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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

If the Brazilian court had ordered a ban of far-left users, the reporting on this would have been very different.

Likewise, this contrasts with the (rightful) criticism of Google and other companies censoring anti-government material in China - which could also be described as "company complies with local laws"

100% just look at Lula's acceptance of the Venezuelan elections, is Brazil doing anything to clamp down on far left support for Venezuela?

Could you share references for this claim? As far as I could find, Brazil haven’t recognized the results of the elections.

[1] https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/blogs/americo-martins/internaci...

[2] https://g1.globo.com/google/amp/jornal-nacional/noticia/2024...

[3] https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/blogs/americo-martins/internaci...

Lula recognized the equally bs 2018 elections, it’s not like Maduro won that election either.

https://elpais.com/america/2024-03-02/nicolas-maduro-asegura...

Lula rolled out the red carpet for the venezuelan dictator months into his mandate, welcomed him onto our soil with full military honors. Everybody knows he's a friend of Maduro and many other communist dictators. Despite this, the judge involved in the Twitter case used to censor any speech associating him with dictators as "fake news".

If he hasn't recognized the results by now, it's because the situation there must be so bad the political repercussions of doing so will be too great even for him. Notably, he hasn't condemned his dictator buddy either. He's not saying much of anything and letting it play out. His silence on the matter also speaks volumes.

"is Brazil doing anything to clamp down on far left support for Venezuela?"

They don't get to do anything. As much as one may dislike another country's political system, all they get to do is carry on with life.

No country has the right to meddle with another's politics. No foreign person has to right meddle with another's politics.

That's the imperialist view of the world. That's not how it should be.

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Vel%C3%A1zquez NATO members regularly interfere in other countries elections, and have a long history of doing so especially in South America.

It’s widely accepted as an international norm, dating back to at least to the agreement of the Monroe doctrine with the UK, and continuing to at least 2022 with respect to Paraguay.

The fact they do doesn't give any legitimacy to their actions.

South America is not the NATO's (or anyone's) political experiment playground.

This is an interesting thought. If a completely different thing had happened then the conversation might be different. People are too often focused on what did happen and miss the importance of things that did not happen at all

The things that didn’t happen often say more than the things that did.

Exactly. This is why it is very upsetting when anyone brings up the people that died in the Challenger explosion but fail to mention Big Bird, who did not, as if there is something that makes those astronauts more important to the story.

https://www.history.com/news/big-bird-challenger-disaster-na...

How would it be completely different? You're confirming that you see the left as more deserving of speech than the right

> You're confirming that you see the left as more deserving of speech than the right

No I’m not.

In that case the situations would be very similar, and the reporting should be essentially the same, with some word substitutions. If not, this would be indicative of double standards, which I'm glad you oppose

This is a good point. When we envision a scenario we are tasked to either imagine it playing out in a way that supports our sensibilities about fairness and justice or we picture it playing out in a way that offends and repels us. Heavy weighs the head of those that take up the task of contemplating the infinite minutiae of the multiverse

Could you stop with the airy condescension and make actual comments please

I have been concrete and straightforward in our conversation about the power and responsibilities arising from exercising imagination.

Because he wouldn't have fought it?

Fun fact: Brazilian court did. PCO (Communist party) was banned from Twitter in 2022.

Is there any point to this comment other than rage bait?

This is a not very useful breakdown of the political situation. There is only one thing that is required to have a democracy, and that is the peaceful transition of power. And that requires that people have to accept the results of elections. Elections don't have to be fair. They don't have to be free from corruption. They don't have to be accurate, lord knows the elections in the United States are horribly skewed due to the fact that we have such low voter turnout. If you wanted to accurately assess who would be the best elected official in a given position you could do a lot better by just getting a board of statisticians and sampling the hell out of your electorate. But the thing that is important is that we go through a process, that process terminates, and we go with whatever it says the winner was. If it was a bad choice c'est la vie I'll see you again next election and if there was shady shit that happened, we can address that in the interim.

I don't give a shit what the far right views on like immigration or abortion or taxes are. I can disagree with them, but that's not like an existential threat to the country. What is in the US is the fact that we have a candidate for president who was still not conceded his loss in the 2020 election and is running again on the same premise that the elections are rigged. Like the bar is so low here.

It’s completely legal within a democracy not to accept the results of an election. Right now the sitting president of the US is refusing to accept the results of an election which Lula accepts.

>What is in the US is the fact that we have a candidate for president who was still not conceded his loss in the 2020 election and is running again on the same premise that the elections are rigged.

I was thinking I had heard he conceded recently, but when I looked it up I found that he conceded before the inauguration:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/trump-biden-us-capit...

He only conceded his loss in the immediate wake of the failed January 6 insurrection.

More recently, in the presidential debate, he has essentially recanted his concession.

> There is only one thing that is required to have a democracy, and that is the peaceful transition of power. And that requires that people have to accept the results of elections. Elections don't have to be fair. They don't have to be free from corruption. They don't have to be accurate

"Democracy" means "rule by the people".

If the people are told who their new rulers are rather than choosing who their new rulers are (or even ruling directly, I think there are a couple places that still have direct democracies), then it's not a democracy regardless of how orderly the transitions are.

An important part of democracy is that it proves its legitimacy to the citizens. Threatening citizens who are skeptical or critical of the process (whether reasonably or not) is the only thing here which is a threat to democracy

> Threatening citizens who are skeptical or critical of the process (whether reasonably or not) is the only thing here which is a threat to democracy

Yet another thing the supreme court judge involved in this Twitter debacle is guilty of.

He opposed all attempts to add an auditable, anonymous paper trail to our electronic voting machines. At some point, he straight up declared that they were unquestionable. It's all "fake news", he claims. Then he started censoring and fining and persecuting anyone who questioned them. Out of all the stupid things our former president said and did, they banned him from politics over his perfectly reasonable criticism of the brazilian voting machines.

Does he have the balls, the sheer audacity to bring his unquestionable machines to defcon and offer them a billion dollars if they can subvert our elections? No. Oh you can audit the machines and the software... By appointment. You're allowed to bring a pen and a piece of paper. The thing runs Linux, good luck with that. Before the elections when I was really engaged with this, I read a report that said the software's makefile downloaded some libraries off the network and linked them right in. Yeah... Normal people protested the elections by actually asking for source code. It wouldn't have helped.

Yes, but the time to do this is not directly after an election in which your preferred candidate lost.

Okay :: "I think our electoral process needs improvement and changes to make it fair, secure, and auditable."

Not Okay :: "I think our electoral process needs improvement and changes to make it fair, secure, and auditable… and therefore I reject the results of the last election and believe $other_guy to be the rightful president."

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