i don’t think the intention was ever to affect the church, but rather to take a voice or institution that people grew up in, and felt condemned by, and lampoon it so that it’s messages of condemnation don’t sting so much for the intended audience.
They may be in polarity visually with Christianity inc, the people created structure of the church, but I don’t find them so out of step with the true spirit of Christianity. Love your brother as yourself. On this vibe they get high marks. On the dogma, no. Of course not. They are inverted to anything that condemns them and their community and do a pretty good job of lampooning them. As nuns they actually do minister the message of love to people they meet whether it’s in the streets or in the hospitals.
These “trans” nuns have raised multi millions of dollars for people who have HIV for four decades, especially in the early 80s when many of those people were abandoned by the church. They work tirelessly and for free and raise huge amounts of money. And yes they do lampoon the Catholic nuns quite a bit but also most do feel like they are doing the work of nuns by ministering to people in need and helping where they can. It’s a complicated relationship with the church in this population many of whom have felt judged and rejected by Christian family members.
Oh my god wow. Where do we get this persons next predictions
That deserves a ten 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡 out of ten.
Autism superpowers activate !
Been traveling across Brazil this week from Rio De Janeiro to the city of Resende, then up to São João del Rei in Minas Gerais. Both have large military installations and schools and there were Bolsonaro protestors out in front of both. Each case 20-30 people. Other than the military installations I haven’t seen much other action on the street. Not like two days after the election in Rio. But these are smaller cities and you can see the people showing up are determined and consistent.
I feel like Kari is finally the person so clear and focused she can cut through the bullshit.
The people of a Brazil feel mixed. Lula is the man of the people for the poor and Bolsonaro the man of the people for the middle class and those with small businesses.
Attended his rally in Rio De Janeiro today. I’ve finally seen some street blocking myself. The people were covered in yellow and green, often shirts with the Brazilian flag on it. They were totally covering and blocking Avenida Pres. Vargas perhaps the biggest grand boulevard into town in front of Centro do Brasil the major train station. For the first time I saw a crowd that really looked bigger than the Lula crowd. It was impressive and up to this point the Bolsonaristas had not had such a visible impact in the city, but this time it was VERY visible if not overwhelming. I got into arguments yesterday on the forum because I had not seen the bolsonaro Visibility in the city. Now it’s obvious. The streets all around that part of town were covered in green in yellow.
I asked around the crowd to find someone I could interview in English. Many families, people looked festive but also troubled. Fireworks went off in the air every five minutes which reminded the nervous system of machine gun fire. One gentleman talked for thirty minutes with me and he said that he wasn’t so much for Bolsonaro as he was against Lula. He said that Lula was the biggest criminal in Brazil. I asked him about the legal exoneration and he said it was a technicality, that there were many other judges that wanted to sentence him longer. He also wanted seven of the Supreme Court judges to be prosecuted, he saw them as incredibly corrupt. His economic impression from bolsonaro was that everything had improved and inflation has stayed relatively low ( I’ve heard Lula fans criticize bolsonaro for the inflation). He offered the metaphor that he felt like the Brazilian economy was like an airplane taxiing down the runway and that it was just about to lift off, and now it was being intercepted. He felt a great pain that someone he saw as a huge crook and danger to Brazil had a chance to come back. That Brazil was the last economy standing in S America.
He also said that the two big scandals were the paying of bribes to the legislature to pass the projects of the left (Mensalão) and the scandal with petrobras the national oil company ( Petrolão ). He reported that he thought he thought Lula was now a billionaire and Lula’s son, who used to feed the alligators at the zoo also somehow turned out to be a Billionaire. He said that the only other countries that had as bad a voting system as Brazil was Bangladesh and Sri Lanka: that the votes were done on electronic machines with no paper trail. I saw these machines with my own eyes on vote day.
I still need to verify some of this stuff , but it’s one of the first bolsonaro supporters I’ve been able to talk to in the country.
The crowd was absolutely massive
I did post his interview with time magazine.
Here I’ll try to repost
An Snippet from a May Time Magazine interview of Lula, the soon to be President of Brazil that just won last night. He talks about Ukraine Biden and Putin and it’s useful to see what will be guiding Brasil’s foreign policy.
https://time.com/6173232/lula-da-silva-transcript/
———-
I want to speak about the war in Ukraine. You have always prided yourself on being able to speak to everyone—Hugo Chavez as much as George Bush. But the world today is very fragmented diplomatically. I want to know if your approach still works. Could you speak to Vladimir Putin after what he’s done in Ukraine?
We politicians reap what we sow. If I sow fraternity, solidarity, harmony, I’ll reap good things. If I sow discord, I’ll reap quarrels. Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The U.S. and the E.U. are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the U.S. and Europe should have said: “Ukraine won’t join NATO.” That would have solved the problem.
Do you think the threat of Ukraine joining NATO was Russia’s real reason for invading?
That’s the argument they put forward. If they have a secret one, we don’t know. The other issue was Ukraine joining the E.U. The Europeans could have said: “No, now is not the moment for Ukraine to join the E.U., we’ll wait.” They didn’t have to encourage the confrontation.
But I think they did try to speak to Russia.
No, they didn’t. The conversations were very few. If you want peace, you have to have patience. They could have sat at a negotiating table for 10, 15, 20 days, a whole month, trying to find a solution. I think dialogue only works when it is taken seriously.
If you were President right now, what would you do? Would you have been able to avoid the conflict?
I don’t know if I’d be able to. If I was President, I would have phoned [Joe] Biden, and Putin, and Germany, and [Emmanuel] Macron. Because war is not the solution. I think the problem is that if you don’t try, you don’t fix things. And you have to try.
I sometimes get worried. I was very concerned when the U.S. and the E.U. adopted [Juan] Guaidó [then leader of Venezuela’s parliament] as President of the country [in 2019]. You don’t play with democracy. For Guaidó to be President, he would have to be elected. Bureaucracy can’t substitute politics. In politics, it’s two heads of state who are governing, both elected by their people, who have to sit down at the negotiating table and look each other in the eye and talk.
And now, sometimes I sit and watch the President of Ukraine speaking on television, being applauded, getting a standing ovation by all the [European] parliamentarians. This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war. Because in the war, there’s not just one person guilty. Saddam Hussein was as guilty as Bush [for the outbreak of the 2003 Iraq war]. Because Saddam Hussein could have said, “You can come here and check and I will prove that I do not have mass destruction weapons.” But he lied to his people. And now, this President of Ukraine could have said, “Come on, let’s stop talking about this NATO business, about joining the E.U. for a while. Let’s discuss a bit more first.”
So Volodomyr Zelensky should have talked to Putin more, even with 100,000 Russian troops at his border?
I don’t know the President of Ukraine. But his behavior is a bit weird. It seems like he’s part of the spectacle. He is on television morning, noon, and night. He is in the U.K. parliament, the German parliament, the French parliament, the Italian parliament, as if he were waging a political campaign. He should be at the negotiating table.
Can you really say that to Zelensky? He didn’t want a war, it came to him.
He did want war. If he didn’t want war, he would have negotiated a little more. That’s it. I criticized Putin when I was in Mexico City [in March], saying that it was a mistake to invade. But I don’t think anyone is trying to help create peace. People are stimulating hate against Putin. That won’t solve things! We need to reach an agreement. But people are encouraging [the war]. You are encouraging this guy [Zelensky], and then he thinks he is the cherry on your cake. We should be having a serious conversation: “OK, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV.” And we should say to Putin: “You have a lot of weapons, but you don’t need to use them on Ukraine. Let’s talk!”
What do you think of Joe Biden?
I actually made a speech praising Biden when he announced his economic program. The problem is it’s not enough to announce the program, you’ve got to execute it. And I think Biden is going through a difficult moment.
And I don’t think he has taken the right decision on the war between Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided [the war], not incited it. He could have talked more, participated more. Biden could have taken a plane to Moscow to talk to Putin. This is the kind of attitude you expect from a leader. To intervene so that things don’t go off the rails. I don’t think he did that.
Should Biden have made concessions to Putin?
No. In the same way that the Americans persuaded the Russians not to put missiles in Cuba in 1961, Biden could have said: “We’re going to speak a bit more. We don’t want Ukraine in NATO, full stop.” That’s not a concession. Let me tell you something: if I were President of Brazil and they said to me, “Brazil can join NATO,” I’d say no.
Why?
Because I’m a guy who only thinks about peace, not war. […] Brazil doesn’t have disputes with any country: not with the U.S., not China, nor Russia, nor Bolivia, nor Argentina, nor Mexico. And the fact that Brazil is a peaceful country will allow us to reestablish the relationships we created between 2003 and 2010. Brazil will once again become a protagonist on the world stage, because we will prove it’s possible to have a better world.
Some of these videos are old. From actions taken in the favelas years ago. Some may be recent.
Yeah I’m forming my opinion from having feet on the ground in Brazil, talking to people and exploring every level of society. Where are you forming your opinion about Brazil? Have you even stepped foot in this country?
I think you are projecting. Because I am informed by Q but I value real conversations and observations above all things. I’ve spoke to 1000s of people in this country and gotten their input on politics? What have you done?
I would say yes, more so in some ways. On the covid issue, they really didn’t have the benefit of the dialog that happened in boards like these about the vaccine. It seems like they don’t have substantial alternative media Outlets like we do. They actually watch cnn. I dropped into São Paulo in January. and my friend and I were the only people on the streets without masks. I got kicked out of so many grocery stores. I was thinking mostly like people on this board at the time. But then I started walking through favelas, major urban areas like rio São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, small towns like Arraial do cabo where it’s run by a militia and it’s very pro bolsonaro. You have to understand militias to understand bolsonaro. It’s almost like if your small town militias in America Started to take over policing and mayoral functions in these small towns and even became a little despotic. Brazil has heterogeneous security and the militias pick up the slack but they also start to get big headed about the power they have. They will move people out of their apartments by force and take all of their stuff. It can be a little fascists in these smaller areas run by militias. Some areas like arraial do cabo it’s been a good effect and seems to have enabled a tourist trade if you don’t mind walking past machine gun guards on the way to the beach. In areas in Rio lime Recreo dos Banderitas it seems more fascistic and not a good influences, dangerous even. Brazil is both a first world country and a third world country all at once… as American seems to be moving closer to. But what works in American is not necessarily going to work here. Hell it doesn’t even seem to work in America.
This is a quote from a time magazine interview before the election
https://time.com/6173232/lula-da-silva-transcript/
I want to speak about the war in Ukraine. You have always prided yourself on being able to speak to everyone—Hugo Chavez as much as George Bush. But the world today is very fragmented diplomatically. I want to know if your approach still works. Could you speak to Vladimir Putin after what he’s done in Ukraine?
We politicians reap what we sow. If I sow fraternity, solidarity, harmony, I’ll reap good things. If I sow discord, I’ll reap quarrels. Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The U.S. and the E.U. are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the U.S. and Europe should have said: “Ukraine won’t join NATO.” That would have solved the problem.
Do you think the threat of Ukraine joining NATO was Russia’s real reason for invading?
That’s the argument they put forward. If they have a secret one, we don’t know. The other issue was Ukraine joining the E.U. The Europeans could have said: “No, now is not the moment for Ukraine to join the E.U., we’ll wait.” They didn’t have to encourage the confrontation.
But I think they did try to speak to Russia.
No, they didn’t. The conversations were very few. If you want peace, you have to have patience. They could have sat at a negotiating table for 10, 15, 20 days, a whole month, trying to find a solution. I think dialogue only works when it is taken seriously.
If you were President right now, what would you do? Would you have been able to avoid the conflict?
I don’t know if I’d be able to. If I was President, I would have phoned [Joe] Biden, and Putin, and Germany, and [Emmanuel] Macron. Because war is not the solution. I think the problem is that if you don’t try, you don’t fix things. And you have to try.
I sometimes get worried. I was very concerned when the U.S. and the E.U. adopted [Juan] Guaidó [then leader of Venezuela’s parliament] as President of the country [in 2019]. You don’t play with democracy. For Guaidó to be President, he would have to be elected. Bureaucracy can’t substitute politics. In politics, it’s two heads of state who are governing, both elected by their people, who have to sit down at the negotiating table and look each other in the eye and talk.
And now, sometimes I sit and watch the President of Ukraine speaking on television, being applauded, getting a standing ovation by all the [European] parliamentarians. This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war. Because in the war, there’s not just one person guilty. Saddam Hussein was as guilty as Bush [for the outbreak of the 2003 Iraq war]. Because Saddam Hussein could have said, “You can come here and check and I will prove that I do not have mass destruction weapons.” But he lied to his people. And now, this President of Ukraine could have said, “Come on, let’s stop talking about this NATO business, about joining the E.U. for a while. Let’s discuss a bit more first.”
So Volodomyr Zelensky should have talked to Putin more, even with 100,000 Russian troops at his border?
I don’t know the President of Ukraine. But his behavior is a bit weird. It seems like he’s part of the spectacle. He is on television morning, noon, and night. He is in the U.K. parliament, the German parliament, the French parliament, the Italian parliament, as if he were waging a political campaign. He should be at the negotiating table.
Can you really say that to Zelensky? He didn’t want a war, it came to him.
He did want war. If he didn’t want war, he would have negotiated a little more. That’s it. I criticized Putin when I was in Mexico City [in March], saying that it was a mistake to invade. But I don’t think anyone is trying to help create peace. People are stimulating hate against Putin. That won’t solve things! We need to reach an agreement. But people are encouraging [the war]. You are encouraging this guy [Zelensky], and then he thinks he is the cherry on your cake. We should be having a serious conversation: “OK, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV.” And we should say to Putin: “You have a lot of weapons, but you don’t need to use them on Ukraine. Let’s talk!”
What do you think of Joe Biden?
I actually made a speech praising Biden when he announced his economic program. The problem is it’s not enough to announce the program, you’ve got to execute it. And I think Biden is going through a difficult moment.
And I don’t think he has taken the right decision on the war between Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided [the war], not incited it. He could have talked more, participated more. Biden could have taken a plane to Moscow to talk to Putin. This is the kind of attitude you expect from a leader. To intervene so that things don’t go off the rails. I don’t think he did that.
Should Biden have made concessions to Putin?
No. In the same way that the Americans persuaded the Russians not to put missiles in Cuba in 1961, Biden could have said: “We’re going to speak a bit more. We don’t want Ukraine in NATO, full stop.” That’s not a concession. Let me tell you something: if I were President of Brazil and they said to me, “Brazil can join NATO,” I’d say no.
Why?
Because I’m a guy who only thinks about peace, not war. […] Brazil doesn’t have disputes with any country: not with the U.S., not China, nor Russia, nor Bolivia, nor Argentina, nor Mexico. And the fact that Brazil is a peaceful country will allow us to reestablish the relationships we created between 2003 and 2010. Brazil will once again become a protagonist on the world stage, because we will prove it’s possible to have a better world.
Huge celebrations in the city centers. Restaurants erupting in cheers. Went with my partner to the suburbs and voting and there the bolsonaro supporters were way more visible. The smaller towns where the militias are more dominant ( para security support until local neighborhood control) there is a much bigger appreciation for bolsonaro. Places where crime prevented business growth, people felt the bigger turnaround. Brazil in general is afraid of an unclear election because they are afraid of political violence and these blockades feel like that to them. Think what people felt during blm and antifa riots. Brazil can’t take to hat right now, people and their business and lives are too vulnerable and there is a history of the elected government being overturned by the cia. Lula is more likely to pressure the end of the Ukraine war.
I could however post about 100 videos of the streets filled with red flags. The entire city center covered in nothing but Lula supporters.
Yes but if you go back to the last time Lula was elected in 2006 he won by 58.2 million so his numbers in a Brazil with a smaller population would still beat bolsonaro today. Factor in two decades of population growth ( and Brazilians hella reproduce ) and the numbers line up.
Honestly most the Brazilians think that the guys blocking the roads in protest are real assholes.I live in Rio.
Well you go on stoning divorced women then, not cutting your hair, and refusing pork.
Please show me one.
Well good. I hope I gave you extra context.
That’s funny, rampant homosexuality amongst the Macedonian royals led to conquering all of Greece and then the known world.