Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
PaperclipPerfector
3mo ago
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Transnational Thursday for September 12, 2024
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On the 6th of October, Brazil will hold elections for the mayors and councillors of its 5570 municipalities. Of these, São Paulo, as the largest city in the country (and of the largest in the world) is the most important one, with 9 candidates of varying odds currently on the running, with a run-off being almost certain. Current leftist president Lula is supporting the federal deputy Guilherme Boulos, the runner up of the 2020 mayoral election, and Bolsonaro is supporting current mayor Ricardo Nunes, after his predecessor left office and died of cancer. Neither of these candidates, however, are relevant to this story today.
José Luiz Datena, known as Datena, is a TV presenter, of the sensationalist variety. He used to be popular in right-wing circles (though he was for 23 affiliated with Lula's PT), especially for his "a good thief is a dead thief" takes and evangelical background, even being a Bolsonaro supporter. However, he shifted to a more left-wing position, having supported Lula in the 2022 election and criticizing several right wing politicians since then. He is running for mayor as part of PSDB (with low support on the polls), which used to be one of the largest parties of the nation, being the main opposition to Lula and Dilma (and the previous governing party) before being replaced by Bolsonaro, only still having sucess in the state of São Paulo (a good enough prize, as the largest state of the country), with Bruno Covas, the mayor that Nunes replaced, being from the party (with its multi-party system, it is very common for the deputy mayor, governor or president in Brazil to belong to another party). The current front-runner (though with a long way to gain the run-off) is Pablo Marçal, a influencer coach that manages to outshine Bolsonaro in controversy and criminal accusations, from scams and fake news to money laundering and almost getting people killed on a mountain hiking expedition, besides his right-wing takes, running for the also controversial PRTB, attacking everyone else in the running (including their supporters like Lula and Bolsonaro) and being also attacked in turn.
Yesterday, TV Cultura held a debate with the various candidates. During one of its turns, Marçal accused Datena of being part of a communist plot, and demanded he stopped clowning around. Datena responded that Marçal was a criminal and a slanderer. In his reply, Marçal accused Datena of being a chicken, mentioned a previous debate on which the presenter came to his face and almost slapped him, to which Datena responded by running up to him and hitting him with a chair, as all hell broke lose (link here https://youtube.com/watch?v=nv3jXHWEUWg). Datena was removed from the debate, and Marçal went to the hospital. Most people online had their usual reaction depending on their political spectrum, and the other candidates criticized both Datena and Marçal. Personally, I'm torn, as this showcases just how far my country has deteriorated and Datena should be on jail already, however, it's not like this deterioration hasn't been a long time coming and, despite this not being rdrama.net, this was also hilarious.
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Australia
I’ve been too busy to be a post-guy rather than a reply-guy recently, but I’m going to try to at least make a few posts to improve my seed-leech ratio. Anyways…
Since the arrest of Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov there seems to have been an uptick in governments pressuring messaging apps and social media to allow backdoor access.
Australia is no exception with the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Australia’s Security Service) Mike Burgess recently threatening to force tech companies to provide access to encrypted chats when presented with a warrant.
The article above quotes Burgess as saying:
I find this somewhat lacking and one of the usual government tropes of ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we violate your privacy’. That along with encryption is ‘being employed by terrorists, paedophiles, drug smugglers and human traffickers to conceal illicit activities and facilitate crime.’ so that’s why we need access to it.
Access to live information (say observing a chatroom) when presented with a warrant seems to be a reasonable request, but I suspect the government will go further and continue to attempt to force companies to change their software in order to meet the needs of intelligence and security agencies through creating backdoors and recording communications for later retrieval.
Edit: Inevitable small grammatical corrections
Elon I believe responded to this (the fines) by calling the government fascist: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1834215798858207667
https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-threatens-fines-social-media-giants-enabling-misinformation-2024-09-12/
The bill hasn't yet passed but I can hardly disagree with Elon. The Australian govt seems dead-set on banning and censoring more and more. The E-safety commissioner wanted to globally censor videos of the stabbing on twitter because Australians could use a VPN to get around the national-level restrictions. After Elon told them to get stuffed they backed down but it sparked a cavalcade of politicians looking to sound tough by promising more banning and restrictions. All we seem to do is ban things - development, mines, pipelines.
And especially the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia
There's an amusing scene where a senator goes around describing Eromanga Sensei. The man's calling was clearly to be a dodgy real estate developer, just look at the physiognomy. Why does anyone have to listen to him on what manga should or should not be legal: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bDmbo5dxgQg
Anyway, computing is inherently multi-purpose. Terrorists, paedophiles and drug dealers can use open-source software that nobody is in control of. Encrypted text messaging is not that hard! What is the government going to do then, backdoor every CPU? They'll have to get in line behind the US and China.
Likewise, it's unworkable to ban children from porn sites. Are they going to make everyone give their ID to every damn booru and sketchy Russian site? We have a massive surfeit of bureaucrats with too much time and money on their hands. Nobody ever wants to leave things alone, they have to work hard making a mess out of uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant realities:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/02/social-media-porn-site-ban-australia-trial-age-assurance
It's also simply a solved problem: For small children, parents should fully monitor their screen time anway; For older children, it's trivial to set up a device with a whitelist; And for teens who are old/smart enough to get past these filters, just watching porn is the least of a parent's worry. In particular it's preposterous that the west claims it's impossible to keep teens from having physical sex, while simultaneously demanding that they can only access porn with 18.
The children angle is always, always, always BS. Any child old enough to have interest in b00bz and unfiltered access to the internet will find it. Especially in a Western country where internet access is everywhere. Ones with filtered access will likely find it too (they have friends, etc.) Shit I grew up before internet and I had access to porn as a teen too (pretty shitty quality, but still). Nobody will be hurt by it. Parents who are more honest just say they support this shit because they are lazy and want the government to do it so they won't have to educate their children and deal with it (yes, I have had multiple real people tell me that). But again, that's not why it's being done from the top. It's to establish a foothold for censoring any information on the internet. If we already have a setup for censoring porn, why not use it for censoring "vaccine misinformation" or "election misinformation" or "untrustworthy sites spreading foreign propaganda that threatens our democracy"? It's always has been, is and will be about control over information. Children is just a convenient excuse to get the foot in the door.
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It's not about the children (it never is).
It's about making sure that if a young man wants to experience sex with a woman, he needs to buy it from her, preferably with his life.
Traditionalists and progressives are in agreement that this is how it should be; that is why it keeps coming up.
Porn puts limits on how much women can charge men for sex- in other words, it [by definition] devalues women. It's also very important that teenage women be kept from having sex, because women (especially the most desirable ones) merely wanting sex for the sake of sex (or worse, putting an explicit price on it) in opposition to Polite Society's attempts to make sure they're exploiting their only inherent value as hard as is humanly possible (rather than treating it as a fun toy) causes that scheme to break down.
People who see men and women as more equal in worth don't generally have as much of a problem with sex or porn, but they're too busy being distracted by said sex and porn to enforce that former consensus.
(It's probably noteworthy that the race of people whose women look like teenagers for longer than average is more liberal than average with their sexual politics- mainly thinking about Japan and Thailand here but the others are kind of like that too. People blame Abramic religions for this, but I think it's just because Asian women don't hit as much of a wall for a decline in looks, so they don't have to be as insecure about bagging a man before losing them, so their society is less neurotic about it.)
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Yes. It's ham fisted and seems to mirror Canada's trajectory. I can appreciate that ASIO is given an unenviable job as the security service and if I took the King's shilling in Burgess's role I would advocate for more tools to do my job more efficiently. But this seems wrong and just looks like the govt pushing to make their lives easier.
Once the apps get a reputation as compromised, only the stupid and uninformed will use them (which to be fair is probably no small percentage of the criminal/terrorist franchise). The rest of the targeted will quickly find other comms methods (eg multiplayer videogame lobbies) and the rest of us will be stuck with 'this is why we can't have nice things'.
She's completely clownish and operates on Think of the Children OS v1.0.
Yes, because its convenient for those working in those roles. At the risk of opsec, I have experience working with the public service and know the mentality. How do we make our jobs easier on a limited budget without having to investigate the issue in depth? Let's ban it. Nanny state, safetyism etc.
I can extrapolate this to the EU which does this writ large.
Yes. There are edge cases. I am actually cautiously supportive of the social media ban for children because of the difficulties a lack of a ban would make for good parenting in isolation (eg telling your 12yo daughter she can't Instagram while she suffers social exclusion from her peers; it needs to be everyone).
But I also know that there's a reason no one likes to upload their docs to the net. No one can keep them safe. Data breaches everywhere. Also who the hell would ever provide ID for porn access?
It's a big mess, but that is no excuse for convenient shortcuts to Do Something.
Yeah banning social media is easier and more workable than porn, I'd be in support too if I wasn't worried about a slippery slope. Even just debundling this stuff from phones might be a good idea, it's not necessary to be installed on start up. Got a new phone recently and they auto-installed tiktok on it. It wasn't even a Chinese brand!
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