I'm glad Bolsonaro didn't win, but this clearly doesn't end Brazil's troubles. Bolsonaro still got a lot of votes, and it was a very tight race. On top of that, Lula isn't exactly perfect either. Brazil needs better candidates. A healthier political system where those better candidates rise to the top.
Of course the same is true for the US. Or for most countries, really. But somehow appointing leaders based on popularity and a willingness to work to attain power, does not seem to produce a lot of candidates immune to corruption or other forms of power hunger.
The problem with Brazil is that the country is just too big. It will never happen, but I'm confident that the solution to Brazil's rampant corruption and violence is to break up the country. In every single election it's clear that the north and the south are two completely different countries that keep getting into each other's way and preventing the country from evolving.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the best countries in the world to live are geographically small. Large countries like Brazil/US/Russia have way too much stuff and people going on at the same time, it's impossible to manage them properly.
sure. small countries are much more adept at asserting their independence against bigger countries. also breaking up a country is always a peaceful affair
Breaking up a country is hardly a peaceful affair; it's almost impossible to do. But that doesn't change the fact that he has a point: large countries do seem to be harder to govern and develop effectively.
> The problem with Brazil is that the country is just too big. It will never happen, but I'm confident that the solution to Brazil's rampant corruption and violence is to break up the country.
What leads you to believe that your proposal is effective? You're just arguing in favour or removing layers of accountability as a solution to rampant corruption.
I agree with you, south-western and north-eastern Brazil will never reconcile politically. Can you imagine a separatist movement in the 21st century though? São Paulo tried it once last century and got crushed... I bet it would have been a major world power by now had it succeeded.
This will sound a bit flippant but what's the alternative to appointing leaders by popularity (aka voting)? All systems are prone to corruption, it more depends on the safeguards within the system that prevent it from being abused.
How are you going to work on long term plans with sortition? At least with vote elections if you are doing well you can be voted again to keep doing what you do.
How are you going to work on long term plans with elections every 2 or 4 years?
Every politician is always looking to the next election, not to the longer term. The lack of "next election" pressure gives sortition the advantage in looking to the future instead of the short term.
Elections are what drive corruption and short term thinking.
If you look at even absolutist monarchs in Europe, they have constituents (lobbying groups) they have to listen to, the peasants and townfolks to appease, the nobility to seek support from, powerful breakaway independent Lords to manage, potential rival claimants inside and outside the kingdom.
Politics still happens outside of democracies.
The difference is just that our system of government, the "People" is given a formal primacy. Corruptions and short-term thinking happens with or without elections.
Nobody is suggesting that a randomly selected legislature shouldn't listen to anyone outside themselves.
The difference is that a randomly selected legislature for fixed single term in office never has to worry about gaining or maintaining power, because they will definitely lose power when their term in office is up.
Whereas both elected politicians and monarchs always have to worry about gaining and maintaining power, the former via elections and the latter via military superiority over rivals. Politicians lose elections, whereas monarchs lose their heads. ;-)
> How are you going to work on long term plans with elections every 2 or 4 years?
The executive and legislative branch make decisions, supposedly seeking consensus as part of their decision-making process.
If you're arguing that consensus are not important or a basic requirement of a democracy, and long term plans can only be implemented if they are dictated by an autocratic government then the problem is another one.
> If you're arguing that consensus are not important or a basic requirement of a democracy, and long term plans can only be implemented if they are dictated by an autocratic government then the problem is another one.
I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that a legislature randomly selected from the population is actually more likely to seek consensus and do long term planning than a legislature of power-hungry politicians.
> How are you going to work on long term plans with elections every 2 or 4 years?
Oh I completely agree. I'm not in favor of the current system, more dubious of randomly picking rulers. If you look at efficiency, authocratic countries are working much better than democratic ones at the moment.
> If you look at efficiency, authocratic countries are working much better than democratic ones at the moment.
Like Erdogan's Turkey where inflation is currently at 83%? Or Putin's Russia that can't even launch a successful military campaign against a supposedly weaker opponent? Or China who's unsuccessfully been trying to stamp out Covid for months now with brutal lockdowns harsher than anything that covid skepticists are talking about in the West? Or Venezuela? North Korea?
the same Russia that is surviving economic and military war from the entire west while Europe risks a political and economical collapse this winter, or
the Venezuela that survives despite inhumane sanctions imposed by the US, or
the China that lifted hundreds of millions from poverty and that can build a colossal sophisticated high speed transport system in mere years while the US can't even build a small high speed railway in California without gigantic cost increases and delays of years, or even
the Cuba that despite decades of inhumane sanctions from the US has one of the most advanced healthcare systems in the world?
Somehow a democracy like Switzerland seems quite capable of building sophisticated transport systems and bringing prosperity to people without first having had to kill tens of millions in a supposed "Great Leap Forward".
Switzerland is literally a dot in the map compared to China. The investment and effort required to build a high speed transport system in each country is not even comparable. We should also wonder more about where does Switzerland's prosperity come from, as they aided very undemocratic war criminals in hiding their wealth for a long time. Not very coherent for a democratic country.
Most other European countries also have excellent public transport networks. It's not just Switzerland.
It's certainly true that China has done a tremendous job developing their country, but it seems that just how much they really developed it is partially based on lies. They've exaggerated their economic growth for years, again because it's an autocracy and nobody dares to present anything less than the best economic growth figures. I saw an estimate recently that the Chinese economy is probably 60% smaller than they claim, and the same is true for many dictatorships.
Because that is a feature of all autocracies: they can't afford to admit failure and therefore always present a more rosy picture than reality. It's why propaganda and control of the media is so important to them; they can't afford independent voices reporting what's really going on.
> They've exaggerated their economic growth for years, again because it's an autocracy and nobody dares to present anything less than the best economic growth figures. I saw an estimate recently that the Chinese economy is probably 60% smaller than they claim, and the same is true for many dictatorships.
Source? This just sounds like more of the propaganda you're spreading in this thread, accompanied by no factual evidence. And why should we trust your "estimate" over what a government representing a bilion people says?
If you are referring to local officials falsifying data[0] then the government wasn't behind it and actually punished it.
Then we have comparisons with the "night lights" data that show that recent economic data from China actually makes sense[1]:
"However, while the level of Chinese GDP may remain overstated, both the Li index and estimates from the night-lights data suggest that the recent growth rate numbers for Chinese official data are more reliable."
Also, it's gonna be hard to fake an entire high speed railway, am I right?
> again because it's an autocracy and nobody dares to present anything less than the best economic growth figures
This is just knee-jerk ignorance coupled with western presumption of superiority. Go study how the political system works in China, you'll find out people have much more agency over many things than we have in the West.
> This just sounds like more of the propaganda you're spreading in this thread, accompanied by no factual evidence.
Just check the video, it's all explained there. It's based on serious research. Of course hard independent data is hard to get from China, but they compare with many different countries, and the conclusions are fairly plausible.
> And why should we trust your "estimate" over what a government representing a bilion people says?
It's not my estimate, and that government has a strong interest in presenting a more rosy picture than reality.
> If you are referring to local officials falsifying data[0] then the government wasn't behind it and actually punished it.
That's not what I was referring to, but it could be related. Unfortunately that article doesn't say in which direction the data was falsified.
However, it does say:
>> There has long been widespread global scepticism about the reliability of Chinese data, especially as the government has sought to ease market expectations of a deepening slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.
> Then we have comparisons with the "night lights" data that show that recent economic data from China actually makes sense[1]:
> "However, while the level of Chinese GDP may remain overstated, both the Li index and estimates from the night-lights data suggest that the recent growth rate numbers for Chinese official data are more reliable."
But also:
>> This sizable gap suggests cumulative Chinese growth over the years could be overstated by as much as 65 percent.
More recent numbers are more reliable than those from before 1994, but still not great.
> Go study how the political system works in China, you'll find out people have much more agency over many things than we have in the West.
Switzerland is but one country, but so is China. To claim that authorianism is "more efficient" based on one single example is not a very strong argument (and even there - while I won't deny that China is very efficient in some respects, it's also hard to deny that it is and has been doing poorly in many other respects).
As for Switzerland's moral failings (you could also cite WW2 and Nazi gold, and a couple others), they are well-known, but so are China's (Maoism, Tibet, Tiananmen, Uyghur internment camps, and so on).
> the same Russia that is surviving economic and military war from the entire west while Europe risks a political and economical collapse this winter,
It's not a war "from the entire west". The war is from Russia. They started a war that they can't finish, but even before the war, Russia hasn't been doing great, whereas all their former vassal states that have changed to democratic systems have been doing very well. In fact, that's part of the reason for Putin's war: if Ukraine goes the same route, that would show more clearly to the Russian people how badly Putin's system is failing, and they might demand the same for Russia.
In fact, part of the reason that Russia is performing so badly in this war, is Russia's autocracy. Many officials who are supposed to inform Putin or perform certain military roles, are doing so not with the goal of doing the best possible job, but with the goal of not angering Putin. Because he can break them. So they lie about any bad news, which has lead Putin to start a bad war based on faulty information, with an army that's poorly lead.
I'm not interested in wasting time over the trite debate of who started first. It's irrelevant. Put it how you want, the entire west is at war with Russia, and they are holding much better than we'd like to admit.
> Put it how you want, the entire west is at war with Russia, and they are holding much better than we'd like to admit.
You are framing it wrong. The west is not at war with Russia, Russia is at war with the west (via Ukraine). The west didn't start the war and saying that it doesn't matter who started it by calling the discussion trite is, well, itself trite because you're just seemingly trying to avoid the difficult point that the war was in fact started by Russia.
And sure, Russia hasn't collapsed, but I don't think anyone expected Russia to collapse 8 months later and in reality they really aren't doing well. If they were doing well they wouldn't have needed to call a conscription and put policies in place to prevent bank runs.
> I'm not interested in wasting time over the trite debate of who started first. It's irrelevant. Put it how you want, the entire west is at war with Russia, and they are holding much better than we'd like to admit.
Im interested in how not being able to even equip your own soldiers with modern body armour, weapons and even socks is 'holding better than we'd like to admit'.
See how you have to twist every fact in order to preserve your worldview?
First of all, who started it is not irrelevant; it's the entire reason for this war. Only Russia wants this war, and the only reason it's still going on is because Putin doesn't want to lose face. Because admitting he failed, would be admitting weakness and would weaken his position, which is something a strongman like him can't afford. But he could end the war any time he wants to.
Secondly, the entire west is quite explicitly not at war with Russia. The entire west is explicitly staying out of the war in order to prevent a war with Russia, because they don't want to escalate the war. Putin is only painting it as a war with the west to the Russian people in order to justify his own failure. If the west had entered the war, Zelensky would have his no-fly zone and a lot more. Once NATO enters the war, there won't be much left of the Russian military positions in Ukraine, and Putin knows this very well. But he needs this lie in order to not look weak to his own people.
The fact you believe Putin's propaganda suggests you listen too much to Russian state media.
Yes and no. No, the entire west is not kinetically at war with Russia. But yes, the west is supplying Ukraine with hardware, training, intel, cyber, and financial (at least). It's not just Russia vs Ukraine, it's Russia against Ukraine plus as much as the west can do without going kinetic.
So, yes, Russia started this war, and the moral blame is on Russia. But when Russia says it's at war with the whole west, there is an element of truth in their position.
> Yes and no. No, the entire west is not kinetically at war with Russia. But yes, the west is supplying Ukraine with hardware, training, intel, cyber, and financial (at least). It's not just Russia vs Ukraine, it's Russia against Ukraine plus as much as the west can do without going kinetic.
Its mostly second rate western gear though, there's no to minimal western EW, theres no wester MBT's, theres no western aviation. Whilst the west has provided a lot this is no where near the actual military force of any modern western country.
It's all the west is willing to give away for free.
I don't know if you've paid attention at all, but there's not the usual US stealth bombers and fighters, F35s, F22s, F117s, that tend to dominate US conflicts attacking any Russian positions. There's no NATO troops fighting in Ukraine (except a handful on a volunteer basis, but not as part of NATO units). There's no NATO subs sinking the entire Russian Black Sea fleet, which they could easily do. There's no Abrams, Leopard and Challenger tanks attacking Russian positions.
Ukraine has received a lot of artillery, as well as old Soviet material, but that's really it. If NATO were to actually get involved in this war, it would be over very soon. But NATO is trying very hard to stay out of it and just giving Ukraine the means to defend itself.
> Well then second rate gear must be all the west has?
Second rate gear that the west is trying to get rid of is what is being supplied, in part because its nearly as easy as mothballing and a lot of it just happens to cross over with what Ukraine needs.
Also by definition the second rate gear may not even be in production anymore which would obviously make, acquiring more of it difficult.
Theres no western fighters, EW, tanks or even large drones.
Even with some of the good gear that is provided (M270 / HIMARS) they aren't even providing ATACMS or other longe range missiles (such as PrSm, or ER GLMRS).
> The fact you believe Putin's propaganda suggests you listen too much to Russian state media.
Oh please, where? Can't access it in the "freedom of speech" bastion that is Europe! Do you have some link?
I only get NATO propaganda, and tons of it, on every media. I have no intention of being dragged by propagandists like you into a old trite and pointless discussion.
Also, and it's clearly shows you're a propagandist (conscious of it or not), the discussion wasn't about who started the war, but about the efficiency of autocracies. Put any European country in the spot Russia's in, they would collapse in weeks.
But no, you had to hijack it and shift the topic on Ukraine. Enough of it, nobody really cares, same way as nobody cares about Yemen or Syria.
It's all a big circus and people like you willingly joined to take the part of the clowns.
> Put any European country in the spot Russia's in, they would collapse in weeks.
No European country would ever be in the spot Russia's in, because they wouldn't start such a pointless war of conquest for some autocrat's pride. They used to back in the 19th century, because that's when many of them were still autocracies.
Russia is the only remaining colonial power in Europe, and one of the few remaining dictatorships, and its performance is not exactly a compelling argument. Russia is the problem. Autocracies are not efficient. They are unbelievably wasteful on several levels. Not only are the Russian government and military inefficient, their goals are also wasteful: we're seeing entire countries destroyed, thousands of people killed, billions wasted on weapons, billions more in houses and infrastructure destroyed, because of one autocrat.
You say you don't care about the Ukraine war topic, but you keep fueling it nonetheless.
I agree it's beside the point. The point is that - except possibly China and a select few others (Singapore, UAE, etc.) - most autocratic countries are not doing well (almost all countries ranked high on the HDI are democracies for example).
You blaming the West for it (regardless of whether that's justified or not), doesn't change that empirical fact.
It’s misleading because they seem to function better but in the long term they always have significant systemic issues due to the political system that are either nonexistent or minimized in a more democratic society.
> If an autocratic country isn't doing well, how would you know? Who would loudly say anything?
Protests and rebellions happen all the time, no matter how heavily autocratic a country is. You see this everywhere in the world, look at Iran where protesters are shot but keep protesting. Hell, just look at history, look at how much lives have been sacrificed on the altar of revolution.
I don't believe that any autocracy could suppress discontent enough for the rest of the world to not know, if widely spread.
It doesn't. Sortition is more like random sampling of the overall population. The assumption is that those being sampled are already "qualified," since Athenian citizens only make up the top 10% of the population. And, anybody who gets picked usually has some kind of qualifying process after the lottery. Additionally, it is typically used for large bodies (like members of a legislature) rather than a single office (like a President.) This limits the damage any one single individual can make.
I don't think the ancient Greeks believe in "Long Term Planning" in the way we believe it today. For that, you would have to believe in the "future" and "progress".
It's an interesting idea, but I think the more important part is ensuring that the candidates are qualified. Of course whoever decides on who's qualified or not will have a lot of power over the process. There needs to be some sort of objective measure to determine that, and that's going to be hard, and constantly subject to attempts to allow or ban popular controversial candidates.
Personally I've been thinking if maybe it would be a good idea if everybody could both vote for someone, and against someone else. That way, the most controversial candidates would never be able to win. Athens had a slightly harsher system where people would vote to banish anyone who was deemed to have become too powerful.
On the other hand, if the system is too moderating, it could become too conservative and it might become impossible to change the system once it's on a certain course; any popular newcomer who wants to address certain problems in the system would immediately be blocked by everybody who benefits from those problems.
I feel this could work if the "random rulers" would only work as administrators, legally required to follow a long term political plan that has been defined democratically with the population. I believe in both the future and progress, so a long term plan is required to me. Look at China and what they're accomplishing with their 2035 plan. I whish my country's politicians could think at least 15 years in the future when they legislate.
Interesting point. One possible solution might be to replace the parliament gradually. Rather then having an election every four years, you might replace one member of parliament with a randomly choosen citizen every week.
> Brazil needs better candidates. A healthier political system where those better candidates rise to the top.
Yes. I think one of the causes of the problem is the fact all the top level positions are appointed by the winning politicians. I have no doubt they purchase support from each other that way.
Definitely the better choice to preserve the Amazon- hopefully the international community takes this opportunity to pursue programs to pay Brazil to conserve it before the next Bolsonaro.
Paying to conserve the Amazon is just blackmailing yourself. Every year you're going to have to keep paying otherwise "oh no, they'll cut down the Amazon". Then once it's been going on a while, they'll start demanding more, or "we'll cut down the Amazon, and you don't want that, do you?" Unless Brazil develops some intrinsic motivation, then it is at risk. So the solution is to make the Amazon so compelling that Brazil wants to keep it.
That is true. But it's cheaper to blackmail yourself while being safe to research the forest looking for new drugs and chemicals than it is to open the intelectual properties that could benefit the Brazilian industries in preserving the forest I guess.
I don't know, Brazil under 1st Lula term grew from increasing PRC commodities demand. Even anti-PRC Bolsonaro had to give away to pro-PRC trade industrial pressure. Reality is Brazil is one of the few geopolitical actors that can provide PRC with soy/beef/petro/iron currently provided by western bloc which PRC wants to reduce dependency on. That means more extraction from Brazil.
Parent comment is partially correct [0] (deforestation was higher under lula but lower under dilma), though it leaves out important context that the rate of deforestation fell precipitously during lula’s term, and rose during bolsonaro’s tenure.
Durante o governo Lula a Amazônia era completamente ignorada, ficava nas mãos de garimpeiros e madeireiros. A mídia brasileira é sustentada pelo governo, como esse atual(Bolsonaro) não dava dinheiro eles usavam qualquer coisa para falar mal.
Nossas leis(brasileiras) de controle ambiental são mais rígidas que as da Europa atualmente, em parte graças ao governo atual.
Though it doesn't explicitly say so in the guidelines, HN is an English-language site. Even if English is not your best language, most of us read bad English better than we read good Portuguese.
What is this obsession with the Amazon? There are far more important things to worry about here. This is a profoundly unequal and violent country. We don't have universal basic sanitation. Right now it's descending into chaos, people are already protesting the election of this socialist by closing down major roads. It looks like Lula supporters are going to meet them head on in the streets and it seems like they are armed, ironically. All this is happening right now and uncomfortably close to my home.
Many of us believe we are in the early days of a synthetic biology revolution which could be as big as the computer revolution. Incidentally, by changing how we think about data and its tendancy to proliferate, this would probably be a good thing for opinions on copyright law you've expressed elsewhere.
And in that context the Amazon represents a treasure of potentially valuable genetics. It's really hard to quantify how valuable because the industry's not there yet, but it feels like a sunken pirate ship we can't quite salvage with the current state of the art, but have a collective interest in seeing remain where it is. Poor sanitation, endemic inequality and political strife are familiar problems. In that respect Brazil gets mentally filed somewhere between Haiti and the US, and the cost-benefit-analysis of fixing these problems feels straightforward. The cost-benefit-analysis of paying people not to farm the Amazon is not straightforward, we have no idea what the upside would be. So we imagine it's very high, but with no way to monetize that treasure today we can't find the funding... so we obsess.
Is there a reason why many of these left/right progressive/reactionary votes are so close to 50:50? This election, the US presidential election, the Brexit vote. It seems really peculiar.
Possible reasons I could think about:
* People get angry on some kind of 1-1 basis. If there's a certain amount of anger on one side that generates a reaction on the other side, which generates a reaction on the first side and so on.
* We're at a time in history where views are changing and we just happen to be in a period at a 50:50 cross-over.
* Selection bias: We only pay attention to close run-offs and ignore the normal ones.
Parties adjust policies/messaging in response to polling, so balancing the tradeoffs ends up close to the cutoff? That doesn't really work for brexit as much though.
If Brexit was extremely popular it wouldn’t be news or even interesting, it would just be obvious. Lots of things end up passing in a landslide but nobody cares.
Of course the same is true for the US. Or for most countries, really. But somehow appointing leaders based on popularity and a willingness to work to attain power, does not seem to produce a lot of candidates immune to corruption or other forms of power hunger.