In Brazil, it's not a crime to say what you think. But it is a crime to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime. This is especially serious if you are influential on social media and your statement, even if false, is likely to generate dangerous reactions from your followers.

We lived in an actual military dictatorship until 1985. A dictatorship that engaged in real hard prior-censorship. Music, news, and pieces of art were all subject to a military collegiate body that would decide what could and could not be published.

What's going on now is very, very different. Brazil, like most European countries, thinks that if you commit a crime through what you say, you can and must be held accountable. No one is being prevented from expressing their opinion.

Freedom from speech isn’t the “right” of the people to express opinions. Freedom of Speech is a an explicit restriction on what the government is allowed to do after you speak, and more precisely, in response to unpopular speech.

Anyway, Brazil has freedom of speech in the very sense you've mentioned here. Unpopular speech is not a crime.

> What's going on now is very, very different.

In the months leading up to the elections, the judges censored a documentary about Bolsonaro before it was published. A priori censorship.

We are living in the exact same kind of authoritharian regime our parents lived through. The difference is our parents knew they were being oppressed.

1) The producers of the documentary in question are a politically active group and well-known supporters of Bolsonaro.

1.1) They are also known for producing (and earning money from) content that spread misinformation, conspiracy theories and the like.

1.2) They always could, and they still can, produce and disseminate this kind of morally questionable content without being disturbed. They were never subject to a priori censorship, for we are not living under a dictatorship anymore.

2) In 2018, during the presidential campaign, Bolsonaro was the victim of an attack (stabbed). The suspect was arrested red-handed.

2.2) After that, a thorough investigation was carried out by the federal police (our FBI, so to speak) that concluded the suspect had mental issues and acted alone. There was no one "behind" the attempt.

2.3) Bolsonaro's personal lawyers, who followed the investigations, saw no elements to question nor to require further investigation, and in the criminal sphere, that's the end of the story.

2.4) However, as we could all expect, Bolsonaro politically exploited his attack. Up to this day, he or his supporters occasionally claim or imply that "this politician" or "that organization" is behind the attack he suffered. None of these claims can be grounded in the investigations carried out by the Police, and he never presents any evidence, not even circumstantial ones, for any of these claims. Long story short: he won the 2018 elections.

2.5) However, in 2022 there was no ongoing investigation anymore. Therefore, if he wants to point the finger towards someone, he has to do it by ignoring the conclusion of the investigations.

3) In 2022, while trying to get reelected, 6 *days* (not months) before the elections, the producers of the documentary in question (whose name is "Who ordered Bolsonaro to be killed?"), tried to release it online. The obvious goal was to exploit the attack politically in order to help Bolsonaro's reelection.

3.1) During the elections, as in many European countries, Brazil has specific rules designed to prevent economic abuse and fight disinformation that could cause a harmful imbalance in the electoral contest. You can't, for instance, accuse your adversary (or people from his campaign) of committing a crime without evidence (specially if the crime in question is something like ordering a murder) a few days before the election in the hope that people in shock vote for you. However, political supporters and campaigners use lots of well-known techniques to try to bypass these rules. One of them is to present Campaign information in the form of a "documentary".

4) That's why the electoral authorities preempted the producers from releasing the material 6 days before the election day as they planned. It could be released freely the day after the elections. And it was. It is there for anyone to see since then. That's what happened. Nothing like the heavy prior-censorship to which every journalist, artist and citizen was subjected to during our military dictatorship a few decades ago.

I hope this helps those interested in understanding Brazil's recent turmoil.

I couldn't care less what the goal of the documentary was. I witnessed these judges censor it and as far as I'm concerned censorship equals dictatorship. It's that simple. If they did it with political motivations, that only makes it worse.

And I don't care for the judge-king's censorship of "misinformation" either. I'll judge for myself, thank you very much. I don't need his "help" to determine right from wrong. He's been doing this ministry of truth thing for around half a decade already and it's seriously tiresome. This is the same guy who censored accusations of communism against Lula, a self-admitted socialist. Censored the people who associated him with his dictator friends, and then we had to watch him roll out the red carpet for the Venezuelan one.

But the Brazilian constitution does care for both these things.

That's why it requires special care during the elections in order to prevent abuse. What's at stake is a principle you find in every liberal thinker since modern times, and that grounds most (if not all) democratic constitutions worldwide: If there's no fire in a crowded theater, one can't shout "Congressman X started a fire! Run!", incite people to leave in a hurry and later claim that "I was just manifesting my political opinion, people were free to ignore and judge the situation for themselves", as if you were not expecting their panic and the risks associated with crowds in panic. You're responsible for whatever ensues, and if this kind of behavior can be preempted, it must be. Or so thinks pretty much every democratic country in the world, not just Brazil.

If we judge by the rule you mention, this would be censorship. That would mean there's probably no country in the world that could be considered democratic (even the so called "absolute" US freedom of speech is something of a myth, for there are lots of decisions from the US Supreme Court that would be deemed "dictatorial" according to the criterion you present here).

Bottom line is: Brazil lives under the rule of a democratic constitution built after much fight against real dictatorship and real censorship, not the rule suggested by you here (which, again, absolutely no country in the world lives by). You're free to disagree with the basic liberal and democratic principles grounding the Brazilian constitution, but whenever you and the constitution disagree, bear in mind that it is the constitution's point of view that's going to prevail.

> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited.

That's what it literally says. It doesn't say you can maybe kinda sorta censor people if your cause is righteous enough. It doesn't say you can do it if it's fake news. So where is this disagreement you speak of? I can't seem to find it. I'm no lawyer but I've asked my lawyer friends and they couldn't find it either.

And nobody is shouting fire in a crowded theater. It's just some obviously biased documentary. Hilariously, that means it's of an artistic, ideological and political nature, all three of the categories explicitly singled out by the constitution. Whatever distorted logic they used to censor it must have been hierarchically inferior to the constitution, and therefore invalid.

I'm using the same logic that allowed US citizens to publish and export cryptography software by printing source code in a book. This is technology was literally export controlled for national security reasons. Cryptography has the power to defeat these judges, it has the power to defeat armies. There are few things in existence that are more subversive than democratized access to cryptography. And they used free speech to publish the source code. Their fight is a big reason why you're browsing this site with HTTPS enabled today. So don't compare distorted brazilian notions of free speech to american ones. They sure as hell have a lot more free speech than we do.

Brazilian law does not consider preempting someone from shouting "fire" in a crowded theater a case of censorship. AFAIK, no democratic country would, for all recognize that freedom implies responsibility. Same goes for those trying to shout, without any evidence, "B's adversaries ordered his killing!" (or something similar) 6 days before the election day, even though they are trying to make it look like a "documentary".

> I'm using the same logic that allowed US citizens to publish and export cryptography software by printing source code in a book. This is technology was literally export controlled for national security reasons. (...) And they used free speech to publish the source code (...). So don't compare distorted brazilian notions of free speech to american ones. They sure as hell have a lot more free speech than we do.

Beautiful story. You should tell Snowden.

I'd me more accepting of your argument if the documentary had been published and censoted after the fact. It wasn't. They preemptively censored a work.

What you have, thus, is a scenario in which 1) the producers were already being investigated for electoral misconduct; 2) they were known supporters of B; and 3) they were boosting and promoting B.'s campaign material in social media disguised as "news" and "documentaries" (which is a way of trying to dodge the accusation of economic power abuse). The case in question is just an acute one.

And even in the face of all this, authorities didn't outright ban the release, but delayed it until after the election (about a week), effectively preventing misuse without imposing censorship.

> Evidence and hearings involving their lawyers were conducted, and that's where and how the judges became aware of everything.

Still a priori censorship. Lawyers obviously could not have watched it either. Or are you claiming the promotions and producer claims were themselves outright defamatory?

> There were clear references to the elections and to people involved in the elections.

Not a problem. As far as I'm concerned the political nature of the work should enhance the protections afforded to the work, not justify its censorship.

> abusing their economic power

That's the same arbitrary nonsense they slapped Google with when it added a link about the proposed "fake news" law to their website. Literally guilty because the message was too effective and they didn't like it.

That's a law which was rejected by our elected representatives and which these judges rammed down our throats anyway via monocratic electoral court "resolutions", by the way.

> 1) the producers were already being investigated for electoral misconduct

By an obviously partial judge. I don't accept that for a second.

> 2) they were known supporters of B; and 3) they were boosting and promoting B.'s campaign material in social media disguised as "news" and "documentaries"

Not a problem. Just citizens exercising their right to free expression.

> authorities didn't outright ban the release, but delayed it until after the election (about a week), effectively preventing misuse without imposing censorship

They censored the work until it didn't matter anymore. Temporary censorship is still censorship.

The constitution and I don't disagree. The constitution says any and all political censorship is prohibited. I cited the exact part of the constitution that backs up my world view.

You have yet to tell me which part of the constitution backs up yours. No brazilian here on HN has ever shown me the part of the constitution that says supreme court judges can censor people if what their political speech is "fake" or "anti-democratic" or whatever.

If it exists, then just show it to me. I can be convinced but nobody's ever shown that to me. Best I ever got was anti-nazism laws which are hierarchically inferior to the constitution. Without such a reference, I'll continue to believe that these judges are above the law and I'm going to make inferences and draw conclusions from that fact.

The difficulty in seeing "where is it in the constitution" is likely related to viewing Law texts as a kind of source-code in which everything must be carefully defined and every possibility must be explicitly stated. No constitution work that way. No one could. It may contain some very specific rules, but in general it is an articulation of principles that must be observed by legislators while formulating laws. One of such principles is that our freedoms cannot be detached from our responsibility (i.e. the possibility of being held responsible). Law works that way because one can't predict in advance every kind of situation.

For instance, if I ask you whether you agree that right to life is a fundamental value, you would probably say yes. I assume the same goes for freedom of religion. But what would you say of a father that refuses to do blood transfusion in his newborn son for religious reasons, thus leading to its death? As responsible for the newborn, is he entitled to act this way? Which value should prevail? Freedom of the father to act according to one's religion or the right of the newborn to life? Distinct communities can give distinct answers (e.g. ancient Japanese would perhaps pick honor over life). The point is not whether there's a clear answer or not. The point is that you can't expect to find an "if-then" statement explicit about it in the Constitution or even in laws in general, and that you can't expect that whatever works in this specific situation is fully generalizable to every other situation in which these two values conflict. Applying the law requires interpretation of both the text and the situation in question, and there's a whole discipline dedicated to how that's done (hermeneutics).

The same goes for values such as freedom of speech. Given its intrinsic connection to responsibility, its application is always bounded by the law, and the application of the law is always bounded by the specific situation at stake. That's why we can and should tolerate people believing weird things that go against our best scientific knowledge (juridically, no one cares if you believe that the earth is flat), because we can easily keep them under check using arguments, rational discourse, etc. However, if it becomes part of something illegal like attributing a crime to someone else without evidence (e.g you're using your influence over flat-earthers and their typical suspicion of NASA, to make them believe that the NASA is supporting your political adversary in an attempt to fraud the elections), you must and will be held accountable, (that why it's not really about "judges deciding what's fake"; rather, it is about how one is (ab)using a given discourse.

The constitution is the constitution. If other laws contradict the constitution in any way whatsoever, they are wrong and invalid. I don't even want to hear the argument, they are unconstitutional and they should be literally deleted from the law books. And they would have been, if these judges were doing their jobs correctly.

Whatever this notion of "abuse of economic power" is, it certainly cannot be used to justify political censorship because the constitution obviously prevails over some lesser law. The constitution is interpreted in the context of itself only. Other laws don't matter at all. So unless this "economic abuse" thing was inserted into the constitution, it is not an argument for violating the constitution. If it had been, surely you would have pointed it out by now.

And there is no "unforeseen cases" problem here either. The writers of the constitution clearly foresaw that people would try to censor political speech, and they made it a point to prohibit any and all forms for such censorship. I guess they couldn't have foreseen supreme court judges making a mockery of what they wrote.

Of all the examples you could have cited, you chose the jehovah’s witness blood transfusion nonsense. I'm a medic, that's not even the worst legal shit show we deal with on a regular basis. Words can hardly describe the problems that these judges cause with their nonsense decisions which basically boil down to "we'll go with what our feelings tell us on a case by case basis". Lawyers even have an euphemism for this idiotic situation: "juridic insecurity". My goddamn lawyer has an entire team of professionals at her disposal and all of them cannot figure out what in the fuck the judges expect us to do in that situation. If you respect their autonomy, the judges condemn you for murdering the patient. If you don't, the judges condemn you for disrespecting the patient's autonomy. In both cases they basically enslave you with some nonsense lifetime payment punishment. Those are supposedly unconstitutional too since Brazil has no lifetime punishments to begin with, but this is Brazil, a land that's apparently devoid of logic. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that you don't want to be in the ER when the jehovah's witnesses show up. You don't want the liability. Working the ER is already seen as a "reassigned to Antartica" tier punishment, and it's only gonna get worse over time. These ass pulls have consequences and they will be felt by our society.

By this point it's more than clear that we're never going to agree with each other.

No. I'm making the Law-101 claim that, according to the Brazilian constitution (as well as most democratic constitutions worldwide) you can't rely on freedom of speech to bypass the law. Pretty much everything you said up to this point relies on this fundamental misunderstanding.

> The constitution is the constitution. If other laws contradict the constitution in any way whatsoever, they are wrong and invalid. I don't even want to hear the argument, they are unconstitutional and they should be literally deleted from the law books. And they would have been, if these judges were doing their jobs correctly.

There's a hierarchy within the constitution itself. Fundamental principles of the constitution come "before" constitutional norms. Indeed, constitutional norms must be interpreted under the lights of the constitutional principles, and any interpretation that doesn't follow them is unconstitutional. Isonomy (equality), for instance, is a principle. The right to speak freely is a norm. That means, among other things, that your right to speak freely can't be used to harm isonomy. Abuse of economic power is a way to to harm isonomy within elections (for you can use money to boost your reach, effectively "silencing" your adversaries by flooding your discourse everywhere, making the voter's decision to be a function of your money rather than about your political ideas and proposals).

Therefore, your whole reasoning about what should be the case is pretty much backwards, for you're implying that norms should come before principles.

Whenever one wants to think of oneself as capable of teaching judges (or any other professional), how to do their jobs, it is always a good idea to study how things actually work.

> By this point it's more than clear that we're never going to agree with each other.

Indeed, for I agree with the Brazilian constitution and you don't.

Plenty of lesser laws expand quite a bit on that concept until it becomes material isonomy. Treating the unequal unequally. They all boil down to things that reduce inequality such as affirmative action. Those are irrelevant to this discussion. TSE's notions of "economic power abuse" no doubt fall in this category.

https://isps.yale.edu/research/publications/isps24-07

Honestly, what did you expect? "Pretty please turn up for the trial and not kill anyone else while we're waiting?" Every country allows this if the crime was severe enough or the person is likely to be dangerous to others in the meantime. Usually there's a threshold to do that, but it's going to happen.

In Brazil there's what we call "preventive custody". If you're caught committing a crime, and if there is a risk that you could jeopardize the investigations (by eliminating evidence, threatening or influencing witnesses, etc.), then you are held in custody until the investigation is concluded.

I don't believe you would find something very different going on in any other democratic country.

Many (most?) democratic countries impose strict limits on how long you can be held without being charged. In the US, for example, you can only be held for 72 hours — at which point the police must either charge you or release you.

Even in situations where you could be held in jail, there's a tendency to let you go unless it is impossible to prevent you from jeopardizing the investigations by any other means. For instance, if the only real worry is that you flee to another country, you might have your passport confiscated rather than being held in jail. Likewise, if the worry is that you can use your influence to make others do stuff for you (stuff that jeopardizes the ongoing investigations, I mean), then you might remain at home, under surveillance, and so on.

bunch of sensitive cis white males

Look at their leaders Trump and Musk, both sensitive men-children with the emotional regulation of a toddler.

Free speech for all, until you say "incel" or question why Trump, a serial philanderer, cheater, and failed businessman, is earning the Evangelical Christians' approval.

Probably not, I can imagine that right now, some of them are on the streets, shouting racist/homophobic slurs. Or simping to yet severely deluded/unhinged take of Elon/Trump on Twitter.

The pun here is that the self proclaimed free speech absolutionist Musk bans people from saying 'cis', but not for 'sieg heil'-ing or even incitements for violence (he himself participates in that).

What's funny here is the double standard and hypocrisy, which deserve our utmost ridicule.

It's the same ridicule one can expect when they claim to be a genius businessman and then buy a company and tank its value and lose half the advertisers. Musk comes to mind here as well.

Also, what's supposed to happen to criminals before they are on trial? Normally they get jailed.

I am not familiar with Bolsonaro's movement, but censoring people under the guise of protecting democracy doesn't seem very democratic to me? At the very least, you have to admit here that there is a slippery slope where a good intentioned government or justice system could progressively get further away from these good intentions, and start using its power merely for the preservation of it?

It seems to me that censoring ideas that seem dangerous is far more dangerous than trying to correct them, and that a very high level of free speech is one of the most powerful antidotes against this slippery slope.

That wasn't what happened.

It's not like we had a left leaning judge favouring a left leaning party, it's Moraes, a conservative technician fight an extreme right antidemocratic movement.

The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself. Because to expect a democratic government never to act undemocratically is to expect it to be replaced by a fascists regimen given time.

You want democracy to be prevented from acting out on its passions by a balance of powers.

IN the brazil case, the state powers, and the brazilian voters are not preventing 1 judge from acting out his passion "to protect democracy". Ergo, this is the problem. The mob is granting him this power, when in fact it should be voters, via congress or even the office of the president which brings this loose cannon of a judge back within the powers given by the constitution of brazil.

In this case, brazil is behaving like a raw democracy. It is true majority rule. Laws apply as the majority sees fit.

Hope you don't end in the minority.

The mob rule here is Bolsonaro’s, and in no functioning democracy are multiple Powers (legislative, governmental and judicial) collected into 1 hand.

If a judge goes out of control it’s another judge’s task to regain it, or an independent Judicial court.

However, whether the judiciary in Brazil is actually overstepping or properly fulfilling its role is a matter of interpretation and context.

The broader and very much core question is whether the actions taken by the judiciary, such as censoring social media or jailing individuals without trial, are justified under the circumstances or if they themselves undermine democratic principles. This is the same basic issue I made my other comment about in your series of replies.

This is a nuanced issue that can be debated from different perspectives and much more of a subjective question, and it’s important to separate the issues.

It’s interesting how it’s all playing out again.

You can rest your case if you'd like but it's a loser.

Democracies got rid of those things that still exist today in undemocratic societies.

I would say it should not do that essentially ever? If so, what kinds of undemocractic behavior would be allowed and what isn't? You probably have a certain kind of behavior in mind that you want to allow when you pose this question. If so, why not legislate that behavior using the democratic process?

It seems to me that the argument that protecting democracy by undemocratic means is okay, is essentially the same argument that a benevolent dictator is superior to democracy. Both arguments give special power to a certain group or individual that others do not have, which can be used to go outside the system if things don't work out. First order this argument is plausible. But second order effects (there is no such thing as categorically benevolent, and characters change, especially when in power) will always ruin it.

Democracy is messy. And when the world changes, there are challenges that democracy has to overcome. We're in the middle of a few of those changes right now. But the mess in by design. I believe that if we give up on a very high democratic standard things will turn out for the worse. My one addition here would be that in my view democracy is necessary but not suffient to get to a prosperous society. It needs to go hand in hand with a common value system where there's fellowship between citizens and genuine respect for individual right and the law. If not, there's a risk that the majority will only cater to itself.

In a democracy, policy has the ability to arrest perpetrators by force if they break the law. The key thing is that the law the perpetrators are breaking was approved democratically, and that there is due process by an independent judiciary. Democracy does not mean that there never is any violence.

Thus it takes longer to slide into an undemocratic state, and checks and bounds are slower to change than a simple election. In essence, laws passed in such democracies becomes the will of the people over decades, not one election.

If a democracy has a will to move towards undemocratic rule, and it takes decades to get there, then really the people have failed themselves.

After the general election the amendment has to be voted on by both houses of Parliament again and win by a super-majority. Thus it is technically possible to disband Parliament and return all power back to the King within a year without the courts having any power to stop it.

So in case Parliament suddenly decides we should go back to an absolute monarchy, then we're only one general election away from completely dismantling democracy.

Just to be clear, this is in no way intended as an endorsement of rioting.

Many protests may turn into riots, that does not suddenly mean that the people involved in the violence are no longer expressing an opinion.

Moreover, if you mess up the messy cases then you should try to do better but society will probably survive, whereas if you censor in the cases that are pure speech or don't punish the actions that are pure violence, you're the baddies.

Riots are characteristically very much a messy case, because not everyone joins a protest with the same intentions. Some will join a protest intending a purely peaceful display of dissent, while others seek violent confrontation.

On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence. Sometimes there are even saboteurs within the protest that try and lure out violent incidents in an attempt to get the protest to be declared a riot.

Finding the right balance between allowing demonstrations and keeping the peace and order is one of the most challenging aspects of democracy.

The people intending a purely peaceful display of dissent don't smash or set fire to anything, even if the people standing next to them do. Now, the court may have some trouble here with evidence because you then have to distinguish these people from one another, but that has become much less of a problem in modern days when everybody has a cellphone camera and police can be issued bodycams.

Either way this is a question of fact rather than a question of law.

> On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence.

Declaring something a riot shouldn't mean anything. If a specific person is breaking windows and looting they're breaking the law. If they're just standing there holding signs they're not.

It shouldn't be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

Have you ever met a cop before? The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork, and the whole court system is stacked against the arrested unless they can afford non-court-appointed lawyers to pave their way. Guilt-by-association doesn't magically disappear from the psyche when handing someone power and a gun, rather it gets easier to apply indiscriminately because it's very hard for people to oppose the one with authority over their freedom and state-sanctioned license to be violent.

Here's just one example out of literally countless examples of police brutality directed towards individual peaceful protestors: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/08/29/nypd-cop-pepper-spray-blm...

Ironically (but unsurprisingly), this example of wanton and indiscriminate police brutality was the police response to protests against wanton and indiscriminate police brutality.

Actually probably not. Judging from them holding their hands up, their protest are probably motivated by the "hands up, don't shoot" hoax, based on a false claim that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot by the policeman. In reality, Michael Brown was not a victim of the indiscriminate police brutality, but rather repeatedly attacked a police officer and tried to relieve him of his weapon (no doubt out of mere peaceful curiosity). The whole "hands up" narrative has been invented later and distributed by the media, and had no basis in fact. One may notice here that while police brutality is indeed an existing and reprehensible thing, a lot of cases of "indiscriminate police brutality" touted by the press, after proper examination, turn out not to be so.

This is indeed a problem in which the police are, essentially, breaking the law. The question is, how do we fix it?

The intuitive answer would be to impose penalties on cops who arrest people without cause. Which sounds great, until you consider the incentive it gives them to commit perjury and falsify evidence in order to avoid the penalty. So what else you got?

One possibility is to have better cops. Right now we need a lot of cops who are willing to get into shootouts with gangs and wrestle amped up meth cooks to the ground, which attracts a certain type of person to the profession, and not really the ones we might want. If we were to end the War on Drugs and thereby put all the drug dealers out of business because they can't compete with Walmart's pharmacy, the people you attract to a profession that is no longer so steeped in violence might be of a different kind.

A protester, by staying in a protest that turns into a riot, may also turn into a rioter.

Usually, a protester would understand that there's law breaking and leave the scene. Staying put, he'd become a rioter.

If you are standing around watching a friend engage in a streetfight, and someone ends up dead, now you are at a murder scene, and if you stick around doing nothing, don't be surprised if you are arrested as a suspect

Only if that individual protestor personally commits acts of violence. Obviously they are not a rioter simply by being near other rioters. That's an illegal concept known as collective guilt or collective punishment.

> Usually, a protester would understand that there's law breaking and leave the scene. Staying put, he'd become a rioter.

That would mean the government can outlaw protests by simply committing a single act of violence during one (or falsely claiming there was violence), declaring it a riot, and calling all the protestors, rioters. Obviously illegal.

> If you are standing around watching a friend engage in a streetfight, and someone ends up dead, now you are at a murder scene, and if you stick around doing nothing, don't be surprised if you are arrested as a suspect

Few would be surprised by police doing illegal things. That doesn't mean the illegal things are legal.

In the same vein, if you record police brutality in the United States, don't be surprised if you are threatened or targeted by police. If you insult a police officer to their face in the United States, don't be surprised if you get assaulted, arrested, or shot and killed. Does that make such police behavior legal or righteous?

That could happen, but in pretty much all known riots that is not what happened. Instead, massive groups of determined violent people have committed many acts of violence, arson, destruction and assault, leading to millions upon millions of dollars of damages and hurting a lot of people. Of course, each rioter would claim there were just present there and its some other people who did that, but it is almost universally a blatant lie. People come to this kind of events with certain intentions, and these intentions are not "mostly peaceful" - they are politically motivated violence. Their claims are just lies aimed at avoiding responsibility. It may be successful in strictly legal sense - that's why terrorist organizations like antifa insist on wearing similar clothing and masking up - to make attributing the violence to a specific person harder - but let's not be fooled by it. All people in that group have the common violent aims, regardless of whether it's possible to legally prove which part of violence were committed by which particular person.

> That doesn't mean the illegal things are legal.

That doesn't only apply to the police. It also applies to the rioters. If you are a participant of the event aimed at political violence as part of the group that explicitly declares political violence as its tactics, then don't whine about "collective guilt".

Suffice it to say, if there are eyewitnesses or video evidence of a given individual committing an act of violence, then they might have. If there are not, then they are assumed to have not done so, and are not rioters, as I said above.

This goes even if someone such as yourself claims that everyone came there with violent intentions (a blatant lie).

This goes even in instances where law enforcement initiated violence against someone and claimed there was a riot, which is a common occurrence.

> All people in that group have the common violent aim

Another spurious claim. No matter how much you make it, it doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make the illegal claims of "collective guilt" true or moral.

> don't whine about "collective guilt

Please be respectful on this forum. Pointing out that the concept of "collective guilt" is illegal, fullstop, is not "whining". Not liking what someone says here is not an excuse for attacking them.

That's bullshit. You are trying to purposely confuse the rules of criminal court (which are necessarily very strict about standards of proof) and common sense understanding of events. If a group of people clad in black with baseball bats, improvised shields and other implements sets buildings and cars on fire, attacks people and breaks windows, it is obvious they are violent rioters, even if when they remove their masks, I can't point to a video evidence of a specific individual breaking a specific window. One of them broke it, and even if I don't know which one exactly, I know they all participated in a riot and thus are violent rioters. Yes, their tactics makes it harder to prosecute them for their violence - that's why they are using it, they are not stupid - but that doesn't change the facts about their violence as readily observed.

> This goes even if someone such as yourself claims that everyone came there with violent intentions (a blatant lie).

There's enough easily discoverable social networking resources that advertise, coordinate and support various "direct actions" and other violent activities. They do not hide their intents, their purposes and their methods. While they prefer to operate in shadows - and violently attack journalists who try to report on them - they are not exactly a secret to anyone who is willing to look. You claiming it is a "blatant lie" just emphasizes how far you are willing to go to not look at what lies in plain sight.

> No matter how much you make it, it doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make the illegal claims of "collective guilt" true or moral.

You behave like just saying words "collective guilt" somehow makes any claim you attach to it correct. This is bullshit. First of all, "collective guilt" is very much legal - there's RICO statute which is pretty much embodiment of this concept, and there are multiple laws which criminalize affiliation or even cooperation with a terrorist organization, even if the person does not commit any terrorist acts by themselves. You could argue it is immoral, for whatever warped definition of moral you use, but certainly claiming it is illegal is just ignorant. Of course, legally speaking, a person can be convicted for participating in a criminal enterprise.

But, of course, the case I am discussing is even simpler. While one can argue that somebody who is merely driving a terrorist around may or may not be guilty in the acts of terror, the rioters I am discussing voluntarily come to the pre-announced place where violent acts are about to happen, voluntarily dress in the same way as those who perform those violent acts, voluntarily stay around while these acts are happening, voluntarily act in concert and cooperation with those who perform the violence, and do it repeatedly, for many instances. Claiming that they are random innocent bystanders does not pass the sniff test.

> Please be respectful on this forum.

I am not sure how you decided that you are the person who defines what "this forum" is and what is allowed here, but I don't think you earned this right by anything. Especially when boldly proclaiming complete hogwash at the same time. Even if what you said were true, you still wouldn't earn the condescending tone you adopt, but certainly it sounds even less earned when what you proclaim is easily seen to be completely false.

Why does this matter?

> The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself.

Democracy is not an being. When you act democratically, that's democracy. When you act undemocratically, that's against democracy. Acting democratically is when the justification for your rule comes from the desires of the people ruled. When you believe it's fine to silence (or officially harass, imprison or kill) people whose desires don't conform with yours, you are actively working against democracy.

The biggest scam of the centrist blob is convincing some (comfortable, middle-class) people that they're insiders who own democracy, so all of their anti-democratic behavior becomes democratic by definition.

For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is able to expand its powers, but it can always be overridden by the legislative branch by design. The executive branch doesn’t even have to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings. And the legislative and executive can be replaced by citizens.

By design, the US Constitution basically has an infinite loop of checks and balances - there is always another institution that can override one institution without breaking any rules.

That said, the buck does stop, but it stops at the people. The problem is that people do need to be well-informed and vigilant to for the this scheme to work out, but to be honest, that is not a problem specifically with democracy — it’s just a general societal problem.

There have been recent Supreme Court rulings that many would say are disagreeable, but we’re not doing anything about it because a lot of citizens either support it or just don’t care. But if citizens did, we could easily undo those decisions using the rules set out by the Constitution. So the problem really lies more with the people than the system.

Now I’m not familiar with the Brazilian political system — who checks the Supreme Court there? I just know the US Constitution had a LOT of people working on it and they covered a lot of bases.

In theory, the Senate can check the Supreme Court by impeaching the judges, the problem is that the Supreme Court checks all the senators and congressmen, by being the only one who can prosecute them.

9 out of 11 Supreme Court judges were indicated by the Labor Party (Lula and Dilma) in the last 20 years, some closely related to Lula. They can do anything they want, without worrying about elections. The president of Brazil doesn't matter anymore, at least for the next couple of presidential elections.

* if a senator commits a crime it can rest assured that the process will moth in a drawer until prescription as long as the senator doesn't go against the supreme court or its ministers personal interests.

* the supreme court (STF) also controls the electoral tribunal (TSE).

A lot of this is more fragile than you want it to be though.

For example, the US Constitution was set out to have a weak federal government and have the state governments handle all the things that didn't specifically need to be federal, and one of the biggest checks and balances for this was that federal legislation had to pass the Senate and federal Senators were elected by the state legislatures. The Senate was the states' representation in the federal government, that's what it was for. Then the 17th amendment took it away, which was immediately followed by a persistent massive expansion of federal power, because the thing that was meant to act as a check on it got deleted.

Sometimes the checks and balances need more checks and balances.

That is wildly outside democratic norms IMO. Not just the arrest of individual employers, but the threat of which coming directly from a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

To answer this question you first have to define what democracy is.

A decent definition is probably something like, a system of government in which policy is decided by having a public debate in which anyone can participate and then, after everyone has had a chance to say their piece, policy is chosen through voting.

From this you immediately run into potential problems. For example, suppose the majority is quite fond of the current leadership and wants to put them in power forever and stop holding elections. Is that democratic? It's the policy people are voting for. And yet, it would be the end of democracy, so the answer has to be no.

From this we discern that in order to have a democracy, there have to be certain things the government is never allowed to do, even if they're what the majority wants. You can't cancel elections, censor the opposition, throw people in jail without due process, etc. These types of things are inherently undemocratic, regardless of what the majority wants, because if the government does them you no longer have a democracy.

It should go without saying that the government can never do these things to "save democracy" because they are the very things that destroy it.

See the Italian constitutional court as an example

They emphasize (in good faith I might add) that certain actions, such as censoring the opposition, canceling elections, or jailing people without due process, are inherently undemocratic and would destroy democracy if allowed, regardless of the intentions behind them. The argument is that democracy must adhere to its own rules and principles, even in the face of threats, because violating those principles in the name of protecting democracy ultimately leads to its destruction.

You can’t “protect Democracy” by violating its core tenants.

I feel like your arguments are more whataboutism than substantive.

It might lose but it will have to put up a fight, legal or physical.

Let's suppose you're right. We have a "democracy" that holds elections and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, but there is no freedom of speech. Whoever is in office controls all the media, all private communications are monitored and lèse-majesté is a crime. Everything is a crime, in fact, and the law relies entirely on selective enforcement. By election day, opposition candidates with any chance of winning are always blood relatives of the incumbent. Deranged candidates with no chance of winning are ignored but independent candidates who start to gain any support are immediately executed for treason. Every year there is an election in which the people can choose between the incumbent, the incumbent's favored offspring (if any) and a selection of paste-eating loons who think Hitler is still alive, campaign on raising energy costs to help Hitler accelerate human extinction and never get any votes.

That isn't a democracy, it's the fig leaf dictatorships wear when they want to lie about being a democracy.

Those tends to be based on variants of democracy being "institutions that enable a peaceful transfer of power". This usually includes the so called democratic freedoms, overseeing journalists, and a non-politicized judicial system.

Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty. Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

You don't offer an established definition, but you do list some things the government must not do, e.g. overseeing journalists, politicizing the judicial system. Those things could easily fall within GP's definition.

You can pretty clearly have a democracy without a peaceful transfer of power. Suppose the state of California had entered open revolt after the 2016 election and the rebellion had to be put down by the military. You could hardly have called that a peaceful transfer of power even if the end result was that people voted and the winner took office. And the reverse can also be true; some aging dictator undemocratically chooses a successor who comes into power without bloodshed.

Also, it is not the role of governments to oversee journalists, it is the role of journalists to oversee governments.

> Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty.

These things are not inherent requirements, they are the implements of tyranny. Notice that the US constitution doesn't have these exceptions written into it, they were read into it by authoritarians and cowards in times of weakness.

The day you find out if you have principles or just empty words is the day when following them is hard.

> Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

You can advocate whatever you want, you're just never allowed to actually do it.

Think about it. A system of checks and balances that can stop them from doing it even after they're already in power is the only thing that matters. If you have that, they can say whatever they want. If you don't have that, censorship doesn't help, because they can gain power under false pretenses (politicians lie) and your system isn't configured to stop them once they do. Indeed, a censorship apparatus would even make it worse, because now they're the ones deciding what gets censored.

Censorship is always the tool of the villain because lies and bad ideas can be openly refuted but the only solution to a ban on the truth is to defeat the ban.

I agree such a government is not acting democratically. However, it's better than the alternative. Don't we do democracy because it's usually good, and not for its own sake? Then if doing something nondemocratic is even better than doing something democratic, we should do the former.

The first thing every dictator and tyrannical government does is stop or subvert the elections. There's still elections in Russia and China and North Korea.

The candidate people voted for would enter office, but elected officials should not have the power to do the things Hitler did.

> The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Is that good or bad?

It's basically meaningless. If you ban the "Nazi party" and then someone comes and says they're a member of the Social Nationalists party which is totally different even though it shares a lot of the same policies, now you have to decide which policies are banned. And we're back to politicians are never allowed to censor their opponents etc.

... Uhuh.

These are supreme court judges who openly and publicly showboat about being the ones personally responsible for defeating Bolsonaro. They literally said things like "mission given, mission accomplished" after the election was over. I saw news where one of them said he was proud to be partidarian. They've also said that Lula being elected was due to decisions of the supreme court.

And you would have us believe they did not favor Lula in any way whatsoever.

Leaving aside all inaccuracies that are unavoidable in political situations: Philosophy spent quite some time thinking about this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/

The devil really is in the details.

Seems pretty “high” censorship to me.

Singapore constrains freedom quite substantially.

Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.

Deeper Analysis of Political Rights and Civil Liberties:

https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...

[0] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

I haven't visited North Korea either. That shouldn't stop anyone from opining on it.

actually, no I wouldn't, because when a Westerner goes to NK, he or she is strictly controlled as to what they can see. In particular, no citizen will talk unguardedly to you because of their intense fear of the police.

If you think that's not true, why don't you tell us about your trip there (you did take one, didn't you?)

You still haven't told us whether you've been there or not.

As for the Western picture of it: it comes largely from NK citizens who've escaped. Call it "propaganda" if you like, but if it were false then there would be a net inflow of people who are as hip to reality as you think you are. Is there?

South Koreans would be trying to move IN if you were correct; after all, they're closer than anyone and they speak the language.

[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/918997255

Just answer us this: is an NK citizen free to emigrate to some other country?

When the police storms your home (the wrong one at first, too) because you called a minister a dick on Twitter, that's not "high-freedom".

Not to say I know which this is, or a better way to balance things, but free speech absolutism over all other considerations is not always the right answer to protect free speech and democracy.

I think freedom of speech is kind of a bullshit concept at a philosophical level - I've become very blackpilled in that department - but at a legalistic level it's beyond the pale to me that someone could be imprisoned just for words barring very special circumstances.

The government should not be throwing people in prison for allegedly "spreading lies for personal or political gain" unless it already clearly falls under an existing crime (like fraud - getting someone to give you money under explicit false pretenses) or tort (like defamation - knowingly telling damaging falsehoods about someone else to harm them). Incitement to likely, imminent lawless action is also already covered.

Many people don't know that the Soviet constitution guaranteed freedom of speech[1] (Article 125[1]), provided it was "in conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system"

Same goes for other socialist governments: the People's Republic of China (Article 35[2]), the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Article 67[3]), the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany, Article 9[4]), and so on.

Of course, the reality was and is lengthy imprisonment for "free speech" against the government or ruling class.

"Free speech, except for [exceptions that are nearly infinite in scope]" is a key feature of socialist governments, as is justifying the imprisonment of dissidents and undesirables as "fighting anti-democratic forces" and "preventing the spread of misinformation".

Moreover, socialist governments are very clear that they are democracies; it's often in the name (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), and also frequently appears in speeches, official documents, etc.

Their commitment to "democracy" isn't just words-on-paper, either! Voting is usually either mandatory or "strongly encouraged", although you can only vote for a Party-approved candidate, and the outcome of elections is basically pre-determined.

[1] https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons04....

[2] http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/...

[3] https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Peoples_Repub...

[4] https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/33cc8de2-3c...

Try advocating for communism from the 20s-80s or for the rights of black people in the 50s/60s/into-70s.

Or say the wrong criticism in the early 2000s after 9/11. At best you get surveillance, at worst you’re dealing with FISA.

We have not had any changes to the constitution to further protect speech, either.

The US has certainly had its problems, like widespread racism and the red scare, sure, but this is all relative to how other countries respond to speech with legal action.

Literally all of those things did.

- Equal rights activism https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/feb/1

- Communism activism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_...

And don't even get me started on Snowden and Assange exposing the tremendous (war + civilian) crimes of the US government and being silenced and persecuted for it.

> The US, from a law standpoint, has had the strongest free speech protections of almost any country in history.

Absolutely false. It's not even in top 10.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

You must be joking. Venezuela is 7th in the free speech index of that ranking.

Furthermore, you have 4 EU countries in the ranking, all higher vs USA. Those 4 EU countries are subject to ECHR, which has ruled freedom of speech does not apply :

- to protect the religious feelings of others [1]

- to restrict content that was tasteless [2]

- to say outrageous things [3]

Yet, all 3 examples above are constitutionally protected in USA. This sort of thing makes it very difficult to take the rest of your commentary at face value.

[1] https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/otto-pr...

[2] https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/leroy-v...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perin%C3%A7ek_v._Switzerland

“Free speech” is so ambiguously defined in the US that it’s effectively meaningless.

The US has had over two centuries of ambiguously defined “free speech” rights at many different levels, any of which could be taken away depending on what state you’re in, what federal circuit you’re in, or if you’re lucky, the Supreme Court or Congress.

So why do you consider yourself free when you do not know what defines free speech?

Quite frankly, anyone tuned into history beyond the basics ought to recall that even the initial leaders of the country did not believe in free speech — Thomas Jefferson had quite illiberal views on what a free press entailed.

For a modern example, providing abortion assistance is not free speech in the state of Texas.

I don't understand this post. Censoring is when a government official issues orders to publishers requiring them not so publish things. Whatever else you're talking about here you're simply using as a rationalization for censorship.

You have to know that you're being dishonest when the subject is a judge ordering publishers to unpublish and silence people, and you immediately equivocate between that and "investigating," then accuse "the right" of trying to confuse "their crimes" and "free speech." You're literally doing that right now. You are somehow explaining away literal and explicit censorship orders (that no one is claiming don't exist) as "investigation" of "their crimes."

In everyday language, when we say "censorship", we only mean the bad kind of censorship. On Hacker News and other places that discuss these topics more in-depth, many use the term more academically, leading to a neverending stream of confusion in the replies every time without fail.

Similar story for the term "democracy", which has a large number of meanings depending on who you're talking to. In this tree there's again people arguing about which specific examples are considered democratic without having even agreed on a common definition of the term.

They’re literally using their freedom of speech. Not sure what else you would call it.

0. https://i.em.com.br/Fpd82XCP-00L-3N2yGZxALIPPqA=/820x0/smart...

It’s indeed tricky, but the sorting criteria is: once in power, would these people club me to death, or let go of power if they lost a free election?

Known for his critical rationalism and vehement opposition to authoritarianism, Popper would probably be spinning in his grave if he knew that his essay is cited as a token every time someone is persecuted for posting the wrong kind of tweet.

I don’t think Popper would be so naive to just limit intolerance to physical violence (which is already ruled out by law, so why bother).

The intolerance is against anything intolerant that if given enough power will stamp out (violently) Democracy itself.

One just needs to look at Putin’s Russia to understand what he meant.

Popper was completely in favor of free speech, and a completely open society, with no censorship except in the cases of actual violence:

"he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_popper#

That’s an interesting way of debating.

I have to admit I’m tempted to grief for your insult but it’s too much of a good day to waste it

How can you prove that you’re not a member of the “dumb masses” being fooled by the fake news?

On the case where Alexandre de Moraes is the victim, it should have been judged by a normal regional court, first by a judge and then by a panel of 3. In case it ever reaches his court, he should have sent it to somebody else (decided by a draw).

In no situation a court should be commanding a police investigation.

I don't personally agree with all of it.

For example: it is illegal to enact lockdowns without following a specific procedure. During pandemic the Supreme Court said health is more important than laws and gave an order/command to the executive branch to ignore the law and do lockdowns. The president at time complained and was immediately accused of being "genocidal" and "antidemocratic" for his criticism of this decision.

I find the notion of fighting extremism with more extremism dubious. The legitimacy of the government derives from the consent of the people. If the people voted for Bolsonaro and are not opposing his actions, the judiciary will not be able to stop the slide, their extreme actions only give him fuel.

To start, the fallacy here, is to assume there was indeed an "extremist anti-democratic movement led by Bolsonaro".

None.

There is no "anti-democratic" movement here. To be against democracy, you need to actually be living within a democracy. Unfortunately, Brazil is not a democracy. Brazil is a judiciary dictatorship.

These unelected judge-kings run this nation. They have been running it for years. They're basically gods here. Untouchable. Their powers have been expanding continuously. In the months leading up to the elections, it got to the point they started disregarding the brazilian constitution and engaging in blatant political censorship. And their power keeps expanding.

What's more anti-democratic than a bunch of unelected judges doing whatever they want? This is the real coup.

If Bolsonaro intended to do anything, it was in reaction to this sorry state of affairs, and I don't blame him for trying at all. I blame him for failing.

The solution is to bring some smarter people into your movement with better counterarguments. Often those counterarguments are going to have to include some minor concessions and soul searching. Maybe your side has gotten complacent and drifted in its beliefs away from the sensible. Maybe you're become equal but opposite to those you call awful.

I.e. produce new ideas that resonate better than theirs and they'll disappear like a fart in the wind.

In practice you can't maintain a viable situation with absolutes: absolute democracy doesn't work, absolute freedom of speech doesn't work. You need boundaries, and it also means intervening through alternative ways when your usual tools can't deal with a situation.

Bolsonaro is a straw man used by the extreme left which currently is in power to justify an institutional authoritarian escalation. And this escalation was happening long before Bolsonaro.