> Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro recently attempted a coup d'etat to overthrow Brazilian democracy.

LOL if only he had had the balls to actually attempt it. Ran away to the US like the coward he is, allowed everybody who ever supported him to take the fall and still got arrested and persecuted by literal communists. It's actually pretty funny.

There was no "coup". There was a protest. Identical to many others in the past, down to the "people all over the buildings" imagery. It was not the first time people have occupied the Brasília buildings and it certainly won't be the last. Just like this one for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Brazil

"High corruption in the government" indeed. The irony is palpable.

> Don't trust internet influencers to know better than law professionals.

I have actually met many law professionals. Always made sure to listen closely to everything they had to say. Truth is reality is actually even worse than whatever's being presented here.

Sometimes they make the most innocuous sounding comments that nevertheless are reveal quite a lot about the brazilian status quo. Quite a few of the lawyers I've met were prone to expressing their frustration with the fact that "instead of interpreting the constitution, the supreme court judges decided to legislate instead". And those were the polite ones. They could get quite cynical about it.

The helplessness permeates their speech like an incurable depression. The supreme court legislates. These judges got zero votes and yet they legislate. Nothing is done about it. Nothing can be done about it. Sometimes I wonder if they expected the supreme court to become the victims, the juries and the executioners too. I wonder if they were shocked at all when all this stuff went down. I wonder if they were shocked when they saw this judge approaching the actual legislators with "suggestions" in hand for the proposed censorship law, only to then ram it down people's throats by force of his "electoral court resolutions" after the law was rejected by the elected representatives of the brazilian people.

This supreme court disease stretches back nearly a decade and that's just when I began to notice it. Wouldn't be surprised if it stretched back to the very creation of these institutions.

> Let's imagine, hypothetically of course

Yeah, let's help HN truly imagine how barbarous and uncivilized this country is. Tell me HN, how would you feel if some power tripping american judges somehow found a way to give themselves unlimited powers to "combat disinformation", only to immediately begin censoring their political enemies? How would you feel if these judges just started straight up censoring Trump and his campaign? And when Trump loses they proceed to go to conferences to publicly brag about how they personally abused their powers to defeat Trumpism?

How would you feel if the supreme court judges whose literal job it is to interpret your constitution just took a big shit on it instead? And literally nothing was done about it? How disgusted would you feel? I really want to know.

HN might not actually need to imagine it. Google did a little campaign against their "fake news" law which amounted to putting a small link on their home page. For that most grievous crime of "abuse of market power", these same judges censored the company. They ordered it to take it down or face totally arbitrary fines of about 200kUSD per hour until they took it down.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-02/brazil-ju...

https://archive.is/EdoqQ

Maybe someone here on HN caught wind of that. I don't know.