• 0 Posts
  • 244 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • Hezbollah can throw any excuse they want, but the reality is that they attacked first. They should have known the limits of their military strength and shown restraint against a much more powerful nation. Too bad they were lacking in common sense. Now all their top leaders are eliminated, half their missile launchers are destroyed, and if a ground incursion by Israel occurs, they’re basically finished.

    And if Israel ends up occupying the south of Lebanon, it won’t be the first time they’ve done so. In the year 2000, they voluntarily withdrew from the south of Lebanon after defeating Hezbollah, in the hopes that they’d stop attacking Israeli territory. Looks like being the nice guy with a terrorist group that’s determined to destroy them at any cost is not a very good idea.








  • Actually, Bolsonaro is a fraud. He only acts in the self-interest of himself and his immediate family members. As he’s being threatened by the dictator, with some speculation that he could be arrested at any time, he’s keeping silent during this whole X blocking incident so he doesn’t suffer retaliation from the dictator.

    As for Musk, I know that, like every businessman, he has his financial interests. I surely would if I were one, and I would not blame anyone for doing the same, as nobody gets rich spending money unwisely. However, I can recognize that his passion for free speech is genuine; otherwise, he wouldn’t have bought Twitter for $44 billion. Under the most reasonable analysis, this was a bad deal in terms of return on investment. Maybe it’ll bear fruit in the long term, but it’s a big, nebulous maybe. So as he decided to buy it anyway, he surely did so on principle, not for money.






  • Are we seeing the same thing? I’ve never seen as much activity from Brazilian users on X as now.

    I guess all this block did was teach the Brazilian population how to use VPNs. And most are just ignoring the threat of a US$ 8.900,00 daily fine from the dictator because, by its very nature, VPNs keep them anonymous. X is on bad terms with the dictator, so it will not expose anyone’s IP addresses even if requested by him. None of the major VPN companies are based in Brazil, and it would be hard to ask them for IP addresses too.

    Even some major news outlets are still posting on X, saying that they’re posting through “international staff members.” Some politicians and notable personalities are starting to use the same excuse: “someone out of the country is posting for me.” This block is looking pretty ineffective, and it’s serving as an educational incentive for people to start using VPNs. If any more social media platforms are also blocked, people are already well prepared to circumvent the blocks.

    So, what has the dictator gained from this temper tantrum? He forced X out of the country, leaving no local offices to receive his orders, even the reasonable ones like those related to normal (non-political persecution) crimes. And he strengthened the protests that were already scheduled for September 7th (Brazil Independence Day), which will turn into an event mainly asking for his impeachment.


  • No minimally serious country destroys the legal separation between different companies so brazenly. If it is for such a thing to happen, it’s only on exceptional circunstances, and only after the a full lawsuit concludes its natural course, giving all affected parties the right to offer their defenses. Anything far from these basic civilizational principles is no more than a whim from a dictator’s inflated ego.



  • Fighting crime is desirable, but within the limits of the law:

    Brazilian Internet Civil Rights Framework

    Art. 19. In order to ensure freedom of expression and prevent censorship, the internet application provider may only be held civilly liable for damages resulting from content generated by third parties if, after a specific court order, it fails to take steps to, within the scope and technical limits of its service and within the specified timeframe, make the content identified as infringing unavailable, except for legal provisions to the contrary.

    § 1º The court order referred to in the caput must contain, under penalty of nullity, clear and specific identification of the content identified as infringing, which allows the unequivocal location of the material.

    Note that the legislator took the trouble to say right at the beginning that the intention is to prevent censorship. Few laws are written in such detail as to reinforce their guiding principles in the middle of the provisions. If the legislator went to this trouble, it is because the intention of avoiding censorship is fundamental to this law. If judges are ignoring the law, they’re ignoring the will of the people.


  • This freeze of Starlink’s financial assets is so absurd, that even Brazilian Speaker of the House (a big son of a bitch himself) criticized it. He made a comparison to another recent national scandal about retailer Americanas defrauding it’s accounting to hide the fact it is in deep debt. Its owner fled to Europe to avoid persecution. Under the same argument, they’d be authorized to freeze Ambev’s (beverage company which is partially owned by Americanas’ owner) assets to cover for Americanas’ debt.

    The insane judge that ordered the asset freeze is so blinded by his vendetta against Elon Musk that he does dumb shit like this, which is putting a big stain on Brazil credibility to foreign investors. If a single insane judge can do this on his whim, who would want to invest in Brazil?



  • The Brazilian Internet Law (Marco Civil da Internet) says that the content to be removed via judicial intervention must be specified. It does not allow the blocking of entire accounts from a social media platform. In fact, Brazilian Constitution forbids this kind of censorship (Censura Prévia). The decision to block X nationwide is based on a series of decisions that blatantly violate Brazilian Law.

    By the way, the dictator-judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Starlink’s asset freeze before Starlink wouldn’t comply with X blocking.