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I don't like evaluating an entire supreme court based on 1 case. I'm not a 1 issue voter. Often you find people banging on 1 issue actually care about other thi
by Herring 1y ago
I don't like evaluating an entire supreme court based on 1 case. I'm not a 1 issue voter. Often you find people banging on 1 issue actually care about other things the court ruled on, like covid lockdowns, or they really want to discriminate against women and gays, or they're Bolsonaro supporters, etc but they won't say that directly.
Overall I think the court is running a high-risk high-reward strategy. They're trying to act as the ultimate guardian of democracy, by adopting methods that strain democratic principles. Is it smart? Hard to say, depends how it goes 10-50 years from now. Again, I'd prefer if all this was correctly formalized and institutionalized. Get your legislature on board.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago... It's not just this one case. I wish it was just one case. Evaluate their "fake news" inquisition which started all the way back in 2019. You don't even have to take it from me. Here, a detailed comment from another HN user which I saved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382 Grab any number of cases where one of the judges favored their own wife's client. They judge the cases brought by the law offices of their families. Conflicts of interest everywhere you look. Scrutinize the countless times they ignored basic due process rules and violated the constitution. They punish family members for alleged individual crimes: censoring you is not enough, they gotta preemptively censor your family as well. Even though it's literally spelled out in the constitution that both of those things are illegal. Recent leaked files demonstrate that they formed an illegal intelligence gathering task force whose purpose was to identify the political positions of defendants. They based decisions to arrest on constitutionally protected political speech. People have been arrested for "demonstrating an aversion to Lula and the worker's party". People right here on HN told me it was insane to believe one could be arrested over online comments but here we are. I asked actual freaking lawyers what their thought about these decisions. They shook their heads. "Instead of applying the law, the supreme court decided to legislate", one told me. "Judges = gods", said another. It's completely fucked up. It's much bigger than Bolsonaro. It doesn't even matter who's president since it's these guys who have the real power. Back then the left also used to complain about their censorship! Now that they're censoring the right they're heroes? Absolute nonsense. > Overall I think the court is running a high-risk high-reward strategy. It's not their place to run any strategy. They do not represent us. They were not voted into office. They have lifetime mandates for god's sake. Their purpose is to apply the law as written by our actual representatives. Any attempt to deviate from that role is to usurp the power of our elected representatives. Any so called "activism" and "creative interpretation" is tyranny and evidence of a dictatorship of the judiciary. The current situation is they could write whatever the hell they wanted on a piece of paper and it would become law. The police does their bidding. They just randomly decided that social media companies are liable for user content despite actual laws that say the exact opposite. They raised taxes. > adopting methods that strain democratic principles Their methods completely obliterate democratic principles. They are unelected judge-kings engaging in monocratic decision making and partidarian censorship. Please stop talking about democracy, just hearing that word makes me sick. > Again, I'd prefer if all this was correctly formalized and institutionalized. I'd prefer the application of Magnitsky sanctions to every single one of them and everyone even remotely connected with them. Trump is quite literally doing God's work here and my only complaint is he hasn't gone far enough yet.
- Herring 1y agoYeah in US history nobody cried about "liberty" and "freedom" more than the slave owners. Were they right? Technically yes. Do I care? Nah. Not really. Good luck and have fun!
- matheusmoreira 1y agoAre you actually comparing me to hypocrite slave owners who talk about freedom while restraining their fellow man? And you think these judges are the righteous resistance against this?
- Herring 1y agoTrump is the party of descendants of those slave owners. If he's on your side, you really should rethink your position. He usually loves autocrats, what do you think is going on?
- matheusmoreira 1y agoI think he's the only person on the planet who's doing something about the abuses of the brazilian supreme court. I will forever be grateful to him for it. The reasons why he's doing it are irrelevant. Maybe he actually likes Bolsonaro that much and wants to save him from the same "lawfare" he suffered. Maybe he wants to leverage the situation into economic advantage by covertly advancing the interests of american corporations. Maybe both. Maybe something else entirely that's escaped my vision. It doesn't matter because things are just too fucked up to care about anything other than the defeat of the judge-kings.