> Demanding a military coup is not, and should neve be, protected speech.
Sure it should. That is a valid political position. They wanted the military to rule them.
If you're gonna ban that speech, then I demand the complete erasure of speech I deem far worse. I demand the complete annihilation of the vast majority of brazilian political parties and literally everything they stand for, especially those which contain the words "communist" and "socialist" right in their names. Those ideologies are demonstrably far more damaging than the brazilian military dictatorship ever was.
I simply do not accept the validity of the notion that militarism, fascism and nazism are all banned wrongthink while literal communists and socialists walk the soil of my country completely unpunished. I am not capable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept that. In order for me to maintain my sanity, one of those ideas must go.
> You know full well that what happened
I know the military didn't actually enact or even try to enact a coup. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant.
> Brazil has a long story of military coups, in more than one occasion invited by portions of the civilian population.
Yes. Military coups. Emphasis on military.
> Murder, while a serious crime, in my opinion, is generally a less serious offense than the abolition of democracy.
Surely we can agree that actual committed murder is worse than an hypothetical attempt to abolish democracy. A crime with actual victims must be more severely punished than one with zero victims.
If we can agree on this, then we can agree that these people were punished in a completely uncivilized manner. They got worse sentences than literal murderers and rapists routinely get here. That's just stupid even if I were to accept the idea that they tried to take power, and I don't accept that idea.
We should also be able to agree that this sends a very dangerous message: if you intend to protest these judges, you want full measures instead of half measures. They're going to punish you as if you had gone all the way anyway, you might as well go all the way.
> We are not talking about people merely "wishing" a coup. They in fact, and very plainly, attempted to make it happen.
Not at all. They were just generally protesting, and the protest was not in any way different in its violence compared to any prior ones. That they called for a coup at the same time does not make it an attempt to enact a coup.
An attempt to enact a coup would be the people with guns showing up, beginning their operation and then failing. That's an actual attempt to seize power. An actual coup would end with them succeeding at it.
They tried to get the military to do it. But they didn't try to do it themselves.