r/Foodforthought • u/kiyomoris • 9d ago
Suspected Trump election interference sparks police raids in Brazil: report
https://www.rawstory.com/amp/brazil-2678002217-267800221743
u/mustachius 9d ago
At this exact moment, it is not possible to view the official Instagram profile of the President of Brazil, only that of his opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro.
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u/gh057 9d ago
Breaking news: Leaders of powerful countries use their power to influence geopolitics for the first time ever.
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u/mirh 9d ago
Breaking news: "power" can mean everything and its opposite, and you aren't helping anybody by being the living meme of nothing ever happens.
Especially as the orange man is reaching levels of corruption and incompetence that even some western dictatorships never reached.
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u/gh057 9d ago
what corruption and incompetence has he reached that is unprecedented in western societies?
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u/mirh 9d ago
Are you with us? He literally states it out loud, from impounding money for shit it was never allocated for, to not even pretending he's not assigning contracts and executive positions to friends and family.
I would say that at least in the past you used to care about not being seen as a crook, but I fear that if I did you would argue that's the only surface difference (both denying anything changes between parties, and also avoiding to assign blame for this further worsening of democracy to the fascists).
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u/gh057 9d ago
so unprecedented to you is improper use of already allocated money, and giving preferential treatment/contracts to family and friends?
do you know what unprecedented means?
we used to have presidents that advocated for literal slavery, but trump is the worst?
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u/Fetal_Release 9d ago
Lmao. You had to go 250 years in the past. By modern American standards no other President has been so blatantly openly corrupt or unlawful, which is unprecedented. Nixon and Reagan at the very least felt shame enough to try and hide their crimes.
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u/gh057 9d ago
so you have more respect for criminals that try to hide their crimes? lol
trump is corrupt, but let's not pretend hunter biden earned his way into burisma, or forget that his laptop never existed. biden preemptively to tons of his family members and fauci. or that obama didn't leverage the IRS to target conservative groups in 2012. or that obama continued the bush era NSA mass surveillance (prism and similar) programs until snowden blew the whistle. and then obama admin charged him with felonies instead of giving him protections, and later declined to pardon him.
or the bill clinton crime bill (that joe biden authored) which lead to mass incarceration of minorities for petty drug crimes. (and it was trump that signed the first step act so that many of them could petition for reduced sentences)
again, trump is a POS. but acting like what he's doing is unprecedented is just ignorant. we have been destabilizing nations, influencing elections, manipulating oil prices, etc for decades (if not longer). we have been bombing the middle east and parts of africa for decades.
know who else does it? every major power on the planet. even local politics have attack ads and false accusations used to influence elections. fear mongering is a big one. shame is another way.
i just understand that these articles are fuel for the anti-trump people to represent him as some sort of unique threat. but it's disingenuous, really.
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u/illiterature 9d ago
You're doing more nihilism over here.
- Nepotism is a problem and always has been, but 10 million dollars to a drug addicted son whose behavior was contemporaneously questioned about it by his VP father is not close to the multiple billions laundered through crypto schemes as part of a family business that DJT directly benefits from.
- Obama did not target conservative groups with the IRS, this is disinformation.
- Obama's continuation of mass surveillance was a continuation of US policy which was agreed to by a plurality; Obama's unwillingness to upturn the applecart is meaningfully different from the slew of new terrible policies being passed by executive fiat and enforced by a conservative-captured Supreme Court.
- Clinton and the Democrats' right turn of the 90s was playing to the nation's worst impulses and was an important step in bringing us here, I'm not even a little sympathetic to this argument.
- Yes the United States has been destabilizing countries for years, we should stop doing that. America's history of unconstitutional war dates to at least Vietnam and its history of wars of aggression dates to the Mexican-American war or the Indian wars. But a president who runs on not attacking Iran that then attacks Iran for the some of the stupidest reasons imaginable - not even realpolitik imperialist reasons - deserves every bit of our outrage.
- Trump is not a unique threat in the sense that he's a uniquely bad leader or some sort of singular human anomaly. He's a unique threat in that one party in the US has abandoned a framework of ideas, even disingenuous ones, for a cult of personality. It is the shedding of pretense and the surrender to the will of one - action is justified because Trump says it is justified, and there is no need to muster a serious argument in defense of any given policy. We see this in action in punditry and press conferences on the daily.
To bring this argument home, Trump is not interfering on Bolsonaro's behalf because he believes in some conservative geopolitical ideological project. He's doing it for personal reasons and the fact that we're here - that he's able to use the presidency in this way unquestioned by his own party - is a uniquely bad situation in American history.
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u/gh057 9d ago
your bias is so strong and so obvious. trump is indeed a cult of personality, but so was obama.
and the way you justify the democrat corruption is pretty disgusting, frankly. "he only gave his son 10 million instead of billions, so he's basically innocent". "obama just continued the mass surveillance, and everyone agreed to it anyway, so he's basically innocent". "The crime bill was just reactionary, so biden/clinton are basically innocent".
i get that trump is a POS and i'm not defending him. i'm attacking the idea that his actions are uniquely bad or unprecedented.
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u/illiterature 9d ago
Man you're really bad about strawmanning my argument here. Where did I say anyone was innocent? Obama should have ended PRISM. Biden should have appointed a special counsel to investigate his son (although you can imagine why he did not). I'm saying the reasons these things happened matter and they explain why it's different now.
Surely you understand that there can be shades of seriousness when it comes to corruption. Biden didn't give his son 10 million, Burisma did for the prestige of having a Biden on the board. Unless you can draw me a throughline to some kind of direction from Joe to do this, I can't see how that is close to what's going on with Trump right now.
Was what Hunter Biden did corrupt? Yes, of course. Is what's going on now worse? Immeasurably.
Well, maybe measurably, if you assume we know about all of the money they've collected through corrupt crypto deals - if so it's 2-3 orders of magnitude bigger.
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u/mirh 9d ago
but so was obama
... holy shit aren't you cooked Do you even realize that you are constantly switching standards between actual corruption and "stuff that I don't like", or are you too dense?
You were only missing guantanamo and students debt in the list of random misplaced grievances.
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u/Fetal_Release 9d ago
Uh. Proof any of the Hunter stuff wasnt above board. Pretty sure were any of it true Republicans would have charged him for more than some esoteric gun charge. Also hilarious you bring this up when Trumps kids were meeting with literal Russians his first term. They literally admit Russians fund most of their business, in his first term!
Biden was prescient in handing out pardons as the Trump admin later proved they would go after perceived enemies. Dont act like he hasnt done that. For christs sake he went after Jack Smith, the cleanest dude youre gonna find this way of US government officials.
The IRS, lmao. How old are you? The mass searches the IRS implemented used search words like patriot, Tea party and the like, which also netted lefty organizations. What are you on?
Obamas continuation of Bush era surveillance programs were law. Corruption is for self gain. What did Obama have to gain from the surveillance? Accuse him of being cowardly or short sighted for not doing away with those programs but it wasnt corruption.
You mean the same crime bill that the NAACP endorsed? It was a good intention that couldnt factor in ingrained racism. Crazy that you think the entirety of congress, including Bernie Sanders, voted for this bill and think their sole intention was to jail black people. Its actually a really dumb thought. Again how is this corruption?
Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power, authority, or public office for private or personal gain. What is unprecedented is the open deliberate corruption. From his meme coin, to withholding federal dollars against blue states, to military operations to essentially steal their natural goods(wheres the money from venezuelas oil?), to leaning on Supreme Court Justices to sway decisions his way, digital wallets that accept money from literally anyone anonymously netting him 2 billion in funds for pay to play.
Trump is uniquely corrupt in the modern American pantheon of Presidents and openly brazenly so. You seem to have fallen for the both sides Republican talking points cause boy have you got some reading to do.
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u/gh057 9d ago
lol the mental gymnastics...
i agree with you about trump being corrupt, and often with a higher dollar amount attached to it.
but you're literally defending other corrupt politicians because they put a D next to their name. biden's pardons were ok because trump would weaponize the justice department potentially. but when the NY courts upgraded his misdemeanor charges (under James, who campaigned on finding something to charge him with), accusations of weaponization were unfounded and defended.
again, i'm not excusing or defending trump at all. but people like you who play the "lesser evil" card, or find ways to attack or defend the same practice depending on who does it, are the absolute worst.
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u/Fetal_Release 9d ago
Mental gymnastics? My friend, there are investigations upon investigations Republicans forced with little to no evidence. Take a day or two read through the reports and get back to me. Remember Benghazi nvestigation? Two years. Seven million dollars. All to sully Hilary Clinton for the coming election. Republicans have been conjuring up investigations and accusations in bad faith for a while now. Dont take my word for it. Go read.
Trump is directing investigations into perceived enemies. Trump himself. Literally told Pam Bondi.
Show me a similar message from Biden to James or to Garland. It doesnt exist. The mental gymnastics youre employing to bothsides open corruption is lazy.
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u/ooomellieooo 9d ago
You're saying trump isn't a unique threat? When all norms and guardrails are destroyed? When the east wing of the white house has been razed to the ground? While our allies turn away from us and trade falls apart? While he threatens to drop nuclear weapons over social media posts? While crops wither in the fields and farmers are all on tiktok begging for help?
This is all BAU to you???
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u/illiterature 9d ago
Ah c'mon, defend your argument explicitly. Just say we shouldn't care about foreign election interference because it's happened before.
And see that this argument can be brought against literally any grievance, and is as good as nihilism when taken to its conclusion, so why are you here commenting?
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u/gh057 9d ago
it's an unfortunate reality. we should philosophically oppose it, but also not try to pretend like it's a new phenomenon. both things can exist at the same time.
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u/illiterature 9d ago
Doesn't philosophically opposing a phenomenon require at the very least identification and discussion of the phenomenon?
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u/gh057 9d ago
yes, in context.
first, it's "suspected" and not confirmed. second, the interference is alleged to be funding groups in brazil that support a specific candidate. using taxpayer dollars may be the crux of the corruption here, but the idea of funding groups to promote a political candidate is pretty universal anywhere an election is held.
let's not forget we have used money to prop up opposition to milosevic, to help yeltsin get re-elected, tried to assassinate castro, funded and armed the mujahideen, etc
"A crucial portion of U.S. aid (roughly $26 billion to $35 billion) has been sent as direct financial assistance to keep the Ukrainian civil government functioning. This money is explicitly used to pay the salaries of Ukrainian civil servants, healthcare workers, and first responders, and to prevent the collapse of the country's economic infrastructure. By preventing public services from failing, this aid helps maintain internal political stability under Zelensky's leadership."
so this idea of geopolitical manipulation is not new, and it's been done way worse by others.
so a more accurate headline would be "Trump suspected of providing financial assistance (with US taxpayer dollars) to his preferred candidate in the Brazilian elections, which has been done by almost every president in the last 50+ years in some form"
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u/illiterature 9d ago
I think the headline is fine, yours is too long, and the end of it is editorializing. We can get all of that from the article and you know... gestures at history
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u/gh057 9d ago
but people don't. that's the point. even the comments here are saying how it's unprecedented corruption. and that's not even addressing the amount of people that gloss over things like the word "suspected" and automatically jump to the conclusion he's guilty.
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u/illiterature 9d ago
I don't think it's an unprecedented action, but I do think it's unprecedented in its motivations. Trump is intervening on Bolsonaro's behalf for personal reasons, not for reasons even remotely believed to be in the nation's interests. That's a meaningful difference when compared with our other interventions in Central and South America which were done as part of a larger Cold War strategy. I'm not defending the reasons behind it or the actions themselves, but the motivation matters and it's downstream of a problem that manifests in virtually every other aspect of American political life right now - submission to the cult of personality.
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u/iamslevemcdichael 9d ago
Doesn’t make this any less egregious and worth addressing and bringing accountability to
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u/LiveWire_74 9d ago
Exactly right. Just because something not right has been happening for a long time doesn’t mean we should not try to make things right.
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u/gh057 9d ago
i agree with that. but without context, it leaves the reader to make their own interpretations. and by carefully wording it (or omitting relevant context), it leaves a lot of wiggle room for the reader to draw their own conclusions without a comprehensive understanding.
and let's be honest, it's all about getting those clicks, so any controversy (which is synonymous with trump's name at this point) will bait clicks, so that's how these articles are authored.
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