Bolsonaro tried to make it a dictatorship. He attempted to convince the military to annul the election result and stage a coup to keep him in power. But he failed to prevent the transition to Lula, so for now, Brazil’s democratic institutions were strong enough to prevent it from becoming a dictatorship.

“Disappeared” is the word typically used when authoritarian regimes arrest and incarcerate (or worse) people extrajudicially, without due process. “Trafficked” doesn’t have the authoritarian government connotation.

China disappeared the Panchen Lama, the second-most important religious figure in Tibetan Buddhism, and replaced him with a China-selected puppet.

But the Panchen Lama is not the successor to the Dalai Lama. The whole point is that the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated when he dies, so his successor isn’t born yet.

The Dalai Lama recently proclaimed that his successor will be born in the free nations outside China - allowing him to be born, say, among the substantial Tibetan refugee populations in Nepal or India.

However, it’s a near-certainty that China will select its own successor from a family loyal to the CCP, and from within China-controlled Tibet, while Tibetans outside the country will likely recognize another.

The EU has been so tepid thus far on the response. I hope the people of Europe keep up the pressure on their governments not to give in to this lunacy. Appeasement does not work.

Because it’s something the EU wanted and didn’t get in the last round. It’ll be funny if Trump accepts because it basically concedes that his negotiating position is weaker than it was eight years ago.

I’m with you though. I think a united front from all the countries where Trump imposed tariffs would be more effective at nipping this nonsense in the bud. And I think countries are shortsighted if they don’t recognize that the U.S. is becoming a fundamentally unreliable negotiating partner and their approach to negotiating with the U.S. should reflect that.

I mean, I don’t know if I can necessarily rank one of those as being worse that the other. Telling Europe that it needs to deny its own racist legacy of colonialism in order to continue dealing with the U.S. is pretty damn bad. Maybe HIV is a more modern problem, but colonialism killed a lot more Africans.

U.S. factories in most cases cannot produce goods that are competitive in a global market. Our labor costs are too high.

This idea that we can revive American traditional manufacturing of basic goods is a complete fantasy. The factories in Vietnam aren’t going anywhere, because they will still be selling to the other 95% of the globe outside the U.S. Even if factories are stood up in the U.S., they will be constrained to producing higher-priced goods exclusively for the domestic market, with all the attendant inflationary impacts from start-up costs and higher labor costs.

Meanwhile, retaliatory tariffs from other countries will cause the collapse of U.S. exports. We’ll lose markets for the sectors where the U.S. is still competitive, like agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and even services.

Trump’s approach is similar to the failed development strategy of import substitution industrialization, except in this case he thinks it will cause the U.S. to reindustrialize. In any case, it will fail for the same reasons ISI failed in Latin America.

It’s possibly the most stupid basis for tariffs. The penalty is directly proportional to U.S. reliance on a country’s imports. The countries that are the most important suppliers to the U.S. are penalized the most. It’s a policy designed to cause maximum reshuffling of production, which maximizes the start-up costs of developing new factories and so on. And those factories are not going to be in the U.S. Import substitution industrialization is a failed policy and it won’t work for reindustrialization either.

Yeah, but they’re not being paid to uncover that particular truth. Watch them somehow lock up the journalist over this.

They’re already killing civilians in Lebanon and Syria, so I’m pretty sure they’ve already identified their next steps.

That site is good for a laugh - a complete alternate universe devoid of science, evidence, or conscious thought.