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Kay Bradley

Opinion | How Trumpism May Endure - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The story demands a religious loyalty.
  • Mr. Trump’s Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms. Its guiding theories include: Christianity under duress and attack; large corrupt cities full of Black and brown people manipulated by liberal elites; Barack Obama as alien; a socialist movement determined to tax you into subservience to “big government”; liberal media out to crush family and conservative values; universities and schools teaching the young a history that hates America; resentment of nonwhite immigrants who threaten a particular national vision; and whatever hideous new version of a civil religion QAnon represents.
  • The Confederate Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. It emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat in the 1860s, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations and rituals in search of a story that could win hearts and minds and regain power in the Southern states. It was initially a psychological response to the trauma of collective loss among former Confederates. It gained traction in violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and in the re-emergence of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Reconstruction.
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  • Crucially, the Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on battlefields.
  • Confederate Lost Cause ideology
  • All Lost Causes find their lifeblood in lies, big and small, lies born of beliefs in search of a history that can be forged into a story and mobilize masses of people to act politically, violently, and in the name of ideology.
  • By the 1890s, the Lost Cause was no longer a story of loss, but one of victory: the defeat of Reconstruction. Southerners — whether run-of-the-mill local politicians, famous former generals or women who forged the culture of monument building — portrayed white supremacy and home rule for the South as the nation’s victory over radicalism and Negro rule.
  • glory of America
  • But it does seem to be tonic for those who fear long-term social change;
  • liberalism; taxation; what it perceives as big government; nonwhite immigrants who drain the homeland’s resources; government regulation imposed on individuals and businesses; foreign entanglements and wars that require America to be too generous to strange peoples in faraway places; any hint of gun control; feminism in high places; the nation’s inevitable ethnic and racial pluralism; and the infinite array of practices or ideas it calls “political correctness.”
  • border walls; ever-growing stock portfolios; access to the environment and hunting land without limits; coal they can burn at will; the “liberty” to reject masks; history that tastes of the sweetness of progress and not the bitterness of national sins.
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    "Mr. Trump's Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms. Its guiding theories include: Christianity under duress and attack; large corrupt cities full of Black and brown people manipulated by liberal elites; Barack Obama as alien; a socialist movement determined to tax you into subservience to "big government"; liberal media out to crush family and conservative values; universities and schools teaching the young a history that hates America; resentment of nonwhite immigrants who threaten a particular national vision; and whatever hideous new version of a civil religion QAnon represents."
Alexander Luckmann

Venezuela Goes to the Polls -- not in the same way we will in a month - 0 views

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    An interesting article on the Chilean election. This theme reflects on our study of economic approaches, in particular the aftermath of the shock therapy first instituted in Latin America to combat inflation in Chile. This policy was so painful for so many people that, in the 2000s, South America experienced a sharp political left turn, one of whose leaders is Chavez. He has ruled Venezuela with an almost autocratic grip, but seems at his weakest in years for this year's election.
Kay Bradley

The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology: Scientific American - 0 views

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    I think that finding a balance between the freedom and social welfare has always been an issue in America and thats why this is such an interesting article. The Nordic countries seem to have a very good balance of free market success and equality. These countries would be good examples for America but there are two reasons that make this difficult. First off, many Americans seem to be deeply afraid of anything resembling socialism or communism. Second all these nordic states are small and relatively homogenous. This makes it much easier for the government to provide social welfare that meets everybody's needs and keeps everyone happy. The US is huge and has a much more diverse population. This makes for a completely different problem. While a social democratic government has worked so well for Scandinavia, we are far from getting to a state like that in the US.
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    Even though I believe a government like that would be ideal for the US, it is not very realistic due to how conservative the US is compared to Scandinavia.
Kay Bradley

Assad warns of 'repercussions' as Congress begins debate on Syria | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • his first with an American television network in two years
  • as been no evidence that I used chemical we
  • gainst the interests of the United States, Assad added during the CBS News interview. He also warned about "repurcussions" if the U.S. strkes Syria: "Expect every action," he said.
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  • networks, including PBS, CNN and FOX
  • ely start working with Damascus," Lavrov said
  • S on Sunday quoted Assad as saying in an interview conducted by Charlie Rose in Damascus.
Kay Bradley

The Female Factor - A Woman Rises in Brazil - NYTimes.com - 2 views

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    It's really cool that the women referred to in the article (Dilma Rousseff, Michelle Bachelet, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and Keiko Fujimori) are taking their countries by storm. These countries are obviously very forward-thinking, and I admire them for it.
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    It's amazing how much power women can have in countries that Americans often think of as less developed than the US. These women are really taking control, when here in America we have yet to elect a female president or vice-president.
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    I want to echo Shalina's point. It's surprising that in the United States we still have not had a female President or Vice President, whereas countries that we often consider inferior to ours, such as Argentina and Peru, have already had female leaders. Though not mentioned in the article, another influential country that has already had a female leader is England- which first had a female Prime Minister over thirty years ago!
Heather Anderson

U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Experiment in Guatemala - 2 views

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    Maybe more of an ethics topic, but I'd say it affects U.S.-Guatemala relations, too...
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    I'd heard about the experiment in the news, but the details that come to surface in this article are just appalling. I'm horrified and embarrassed. It's just one of the many examples of why other countries hate us, and quite frankly, I can't blame them.
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    I found this article truly shocking. The U.S.'s hypocrisy in the past century has been baffling, and one line in the article (that criticized the U.S.'s prosecution of Nazi's while commiting aweful humanitarian crimes itself) in particular really highlights this point. The fact that these crimes occurred, and moreover, the fact that the U.S. got away with it for over half a century, sheds light on how America viewed the rest of the world. This article reminded me of the exploitation of have-not's that we have studied in history by the have's (bourgeoisie vs. proletariats). This is also relevant to the domestic crimes involved with Tuskegee and the socioeconomic divide in America during those times. While I appreciate the efforts to improve transparency in the government, I totally believe that apologies are not enough. There should be reparations.
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    I agree with all that has been said. I was horrified when I was reading this article. I had heard stories of some unethical scientific experiments before, but I never thought that the US could be involved in something as terrible as this, something just as terrible as the experiments of the Nazi's. This article highlighted my beliefs and prejudices that the US was more ethical than other countries, when in reality we have a similar, if less well known, history.
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    I am very proud of Clinton for issuing an appology for the actions of the US government. I am glad that there was a public statement made in order to admit to our crimes as a nation. I find it hard to believe that the US would do these horrible things, and it serves as a reminder that the US was not always a free and accepting nation. We have a deep history of racism. I don't think that appologies are enough to repent for the horrors we caused, but I think they are a step in the right direction. Articles like this are a great way to prompt discussion aobut our racist past as well as remember what has happened in order to make sure these crimes will never be repeated.
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    I have to admit that when I first heard about this, I thought that it was some sort of twisted joke. I found it particularly appalling that these studies were conducted on prison inmates and mental patients, people who were completely at the mercy of the government system and had little or no other independence (and therefore no way to get out of this). The fact that the United States could do something so completely hypocritical, especially while leading the Nuremberg trials (as Harrison pointed out) is shocking. I am glad that Secretary of State Clinton and the US government seem to be ready to apologize for this heinous program without attempting to justify or conditionalize it and that they openly apologized to the Guatemalan government. I hope that they will continue to be as transparent during the Guatemalan investigation.
Heather Anderson

Russia Plans Nuclear Plant in Venezuela - 0 views

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    Russia hinted that they wanted to calm any U.S. fears about building a nuclear power plant in Venezuela, whose government is not exactly the closest of the United States' friends. Just an illustration of lingering tension over socialism vs. capitalism, the Cold War, and the spread of nuclear technology. Russia has been building plants worldwide in a mission to sell nuclear energy.
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    One thing that jumped out at me when I read the article is that Russia's first reaction when announcing this plan was to attempt to quell US fears and tell the US that we shouldn't be getting involved. Interesting that other countries see the US as so involved in their affairs that the first thing they do when they do something controversial that does not involve us to to justify it to us...
miriambachman

Ebola Drug Could Save a Few Lives. But Whose? - 5 views

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    This article not only touches upon the dangerous and negative effects of the Ebola outbreak, but calls into questions an ethical controversy regarding preferential treatment when it comes to medical care. As the need for a cure escalates, the time allotted for the testing and developing of an anti-Ebola drug diminishes. Thus, medicine that has not been thoroughly tested has been distributed to two white Americans infected with the virus. This begs the question: Why these two? Does it have to do with their race or anti-African biases? And once the drug is fully developed, who will receive the treatment first? Who will be prioritized? Additionally, this contentious matter has added to the already distrustful African view of Western pharmaceuticals and relief efforts.
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    I think this article really shows how the US can't really win in the eyes of other countries. If they had tested people from Africa before treating the American citzens who had been infected, then America would have been accused of using the Africans as guinea pigs. Instead, the CDC is now being accused of racism and valuing the lives of Americans over Africans.
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    Fascinating article! Like Karan mentioned, countries developing vaccines are in a bit of a Catch-22 bind. I personally think that offering the drugs to those it could benefit most would be the most helpful to both research and those it could save, but the hesitance on the companies part is understandable. I think interesting questions to ask is "Where is the line between justified and unjustified fear?", and "are possible lives saved worth the risk that it may end some?" I certainly am in the boat that all participants should be warned outright of negative side effects and possible failure as a part of experimental treatment. But the most fascinating part of this article is how it never mentions polling the people of the affected countries. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only people whose opinion is really concerned is country heads and ethicists. What do the people think of getting a fighting chance?
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    I found it interesting that not only did the article touch on the ethical questions of who to give the first available drugs to, from a standpoint of where it would be most effective rather than just where it would be most convenient. The part of the article where acceptance of the drug came into question was another touchy matter. The attempt to administer the drug as a solution to the Ebola break out is difficult because of the nature of the illness and the apprehension towards Western Medicine. Even though the medicine is available there's no telling if this quick fix will actually contain and solve the crisis just as Arthur Kaplan says at the end of the article.
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    The article brings to light interesting conflicts between African countries and the western industries of medicine. I feel like it would be effective to offer medical education to the local inhabitants in the infected african countries. That way their knowledge can help them avoid getting the disease. Furthermore, they would have more knowledge to help them decide whether or not they would like to take the drug that is possibly a functioning vaccination, rather than just not giving the sick African patients the option. The complexity of this problem is interesting because it deals with issues of ethics and trust.
anishakaul

Few in Venezuela Want Bolívars, but No One Can Spare a Dime - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Venezuelans have lost faith in their economy and in the ability of their government to find a way out of the mess
  • domestic confidence in the economy has crashed
  • the government has refused for months to release basic economic data like the inflation rate or the gross domestic product
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  • A movie ticket costs about 380 bolívars. Calculated at the government rate, that is $60. At the black-market rate, it is just $0.54. Want a large popcorn and soda with that? Depending on how you calculate it, that is either $1.15 or $128.The minimum wage is 7,421 bolívars a month. That is either a decent $1,178 a month or a miserable $10.60.
    • anishakaul
       
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  • country’s income has shrunk
  • the black market for dollars has soared
  • strict controls on prices and foreign exchange for imports
  • “It’s crazy,” he said. “We’re living a nightmare. There’s nothing to buy, and the money isn’t worth anything.”
  • “Necessity has a dog’s face,”
Kay Bradley

[Article] The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter | Harper's Mag... - 0 views

  • By Richard Hofstadter
  • merican politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
  • It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant
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  • Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.
  • But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion
  • The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
  • we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.
  • Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
  • First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.
  • The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.
  • Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.
  • He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn:
  • They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure;
  • they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse;
  • they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South;
  • hey have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”
Kay Bradley

Katharine Hayhoe - "Our future is still in our hands" | The On Being Project - The On B... - 0 views

  • I was talking with a pastor just recently, and he asked me very genuinely, he said, “How do I talk to people about climate change, when the only solutions that we are told that there are to climate change is to stop eating meat” — which is a very big deal in Texas, with those barbecues, it really is. It’s an identity issue. I’m not saying this facetiously; it is literally an identity issue — “and stop driving trucks, also an identity issue, stop traveling, stop having children, which is also an identity issue — basically, stop all these things that actually we often see as defining who we are?” And he said, “How am I supposed to tell people that we’re supposed to do this, when it’s as if I’m telling them, you know, we have to just” — and I think these were my words — “return to the Stone Age, unplug everything, and all the solutions are bad”?
  • And sadly, the way our human psychology is built, psychologists have shown that we, as humans, are much more averse to losing what we have than gaining something new.
  • I think there are some very smart people who have put those pieces together and deliberately communicated a message to us that we’re going to lose all we hold dear, instead of messaging the truth, which is, don’t you want to be more energy independent, rather than less? Don’t you want to have a car that is faster, that you never have to go to the gas station again — especially in the days of COVID — than the one that you have today, and that doesn’t produce air pollution that’s responsible for almost 9 million deaths a year? Don’t you want to grow food in a way that is healthy and good for the soil and for people and for the animals, too? Don’t you want to invest in nature, so it can protect us by purifying our air and our water and protecting our coastlines and providing habitat for animals and preventing zoonosis? When we actually start talking about real solutions  — and that’s the Yale survey that you referred to that I talk about in the book — when we ask people about real solutions, everybody’s on board. Everybody says, heck yes, I would love to do that. And so that is where we can directly address the fear, head-on.
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  • what you’ve been saying. “What we need to fix this thing is rational hope.” How do you instill rational hope? And I mean, how do you do that, right, when you’re out there?
  • And then the second thing is recognizing that we are already moving towards a better future. Now, it might not seem like that, because all the headlines are full of doom and gloom and bad news. But when we start to look for hopeful news — and sadly, we have to go out and look for it, because if you just go — I did an experiment the other day, where I went to the website of a major news organization, and I just paged down through 35 headlines. And about seven or eight were very neutral; like, they didn’t evoke any emotion in me. They were just neutral, factual headlines. And every single other headline was negative — every one. So when we go and we look, though, for the hopeful stories of people who are making a difference, that imbues us with a sense of efficacy, that, wow, there’s somebody over there who’s doing something.
  • And you’re talking about what I refer to as a muscular hope.
  • Nobody in Texas knows that we have the biggest army base by land area, in the U.S., Fort Hood, that is 43 percent powered by clean energy.
  • Nobody knows that the Dallas Fort Worth airport was the first large carbon-neutral airport in North America.
  • Nobody knows that the city of Houston, which is home to, of course, most of the headquarters of many large, multinational oil and gas corporations, that the city of Houston has — is going to be meeting its Paris targets, in terms of reducing its carbon emissions.
  • we think of climate action as a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of an incredibly steep hill, and it’s only got a few hands on it. It’s got, you know, Al Gore’s hands are on it, and maybe Jane Goodall, and maybe a couple other hands, but nobody else. And so there’s just no way we’re going to make it up that hill. Like, just forget it. Why even waste my time? That’s sort of mentally how we think.
  • But the reality is, when we start to look around and see that 90 percent of new energy installed last year, during COVID, was clean energy, and we start to see that cities all over the world are taking action on climate change, and big businesses, like Microsoft and Apple and AT&T — you know, they’re building the biggest solar farm in the U.S., outside of Dallas, to supply major corporations with clean energy. So really, that giant boulder, it is already at the top of the hill, and it’s already rolling down the hill in the right direction, and it already has millions of hands on it. It just doesn’t have enough to get it going faster. And when we think, well, maybe I could add my hand to that, because I could get it going just a little bit faster, that’s totally different than if we think it’s at the bottom of the hill, not budging even an inch. So I find tremendous hope from that.
  • Texas, if Texas were its own country, it would be the seventh-most prolific emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, it’s the number one emitter in the U.S. — and Texas leads the nation in wind generation, for example.
  • that, honestly, and here’s the crazy thing. When you look at how the world has changed before — and it has changed. I mean, you know, 200 years ago it was somehow completely socially acceptable to have other human beings in slavery. And 150 years ago, it was entirely acceptable to say that women’s brains were too small and too fragile to be educated, because they would overheat.
  • It is the verse in Timothy where it talks about fear, where it says, “God has not given you a spirit of fear.”
  • that verse goes on to say, is a spirit of power, which is kind of an old-fashioned word, but in modern parlance it means to be empowered; to be able to act.
  • Or “agency.”
  • Yes, agency. Exactly — a spirit of agency. I like that.
  • And that’s the opposite of being paralyzed by fear. And we also have a spirit of love, which means we can be thinking of and considering others, not just ourselves and our own needs
  • So caring about this issue and acting on it is not only consistent with who we are, but it enables us to more genuinely express what we truly care about
  • It’s about acknowledging that, to care about climate change, you only have to be one thing, and that one thing is a human, living on planet Earth.
  • But talk about why it matters to you. Talk about how you both ski, or you’re both parents and you’re worried about your kids and the playground being too hot for them, or the fact that you fish and you’ve noticed that the fish populations are changing, or the fact that your basement got flooded last time it rained. Talk about something that matters to you and to the person that you’re talking with, and then do your research, to learn about what real climate solutions look like, and share that information with people.
  • do you know what our city is doing? Find out what your city’s doing. Tell people. Do you know what your state’s doing? Do you know what your church is doing? And if you don’t know, ask, and then if they’re not doing anything, say, hey, here are some things that you could be doing. And I even have a list on my website, because people often ask me that. So I’ve got a list of, you know, what could your church do, what can you do at school — all of these different things you can do.
  • hope begins with fear or despair or anxiety, it begins, as the bible says in the Book of Romans, it begins with suffering. And that suffering produces perseverance, and that perseverance produces character, and the character produces hope
  • in the middle of the century, it was somehow acceptable to say that, depending on the color of your skin, you could or couldn’t enter certain buildings or sit in a place on the bus. So the world has absolutely changed before, and how did it change? It was when ordinary people of no particular wealth or fame decided that the world could and should be different, and they decided to not only take personal action, but to use their voices to talk about why it mattered, what could be done, and to advocate for change in every sphere in which they were.
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    "Well, we live, today, in a country, the United States, that is more politically polarized than it's been in either of our lifetimes, ever. And that just seems to be getting worse by the day." What Hayhoe and others are pointing to is another way of communicating about climate change.
ershai

Barbados Elects Its First Head of State, Replacing Queen Elizabeth - 4 views

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    Barbados' Parliament has elected Sandra Mason to assume the symbolic title of Head of State, replacing Queen Elizabeth. This act is a move to distance the country from their colonial past.
nicksandford

BBC - Brazil election: Lula and Bolsonaro to face run-off - 1 views

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    This election seems like choosing the lesser of two evils for Brazil, whichever that may mean for them. Bolsonar has used far-right fiery rhetoric to denounce climate change, social reform, and the West, while Lula was unable to run in the last election because of corruption charges. Many analysts see this election as a tipping point for Brazil on many issues, including poverty, education, and environmental protection. Neither side was able to secure the win in the first round of voting, but Lula is in the lead and Bolsonaro came in at a much closer second than many pollsters anticipated. It will be interesting to see what the next 4 weeks will hold.
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    Brazil usually has a pretty high voter turnout (around 80%). I wonder if that will stay the same or if it will drop in this election.
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