a brazillian reasons to support free speech
and why you need to be a one issue voter on rights
(i’m on vaca, so will not be in comments, this was already teed up when i left. enjoy.)
brazil has just turned off twitter/X and star link.
it’s difficult to even find content on this in the US media, so i wanted to share the brazillan good reasons you need to care about this.
in a truly telling outcome, the smart US media are ignoring this, but most US media outlets and celebrity fascism aficionados are favoring and even cheering for speech suppression. “musk needs to follow the law!” they say.
bullshit.
not even they believe this.
this is the nazis pretending they are shindler.
“legal” is not moral.
legal is not “right.”
legal is not even “acceptable” and can well be “intolerable.”
slavery was once the law of the land in the US. escaped slaves were criminals (and property). those who aided them were outlaws.
and as ever, the left cannot seem to rotate shapes or think by analogy.
here, let me help:
“you must shut down the underground railroad and follow US law!”
you guys still sure “you need to follow the law” is the hill you wanna die on? how about abortion or immigration laws?
no?
anyone?
bueller?
yeah…
in no small irony, some of the more even-handed coverage here comes from, wait for it, al jazeera. (yes, really)
like just about everywhere (including the US), telcom is a state granted privilege in brazil. when the state says jump, everybody jumps.
it’s a basic vulnerability in modern systems. and what would make them do this?
demands to censor, what else?
and as with the EU, the muskrat is having none of it and is happy to pick a fight. because a line must be drawn.
lula wants to make it sanctionable to “offend” brazilian politicians.
this is late state dictatorial rage.
Left-leaning President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who retook the presidency in 2022, defended the court order to suspend X.
“A lot of money does not allow you to disrespect Brazilian laws,” Lula said in a radio interview on Friday.
“Elon Musk is an American citizen, he is not a citizen of the world. He can’t offend presidents, congressmen, the Senate, or the Supreme Court. Who does he think he is?” he added.
who does he think he is?
he thinks he’s a free human with free speech you intolerable popinjay muppet of a totalitarian.
what makes you think you have some right not to be offended? who do you think YOU are?
any of this sound familiar?
Musk has been commended by conservative supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who say Lula’s government has silenced them.
Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election to Lula after peddling unsubstantiated claims that Brazil’s electronic voting machines are prone to fraud.
all over the globe, it’s the same discordant song.
in more proof that the world is a video game, this is supreme court judge alexandre de moraes. you seriously cannot make this up.
in case you think this cannot happen here:
it can. and it will if some people get their way.
this is from 2019. she’s speaking about trump getting yanked off social media while she and joe were amplified in their panoply of public health and public interest lies and laptop hiding.
private organizations making private choices is all well and good. any community should be able to set its own standards.
but this was not that. this was overt threats and staff embedding to control content “or else.” they argued it was “private companies doing private company things” but look how they feel about that now that twitter/X is owned by elon. different kettle of fishheads, huh? rumble, gab, parler, they go after all of them. but so long as you play ball and kowtow and slant, all good, enjoy your section 230 freedoms (as long as you only allow them to be exercised in a manner we find acceptable).
that is not a right, it’s a privilege.
and that is neither right nor moral.
it’s oppressive.
they forget whose rights these are and from whence they derive.
and this makes them monstrous.
based on swamp donkey track record in office of blatant lawfare, censorship, surveillance, shaping, manipulation, intimidation, and other twitter files shenanigans, make no mistake: kammy-whammy will be even worse than joe on this topic because she and her backers have no other defense. they will lean into the EU. they will serve up US companies to despots like lula.
the global censorship net is being set to close. and if the US falls, it will.
they absolutely hate free and open social media and agoras. they will find pretexts for misinformation and disinformation to take town truths they dislike and spread the lies they do. just like the last 4 years.
they cannot have “elections questioned” or “courts second guessed.”
they are too corrupt, too dishonest.
in all this, let’s not forget, they may actually try to sentence trump to prison during his presidential run for the political equivalent of jaywalking. biden sits in the oval after being deemed unfit to stand trial for mishandling classified docs because he’s far too many fries short of a happy meal, no one will even investigate his and hunter’s clear graft and outright influence peddling in ukraine and china, and trump is facing actual prison for misclassifying expenses.
small wonder they want media suppression.
(for the record, putting trump in the pokey will lead to a landslide win. the “letters from a birmingham jail” that will emerge will become a civil rights rallying cry of unimaginable intensity.)
facile fascism fears freedom.
and this is wrong.
a government should fear its citizens, not the citizens their government.
and we simply cannot take much more of this and survive as a society.
if you vote on one issue this election, vote on this: free speech is the cornerstone of free people.
and anyone who says otherwise cannot be allowed near power.
someone shared this with me. i cannot speak to the accuracy of all these claims some of which may be fanciful or hyperbolic, but i think the general gestalt is exactly correct.
there is a new tribe of active informationalists and analysts and they are simply crushing the propaganda sprogs.
we are too many, too motivated, too interested.
this upwelling cannot be contested or convinced or disputed. not by them.
and the magic trick of calling everyone “racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever” has ended and inverted into a shibboleth for “i have no argument.”
so they will seek to shut it down, shut us down.
it’s all they have.
your free speech is their existential threat.
and what that says about them should be more than self-evident.
you can have this:
or you can have this:
there is no middle ground.
LFG.
Great article as always gato. To your point about where rights come from:
Given that the government is going all in to use the scamdemic/Jan 6/elections/etc as an excuse to take full control of our lives, I think now would be a good time to revisit the actual contract we have with our government.
Here's the basic premise in the founding of the enlightenment model of the US: Rights were given to you by your creator, not by your government. Your government didn't give them to you so, they can't take them away. Furthermore the 9th amendment to the constitution makes these guarantees explicit. If any person in the government tries to take them away anyway, despite lacking any authority to do so, they are traitors to the citizens and must be treated as such.
A common misconception regarding the US government is that it is not the case that they start with total power and authority and the Constitution then subtracts from those powers. Under the Constitutional principle of Enumerated Powers and despite common wisdom, the government actually starts with zero power. Powers are then granted (Enumerated) by the constitution. This means that our natural rights such as the right to privacy or the right to free speech do not need to be explicitly granted to the populace - we have them by default. (The bill of rights is - quite literally - redundant and completely unnecessary.) What it does mean is that the government cannot violate those rights unless the ability to do so is explicitly granted by the Constitution - which in those cases it is not.
Just to be clear, our government has invalidated itself by abrogating its duties, for breaking and trampling all over every oath of office, for committing every crime we have a law for, and for subjugating us, meaning we do not have one and instead we have a bunch of criminals masquerading as our government.
Excerpt from https://tritorch.com/covenant/
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
- Yeats
I'm not "spiritual" by nature...but I do think ordinary people are no longer paying heed to the old social and political leaders. It seems there's an awakening where many are listeneing to new movement leaders instead.
Seems like we're getting close to an "uprising"....but normal people don't seem to know where to direct these "emotions"
Perhaps we're "put" here to help?