The famous dinner with Xi Jinping continues to haunt Janja da Silva. The criticism, concentrated in the first lady, show two parallel inclinations of the Brazilian public debate: the preferential option for gossip, especially when the target is a woman, and the protection impetus of the head of state, who would be powerless victim of mischief. On the way, it is passed on politics-and in this case of state policy.
In fact, the Chinese comedy covers four errors. Janja committed the smallest of them.
Lula’s word needs to be taken seriously for good or evil. According to the president, it was him, not his wife, who infiltrated Tiktok at the dining table. Error number one: Brazil, the sovereign nation, has the means to regulate social networks and, therefore, must refrain from claiming actions from other countries. XI Jinping presented Lula with this free international relations class.
In Lula’s version, Janja would have followed the direction he indicated, describing Tiktok’s sins. Error Number Two: The President speaks for Brazil, as it has a popular mandate, but the first lady does not exercise representation. “There is no protocol that makes me silence,” she exclaimed, lighting the torch of a curious feminism supported by her husband’s attributes. In this step, he revealed the typical ignorance of activists: the “protocol” here is not an anachronistic bureaucratic norm, but the border that marks the distinction between the public (popular sovereignty) and the private (the marriage bond).
He made the third error by scandalizing with the leakage of the dialogues. In his inventive against a hidden guy (Rui Costa?), The president defined the event as a “private dinner”. In fact, it was a state dinner – or that is, an official diplomatic act. Normal, in democratic countries, is to publicize conversations in such meetings, except for national security topics.
The most serious mistake was Lula’s work. According to the president, he accepted his request to send to Brazil a “expert” in the regulation of social networks. The Chinese dictatorship surrounds the networks with the “Great Digital Wall”. Its main target is not pedophilia or pornography crimes, but the word dissonant politics. It is as if Lula invited a Trump expert to contribute to our immigration policy. In a heroic attempt to fix the capital error, the chancellor employs the extreme resource to deny the president, swearing that “there is no Chinese expert visit program.”
The comedy of the four mistakes was not born from a blue sky. In Lula’s earlier terms, the PT cried for “social media control” – this is, for some kind of censorship of the professional press. Today, only feverish militants still cultivate the old obsession: the focus of the boss has turned to social networks. Under the alibi of the necessary regulation of networks, the government dreams of criminalizing “misinformation” and “hate discourse”, abstractions subject to the interpretation of state authority.
Faced with Xi Jinping, Janja would have stated that the Tiktok algorithm favors the right. Digital crime? No: This is the search for the “right algorithm”, capable of favoring the left. From classical Greece here, we learn that every comedy contains a tragedy.
Gift Link: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release seven free hits from any link per day. Just click on F Blue below.
