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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.
What you seem to mean by this sentence is "Nobody in S America could ever convince me that democracy is better than fascism that favors my group".
You wouldn't be happy with fascism that favors your opponents.
This is an imprecise description of the situation. White Brazilians are not even close to a monolithic political block. Whites do lean Bolsonaro over Lula, but it's more like a 60-40 split, not something like 90-10.
Anyway, I think that fascism is the inferior solution to the problem. The superior solution is some kind of secession. Solves the problem, without creating the new problem of living in a fascist shithole.
I'm pretty sure I'd be better off under fascism that favors East-Asians over current European democracy.
What sort of state are you envisioning?
If I try to imagine a situation where I, a Caucasian Australian person, lived in an East Asian fascist state, the closest examples I can think of are things like 1) WWII Japan conquered my country and took over, 2) I move to North Korea, 3) Somehow China gets a lot more populist and expansionist and either conquers my country or I move there, or something else along those lines.
In all those examples I think I would be worse off than I am currently under liberal democracy. If imperial Japan took over Australia, I think there's a chance they treat European people better than southeast Asians, but realistically we're probably going to become a second Manchukuo, turned into a resource colony. Ethnic Japanese settlers would likely come down and turn into a local aristocracy. That seems bad to me. I don't think I need to explain why the North Korea option is terrible. And as for China, well, I wouldn't want to be an ethnic minority in China now. How much better would it be if China went even more militantly Han-supremacist? You don't even have to bring up the Uighurs or something - look at how, for example, the Manchus went from a majority of the population in multiple northeastern provinces to the small minorities they are right now, and anti-Manchu conspiracy theories are still common. Let's just say that as a laowai I do not think I would be safe under an intensification of the same sort of thing.
China's got pretty-strong affirmative action for minorities in present. They're definitely less well-off on average than the Han population, but on the other hand the Han population is essentially concentrated in the areas that are easier to develop and the infrastructure build is increasingly rolling out. You can also make historical arguments that frequently what allowed a Chinese minority to stay a distinct minority population tended to be some form of 'will live in/was forced out to areas that even the Han didn't particularly want to live in' which then has significant impacts on their average welfare in modernity.
It's also further complicated by other situations. I spent a year in Darwin with 'the locals', and I do think the Chinese system would probably be better equipped to 'fix' the Indigenous situation of Australia since they'd have little-to-no qualms with making short, sharp interventions to try and shift them back into shape. The Uighurs also somewhat similar, where I believe that the longterm median life conditions of the Uighurs are probably better than they'd be if the same issue were handled with the typical Western ineffectual fumbling at Islamic society, but also the period of pacification was intolerably brutal by Western standards. The West, through an abundance of empathy, frequently makes decisions around minorities that don't really benefit anybody long (or even short) term but they aren't being 'mean'.
I'd much rather live in a France right now where the Chinese state were in charge of ethnic issues than live in one where well-intentioned bureaucrats just kind of allowed things to snowball endlessly.
I don't think anybody will argue that Australia's approach to indigenous peoples is anything but broken, but the number of Australians in any way affected by our approach to indigenous peoples is very low. I'm Victorian and I encounter approximately zero Aboriginal people on a regular basis. If you don't live in the Northern Territory, you're just not going to run into the issue.
I am by no means defending our Aboriginal policy to say that firstly, even assuming hypothetically that a Chinese fascist government would handle Aboriginal policy better, that is such a minor, insignificant issue that it does not factor into my judgement of whether Chinese fascists would be better for me than the present system; and secondly, I do not think Chinese fascists would handle Aboriginal policy better, neither for Aboriginal people themselves nor for the majority.
My take is basically that today the People's Republic of China is a state run for the benefit of the Han majority, and a hypothetical fascist China would only intensify that. If fascist China conquered Australia, I think that would, in the long term, be worse for people like me than sticking with liberal democracy.
None of that means that I think the present establishment is flawless, or even good. I do, however, think it is less bad than it would be if the Chinese took over. Hell, if nothing else, I prefer a relatively free market to socialism with Chinese characteristics!
True. Was actually funny to me after moving back to Melbourne and I didn't see an Indigenous person again for 3 months until I boarded the 109 and there was one going about his business.
I do think you've got a bunch of vast misunderstandings of what modern China is and how it operates. You're living in Socialism with Australian characteristics and there's an abundant relatively free market over in China that's going about its own business. China having a layer of fascism allows a lot of absurdities to be managed with less insane pointless slogs that pop up in the Western system as of present.
Are you thinking of any examples?
To be clear, I don't think that modern China is fascist. I'm imagining a fascist China that exaggerates and intensifies some of China's existing pathologies. My understanding of the state of modern China, absorbed mostly from talking to Chinese people, is that everyday life is a lot like everyday life in the West, only everything is a little bit nastier or more corrupt. Cities are a bit dirtier. Officials are slightly more on the take. Little everyday things are just a bit more frustrating. Still, it is perfectly liveable.
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