardly makes going back to that any kind of panacea。
I would see it like this.
Does Communism work? No. Never.
Do right wing dictatorships work? Sometimes, with a large range of outcomes including very bad ones.
Does Democracy work? Yes, usually, although highly dependent on the intelligence of the voters and susceptible to takeover by communists.
If your Democracy gets corrupted by communism, is it worth rolling the dice on a right wing dictatorship? Maybe, depending on how bad things get. In the US or Europe, almost certainly not. In Brazil... maybe.
The CCP seem to be outpacing any right wing dictatorship by any metric you could name.
What democracies, besides Venezuela, have been taken over by Communists. I don't think it's ever happened in a middle or high income country or really basically ever outside of Venezuela or basically non functioning African countries that could hardly be called democracies. So that leaves us with a data point of one against Europe, South America and a fair bit of Asia.
What did Lula do that was so bad last time that it's worth throwing out democracy for. The great thing about democracy is if Lula fucks up the economy or whatever he can just be voted out.
The CCP is a right wing dictatorship.
Uh. What? Very curious to know why you think so.
China clearly abandoned communism decades ago. Their government is based on Han Chinese supremacism and state capitalism. They even operate camps for undesirable minorities.
There is very little separating China from Nazi Germany except gradations of scale and pace. I don't say this in a bad way necessarily. The Nazis unquestionably improved Germany until they decided to start pointless wars. And for China, lifting 1 billion people out of poverty is not nothing.
But the idea that China is in any way left-wing died with Mao. And good riddance.
I will, however, concede that Nazi Germany itself was a nominally socialist movement. Fascism and communism share some characteristics.
The only minority that gets adverse treatment is the one that has been implicated in mass killings and separatist conspiracies. And even then it's still not universal reeducation.
The other minorities get DEI boosts on the gaokao and other forms of preferential treatment.
It's still pretty leftist.
If a Reddit dictatorship were enacted and white Appalachians engaged in terrorist bombing campaigns they'd probably be treated worse than the Uyghurs.
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China has a mixed economy that’s contains a variety of features both at home to communists and capitalists alike. Dude. If you think that Communist China is akin to Nazi Germany, I’m going to suggest you need some real life experience. That doesn’t in any way negate the government’s treatment of the Uyghurs. China is not even remotely right-wing.
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The Nazis were in many ways closer to Mao then Xi Jinping. They had all sorts of revolutionary plans for society they just put them on hold until the end of the war.
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