From Pedro II to Alexandre de Moraes: the great effort that the country makes to go backwards
By J.R. Guzzo”
Perhaps it was lucky, for all of us, that when they invented the phone Dom Pedro II was the emperor of Brazil. As it is said in History, the most civilized minds of the time thought that Graham Bell’s invention was a useless gadget for anything – but Dom Pedro never agreed with this assessment, and brought to Brazil, on the spot, what would become one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements. Imagine if, instead of him, the emperor was Minister Alexandre de Moraes. There would be no phone until today in Brazil.
Since then, in terms of technology, Brazil has specialized in running in the back peloton – there between the middle and low Third World, without infamy and without praise. Except for one thing or another, such as certain types of airplanes and electric motors, the rest of the world has never been interested in buying anything that Brazil has produced in recent centuries. Our problem today is the great national effort to go backwards. We have few Pedros II. We have many Alexandres de Moraes.
The phone was discarded as nonsense – but at least no one thought it was dangerous. They didn’t count, at the time, on the cunning of Minister Moraes. If it had been active 150 years ago, it would have realized what no one, starting with Dom Pedro II, noticed. What seemed like an innocent invention of Professor Pardal would end up becoming, in the future, a fatal threat to democracy.
The problem, from what can be deduced from what the minister says all the time in his sermons, would not be exactly the phone. It would be, as always, the human being and his incurable vice of using the fruits of progress for purposes not foreseen by the authorities – let’s say, people like Moraes. Do you mean that now, with this distance communication, anyone will be able to say what they want, to whoever they want, wherever they are? You can’t.
Worse: the operation of all this would be in charge of foreign companies, have you ever thought? At any minute of the day they could use their control over the telephone network to interfere with national sovereignty – and this is not Maria Joana’s home. Imagine, then with Elon Musk’s cell phones, social networks and new Starlink equipment, that they don’t depend on Moraes’ antennas to keep people talking to each other.
It’s not a case of progress, the minister thinks; it’s a police case. Communication must be a monopoly of the “State”, such as printing money and issuing a passport. People who “don’t understand” freedom of expression can’t keep messing with social media; this is today, along with Musk, the biggest threat to democracy. Moraes gets sick with these things.”
estadao.com.br/politica/j-r-g…
Translation: the hotspotorlando news