It's also inconsistent with the court's own precedent. Extending voting hours was deemed illegal back in 2022. "Everybody had the chance to vote", said Alexandre de Moraes.

After Lula lost in the 1st round, suddenly it became legal again. The irony is not lost on me. That's the pattern with the leftist judges in the courts. The supreme court judge who decided it used to be Lula's own lawyer.

They called for extension back in 2022 too, and it was ruled illegal. "Everybody had the chance to vote", said Alexandre de Moraes.

Bolsonaro generally supports privatizing Brazilian state companies and selling them off to foreigners. I don't want that. Especially not to the US and Israel.

Lula on the other hand is better aligned with China, which is also what I want.

Lula and myself are aligned on these two points. So this outcome is not entirely bad for me.

The problem I have with Lula is his party's obnoxious taxation, lack of a real plan for reindustrialization, continuous defense of criminals, and most importantly, his total domination of the supreme court. I voted for the right specifically to see those judges impeached and imprisoned, because I absolutely oppose everything they did in 2022, far more than I ever opposed Lula himself. I'm of the opinion that presidents and elections barely matter anymore, because it's the supreme court that runs the country. It's the Venezuela governance model: president appoints god-like supreme court judges and rules monocratically through them.

The 1st round this month was such an upset not because of Bolsonaro but because of the senate. They are the ones who can impeach supreme court judges, and when Brazil unexpectedly elected a right wing majority in the senate, it struck true fear into the court. This was our chance to completely wipe out that court and forever change the history of this country, like Bukele did for El Salvador.

While in the end the necessary victory didn't materialize, Brazilian senate is still absolute majority right wing now, and they could still impeach those judges. I'm not going to hold out hope for that anymore, but if I see at least one judge bite the dust I'll still call it a major win.

This time around, some guy in Lula's party created "Lula's Army", a channel with millions of people in it. Suddenly, it was fine.

They used to cry about "fake news" and call for censorship at every opportunity, and they'd get it because they own the courts. Now they were the ones spreading "fake news" of all sorts. Did they get censored? Nah.

Censorship in Brazil is unconstitutional, by the way. Political censorship is doubly so. It doesn't matter, because they own the supreme court.

Debating politics with the Chinese on X taught me a lot and allowed me to move past left/right labels. My personal politics turned out to be a mix between what people call left and right wing ideologies.

I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risky. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.

>funny business

This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.