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Comment by kingofthehill98 | Hacker News Reader

They elected a freakin' maniac and they're gonna pay a heavy price for that.

In Brazil we have a saying "pior que tá não fica", which translates to something like "it cannot get worse than this". Belive me when I say this: it can (and probably will) get worse. It can (and probably will) get SO MUCH worse.

We tasted this poison with 4 years of Bolsonaro trying to get away from the establishment. What did we get in return? 700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem and after the piece of shit lost the election he attempted a COUP. Luckily he's going to jail on the next few months, but the damage is done.

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Also unlike here in Brazil, from some interviews I felt like all (ok, most) argentinians were rooting that Milei's measures have a positive impact, even people that didn't vote for him. That did strike me as a very mature position.

> That did strike me as a very mature position.

Perhaps. But it might not be the kind of maturity that comes from 40 years of witnessing what politician promises are worth.

There are never politicians that ought to be adored.

The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now. Minister of a president who basically said "you know what I'm out" in 2022 and basically gave the government to said minister.

> The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now.

That's the problem though. It's completely understandable to vote against that. But to have one option to the status quo, and that option is this?

It's basically like you have lived beyond your means for a long while and you live in a too big house and the sensible solution might be to get another job, sell the car and move to a smaller place. But see that choice doesn't exist. Your choice is to keep aggregating debt, OR you burn the house down and live in a tent.

The problem with very bitter medicine like this is that it risks swinging back the other way just as fast when people become angry enough.

> They elected a freakin' maniac and they're gonna pay a heavy price for that

LMAO like the previous twenty years didn't exist eh?

Signed: an Argentinian

"700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem"

That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian. In my country of 11 million (including Ukrainian refugees), we've had 45 thousand deaths. And anywhere where people frequent Facebook, the anti-vax movement thrives. It is not even specifically far-right, a lot of the crowd belongs to the organic green bio-mom milieu. I can't even begin to count all the middle-aged ladies in colourful ethnic clothing who hate vaccines based on very flimsy arguments.

The coup thing is fairly unique, though.

>That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian.

Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. Our health system had one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world, we were nearing 100% rates on a country with a scale of continent. Since Bolsonaro our rates are dropping on a very alarming rate and on the streets you see people trash talking vaccines all the time, even solved diseases and infections are returning because of this.

And about the 700k deaths, a lot of studies have been published proving that if the piece of shit bought the vaccines earlier hundreds of thousands of lives could've been saved, or if he did not made a public campaign AGAINST the vaccine we could've saved countless lives.

"Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. "

In that sense, you were lucky before. In the Western world, widespread anti-vax paranoia dates at least back to the infamous Wakefield paper (1998) linking vaccination to autism. It was probably just a matter of time until it skipped over the ocean to Brazil as well. Language barrier might have protected you temporarily, but with the advent of automatic translation, it has been significantly lowered.

Ironically, there is no vaccine against bad ideas such as anti-vaxxery.

Anti-vax existed in the US long before that. It was common in the hippy alt health movement for decades. Bullshit is a powerful force. So much so that it might be the norm not the exception.

> The coup thing is fairly unique, though.

Not as much. It was heavily inspired by the events in the USA.

> it was heavily inspired by a Russian-Chinese coalition trying to create a powerbloc in Latin America, and who also pushed for the same thing in the US

Lol Lula da Silva is much more pro-Russia and pro-China than Bolsonaro ever was

Yeah GP seems to have gotten a bit lost in ideology.

It's especially interesting since the whole thing with Steve Bannon & co. is pretty widely knwon.

Did you read the article? It’s all about the currency problems and disparate exchange rates that have resulted in the country for the last 20+ years and has nothing to do with the president who’s been there for hardly 2 months. One of his first acts actually tackled that problem by slashing the artificial government exchange rate so that it’s much closer to the true black market rate.

We've tested many different ideologies and organisational structures just in the last few hundred years.

Currently we have a successful but pretty crappy form of capitalism. Some countries have experimented with Communism, fascism, oligarchy (ism)?), feudalism ect ect.

Why not give libertarianism a shot?

We did. Until the 1950s. We gave the states so much power under a confederacy the government didn't work and we had to go back to the drawing board to make a new constitution.

Things weren't regulated for a long time, and that's why there were literal snake-oil salesmen blowing literal smoke up your ass while their 10 year old kids worked 7 days a week. It was only around the 1900s that we really started regulating things -- and for good reason.

>Why not give libertarianism a shot?

Because it's capitalism on steroids? Are you not aware of the world we're living in? Every major forest destroyed, countless species exctinct, climate change reaching point of no return, etc.

We urgently need to slow down, not speed up.

The most developed countries should show us an example then. I am not Argentinian or from South America at all, but we have the same problems. As long as an average American keeps their consumption levels at more than 10× of ours, I am not listening to what they think we should or shouldn't do. Same for other poor countries, I guess.

That's the spirit. There really is no other way than development. If we try to go back to 19th-century resource consumption and CO2 emissions we also need 19th-century population numbers. If the "degrowth" (a euphemism for poverty and societal collapse) movement got absolute power that will be precisely the result, intentional or not.

This is such a tired argument. The socialist block was, at least by the 1980s, much more wasteful and destructive to the environment than the capitalist world. I encourage you to search for videos like "1980s krakow winter" or "Elbe river GDR" to see a few examples. Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws.

More than that, it's easy to make abstract statements like "we need to slow down", but how do you imagine that could be done? Who decides which sectors need to be frozen and how do we make sure we don't accidentally starve millions of Africans while doing it (look up food self-sufficiency numbers)?

> Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws.

Then, for comparison, research the position people describing themselves as libertarians hold and held on the existence of these laws...

(I'm not a big fan of blanket statements on growth like "we should slow down" either, but libertarians deserve no more credit for the enactment of environmental laws they campaigned against than Stalinists do for the reunification of Germany)

My comment was specifically a response to the "because it is capitalism on steroids" line of reasoning which implied that global warming and environment destruction are consequences of capitalism.

Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries?

Because liberalism, I/E shrink the state so that ~the corporations can rule~ the invisible hand of the market can fix everything.

Even Adam Smith recognised that you need a state to limit the power of the big actors in the invisible hand of the market.

The American healthcare system is not libertarian. The US has the highest total health spending per capita in the world, more then France and the UK combined. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

> Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries?

Yes, its in the post you're replying too. The USA run an oligarchy system where by the vast majority of money, power and influenced and controlled by an impossibly small interconnected group.

But its ok because every four years the peasants get to chooses which billionaire is the least worse and cast their vote.

What does anything in my post have to do with liberalism?

Well, oligarchy is the eventual result of liberalism. Even though we may have started equal, some people, through luck or questionable methods, have attained a position of power, possibly by being owners of a company that has a monopolistic status. And now, via regulatory capture and targeted actions against competitors, looks to subvert the "free" hand of the market.

Why can't you get decent internet in the States? Because on each location there are two or maybe three companies that collude to keep prices high. And when you try to start your own ISP, suddenly these companies offer crazy good/under cost prices so that your new ISP is unable to survive, and then jack up the prices again.

Of course, at any point, as a consumer, you are absolutely free to enter into a contract with whatever ISP you want. If only there were a few more...

Now tell me how do you fix that without bigger state imposing specific regulations.

Ok just to be clear, your the only one here talking about Liberalism.

Liberalism and libertarianism are two very different things.

Sure, can you explain the differences? Google is not being helpful here, it seems both words have quite a bit of propaganda behind them.

GP seems to be using the "classical liberalism" definition of liberalism, which largerly overlaps with what's generally considered libertarianism.

It seems like you are confusing two different terms, liberalism and libertarianism.

Can you explain the difference? Googling it is quite hard, as it mostly throws me biased views.

In the U.S.:

"Liberalism": Broadly, what other countries call social liberalism, i.e. liberty, individual rights, equality, all rooted in Locke's notion of the social contract.

"Libertarianism": An American revival of what's formally called classical liberalism. Broadly: Small government, strong individual rights, free market capitalism, etc.

No, they are using the term “liberalism” in its historic meaning, not the current, US meaning.

>Why not give libertarianism a shot?

You'll soon see.

Did you read the article?

It's a shame to see people like you taking a stance on the matter without 0 knowledge speaking out emotionally

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