Tag: Brazil

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Brazilian Censors Banned!

liberty, freedom, censorship, Brazil, free speech

The American government — after years of nurturing a censorship agenda in the South American country — is now penalizing Brazil’s super-​censor Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, along with various colleagues, for imposing censorship demands on U.S. companies.

The U.S. State Department revoked their visa privileges, preventing them from entering the United States. The general policy had been introduced May 28, when Secretary of State Rubio announced that it would apply to “foreign officials and [other] persons … complicit in censoring Americans.”

By then a UK police commissioner, Mark Rowley, had threatened to “come after” Americans who violate UK “hate speech” laws.

The Trump administration “will hold accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” Rubio says.

“Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.”

Bolsonaro, a former president of Brazil, is on trial for allegedly seeking to overturn the country’s 2022 presidential election. He has been prohibited from posting on social media or communicating with others under investigation. 

One on this no-​contact order is his own son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, currently living in the U.S.

Having ordered social media platforms Rumble and X(-Twitter) to censor opposition figures, Justice Moraes acted to block both services from operating in Brazil when the platforms disobeyed him.

“Free speech,” said X’s Elon Musk, “is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-​judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” 

It’s a wonderful thing to have our government once again defending democratic free speech — from its enemies foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs social media

Banned in Brazil

Brazil, censorship, authoritarianism, mind control

Twitter is being banned in Brazil by a “Supreme Court justice” who seems to be the de facto ruler of the country. Who is also threatening Brazilians with massive fines, $8,900 USD daily, if they try to reach Twitter through a VPN.

A VPN or virtual private network hides your IP address and encrypts your web traffic. VPNs protect privacy and let you visit sites otherwise inaccessible. Sites that purvey “disinformation,” i.e., criticism of the government, and other verboten content. VPNs combat censorship and surveillance.

The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, issued an edict to ban Twitter after Twitter owner Elon Musk refused to obey censorship orders.

Twitter had told users that it expected to be shut down by Justice de Moraes “because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

Now Musk declares that an “unelected pseudo-​judge in Brazil is destroying [free speech] for political purposes.”

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino adds that according to Brazil’s own constitution, “censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden.… Until there is change in Brazil, X [Twitter] will be shut down.”

Dictatorships often issue “illegal orders” in the sense that these contradict constitutional provisions whose force has faded … or that were never intended to do anything but fool people to begin with. Such political systems are not truly constitutional.

Nor would the situation be any better were the “constitution” more honest, simply announcing that whatever the dictator says goes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

The Pushers

Brazil, disinformation, propaganda, media

They’re skulking around, speaking in furtive tones, lurking in dark places … hiding from oversight so they can do their dirty deeds unimpeded.

Who?

The disinformation pushers.

They grab hold of one or more incorrect propositions and, indifferent to how wrong it is to be less than infallible in their utterances, willfully communicate their blunderful asseverations to others.

Some pushers use encrypted services to peddle their verbal wares and evade beneficent censors who want only to help.

Public policy is one of the topics the pushers brazenly yap about. 

Result? Political discourse is a mess, with not everybody agreeing about everything, as they simply must. 

In Brazil, for example, where “Far-​Right Disinformation Pushers Find a Safe Place on Telegram,” experts worry that the Telegram messaging app “could become a powerful vector for lies and vitriol before next year’s presidential elections,” explains The New York Times. And that would be regrettable, making for “a tense political moment in the country.”

Thank goodness for the Times, eh? 

Now we finally know that people disagree in Brazil, sometimes indelicately. Even during elections!

Note the unmentioned presuppositions.

First, that there’s no far-left disinformation in Brazil, as anyone who peruses all the inaccessible encrypted messages on Telegram would know.

Second, making do by relying upon better speech as the only way to counter erroneous or dishonest speech is out of the question. 

At least according to the Times. 

Which, being in the Better Speech/​Better Press business, does seem a bit odd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bolsonaro’s Little Flu

CNN, Covid, Coronavirus, Bolsonaro,

“I know that nobody can recover from dying, but the economy not working leads to other causes of death and suicide,” said Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro regarding his reopening of his country’s economy. “We have suffered very harsh criticism in this regard, but today it shows that we are right. The fact that I am infected shows that I am a human being like any other.”

Some of that strikes this reader as not well put, but there are two important points: shutting down commerce does lead to horrendous consequences, especially for the poor, and … President Bolsonaro — who is often characterized as a Brazilian Trump-​like figure — has been infected with SARS-​CoV‑2 and has COVID-​19, if in mild form.

He has taken hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the much-​disputed treatment. 

The news report from CNN mentions his diagnosis and immediately follows it up with “after months of downplaying the virus.”

Now, downplaying threats is one way of handling them, for psychological reasons: sometimes the worst thing to fear is, as FDR said, “fear itself.” In the beginning, Bolsonaro called the virus a “little flu.”

“More than 65,000 people have now died of the virus in Brazil, according to figures released by the country’s health ministry on Monday,” CNN explains. “So far, 1,623,284 cases have been confirmed.”

That’s a 4 percent lethality rate — but that rests upon an under-​tested population, and CNN admits that “some local experts say the real number of people infected could be 12 to 16 times higher.”

Like so many major news reports, CNN does not describe the curve of coronavirus deaths, just says they’re up.

Apparently, good reporting has a high lethality rate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Popular too much government

Cuban Slave Doctors

Cuba, doctors, Brazil, freedom, slavery, slaves,

Did Cuba and Brazil just prove Sen. Rand Paul right … about socialism?

Eight years ago, the ophthalmologist-​turned-​politician raised progressive ire in a subcommittee hearing.

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies,” the junior senator from the state of Kentucky said. “It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.”

To many, this seemed preposterous. Doctors would be paid! They wouldn’t be forced to work.

Well, consider Brazil’s socialized medical service. 

In his campaign for the presidency, Jair Bolsonaro promised to make “major changes to the Mais Médicos program, an initiative begun in 2013 when a leftist government was in power,” the New York Times explains. “The program sent doctors into Brazil’s small towns, indigenous villages and violent, low-​income urban neighborhoods.” 

But there was a catch: “About half of the Mais Médicos doctors were from Cuba.” Brazil paid a hefty price tag for those doctors — to the Cuban government, not the doctors.

None too pleased with Bolsonaro’s talk of “freeing” the doctors, the Communist dictatorship pulled them out. 

Maybe Kentucky’s senatorial physician was right. When a government seizes the control of the means of production, as socialists want and communists demand, at some point somebody in charge will notice that labor is a means of production.

Slaves don’t set the terms of their own employment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Cuba, doctors, Brazil, freedom, slavery, slaves,

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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Evil Capitalists Hook Brazil On Eating

Brazil, junk food, capitalism, free markets, New York Times, folly

Have you heard the latest? 

More and more peoples around the world these days have the unfortunate misfortune of having adequate food — not merely vegetables either!! — thanks to the ruthlessly profit-​seeking food producers and their unconscionable engagement in the division of labor, capital accumulation, and international trade. 

It’s right there in The New York Times, which is, as you know, the paper of record. 

“DealBook: How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food.”

Dastardly! Those Big American Businessmen must have kidnapped the Brazilians, strapped them into chairs, and pumped Doritos into those poor souls with a syringe. Heaven knows, the fecklessly irresponsible Brazilians can’t be held responsible for their own diets.

How bad is it? 

This bad: “As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.”

One expert quoted in the story (no hungry people consulted) says, “Part of the problem … is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.” 

Worse than Hurricane Irma!

Thanks to the Times’s aggressive investigative journalism, we know that these brazenly food-​selling companies do not even nag their international customers to be careful about their diets. Ergo, it’s chips and other indiscriminately convenient snacks for everybody, no strings attached. 

It’s become all too easy to be well-​fed and overfed and mis-fed. 

Thanks a lot, capitalism.

Oh for the good old hunting-​and-​gathering days when human beings spent much of their time starving, and the world had the human population of Binghamton. No problem with anyone gorging on Twinkies and Doritos back then. No problem of epidemics of corpulence.

We’ve lost that swell paradise … perhaps forever. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration based on original photo by David Goehring on Flickr.

 

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general freedom

Free Brazil

Kim Kataguiri

Kim Kataguiri — a founder and the most prominent public face of the Free Brazil Movement, which recently led millions in protest against high inflation, high taxes, and economy-​crippling cronyism — is an unusual man.

First, there’s his age: 19.

Second, there’s his background — atypical but hardly unique, given the country’s substantial Japanese-​Brazilian minority.

Third and most important, there’s the fact that he’s influenced by the ideas of free-​market thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, ideas communicated online by Brazilian and American think tanks. In consequence, Kataguiri’s popular, social-​media-​conveyed critique of Dilma Rousseff’s tax-​happy socialist government is openly liberal in perspective.

“Liberal,” of course, as in “having something to do with freedom and responsibility.” Classical liberal. Libertarian. Not warmed-​over socialist-​leaning liberal, as in America’s Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Do his free-​market ideas and those of other young Free Brazil leaders mean that most Brazilians inspired by the Free Brazil Movement are just as principled? No; they may just be angry at the destruction wrought by an openly socialist government. Consistency may be the furthest thing from their minds.

But they do seem open to a new, positive alternative.

Kataguiri is perhaps overly optimistic, predicting that “in the next decade or two, most of our society will not only understand classical liberalism, but defend it too.”

But I like optimism. Especially since, whether you call it “classical liberalism,” libertarianism, or “small-​government conservatism,” freedom isn’t exactly winning here on our fertile soil.

Still, I invite Kataguiri to drop by the United States when he has a chance … and do what he can to convert us to classical liberalism as well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Kim Kataguiri

 

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insider corruption political challengers too much government

Protesting “Capitalism”?

While Americans appear mildly unsettled or perhaps “ticked off” about recent government revelations, elsewhere in the world citizens move from “unease” to “unrest” and outright “protest.”

The protests that erupted first in Turkey and now in Brazil and elsewhere are filled with the ranks of the young, not a few of whom have noticed something: They are getting a raw deal.

Many of their issues are meat-​and-​potatoes: lack of jobs, burdensome student debts and, in Brazil, a bus fare rate increase made ugly in the context of cost overruns in taxpayer support for the World Cup and Olympics.

The young Turks protested, at first modestly, over planning for a park, but a harsh police crackdown led to more widespread marches, sit-​ins, and demonstrations — which now often bring up questions of the current administration’s repressive anti-​modernist, anti-​freedom agenda.

This more heroic theme resonates elsewhere, too.

In Bulgaria the issue most protested appears to be police brutality and the general spirit of repression. In Latin America, opposition to corruption has moved from old stand-​by to vital question of the day.

The saddest statement I heard was this appraisal, hailing from the BBC, of the general climate: “today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.”

Well, that’s not laissez faire capitalism that’s failed, but crony capitalism. Laissez faire’s truly free markets require a rule of law, the suppression of government corruption, and effective public accountability.

But that’s not what’s dominant. America itself serves, today, not as a beacon of liberty but of institutional control, of crony capitalism.

We need to protest that here, again, in the U.S.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.