So what they're saying is Lula destroyed the future of the country (by signing an agreement designed by Bolsonaro) but he must be reelected to prevent Bolsonaro from destroying the future of the country.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Eh, I would like to offer a little pushback to the whole "Soviet Union wouldn't be so lax" narrative. Sure, the purges and killings were real, but they only started in the immediately pre-WW2 years when the Soviets uncovered massive Nazi and Japanese collaborator infiltration operations in the high-ranking party circles; before that their policy for saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries was actually remarkably similar to the approach described here.
I highly recommend the book "This Soviet World" by Anna Louise Strong from 1936, and particularly the chapter "Remaking Human Beings" which describes the Soviet treatment of criminals.
Basically there were protests (mainly by business-owners) about currency instability (we're talking thousands in big cities). Nothing drastic happened. Then the next day violent thugs started assaulting police stations with Molotov cocktails (and, in one case, a flamethrower), it's probably quite clear to most in Iran that those are paid agitators/Mosad assets. It's not the first time.
When it comes to current events in Iran, I recommend to look for prof. Mohammad Marandi's interviews on youtube; he's always there on some progressive/anti-imperialist channel. Here's one I found where he discusses those protests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqsy4f0OE8M
The claim that not achieving wealth or diversity is proof a country is not socialist is also the same argument Maoists use against Cuba
But of course, if you do achieve wealth and diversity, it's because you betrayed the Revolution and became capitalist. It's Parenti's unfalsifiable orthodoxy, but applied in reverse.
No worries, Turkiye is definitely one of the more subtler cases.
Btw, you seem to be a Turkish comrade. How seriously is the whole Turkiye vs Turkey taken? I didn't mean to be inconsiderate, I just rolled with the name the article was using.
True, but we all know the general western reaction to amending the law to extend the term limits in any way.
But here we arrive at another unspoken assumption of western democracy, namely that whatever idiosyncratic procedures a particular liberal democracy might have, they are more or less set in stone and any proposed reform will easily be portrayed as anti-democratic.
You're of course right that Turkey is quite reactionary. But Global South really just means "Not-Global North". It's not a coherent block.
As you must be aware, Turkey while formally being a NATO member, did not really follow the NATO line of "Russia bad"; nor did it follow the "Guaido is the president of Venezuela" line like the EU. It often opportunistically aligns with the West, like by helping with the assault on Syria; but economically, it increasingly follows an independent line (compare that to all the EU vassal states).
Indonesia also did a genocide against its own people in the 70s with US help, yet it's one of the most important economies in BRICS now. India is similarly torn between East and West, like Turkey. There's a reason all 3 of those countries are classified as "non-aligned".
Shows even more neoliberal continuity.