Comment by chbint
10 months ago
> You're basically arguing that the constitution is on equal footing with or inferior to the other laws. That's just backwards and to insist on this borders on gaslighting.
No. I'm making the Law-101 claim that, according to the Brazilian constitution (as well as most democratic constitutions worldwide) you can't rely on freedom of speech to bypass the law. Pretty much everything you said up to this point relies on this fundamental misunderstanding.
> The constitution is the constitution. If other laws contradict the constitution in any way whatsoever, they are wrong and invalid. I don't even want to hear the argument, they are unconstitutional and they should be literally deleted from the law books. And they would have been, if these judges were doing their jobs correctly.
There's a hierarchy within the constitution itself. Fundamental principles of the constitution come "before" constitutional norms. Indeed, constitutional norms must be interpreted under the lights of the constitutional principles, and any interpretation that doesn't follow them is unconstitutional. Isonomy (equality), for instance, is a principle. The right to speak freely is a norm. That means, among other things, that your right to speak freely can't be used to harm isonomy. Abuse of economic power is a way to to harm isonomy within elections (for you can use money to boost your reach, effectively "silencing" your adversaries by flooding your discourse everywhere, making the voter's decision to be a function of your money rather than about your political ideas and proposals).
Therefore, your whole reasoning about what should be the case is pretty much backwards, for you're implying that norms should come before principles.
Whenever one wants to think of oneself as capable of teaching judges (or any other professional), how to do their jobs, it is always a good idea to study how things actually work.
> By this point it's more than clear that we're never going to agree with each other.
Indeed, for I agree with the Brazilian constitution and you don't.
There is no disagreement. In the constitution, isonomy is just the principle that says everyone is equal before the law, everyone is subjected to the same rules. That's formal isonomy. Under the constitution, isonomy means you have a proportional right to answer the other party's claims and even extract damages. It does not mean you can have those claims censored. This is literally spelled out in the text. They get to say whatever they want, and you get to answer them and sue them if you want. After the fact. You don't get to preempt it with a priori censorship. That would mean the manifestation of thought is not free.
Plenty of lesser laws expand quite a bit on that concept until it becomes material isonomy. Treating the unequal unequally. They all boil down to things that reduce inequality such as affirmative action. Those are irrelevant to this discussion. TSE's notions of "economic power abuse" no doubt fall in this category.