Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one.
Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
It was something to behold. Took a lot of guts to take the entire cabinet of ministers to task for failing to protect brazilians against errant bureaucracy. Too bad the video seems to not be in youtube anymore
Bolsonaro was called genocidal for doing everything wrong about the pandemic. He pushed for alternative medicine that doesn't work, he ignored vaccine offers from Pfizer (which delayed the start of vaccination in Brazil for months) and he replaced two healthcare ministers for doing their job. And let's not even get into the straightforward genocide of the indigenous people that occurred under his government: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cw011x9rpldo
Keep the far-right conspiracy theories in the sewer where they belong.
Could you please stop using HN for ideological battle and flamewar? You've unfortunately been doing a lot of that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we end up having to ban accounts that do it (regardless of what they're battling for).
Ok, got it. I can see how my comments were inflammatory in this thread and will refrain from that in the future.
On the other hand, I think a thread like this one also fits your description of ideological battle and flame war. It is very political and deeply biased, including inflammatory comments about imprisoning and killing people for their political ideology. We see that in threads about religion as well, which are very lightly moderated but contain uncivilised content. If you allow trash and ban the pushback, eventually HN will devolve into Truth social or equivalent when it comes to politics.
HN actually has a guideline to address just that: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
We can't exclude divisive topics altogether—that would not be consistent with the mandate of this site (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... for lots of past explanation about why). So we ask users on all sides of divisive topics to respect the site guidelines, and each other, by posting thoughtfully and not collapsing into flamewar.
Everyone with strong passions feels like the other side is posting inflammatory trash and they themselves are merely providing pushback. This feeling is part of the standard equipment that everyone brings to a flamewar, so you can't let yourself be guided by it.
What you need to do instead (<-- I don't mean "you" personally, I mean all of us) is hold yourself to a higher standard and not break the rules even if other people are breaking them badly. If you make a good faith effort to do that, then you can just about compensate for the default bias of feeling like "the other side started it and behaved much worse" and approximately level the field.
I see your point of course, it's easy for me to think I'm right and these guys are wrong and they do probably think the same. That doesn't mean that neither of us is correct though. And you do draw the line somewhere. You would not allow a discussion to emerge here on whether pedophilia should be allowed, how Ukraine is actually an aggressor or about how the American elections were stolen - at least it seems that you moderate these topics swiftly. When similarly unhinged political topics emerge from more marginal countries like Brazil or India, I find that the discussion tends to be polarized by the interaction of users who really care about the topic, while most of the community stands aside. The problem is that most of these users are extremists. As a result, these threads devolve into toxicity and are very far from the standards we are used to seeing.
From my part I also contributed to that in this instance. I understand what you're trying to say and in the future I'll try to keep in mind your larger point - even if I firmly believe I'm right and I would like to convince someone, being rude or dismissive does not actually help, and certainly does not foster a good sense of community. So, I'm not trying to excuse the two comments you correctly called me out for.
On the other hand, perhaps you should consider that your own personal bias about what is legitimate discussion and what isn't is obviously limited by your own knowledge pool and bias. I would not expect you to know how close Brazil came to an actual military coup, or that this "Supreme Court dictatorship" discourse is the backdrop of the justification for a possible coup which is still a threat. I don't think much would be lost at all if these discussions are simply suppressed in HN, in the same way I see you delete submissions about the Ukraine war that are very clearly deranged. And if not, you really should not expect a calm, rational discussion starting around a perspective that defends dictatorship or war.
I completely agree with you about how little I know, but I don't need to know much to moderate this site according to its guidelines. It's the other way around: people who do know are welcome to comment (and we hope they will!) but only if they stay within HN's rules.
> you really should not expect a calm, rational discussion starting around a perspective that [...]
I don't know about calm or rational but following the site guidelines is exactly what we expect, regardless of how divisive a topic is. As I said in the GP, a divisive topic makes that more important.
To call PT a communist organization is just another laughably stupid conspiracy theory. But let me tell you something, for all the bad communists may have done, at least they fought against Nazism very well. The misinformation you are spreading in this thread is about a literal Nazi group that has already killed four children. Your ideology has twisted your brain so hard that you feel the need to defend these people.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously here. We ban accounts that do this. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
> To call PT a communist organization is just another laughably stupid conspiracy theory.
There are videos of Lula saying his plan is to literally implement socialism in Brazil. There are videos of him preaching ideas like having the government give everyone what they need to "survive". If you think these people aren't communists, then you're simply wrong.
> The misinformation you are spreading in this thread
If I "spread misinformation" about anything, it's simply because I was wrong. It happens. Simply post the correct fact so that I may know better. I've been corrected twice in this thread. I have absolutely no problem with it. Hell, I upvoted the comments correcting me.
Don't accuse me of "spreading" misinformation though. I'm simply posting my opinions. Just like you, who thinks PT isn't made up of literal communists.
Thinking these people aren't actually communists seems to be a common mistake. Apparently lots of people here in Brazil who backed Lula believed so. Even bankers. Even US president Biden. They believed he would be "moderate" and "reasonable" and not the authoritarian socialist he really is. It's not a surprise they seem to be angling towards impeaching him now.
Edit: you posted dozens of ideological battle comments in this thread. That's not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. Please avoid such flamewars in the future, regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong others are or you feel they are.
> There are videos of Lula saying his plan is to literally implement socialism in Brazil. There are videos of him preaching ideas like having the government give everyone what they need to "survive".
That's literally the ideology of every social democratic party in Europe (and most center right as well). They are not communists, and neither is Lula.
Relativization of private property: you own land, someone invades your land and settles on it and you're forced to "mediate" with the invaders before being afforded access to the justice system.
Regulation of all media and communications, censorship in case of "abuse" and even a government ranking of media channels based on how much they conform to "human rights".
Prohibition of religious symbols in public.
Taxation of fortunes because entrepreneurship in Brazil apparently wasn't difficult enough.
Do european political parties really push shit like this?
I know, I just don't care. To me they're both synonymous with misery, famine, rationing, forced labor under penalty of death and mass genocide when people inevitably revolt. If people are so big on banning destructive ideologies, one would think they'd start with this one.
Since these communists are allowed to walk the soil of my country unimpeded and not only hold political office but have literal organized undeniably communist political parties with communism in the name like the Communist Party of Brazil, I have no ideological objection to extending the same freedoms to literal nazis and fascists either. They're all the same to me, I don't see any reason to prefer one over the other.
What I think is that you know just enough history to be able to loosely connect the word "socialism" with Bad Things (common ones being that both NSDAP and USSR had "socialist" in their name, or that Venezuela is "socialist") and you're incurious enough ("I know, I just don't care") to not bother understanding whether that's true, how any of those Bad Things actually came to be, whether that was due to anything related to "socialism" or even what that word actually means.
Doesn't bother me either way, but if you consider yourself a smart or informed person then you're doing yourself a disservice by not actually understanding any of this.
I wasn't about to give socialists the benefit of the doubt, especially not in this thread where people actually created sockpuppet accounts just to call me a "bolsonaro minion" who needs to move to Afghanistan. You seem to be posting in good faith though.
I believe socialism inevitably leads to oppressive totalitarian states. Simply because nobody wants to work for no reward. People must be forced into such slavery and that's inevitably what happens. It's what's happened every time it was tried. Because the alternative is starvation.
The only way that could possibly work is if nobody had to work. That's only possible if there's abundance instead of scarcity. If there's no scarcity, then there is no need to economize. In other words, real socialism is actually a fully automated economy-less post-scarcity society.
Brazil is so ridiculously far from that ideal that it's comical to even suggest implanting socialism here. Comical. The damage caused by that idea is worse than literal nazis roaming free. These people have infiltrated every school, every university.
Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one.
Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)