#lula

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March 21, 2026 - “After taking everything we had … they want to colonize us again.”

MY BAD BATCH ITA BAG!

I made the big and small Lula plushies in crochet (cause apparently crochet is one of those things I can comfortably do while lying down lol)

Hunter made her promise to check in at least once a week. She'll never tell, but calling them is her favorite part of the day.

I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TOMORROW (Jun 23) in TORONTO at Osler Records, and WEDNESDAY (Jun 24) in NYC at The Strand. After that, it’s Philly and Chicago.

Some people love to admire a beautiful football play; me, I can't get enough of politicians doing good politics – and like those World Cup fans, I am doubly pleased when it's my team making the play.

I definitely have a team in Brazilian politics: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Workers' Party. Lula's done so many amazing things in his career, and these often intersect with my own special interests. Like, he made Gilberto Gil his minister of culture, and his people built the telecentros, free software-based internet dojos for the poorest kids in the country, living in favelas:

https://www.informationweek.com/software-services/brazil-turns-away-from-microsoft

Lula was royally ratfucked – framed by a corrupt justice minister who secretly conspired with the country's oligarchs – and imprisoned, and the conspirators installed Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist war criminal whose covid bungling led to mass death:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash

When Bolsonaro lost his next election – to a triumphant Lula – he attempted a coup, for which he was arrested and handed a long prison sentence, despite Trump and Microsoft trying to intimidate the Brazilian judge into letting him walk:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/22/bolsonaro-prosecution-us-sanctions-00575122

Now, Lula is fighting to keep Bolsonaro's nepobaby failson, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, from wrestling back control over the country for his fascist party; and that's where the good politics come in.

Lula's party has just scored a massive, national political victory by tabling legislation to establish a five-day workweek. While Brazil's professional/managerial class enjoy a two-day weekend, the working poor of the nation are prisoners of the escala 6×1 system, which sees them working six days per week. It's a hangover from the era of Brazil's fascist dictatorship, which (nominally) ended in 1988, but whose legacy still haunts the Brazilian people.

Lula's 40-hour workweek is incredibly popular. So popular that Bolsonaro's party whipped its members to vote for it, because they fear that to do otherwise would hand an even bigger majority to Lula, who might go on to give workers a four-day work-week:

https://prospect.org/2026/06/22/lula-sees-boosts-as-he-pushes-to-reduce-brazilian-workweek/

It turns out that weekends are popular and promising the electorate access to a weekend is good politics. What's more, denying weekends to the electorate is shitty, awful politics, which is why Bolsonaro's fascists were forced to vote in favor of a policy they hate, even though all credit for that policy will still go to Lula and the Worker' Party. The bill passed 461-19.

Contrast Lula's muscular, deliverism-based politics that seeks to improve the lives of working people in tangible, immediate ways with the catastrophic series of blunders that Keir Starmer's Labour has delivered. Despite having won a majority so large it would have made Saddam Hussein blush (not because Labour was popular, but because the outgoing Conservatives were universally loathed), Starmer has refused to lift a finger to improve Britons' lives. Instead, he's abetted genocide, criminalized protest, proposed ending jury trials, imposed austerity, handed the NHS over to Palantir and all the remaining potable water and electrical capacity in the country over to American most unprofitable AI giants.

Starmer's insistence that we can't have nice things is bad politics, because (and it's weird that this has to be said) a government that makes people's lives worse is less popular than a government that makes people's lives better:

https://www.whatwelo.st/p/everyone-hates-tech-but-nobody-knows

Now, the right is incapable of making working people's lives better, because broad improvements to the vast majority necessarily come at the expense of the tiny minority of morbidly wealthy hoarders whom the right serves. In order to get millions of turkeys to vote for Christmas, the right substitutes spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities to distract their voters from the quiet acts of everyday cruelty they subject those voters to:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

This isn't good politics. The sadistic torture of your base's enemies will never please them so well nor so durably as making immediate, significant improvements in their lives will.