Brazil - have you been there?

Not for me either

I only have the opening paragraph, maybe I have used up all my LRB freebie privileges.

without reading that lrb piece and at the risk of being extremely reductive the current brazil crisis can be boiled down p easily it seems: opposition politicians, the great majority of whom are implicated in corruption, are voting to impeach the president ostensibly for corruption, but really because the pt keeps winning elections and they've had enough of that

Rio all set for the Olympics

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/rio-warns-of-fiscal-collapse-as-brazil-states-seek-debt-relief

Bolsonaro just got stabbed.

Not thought to be seriously wounded, afaict.

Wouldn’t put it past him to do a Chen Shui-bian tbh.

Elections this weekend:

https://newsocialist.org.uk/future-brazilian-democracy/

Interesting parallels in the way courts have been used in Brazil and the US to shut down any resistance.

That article is so poorly written it makes a mildly confusing situation almost utterly incomprehensible.

Maybe certain things were lost in translation and granted a couple of the scenarios could be hard to understand - its not a newspaper piece so there is more analysis than usual - but the situation is fairly clear, and I am not that close to the minutiae of Brazilian politics.

Somebody told me it is "just like America". This can't be right.
― just adam (nordicskilla), Monday, March 14, 2005 9:59 PM (thirteen years ago)

They just needed a little help

It was a pleasure to meet STEVE BANNON,strategist in Donald Trump's presidential campaign.We had a great conversation and we share the same worldview.He said be an enthusiast of Bolsonaro's campaign and we are certainly in touch to join forces,especially against cultural marxism. pic.twitter.com/ceHoui6FH5

— Eduardo Bolsonaro 1720 (@BolsonaroSP) August 4, 2018

brazil is the most fucked-up country in the world y/n (see also: india)

i mean i guess it's about to be. when you're not sure whether he destroys civil liberty or the rainforest more quickly then you're kind of worried

hopefully someone doesn't fail next time they come at him /silby

There's a real sense of deja vu looking at my Brazilian friends on FB saying they're in mourning for their country, unfriending friends and family members who voted Bolsonaro, etc.

people are such craven fucking savage morons. you'd have thought they'd have learnt something as children, but no here they are, voting in satan himself, all in the name of their unreconstructed need to see other people dead. fuck this species

What is moronic is to call Brazil or India the most fucked-up country.

There is a 2nd round so Haddad could win that.

What is moronic is to call Brazil or India the most fucked-up country.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, October 8, 2018 11:02 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk, ecological damage x murder rates x rape culture x suicide x political corruption it all kind of points to a perfect storm. what would your suggestion be

US...ah never mind.

Just under 80% turnout and yet Bolsonaro only just missed an outright victory :[

+ of all the countries built on rape, murder and slavery by europeans they've pretty much got the most abominable histories give or take the african west coast. i mean sure the congo/car might be more fucked up on some average-life-of-citizen basis but these are places that have just seen endless, endless evil for centuries anyway this isn't a competition really whatever

This will end well.

America wishes it had India's Supreme Court.

The whole Brazil situation just seems desperately sad, scary and depressing. In a final two run-off you'd normally expect some kind of Macron/Le Pen outcome but 46% of the vote is terrifying.

imago, I'm sure you're doing this with no ill intent, but the very thought exercise of "let's decide what the most fucked up place on earth is" has an unsavoury Mondo Cane exoticism to it, and certainly isn't very helpful at a stage where most of our problems are global in reach.

The whole Brazil situation just seems desperately sad, scary and depressing. In a final two run-off you'd normally expect some kind of Macron/Le Pen outcome but 46% of the vote is terrifying.

Yeah, and Macron had a somewhat successful rebrand on his side, while Haddad is settled with the legacy of the PT*. I can't see this going well.

* obviously I think Macron's rebrand is bullshit and the anti-PT sentiment pretty suspect but that's neither here nor there rn.

yeah no that's fair, i'm just venting, this guy cannot be for real and yet he is

If you had spent time any reading about Latin America or bothered to check any of its literature instead of wanking on about Pynchon you'd know this guy is very much for real and very common.

tbf....i did read 'nazi literature in the americas' recently

but it felt like a fantasy with an only tangential relationship to truth. lol

still great obv

I wonder how much Haddad can take away from Gomes (12.5) and then the others? Need to look at the full breakdown once we have full results

Anecdotally, from the people I’ve discussed it with, there seems to be a complacency that Brazilian social liberalism isn’t under threat - that Bolsonaro’s rise has much more to do with economic stagnation and perceived corruption than a Trump-style culture war, though the view from SP is likely to be different from elsewhere.

It can’t be underestimated how effective the campaign to tarnish first the left and then ‘politicians in general’ has been. It’s also incredibly well-funded and able to successfully astroturf targeted public protests. Tracing where all that money comes from, within Brazil, would be interesting.

I agree that it's to do with economic stagnation and perceived corruption, but surely so is Trump's culture war? Drain the swamp, bring back jobs, etc. It goes hand in hand, Bolsonaro stans argue exclusively by attacking "corruption" and when you bring up the dude's fascist ideas it's either "fake news" or they fess up that they see no problem with that.

"How can he be sexist when he's pushing for chemical castration of rapists?" was one particularly choice tidbit from a recent Bolsonaro FB argument I witnessed.

Still wrapping round my head around the far right party in Brazil being known as the "Social Liberals".

Interesting demographic data that suggests he’s surprisingly popular with the youngest voters as well as the oldest:

I’ve been wondering who the 40 million Brazilians who voted for Bolsonaro yday are, and my mum sent me this polling (link below). There are some demographic trends...

— Yara Rodrigues Fowler 🧜🏼‍♀️ #mariellepresente (@yazzarf) October 8, 2018

I'm with my Brazilian friends against this fucker; they've been in the streets for weeks against this, and now it's happened. but I do wonder what is to be done about Brazilian crime. I passed on an invitation to Salvador last fall because the crime there seemed to be spiking; and sure enough, several people who went ended up getting robbed. when I've been in the SP area it's been taxis everywhere on the advice of locals. there's an air of menace everywhere it seems. How can you live like this? This election is on the surface at least about that, and about the complacency of past politicians in the light of this crime. What is the left going to do about it?

SP isn't particularly dangerous imo if you know which areas to avoid.

It's worth bearing in mind that the police were still killing three or four thousand people a year under Dilma and Lula, that the jails were still overflowing, etc. The number of shootings has gone up since, and will go up further under Bolsonaro, but it's not as though there hasn't always been a heavy-handed, militarised approach to law enforcement. It's just not particularly effective in the context of an extended economic crisis and unbelievable disparity in wealth.

I've spent more time in Campinas than in SP proper, so I trust you there.

I suppose a big enough part of the population isn't ready to deal with inequality, and so they're thinking another round of (unofficial) military rule can safeguard the way things have been, which is better than losing their current status.

Looking at this more widely and beyond the election...obviously its horrible if you are on the Brazilian left but the new socialist article talks about the problems even if you have Haddad winning, and the obstacles he would face from the elites. Lula -- like most Latin American left leaders -- compromised and never really dealt with breaking elite power. The elites themselves are under threat from climate change and ofc the fallout from the financial crash never properly being dealt with.

So while its depressing and divisive I also see opportunities for action and organisation too. It's dangerous, could go either way but whatever happens the days of having dumbos going on about the worst country are surely coming to an end.

"Whatever happens"

Not to worry, dialectical materialism will save the day. It's all just an unpleasant interlude.

I mean it could go both ways, right? At least something is happening! Anything is better than liberal mediocrity!

Pretty much. We'd have time for libs and plenty for sitting on the fence but its a hot autumn we are having.

We'll solve it comrade, just you wait. It'll take a bit of extra bloodshed but it will have been worthwhile. Once we reach the end of history, there will be no more sickness, no more crying, no more poverty, no more death. We will have overcome it all through sheer strength of will. There will be no ghosts left to haunt us, for the Geist will have reached its final destination.

You are catching on, my friend.

Hilarious post pomenitul, as if the left are the only ones that spill blood.

That was obviously, clearly, glaringly implied, wasn't it?

Yeah you were on your libs are best as the world burns routine again. Keep it up.

On the contrary, I was wistfully musing about the utopia that I will unfortunately not come to know in my lifetime but that will no doubt be achieved thanks to our collective efforts as a species. As long as you have faith… (This is totally-not-secularised-monotheism btw).

Just staying true to the Absolute, you know what I mean? All it takes is a bit of patience. The interregnum will go away eventually – it always does.

No but you are clearly having fun with it. And I would never want to stop the fun.