Far-right insurgent Jair Bolsonaro elected President of Brazil
249 replies, posted
Fascists like Bolsonaro are gaining power and actively threatening to kill people and establish dictatorships but abloo bloo some leftists on the internet insulted me. Clearly they're the real problem.
Don't be a cunt all yer life.
This post reads exactly like the kind of whining you'd expect from some manchild angry over not being able to casually throw around slurs in video games anymore.
The numerous "A fascist was elected in Brazil, and here is why it's the lefts fault" posts are pathetic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joRrWSZmXdo
So here Vice video show Young supporters of newly elected Dictator wannabe over these factors I was thinking about.
Finally a president I voted got elected!
No more Lula robbing the enitre country and financing dictatorship countries.
Yeah, now you will be financing your dictatorship.
Honestly just cut out the middleman. Elect a dictator directly!
how do you justify his support of our own dictatorship, chile's and peru's?
Not because some hipster-looking barista at Starbucks told them to check thier privilege, I can tell you that much.
this is a collection if simplistic truisms which you have somehow universalized (i assume from watching american politics) and applied to "the left" and "the right" of the world, as if the nuances of local politics and the long dark shadow of regional history make no difference. this narrative does not apply everywhere and is not sufficient to explain, for instance, why bolsonaro was elected. in fact, i would call into question the possibility that this narrative applies anywhere at all. the complex interplay of social, cultural and economic factors in play that results in the support and election of candidates cannot often be reduced to these simplistic monolithic, almost anthropomorphic, group entities which one has constructed and dubbed "left" and "right" and given life-like agency and will.
perhaps instead of making universal statements which stand on shaky foundations due to ignorance of local conditions and how important they are, one should instead educate oneself about the situation and the political and governmental actors in a country and the history of the place before making any judgement of the sort whatsoever. the delusion of knowledge is worse than ignorance.
Because most people wouldn't notice if you shoved a pineapple up thier ass in front of a mirror if you told them the right populist platiudes while you did it.
can't this be flipped around and be used as an argument against reducing the last couple years to the rise of fascism against some slow march of history
yes, and it should be. simplistic notions of what is going on - ones that do not at all take into consideration the regional history of the sociologically meaningful groups involved, nor the actual groups themselves - help no one but politicians and anybody else trying to push a narrative to some end, usually that of power over others.
reductionist narratives are merely mobilizing rhetoric, usually done by leveraging fear and the feeling of in-group solidarity in order to do something.
Can someone check whose alt this is
no, what im saying here is that this interplay between these two sweeping generalizations you dub "left" and "right" which you have constructed does not help us understand why things happen, nor does it take into account the actual groups involved.
its a narrative you decided universally applies between "the left" and "the right" everywhere, despite lacking the knowledge necessary to explain in actual depth why a person like bolsonaro was elected.
i ask explicitly the question that was previously implicit - what do you base this narrative in? just your limited observations?
Despite your new president is literal Pro-Dictatorship apologist and (hopefully for now) retired general. Like what even point anymore.
Let's recap:
Dude dismisses all Brazilians, we're a shithole already, who cares if our lives get worse
I politely ask him for some consideration, he tells me nah. I react negatively to someone who's essentially saying I don't matter
And then you drop in like you're hot shit to tell me my entire outlook on life is "retarded" and that I deserve to be ruled by a fascist
I doubt you know anything about our situation, because as of right now, you haven't given out a single piece of information that is specific to Brazil. You took your perspective on American politics and assumed it to not only be true, but universally true, applicable to all corners of the earth, giving yourself ultimate understanding over countries that, in reality, you know nothing about.
It really puts this post in perspective
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/172/bfe11651-e306-4557-8d9e-75b85b62140a/image.png
Wow it sure is weird that this fervent defense of centrism is coming from someone who is now literally saying the left doesn't work. Like I said to you in that thread, the people who give centrists a bad name are the ones who wear it as a mask to feel superior to others, or push agendas under the guise of neutrality. I had no idea you would turn out to be the best possible example of this
I think you're right. I can't help but notice that with the death of religion and the rise of the mass, connected society we've gotten today's modern ideology. I think the number one cause of today's crisis in the West is that we essentially spent a century having its 3 poles (liberalism, socialism, and fascism) fight for dominance, with the victor having not really solved the problems that spawned the latter two in reaction.
I think we know there's some truth to what you are saying because that broad, simplistic declaration we grew up with (the 'end of history') has turned out to be a bubble. I think we need to rely less on grand ideologies because they have no room for local and particular problems. They're about gambling on the future as we economically change, dreaming big and promising to end some theme of history.
bolsonaro is (and always was) a piece of shit justifying his thirst for power with calls for order and nostalgia for the old days of the dictatorship in which he conveniently was on the winning side. or so it seems to some, such as myself, who read up on his life history. this is an opinion i hold not very firmly, and one i hold based in something.
what drives a man to extremes is merely the perception of a bad situation and disillusionment with the means applied to attempt and solve it, or the perception of another extreme.
whether that other extreme really does exist or doesn't will not matter because for as long as it does have existence in their mind they will find constant justification for the ever-worsening means they adopt to achieve their ever-growing-and-disconnected idealized ends.
This is such a simplified outlook on politics. Do you realize that through this perspective you paint Bolsonaro as being inherently justified? That you make him out to be nothing more than a natural response to his counterpart, and not a person to be held accountable?
Stop thinking that grabbing the two ends of the spectrum and finding whatever's in the middle makes for a sensible mindset. At one point, you'll run into a situation where one end is clearly more radical than the other, and your "middle" will lean a bit more than you think. Like what's happening now
So, Duterte 2.0?
'Why' is just way too complicated to actually answer. It could be any random combination of things, all further skewed by genetics.
Being abused as a child
Mental illness
Growing around certain politics, could become the opposite or the same
Being spoiled, or poor, developing an infinite desire for more
Extreme rough patch. Maybe a family member died, or a car crash happened, who knows
You could have had brain trauma that altered your personality, a surprisingly real thing. Poor surgery, injury, lightning strikes, all sorts of stuff could do this.
You'd need a trained psychologist to really sit each one of anyone like this and understand their history and how their brain works to know HOW they exist. Every single person is different after all.
Any combination of this stuff could be a factor, even 30 different things I've not listed could be. You could pretty much apply this to any human really. It all stems from genes and childhood.
If I were to say 'why', I'd probably just say that it's because the world isn't black and white, and good VS evil is an absurd human construct that is infinitely flexible to whatever anyone wants it to be. The correct bad conditions lead to the correct bad outcome.
Justified in his politics and his stances, what else? And yes, both can be true at the same time, but your outlook leans towards giving Bolsonaro more leniency for the sake of what I believe is a false balance. The fallacy link is there to help visualize what I mean by the rest of the post, it's not the only argument, it's to be taken as a whole unlike what you did.
And for the fourth time: You haven't given a single piece of information that is specific to Brazil. You don't know the Brazilian political landscape, and you haven't said anything that demonstrates otherwise. Stop projecting your preconceived notions of Left and Right onto a situation you don't understand.
can you explain then how he is a natural response, preferably with naming specific actors, be they individuals or groups, and how they came to cause this "natural" response?
as of now you can't even be proven wrong because you have said nothing of real substance about the situation - you have said nothing that can be proven true or false.
Tbh it feels like such a distraction to ask the 'how' and 'why', when it doesn't matter because either way it's still a 'now'
Especially when your conception of "left" and "right" is seemingly based on American politics, which are notoriously heavily skewed towards the right end of the spectrum. Even here in France, "centrism" is basically right wing economic policies sprinkled with a socially progressive façade.
It's not skewed to the right, this is crap peddled by Europhile progressives. They don't like how our liberal traditions are defined by a rejection of exactly something like France's historical radicalism, and instead our social liberals have their roots in protestant religious movements. But thanks to that, we have no history of Bonapartism, socialism, or a bunch of different republics like you do.
this was never his argument and even if it was, you made it yourself twice by saying "the left doesn't work".
Bolsonaro’s Hope and Change
‘Bolsonaro threatens the world, not just Brazil’s fledgling democracy,” declared a headline last week in the Guardian, referring to presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. And that was one of the milder warnings in the international press. Yet Brazilians elected him anyway on Sunday with 55% of the vote. Maybe the world should show a decent respect for Brazilian democracy and try to understand what happened.
Start with the fact that this was a transparent, competitive and fair contest. Mr. Bolsonaro didn’t steal the election. He won it by persuading voters. A 27-year member of the legislature, Mr. Bolsonaro was also fortunate to be running against Fernando Haddad, the hand-picked candidate of the Worker’s Party (PT) that has ruled Brazil for most of the last 15 years. Mr. Bolsonaro was able to run as the reformer against a legacy of economic and political failure.
Brazil has yet to recover from the leftwing populism of PT President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and successor Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016). Deficits, public debt and inflation soared, as the PT expanded the number of state-owned enterprises. It also squandered the opportunity to boost capital flows, most notably by failing to create attractive auction rules in the huge deepwater oil reserves discovered in 2007. By the time the Workers’ Party was done, Brazil was in a recession that lasted nearly three years.
The PT also built a legacy of graft. Construction companies padded bids and paid kickbacks to politicians, executives and the PT. The national development bank extended loans to facilitate the transactions, including to Cuba and Venezuela. The head of the bank said in September that the dictatorships in Havana and Caracas have outstanding loans of $1 billion and both are in arrears.
Many other politicians from other parties joined in the bribery schemes. Mr. Bolsonaro did not. That gave him credibility when he ran as the antidote to PT greed and promised to drain the swamp.
Now he has to deliver. One good sign is that his chief economic adviser is Paulo Guedes, who trained at the University of Chicago. Mr. Bolsonaro has a history of economic nationalism, which could be his downfall. But as a candidate he promised to privatize some industries, clean up the fiscal accounts and propose full independence for the central-bank. He has also promised to repair the state pension system. The best medicine would be a Chile-style privatization.
To achieve any of this Mr. Bolsonaro will have to confront an array of special interests in Brazil’s powerful business class. He must also deal with 30 separate parties in Congress’s lower house and 20 in the senate. Yet he has a mandate, which means he should act fast on his reform agenda.
Mr. Bolsonaro has often made offensive comments about race, homosexuality and women, and in the PT days he sometimes waxed nostalgic for an earlier era of military rule. But Brazilians went to the polls knowing all this, and knowing too that their democratic institutions proved their mettle resisting the corruption of Lula and the PT.
Brazilians didn’t vote for fascism or a military coup. They voted for hope and change, and they will throw Mr. Bolsonaro out if he fails to honor his promises.
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