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The Current Transcript for October 5, 2018

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE 1: I [unintelligible] to believe him.

VOICE 2: In the grand scheme of things, my goodness, there was no intercourse. There was maybe a touch. Can be really, 36 years later, she's still stuck on that?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: The Voices of some women saying they're standing by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Despite Christine Blasey boards allegations of sexual assault last week, the controversy has become a flashpoint in a highly charged, highly partisan United States. It is not just torn apart that country but torn apart those within the same party, especially Republican women. And we're starting today with their voices on the story that is wracking America. Then if you've been following that debate and so many more divisive issues on social media, I bet you thought, however briefly, 'Hmm. I should just delete my Twitter or Facebook account for good'. Well Jaron Lanier says just do it because:.

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You can still text your friends. You can still make your own website. If you get off Facebook gold matics much less time to get informed by the news and you get better informed. That's been I think well demonstrated.

PC: The renowned tech guy joins me in a half an hour and we'll see if he convince us to delete our account. And then there's a major vote this weekend in Brazil.

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[Demonstrations]

PC: That is how it sounded when the right wing candidate, known as Brazil's Donald Trump, was stabbed while campaigning on the streets last month. We will head to Brazil to talk about this weekend'st hugely consequential general election. Hi I am Piya Chattopadhyay and this is the Friday edition of The Current right.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed, Democrats could still impeach him, says Republican activist

Guests: Mary Rice Hasson, Meghan Milloy

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[Cheers]

Thank you all so much for showing us today. We're going to do. We're going to keep showing up and no matter how this goes, they cannot keep us down. We will win. A vote for Kavanaugh is about saying 'women don't matter'. Let's stay together, let's fight, let's keep showing u.

[Crowd chanting]

PC: Comedian Amy Schumer was among the thousands in Washington yesterday protesting Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judge has denied allegations of sexual assault dating back to when he was in high school. And a days long FBI investigation into his past has now been completed. Critics say it was too limited in its scope. But Republican senators held a press conference yesterday to say the report does nothing to corroborate the allegations. Here's Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah.

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I want you to know I take this stuff very very seriously. And I don't know that I've ever seen anybody who would exceed Judge Kavanaugh as a judge in the federal court system. I'd personally resent the calumny that's been heaped upon him, just isn't right. It is unfair and it sends a message to everybody that they really want to take a federal judgeship in the future.

PC: Then last night the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Brett Kavanaugh in which he wrote "Going forward you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I've been for my entire 28 year legal career; hardworking, even keeled, open minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good." As the vote approaches to put Judge Kavanaugh on the bench of the country's highest court for life - a procedural vote today and a full Senate vote as early as tomorrow – the U.S. remains extraordinarily divided. That's particularly so for Republican women facing the prospect of a conservative justice accused of sexual assault and misconduct. Well I'm joined by two lifelong Republican women to share their thoughts. Mary Rice Hasson is the Kate O'Beirne fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. She's in South Bend Indiana today. And Meghan Milloy is the co-founder of Republican women for Progress, an organization of Republican women opposed to Donald Trump. We've reached her in Strasbourg France. Hello to both of you.

MARY RICE: Good morning.

MEGHAN MILLOY: Hello.

PC: Mary Rice Hasson, let me begin with you. Should Brett Kavanaugh become the next U.S. Supreme Court judge?

MARY RICE: Absolutely.

PC: Why?

MARY RICE: Because he has shown through his 12 years of being on the federal bench that he has the judicial temperament, that he has the qualifications that are needed here. And it is unreasonable to derail a nomination of someone like him because of unsubstantiated allegations. And that's the crucial point here. An allegation is not the same as a credible allegation. A credible allegation means that you can find corroboration. And what's clear both from the hearings from Rachel Mitchell's report, from the FBI report as far as we know, is there is no corroborating evidence.

PC: You say he has the judicial temper temperament. Last week when he was in front of the committee many would say that was not a judicial temperament. It was a person who was frustrated, angry. What do you say to that?

MARY RICE: I say first of all you judge judicial temperament by what you've seen over the long haul up of a person's life. And he has been on the federal bench. We have observed his judicial temperament for 12 years. One afternoon where this man is facing the worst kind of allegations, of course we want to hear that impassioned defense. And in fact anyone who hopes that he is going to be sympathetic to habeas corpus, petitions to the rights of a defendant who says he's unjustly accused ought to find consolation in the fact that he's a human being who understands what it's like to be unjustly accused.

PC: For those who haven't read his op-ed, he did address his emotion in it. He said I was very emotional last Thursday more so than I've ever been. I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp and I said a few things I should not have said. I hope everyone can understand that I was there as a son, husband and dad. I testified with five people foremost in my mind. My mom, my dad, my wife and most of all my daughters. That's Brett Kavanaugh in yesterday's Wall Street Journal op ed. Meghan Milloy, let me come to you. Where do you stand on this vote should Judge Kavanaugh be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the USA?

MEGHAN MILLOY: I don't believe he should. I mean you know we are seeing credible accusations against him of sexual assault. But I think what's really getting lost in this conversation is that there have been a number of examples where it is a very real possibility that he has been lying under oath. Yes about very small details. But if it's a man willing to lie under oath about small details I don't think that someone should be on the highest court in the land.

PC: Give us an example of where you say he was lying.

MEGHAN MILLOY: Well you know look at a lot of the conversation around his yearbook language in the yearbook talking about beach week and some names of you know the devil's triangle which has kind of been disputed as to what that is. And just various things that he said she said as to their definition. And a Supreme Court justice should be absolutely above reproach which I think this brings into question. And they should be unimpeachable. I mean we're looking at a very real possibility that the Senate could become a democrat majority and you have to imagine the first thing that they would do is impeach him.

PC: Was there a specific moment for you, Meghan Milloy, where you said to yourself, where you really question 'should he be confirmed?' Or have you always felt that he shouldn't be confirmed?

MEGHAN MILLOY: Well to be honest I had I had concerns about him from the onset. I think philosophically healings a little to the right. And some of his decisions. I had some concern when in his testimony he called birth control pills abortion pill. I think that those sorts of conversations really begin to call into question where he stands on women's rights, women's issues. And you know I do think he has an excellent track record as a federal judge. He's got an impressive resume. He's obviously a brilliant man. But as I said before this should be a person that is above reproach and is of the highest character. And I think that we've seen some real doubts on those points.

PC: Mary Rice Hasson you are all in with Brett Kavanaugh in terms of him being confirmed. But did any sort of moment in the last number of weeks make you go 'Huh. Maybe not. Maybe I don't feel fully comfortable'?

MARY RICE: I listen very carefully to Dr. Ford's testimony. I think every woman and hopefully every man in the country was just listening and she was very emotional very obviously affected by whatever occurred to her. But I'm also [unintelligible]. And when you look at what she said there are significant gaps. So while I was listening I didn't really make up my mind about her until after I went back and just read through things, read Rachel Mitchell's distorted digest of the testimony. And I think that's what people need to be doing here is stepping back from the emotion of the moment and really looking and realizing there is absolutely no corroboration. But even more than that there's a reputation. The people she named as witnesses said 'Uh-uh. We cannot corroborate that. We don't even remember such an event occurring' and she's got these significant gaps. I want to address something that Meghan brought up where she said that a Supreme Court justice should be above this reproach in the examples that she just gave of him quote "lying under oath" really amount to different perceptions. Because there is evidence that other people say 'yes what he said Devil's Triangle means is exactly right'. So that's a differing perception, that's not the same as lying.

PC: It maybe spinning or twisting though.

MARY RICE: So here is the thing is that you said lying. So I think we have to be really careful about our language. And when you say needs to be above reproach, I would hope that a man who has been in the public eye for 30-35 years would be judged by that standard not by what he did or said in high school, which is a ridiculous thing for any of us to be tied to.

PC: I want to pick up on one more thing that you said you said that you were an attorney and that this is the Brett Kavanaugh. You know I'm paraphrasing here but in a court of law this wouldn't hold up. But here's the thing he was not in front of a court of law. He was in front of the Judiciary Committee and people say look he wasn't on trial this is a confirmation process. Why do you. And you know as a woman that many survivors of sexual assault have gaps in their memory that is well-placed in society in terms of us knowing that. So what do you say to that?

MARY RICE: So here's the thing it's not that he I would have expected the allegations to meet a criminal standard, you know beyond a reasonable doubt. It's rather there was not even a preponderance of evidence. There was not even a tilt towards the evidence backing her up and her gaps in memory are one thing and she clearly had gaps. But it's even more troubling that the very people she named as people who should corroborate her testimony or her statement said 'We can't do that. We don't even remember this event'. That to me is really compelling because it's a refutation. It's a pushback saying I'm sorry. She 'Whatever she remembers. That was not our experience' and you've got three people weighing in including her [unintelligible].

PC: I just want to move along because we've had heard this debate.

MEGHAN MILLOY: Very briefly. So just on the topic of evidence, I hear that that conversation thrown out a lot. There was absolutely no evidence to Dr. Ford's accusations. And as an attorney myself as well I think one of the very first things you learn in criminal law is that witness testimony is evidence. So the fact that these people are discounting that her testimony is not evidence, I think really is missing the whole point of this Me Too movement and empowerment of women.

PC: Well here's what I want to get into with the both of you because you guys, you gals, you women are on the same team, right. You're both Republican. So what impact has this confirmation process had on Republican women? Meghan Milloy.

MEGHAN MILLOY: Well I think that will really see the impacts in November. You know you look at a lot of the recent polls and you're starting to see a number of Republican women, especially kind of the suburban college educated Republican women, that did in fact vote for Donald Trump in 2016, they're now saying they regret their vote and wouldn't vote for him again. So I think it's those women that may be more moderate or just maybe fed up with the rhetoric and the tweets and the grandstanding of the current administration that this will really affect. I think that in a number of key districts this is seen as a check on Trump. If you vote for Kavanaugh you're voting for Trump. If you vote against him you're voting against Trump.

PC: You have never back Donald Trump but what has this confirmation process done to your convictions as a Republican?

MEGHAN MILLOY: I think it's disappointing. I mean we have no female Republicans that were on the Judiciary Committee to help make any of these key decisions. I think that our female senators Murkowski and Collins had ample opportunity to speak up for women and for the moderate Republican base that I think they often speak to and they haven't. So it's disappointing for me as a Republican woman but I think it really has split the party once again. And you know terms of the pro Trump Republicans and the anti-Trump Republicans in a time when we really should be coming together.

PC: So are you having a crisis of conscience at all, that maybe the Republican Party as it is today in 2018 is not my home and maybe I just need to leave?

MEGHAN MILLOY: Yeah I've been having that crisis of conscience for a couple of years now. But you know we like to say that we didn't leave the party, the party left us. That's why we are still Republicans because we think there is still some good to be fought for. You know we've been lifelong Republicans for a reason. We want to bring it back to that point of good and to the big tent Republican Party that it once was.

PC: Mary Rice Hasson where do you stand on this? When you look around at your fellow women in your party the Republican Party, what impact has this confirmation process had on that?

MARY RICE: Actually my experience has been very different from Meghan's. It's been galvanizing. I'm hearing as much from women as I am from men that say they were disgusted by the whole process. They really felt that Judge Kavanaugh did not get a fair hearing or a fair shake in terms of people saying believe the victims. Well no. Hear the victims. Believability comes down to more than just the fact that someone share their story. And so women, the women that I'm hearing, are going to turn out in November because they care about the policies. They may not care for Donald Trump personally. But he's not the issue. They're voting for their local representatives. They're voting for their senators. And this whole hearing process has been galvanizing.

PC: How intertwined is support for Brett Kavanaugh, Mary Rice Hasson, with support for President Trump? In other words can you imagine backing one but not the other? Are these two a pair?

MARY RICE: No I would say I don't see them being as an inextricable here. I think what people are saying is that Trump was elected in order to bring a conservative perspective to the federal courts to really restore some balance because those courts had gotten very out of balance. And so people are looking at this as saying this is what he was elected for. These are the policies that we care about. And Judge Kavanaugh has proven himself to be reputable, to be brilliant, to be fair. And so, yes, we're going to back him for the Supreme Court.

PC: I appreciate that you say the people the Republican women you've talked to are steadfast in their support. But you have heard that other women within your party are conflicted and some are even against a judge Kavanaugh. What do you say when people say women need to stand by women, whatever their party affiliation?

MARY RICE: I think that insults women because women are not monolithic. We think, we judge, we decide for ourselves. And I think that that kind of openness to people's differing views, even within the Republican Party, is extremely important. And that to me is a good thing because we're going to have these conversations. We're going to go back and forth and the whole process will be improved by that, assuming we're civil and we're not demonizing others. And I think within the Republican Party there is room for people to come at this from different perspectives.

PC: Meghan Milloy you mentioned the midterms, beyond that, or even leading up to that seeing the rift that's come out of this within your own party, what is your biggest concerns about where the Republicans are heading more generally?

MEGHAN MILLOY: Well I think that you can kind of backtrack to 2012 from the Republican Party wrote its own autopsy. And one of the main points that it made was if the party is to continue to survive and that's continued it's going to continue to win elections, tt has to do better with women. And flash forward six years and I think we're doing even worse now than we were then. I mean we're kind of, yes this is the judicial courtship, but this issue I think is so much about how the party perceives woman and how the party treats women. And when your party is being run by a man who seems to treat women very poorly both verbally and physically, I think that just disregards women in the future. It's embarrassing that we have so few women elected officials within the party. I think that is both a symptom and a cause of where we are today as a party. And I think that you know you're seeing polling among women and especially young women who are totally repulsed by the Republicans and are leaving the party and huge numbers of ever joining the party at all. So I think that if the party is going to get those young voters and get those suburban college educated female voters, they have to at least pretend like they care about women which they're failing to do right now.

MARY RICE: I disagree with that. The Republican Party does care about women. But as a Republican I don't think it's right to say there is one woman's agenda as the Democratic Party does. As if the progressive agenda equals what women care about. And women care about the economy. They care about jobs. They care about their husbands and their fathers and their sons, being vulnerable to having their whole life's work derailed.

PC: Do they care about their daughters, their sisters and their women friends?

MARY RICE: Absolutely but that's why I was totally in favor of you know let's hear her out. Let's have that additional investigation. But when the fruits of that come back with the same conclusion then I think we need to assess that and not just have this sort of blind sense of whatever a woman says is the truth. I think that's insulting.

PC: Mary Rice Hasson what do you say to Meghan Milloy? Well let me ask you Meghan, Meghan are you approaching your line and sound like what is that for you?

MEGHAN MILLOY: I keep thinking there is going to be a straw that breaks the camel's back and yet we continue to push forward. I know I'd like to think that the party will kind of wake up at some point between now and 2020. But I have to imagine that if the Republican Party continues to be one that will re-elect Donald Trump they will stand by his rhetoric. I think that I and many others kind of in my same group will find a new place for them.

PC: So Mary Rice Hasson what do you say to Meghan? 'Hey stay with us. Stay Republican,' when you hear her say that?

MARY RICE: I say it's about results. And I think if you look at people who were never Trumpers, very many of those people, in spite of Donald Trump's rhetoric, look at the results and the policies and the economic jumpstart that has occurred and they say 'Yes this is something we can support'. And so that's where I think it comes back to. It's not a question of Donald Trump's rhetoric. It's a question of what happens on the ground. What are the policies and where is the direction of our country going.

PC: I want to thank you both for speaking with me and talking about the divisions within your own party and your family of Republicans. Thank you very much.

MARY RICE: Thanks.

MEGHAN MILLOY: Thank you.

PC: I've been speaking with two lifelong Republican women. Mary writes Hassen is the Kate O'Beirne fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. We reached her today in South Bend Indiana. And Megan Malloy is the co-founder of Republican women for progress. We reached her in Strasburg France today. By the way the procedural vote on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court takes place later today and a full Senate vote may take place as early as tomorrow. Well for us the CBC News is next. Then he is a tech pioneer and a scientist employed by Microsoft. So why in the world is Jaron Lanier urging all of us to get off our social media networks. He joins me in just a bit to talk about the pernicious effects of all that tweeting and liking and how much he says you'll like life post Facebook page. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay. You're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. We're back in just a little bit.

[Music: Theme]

Can this tech pioneer convince you to delete your social media accounts?

Guest: Jaron Lanier

PC: Hi I am Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme].

PC: Still to come: South America's largest country is on the knife's edge. Brazilians go to the polls this weekend after a wild election campaign, and the choice seems to have come down to a government of the far left or far right. I'll speak with The Globe and Mails Latin America correspondent Stephanie Nolen in half an hour. But first a call to log off from our anti social networks.

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I don't like the way it makes people feel. I don't like the way it makes people gang up on other people. Justly or not, it's just uncomfortable. It's just a cesspool we are just yelling at each other.

PC: That is comedian Michael Che talking about Twitter and why he doesn't use it. You may have heard similar sentiments from your friends and family about swearing off of social media networks and ironically you may have heard them voicing those opinions on Facebook or Twitter. These networks may be ubiquitous in our world but they seem to be giving rise to a growing dissatisfaction about the way they make us feel. The role they play in our daily lives, our politics and even our relationships and how they're seemingly dividing us. Here's how Britain's Royal Society for Public Health put the message in an awareness campaign.

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Is social media taking over your life? Do you find that you are constantly comparing yourself to unrealistic beauty standards [ding] and can't stand to be alone with your thoughts? Do you feel that you are missing the transient beauty of day to day life? Is your sleep suffering as a result of the incessant desire to scroll [tweet, wistle] all the time day in day out. [Ding] Then it's time for you and social media to go on a break. [Notification tone]. Take part in Scroll-Free September and use the time you would spend on social media on something else.

PC: My next guest recommends taking a step much bigger than a single scroll free month. He says it is time to delete your social media accounts entirely and forever. But Jaron Lanier is no tech Luddite. He's a tech pioneer who is considered the founding father of VR, or virtual reality, who worked on the growth of the Internet in the 1990s. He holds the position of interdisciplinary scientist at Microsoft and Jaron Lanier has a new book it is called Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Jaron Lanier is in Berkeley California hello.

JARON LANIER: How are you?

PC: I am good. How did someone who so steeped in the world of tech end up feeling like social media is fundamentally a destructive force?

JARON LANIER: Well you know the destructive force is not exactly social media. I mean the idea of people being able to connect over the internet is great. That's why we made the Internet. The problem is that behind the scenes the social media companies, especially Facebook and Google through through YouTube and some of its other services, use these algorithms that are designed to de cue, a design to get you riled up so you get more and more addicted. And they do that in order to just get you glued in so they can advertise at you which is really more like a sort of a weird hypnotic manipulation process than traditional advertising. So it's really that algorithmic sort of evil in the background that's the problem not so much the smartphone not so much social media itself.

PC: I would like to think that I am smarter than these companies and their ability to lure me in. So explain that a bit more to me. How are they getting me to be addicted?

JARON LANIER: Well you know the thing is you are smarter. But the way this works is not through intelligence it's through relentless statistics. So a company will measure as much information about you as possible as you probably know. Their ultra information hoarder's they know, oh my god, just every little thing they possibly can get about you; how your body moves, your facial expressions, all kinds of stuff. And then they try to put you in a bin with millions of other people who might bear some similarity to you. And then what they do say do little micro experiments. Like if I change the border around this ad does that change how much people who are in this bin together are affected by it. If I wait three postings before I show them something inflammatory does that get them more upset or should I wait four? And through relentless micro experiments and relentless statistical measurement they just kind of end up with these formulas that have an effect on people. It's not profound It's slight but it's kind of like compound interest. It builds over time. So it's not that they're smart. It's if they have any insight into how to hypnotize you or get you addicted. It's just that the statistics work. It's math. It works and just over time with enough data the algorithms find a way to get at you.

PC: So you say that social media robs us of our free will which sounds like a giant thing. Like what do you mean it robs me of my free will?

JARON LANIER: Well look first of all I mean I say that provocatively. From a philosophical or scientific perspective I can't quite define freewill but what I can say is that if you're under the influence of a hypnotist working for someone else whatever freewill is you have less of it, and that's what's going on with current social media.

PC: You ask, we the users, I'll admit I'm on social media, not to be insulted when you suggest we may be turning into well-trained dogs as a result of social media. Bark bark. What about people who feel like they're using this stuff with their eyes wide open. Like I know what I'm doing and doing it through a critical lens and I'm not being manipulated. What do you say to me and others who you say are well trained dogs?

JARON LANIER: Well you know this is all about statistics. So the thing is for some and it's a minority they can say that and they can be correct. There's some number of people who have a great experience on it. But even Facebook's own scientists report results that on the whole people get sad or they lose quality of life. You know one of the symptoms of being addicted to something is anhedonia, a loss of joy in life, and overall statistically you're more likely to experience that and to not realize why it's happening. Just like somebody who's addicted to gambling or some other behavioral addiction.

PC: But is there evidence that people are actually addicted to their social media? Like where is the evidence for that, other than asking people when you're on Facebook 'are you just unhappier after you walk away?'

JARON LANIER: There is a world of research on this and furthermore the people who created these systems have publicly stated that they used addictive designs as had been studied by scientists in the field of behaviourism. Sean Parker the first president of Facebook has stated that For the record. So I think we can really say that they're both deliberately and effectively addictive design.

PC: Ok I imagine given the book that you've just written that you have now at least canceled all your social media accounts. Yes?

JARON LANIER: Yes I never got them to begin with. I thought the manipulation machine in the background was unethical and destructive so I never was on board.

PC: And so would people call you a Luddite even though you work in the tech world?

JARON LANIER: Oh no, I'm no Luddite. I suspect I've been involved in more new technologies and there'd be very few people alive who I think could match my record for that. But the thing is I strive to be an ethical Luddite. I don't think you can be a technologist without also being an ethicist and I mean it's just not it's not right.

PC: What do you mean by that?

JARON LANIER: Well you know technology is the primary thing that increases the range of human options so we have a chance to be more decent. There's no guarantee will be more decent with more technology but in the course of history what you see is, as we have more and more inventions to draw upon fire and the wheel and then you know vaccines and flush toilets whatever it might be, we have the option to make it more and more decent society. So technology gives us the wiggle room to become better towards each other but it doesn't guarantee it. Ethics can only come from the heart at the end of the day. So to be a technologist without also being an ethicist is not to be helpful. You don't achieve anything you might just be sending humanity backwards. So I think we have an absolute responsibility to think through the implications of what we do and to try to at least recommend the best uses of our inventions and that's not what happened in this case.

PC: I'm not going to use you as an example, you're not on social media, but I will use myself which is sometimes you know I go on Twitter and I go: 'God. The World is an awful place. People are so mean'. And I say that to make this point because you argue that social media makes what we say, not only meaningless, but that it destroys our capacity for empathy. I want you to connect those two things.

JARON LANIER: Yea. So you remember we're talking about dogs earlier.

PC: I think you called me a dog. Yes.

JARON LANIER: No no. You called yourself one, I think I am.

PC: This is right for a Twitter fight my friend.

JARON LANIER: Yes probably so. The thing is that early in the history of the science of behaviourism, a famous behaviourist named Pavlov, probably the first celebrity behaviourists, showed that you could get a dog to salivate through the ringing of a bell. And so what he did is he rang a bell while the dogs were eating and then they would associate food with the bell. And then the bell itself became the treat. So you can use symbols instead of actual candy as a treat or electric shock as a punishment. And so in our social media technologies that are manipulative we use social pain which might be rejection, humiliation or just being ignored as the equivalent of the electric shock from classic behaviourism. And then we use that occasional time when you're liked or something you do goes viral. Those are like the equivalents of the treats. That's like Pavlov's bell for the dogs. And so there's a whole science about how you time these things in order to get people more engaged. And there's an unfortunate little fact of human psychology which is while in the real world the sort of negative emotions like anger and paranoia and fear and resentment and jealousy and all that, those things are roughly equal by the positive ones like admiration and affection and trust and all of that respect. In this cyber world because we're measuring so fast the algorithms tend to pick up on the emotions that rise the quickest. And so the negative emotions, the fight or flight emotions, rise really quickly. So the algorithms latch on to them and then they elicit them more and more because they're just economical, they're effective. So you tend to have a system that makes people irritable and cranky and kind of just ugly. That's a natural byproduct of just trying to optimize it to make it more and more engaging.

PC: My friends who you know aren't on social media or find it useless. So you know 'get off it. It's soul destroying'. And you make that point you see social media having an impact on our soul. So what is it doing to our spiritual selves?

JARON LANIER: Well you know the tenth argument is the one that's the closest to my heart and that's about spirituality that I feel that when we use these systems, we're gradually buying into a new religion in which everything's just information and people are subproblems of a big program. And people are being subsumed by a giant new church which is the Church of the biggest program which would be the company with the big computers like Facebook or Google. And everybody's gradually melding into these until people themselves become obsolete and that gives birth to the rise of a new super artificial intelligence that will be like the messiah that comes back and takes over something like that. It's a weird new medieval style religion and I think people are gradually being herded into it without even realizing it. And I hope, if nothing else, this book at least makes people realize that they're being sort of inducted into this bizarre religion that's really kind of dumb.

PC: I want to talk about politics and that's probably the most sort of obvious realm in the social media world that we've talked about in more practical ways. Because of the whole Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, and I know you wrote this book before that. And just to remind people have forgotten about that; the personal data from 87 million Facebook users was handed over to the political consulting firm known as Cambridge Analytica. How much is that revelation changed people's perception of Facebook do you think and their willingness to stay on that platform?

JARON LANIER: Yes well the thing about it is I'd say a lot of people distrust Facebook, dislike it but that doesn't mean that their addiction magically goes away. So there are reports of a lot of people leaving it. There are some statistics that support that. It's very hard to get to any truth about this because the vast vast vast numbers of people on services like Facebook are fake people. They are sort of fictitious persons invented by the Russian intelligence service or others to add persuasion layers to rile up society or ruin politics in one way or another. So since we don't even know who's real in the first place it's very hard to tell who's deletions or real. At least distrust and dislike of Facebook are a step in the right direction.

PC: And so is that what you mean when you say that social media is making politics impossible?

JARON LANIER: Yes so since at this point most people are getting news that's in some way made it mediated by these algorithms, and the primary job of the algorithms is to get them riled up in order to get them engaged, in order to get them modified for the service of the people who are actually paying for the whole thing who are off to the side: advertisers, it's almost impossible to have a rational political debate. Everything becomes a confrontation of irritants. It's bringing down democracies all over the world and it's bringing about bloodshed in developing areas all over the world. It's kind of ruining everything for people. It's a truly malicious ugly force in the world.

JARON LANIER: everything for people. It's a truly malicious ugly force in the world.

PC: But the argument is: social media has some good too. And I'm thinking you know it allows people to organize and find like-minded people in order to find a community, campaign on issues that they care about. If we abandon social media wouldn't that be a setback for civil society?

JARON LANIER: Well first of all the benefits that you describe are real. I wouldn't deny that for a second, although I would describe them as being intrinsic to the internet not so much the social media companies that have come to take it over. What's happened with the social media companies is this good, which I absolutely believe is real. I absolutely believe in what you just said. But this good has been ruined. For instance if you look at the Arab Spring which are sometimes called the Twitter revolution or the Facebook revolution, it turned out that later ISIS got more mileage and better mileage out of using the same tools in the Arab Spring had. And the region turned to chaos and hasn't developed. It hasn't been pretty at all. A similar thing happened in the United States where the Black Lives Matter movement, which I found admirable, the data from all those people who were posting about Black Lives Matter and using it to organize was used by the algorithms and a totally blind way just to figure out who they could engage. And with the algorithms ended up doing was identifying and introducing to each other a whole world of American racists that had been latent. And it created this kind of rising neo Nazi, Ku Klux Klan revival that's just been horrible. That's this really darkened our nation.

PC: But do you attribute it like all of that to social media?

JARON LANIER: Well I don't want to oversimplify the world. I think we can say that social media brings out the worst in people, that it invented what is the worst is a different claim that would be harder to make, but that it brings out the worst. I think it is easy point to defend. I mean the thing is you see it all over the world, in both rich and poor countries and in countries with all kinds of different histories. You see it in the Rohingya crisis, you see it in rural India in Africa. But you also see the same phenomenon in Eastern Europe and even in Scandinavia now, all over the place. So when you see it everywhere you have to say 'Okay there's something going on here' that you can't explain in other ways. These political problems arise after Facebook becomes prominent, along with other degradations like a rise in teen suicide. I don't think this is something where you can say oh it's multifactorial and then just put it aside. You have to say 'No this is actually a dominant factor'.

PC: Let me ask you about one more. The hash tag Me Too. It's certainly galvanized a lot of people, namely women, to come together around the world to find support and lean on each other and arguably to out some of the perpetrators, or at least alleged perpetrators.

JARON LANIER: Yes. So if my theory is right we'll see a sort of reaction to Me Too. That'll be disproportionately powerful at some point. So I'm making a prediction and we'll see if it's accurate or not.

PC: Okay. Of course there are demographic differences about who's engaging in social media and who is not. And of course that leans towards young people they are some of the most immersed in social media. What impact do you think that is having on their perceptions about the world and their view of the future?

JARON LANIER: I have to correct you actually that was true at a certain point. I don't know 10 or 15 years ago. At this point the demographics were much more complex than that .and in fact some of the youngest demographics are quite skeptical about social media. When I'd visit a high school or an undergraduate campus ten years ago, and I would say the same things I'm saying now, it really sounded alien and bizarre to the students. Now I get cheered. I run into kids saying 'I won't date anybody who has an account in any of these things'. And you know there's that. And meanwhile there's actually quite a large component of the older demographics on Facebook in particular. I mean it varies per platform. So the demographics are really shifting and in a way that I think is positive. But can I just say one thing? I think a lot of what drives people to stay on these things is an almost accidental fear that if I'm not on these services, I'll just disappear. I won't know anybody, nobody will know about me. My life will disappear. So I write books, which leads me to be in your interview, and I'm seemed to be a successful writer. So far as I can tell I'm about as successful as I could reasonably expect to be. And yet I've never had these accounts. And it's possible that if you just get rid of this stuff you'll discover you really didn't need it.

PC: It's the old FOMO thing right. Fear Of Missing Out.

JARON LANIER: Yes. You can still text your friends. You can still make your own Web site. Remember doing that? You can still really do all the things you might want to do without using Facebook. And if you get off Facebook all of a sudden it takes much less time to get informed by the news and you get better informed that's been I think well demonstrated. So you know a lot of it is a groundless fear.

PC: Is the real idea behind asking people to delete their accounts, I mean are you actually expecting a mass exit. I mean the call to arms so to speak that you're making, do you think it's going to make a difference?

JARON LANIER: Well here's the analogy I would make: in the past society has faced a number of instances of mass addiction that led to mass destruction and we were able to reform ourselves despite there being massive commercial interests. So one example is public cigarette smoking. It used to be ubiquitous and now it's gone. Another example is drunk driving. It used to be cute. Now it's gone. And in both cases what happened is there were enough people, a minority probably, who simply didn't drink and or didn't smoke. And that small portion of society was enough to start a conversation. There were just some people who were outside of the addiction and could see it and could articulate that this addiction wasn't doing us any good. And everybody eventually responded to that reasonable argument. So in the same way here, my goal ultimately is just to have enough of a sliver of the society that can be outside of the addiction that we can have a rational argument. And I believe that once we can have a rational discussion, once we can have that discussion then I think I trust in people and I think that will start to make the same corrections that we did for cigarettes and alcohol. So there's a lot of people trying to do non-commercial versions of social media, most of which are better. You can write books and magazine articles, you can have meetings, you can give talks. You can do all these things and then you're actually more connected to people. I mean it's actually better when you do it that way.

PC: What responsibility do big tech and social media companies have in trying to solve some of the problems you've laid out?

JARON LANIER: As you know I believe we do have responsibility. And that's why I speak up so much. You know I'm a member of the loyal opposition in the tech world you might say. But at the same time society can't ask the tech platforms to solve all the problems because that makes the tech platforms too powerful and too central. So every time you petition Facebook to do something like get rid of fascists or cruelty or pornographers or whatever it might be, there are a whole host of evils, every time we ask them to be the authority that regulates these we're kind of making them more powerful and more central and more like an authoritarian government which I don't think is the direction we want to go in. And so my own feeling is that the solution is not so much asking the tech platforms to become the morality police but instead to build up societal structures like journals and even radio stations, if I might say, that can become the places that have quality standards that people can come to trust. And then those things can voluntarily have standards that are higher without requiring this giant global censorship effort. Facebook and similar companies and Google have had the effect of subsuming or reducing or crushing into obedience of the independent press. You know everybody has to sort of beg to be included in these algorithmic flows that are being calculated for totally different purposes for manipulation. And what we need to do is strengthen those institutions the newspapers, the schools, the journals so that they're powerful enough to stand up. And I think that's where we'll see more benefit than demanding that the platforms become more and more authoritarian.

PC: And are you optimistic that we can actually turn the ship around somehow?

JARON LANIER: Oh yes sure. I mean humanity has faced horrible problems in the past. We have to try to pull back from falling into irritable insanity in time to deal with climate change and other real issues that are threatening us. Can we do it? Yes I mean what's the point in thinking we can't? There's no benefit to that. So of course I'm optimistic. Criticism is optimism. Criticism is what you do when you think there's hope for improvement. So I'm absolutely optimistic and the more optimistic I am the more of a critic I'll be.

PC: I'm not going to give you 280 characters but I'm going to give you about 30 seconds to make the pitch to someone to get off social media right now. What are you going to say to them?

JARON LANIER: I'm going to say the only way you can know yourself is to experiment, to push yourself. You could go hiking in Tibet. That's one way. But even better way these days is to get off social media for six months. Get to know yourself, your friends, your world and then decide again. Then you'll know yourself then you have the standing to make a decision.

PC: Jaron Lanier, it's been great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

JARON LANIER: Oh hey thanks for being interested.

PC: Jaron Lanier is a scientist at Microsoft and the author of Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now. He was in Berkeley California. All right. Coming up we are heading to Brazil where a raucous election campaign has played out against a backdrop of violence. And the general election, the vote is this weekend. We'll be heading to Brazil in just a moment. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay. You're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. We're back in a bit.

[Music: Theme]

Could Brazil be about to elect 'the Tropical Trump'?

Guests: Stephanie Nolen, Joanna Burigo, Oswaldo Junqueira Franco

PC: Hi again I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Brazil heads to the polls this weekend in what is widely considered the most important election in that country's history. The frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro is a far right populist who sounds, well, like a far right populist. Here he is on prisoner rights.

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Well then don't rape don't kidnap don't pursue a life of crime and then you won't go to prison. That's it. That's it. We have to provide a good life for these scoundrels. Sorry, but they [beep] our lives up. And then our workers have to keep these guys in prison and provide them with a good life they can go [beep] themselves. That's it.

PC: Mr. Bolsonaro's Tough On crime campaign comes at a time when Brazil's homicide rate is at an all-time high. More than sixty three thousand Brazilians were murdered just last year, according to one study. Another one found that between 2011 and 2015 more people were killed in Brazil than in Syria. Despite the violence, Mr. Bolsonar's controversial campaign has still ignited protests.

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[Sound: Demonstrators chanting]

PC: Those are some sounds from a demonstration against Mr. Bolsonaro's candidacy last weekend in Rio de Janeiro. Until last month he was polling a distant second to former President Lula da Silva. This despite the fact that Lula is currently in prison serving a 12 year sentence for corruption. He was caught up in a multibillion dollar corruption scandal that has rocked Brazil, its economy and his ruling Workers Party. Now Mr. Bolsonaro's closest competition is Lula's former running mates who represents the same disgraced Worker's Party. Oh, and Mr. Bolsonaro was Stabbed on the campaign trail and confined to a hospital bed from which he continued campaigning. So to help us unpack all of this I am joined by Stephanie Nolan. She is the Latin America correspondent for The Globe and Mail. And we've reached her today in Mexico City. Stephanie hello.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: Good morning.

PC: Help us make sense of so much of this. Why is here your Bolsonaro the frontrunner in Brazil?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: Yes I think a lot of people are wondering how we got here. He has won a very effective campaign, a particularly effective campaign on social media in which he has presented himself as an outsider, at a time when across the border Brazilians of all political leanings are incredibly frustrated, disgusted with the existing political establishment. There is a lot of irony Jair Bolsonaro is saying that he is an outsider given that he has served seven consecutive terms in Congress. He's been in Congress since the early 1990s. But he has managed to convince a lot of people that certainly because he's not affiliated with any of the largest parties that has helped to make the case that he's someone different who will do things differently at a time when everyone is just revolt by the status quo.

PC: He has said some pretty radical things as we heard about prisoners. He said women deserve to get paid less because, well, they get pregnant. Who are his supporters?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: So there are the people I think who you know the kind of quite right leaning Brazilians who appreciate most of what he has to say. I don't think there's obviously a small constituency. I don't think it's really a lot of people who would agree with most of what he says. He's repeated hate speech charges for things he has said about Indigenous people about Afro Brazilians, about women, about queer Brazilians, Asians kind of across the board. He has been brutally, crudely, I'm [unintelligible] insulting but actually arguably inciting hate and violence against all kinds of different groups. So I don't think that those messages are particularly what appeal across the spectrum but his message is about crime, it's a very very simplistic message. It's give everybody guns or give all the good guys guns without ever really defining how we're going to figure out who the people are. And give police the right to shoot, to kill anyone they suspect of criminal activity and that's basically what it boils down to. Is that going to make Brazil's staggeringly awful violent crime problem better? No but the actual solutions the violent crime of course are very complex and painstaking and slow and you don't get elected by campaigning those. So, for a population that feel besieged and imprisoned and facing violence around every corner, Bolsonaro's idea that somehow as a man with notary experience he's going to come in and arm the good guys and make you feel safe in your home kind of tomorrow, is that practical 'no'. But it's really appealing for people who- you know there's a lot of- the rates of anxiety especially among lower income Brazilians who don't have the ability to hide behind high walls and security systems are just off the charts. People are afraid all the time but when you're afraid, I think a message like that even if it's not very logical, is quite appealing. .

PC: I want to talk about his closest rival in just a sec but just staying on Jair Bolsonaro for one more moment. You say as a lot of rhetoric, his message is pretty simple. People are calling him the Tropical Trump. Is that a fair characterization?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: I mean I don't really like that comparison, Piya, because I feel like things that have propelled Bolsonaro to leading this race in Brazil are very very Brazil specific, and the kind of slapping the Trump label on any race leading ideologue in any part of the world I think doesn't really give people great service in understanding it. But it is true that he certainly needs to make some comparisons. He again presents himself as an outsider when he is arguably very much in the Brazilian league and certainly has been inside the system he that he criticizes for a long time, which I guess is one significant way that he's different from Trump in that Trump had no governing experience. Bolsonaro has at least been in Congress but he is. He's from a family, his sons have been politicians for years. He's got extended family members who've been in the political system. He I think also has been very effective in daubing political support. This is I think maybe where the Trump comparison is strongest from people who don't actually necessarily agree. You know all those people who were revolted by Trump's at that Hollywood videotapes but then again supported him anyway because, you know, 'oh I don't like a lot of what he says but he speaks his mind and he's honest and that he's different from all those other people because he tells me what he really thinks.' Even if what he really thinks is kind of important, a lot of Brazilians seem to feel like 'Oh at last year as a political figure who tells the truth and that makes him very perceived in that way to be different from his rival.

PC: Okay then, Stephanie Nolen, talk to us about his closest rival Fernando Haddad from the Workers Party. Who is he?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: So Haddad is an academic who served in government. He was education minister previously, he was mayor of Sao Paulo which of course is Latin America's largest city. And I think, by the standards of these things, a fairly successful mayor. On his own he would have been maybe an appealing political candidate. The problem is that in this election he's really just the stand in and he was anointed the candidate really just over a month ago when it became clear that Lula, the incredibly popular former president who's now in jail, would not actually be able to stand for president from his jail cell which, believe it or not, was an ongoing debate until kind of the 11th hour. And so Haddad has been trapped as Lula's just kind of stand in. And the worst problem I think for a lot of Brazilian voters with Haddad is they don't really know if he's running on his own or if he's going be- you know his critics paint him constant as Lula's puppet who will be manipulated from the jail in Curitiba and secondly that he's running for the Worker's Party. And while that party was responsible for some very impressive social policies that helped to lift 35 million Brazilians out of poverty, over a decade in the beginning of this century, it is also the party that is most associated with the giant levels off the corruption scandal. And so it's perceived as irredeemably dirty and corrupt at this point. So Haddad, although he personally, by Brazilian standards, is perceived as being fairly clean, his affiliation with the party makes him just an untenable candidate for a lot of people. That said, the Worker's Party does retain a very important very strong base of support which is now Haddad comes to being second, especially among poor Brazilians in the northeast who are the people who most benefited from all of that social policy I mentioned.

PC: Steph Nolen the key issues in this election have been crime corruption and the economy. What impact has this all had on the economy? Where are we in Brazil?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: So you might remember in 2016 when President Dilma Rousseff was impeached and she was replaced by her vice president Michel Temer who immediately made a sort of sweeping overhaul of economic policy that was based on austerity and mostly the cutting of social spending. That was supposed to kickstart the economy and turn things around. Brazil was in its worst recession in a hundred years. Unemployment was almost at 13 percent. That unfortunately really hasn't worked. Inflation came down but otherwise there's been really, on the whole, very little progress on unemployment and very little progress on economic growth. That recession we're technically out of a recession but growth is not anywhere near where it was 10 years ago. And what really you would need for people to start to feel like their lives were getting better again. So that's why the economy is a big issue. One of the things I would say that behind the scenes is really propelling Bolsonaro's campaign is that he has advocated a lot of sweeping privatization across the board of all of the big Brazilian parastatals in the energy field and otherwise, and really a sort of free rein for markets. And so perhaps unsurprisingly he's very much the preferred candidate of business. And as a consequence, major business leaders have thrown their support behind him. But what we've seen even in the last few weeks is employers across the spectrum, from very small businesses to large ones, instructing their employees that they need to vote for Bolsonaro. If they want to have a job they have to vote for Bolsonaro to a level of interference that the Brazilians electoral courts have said is illegal but which it's been clear - you know Brazilian journalists have made clear in the last few weeks it's happening anyway. The markets have made very clear they think Bolsonaro will be the thing that will turn the economy around.

PC: Stephanie Nolan thank you for all that and the context and analysis. I'm going to hold you up there but I want to stay with us because I want to bring someone else into our discussion now. Joanna Burigo is the founder of Casa da Mae Joanna, a feminist consulting firm and we have reached her in Sao Paulo Brazil hello.

JOANNA BURIGO: Hello. Thanks for having me.

PC: Thank you for being with us. You participated in the #EleNao or Not Him protests last week. These are against Bolsonaro who you do not support. Why not?

JOANNA BURIGO: Well because I think he embodies, not only sexism and racism, but also politics of genocide and authority and throwbacks that represent a terrible terrible prospect for the future of our country. So it's pretty self-evident based on his speech which you showed a little bit on the beginning of the show, that all the danger that all these things represent. So I think Brazilian women, four million Brazilian women, who actually took to the streets are very much concerned about the materialization, the turning those enunciations into something very concrete and obviously very dangerous to the already very marginalized populations of Brazil.

PC: As you heard Stephanie say you know one of the big appeals of your Jairo Bolsonaro - there are many - as his tough on crime policy that he is promising. What about that worries you?

JOANNA BURIGO: I think that Brazil has a very authoritarian culture. And I'm not even talking at state level, I'm talking at civilian level. I think people have a very authoritarian mindset in Brazil. And violence and crime are rife in the country. This is something that sort of found the country. We've always been very violent. We've always been very intolerant. And I think that if the culture that leads the vote - The police already kills a lot in Brazil. Every 23 minutes a black man actually is killed by police in Brazil which is a frightening number. And he seems to be, instead of trying to make that something more organized by the state, what it sounds like, and what his politics appear to be directing the country towards is a sort of a liberation of this anger and absolute lack of control. And I think that, given that this is a country that has suffered immensely from social inequality, the people who are actually targets of this police violence are already very poor and mostly black people in Brazil. So I think his rhetoric sort of authorizes people to see these populations as criminals. So I think that the danger that we have ahead of us is that the country becomes even more authoritarian and even more violent and not only from the hands of the state but also you know between the population.

PC: I want to play you a clip. This is from Annie Parry a florist in Sao Paulo. We spoke with her earlier about Bolsonaro and that threat that you talked about, the threat of authoritarianism returning to Brazil. I want you to listen to what she had to say.

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There is a consolidated democracy in the country. If he wants to do that, he's going to need support from Congress and he won't get it. In reality what the people want is not authoritarianism but authority.

PC: Okay Joanna Burigo, authority rather than authoritarianism. What's his response to that?

JOANNA BURIGO: I think that of course some level of authority is necessary when you're handling a country. I couldn't disagree with that. But I think in terms of authoritarianism the Congress that we have at the moment is the most conservative congress since our dictatorship times. We do have a consolidated democracy. It's a bit feeble and of course these general elections are also going to elect a new Congress and new members of the parliament. And my fear is that, and it's mostly religious and conservative men, my fear is that at this point in time at the end of the elections we do actually choose to put at the top of our country's political realm many many authoritarian man who will normalize and naturalize authoritarianism instead of just being concerned about authority and actually running the country with checks and balances and Democratic best practice.

PC: Joanna Burigo. Thank you for your time today. Appreciate it.

JOANNA BURIGO: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

PC: Joanna Burigo is the founder of Casa da Mae Joanna feminist's consulting company. We reached her in Sao Paulo Brazil. Well although Jair Bolsonaro is unpalatable to some he does appeal to many others in Brazil, including our next guest. Oswaldo Junqueira Franco is an economist who runs his own farming related consulting firm. And we have reached him at Ilhabela Brazil. Hello to you Hello.

OSWALDO JUNQUEIRA: Hello everybody. Hello, Piya, Stephanie. Good morning to all listerners. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me in.

PC: Thank you. And as a voter why do you think Mr. Bolsonaro is good for Brazil.

OSWALDO JUNQUEIRA: Well I think there is a segregation between what the Brazilian society truly as fires and what the political situation represents. We all know Brazil for being a melting pot with peaceful people. And after the PT, the Liberal Party years, we're not fully segregated into different minorities clashing each other. So Mr. Bolsonaro's values represents the aspirations of the society. These being he constantly talks about God, family and country. So these explains why running a campaign, lacking money lacking TV time, he's ahead in the polls and he's growing especially in a minorities that he's accused of being against, such as the black people and women.

PC: What do you say to critics like Joanna who we just heard from, who say, listen Bolsonaro is a danger to democracy.

OSWALDO JUNQUEIRA: Well we are running elections to clean the housing Brazil. We all know the legacy that PT has left us. We have 14 million unemployed people and as you said 62,000 murders per year. More people dying of shotgun in Brazil than those who have been killed in Syria. So it's really a mess. So the two options that we have at this moment are Mr. Bolsonaro and Mr. Haddad Who has been campaigning for 22 days only. Because prior to that the guy who was heading the team was Mr. Lula da Silva who is in prison. So the option this is pretty clear. Either you go for PT and you can be sure of a disaster even because if you go to the home page of the party and if you check the government plans they talk about social control of media. They talk about land reform. So the authoritarians comes from the PT side not from Mr. Bolsonaro, who has been constantly repeating that he respects the Constitution.

PC: How important do you think the vote on Sunday is? It is being considered as one of the most important in Brazil's history. What do you think is at stake?

OSWALDO JUNQUEIRA: Well I think the very future of the country because if you think about the legacy that we had after 16 years off for Labor Party it's a mess, what they did to Petrobras, all the business they did with [unintelligible] and other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, some African countries like Guinea. They have been leading the country. It is a miracle that the country is still standing. As one of the listeners said we have democracy here so everybody can speak their minds. And I trust that PT has learnt from their mistakes and their true intention is to make Brazil the next Venezuela. So we have to avoid this, in the way to avoid this is to cast our votes to Jair Bolsonaro. I am not saying that we have 100 percent certainty that he will be good. But it's the only option we have.

PC: Oswaldo Junqueira Franco we'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much.

OSWALDO JUNQUEIRA: My pleasure. Thank you.

PC: Oswaldo Bolsonaro Franco is an economist and agricultural consultant. We reached him in Ilhabela Brazil. Let's bring in Stephanie Nolen of Globe and Mail back into our discussion. Stephanie, our two guests how emblematic are they of the polarization in Brazil today?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: They are pretty emblematic. I think in the very big gulf that you see between them where what each of them sees as the only possible option is that untenable to the other. I think that's a pretty pretty good illustration of how we got here.

PC: Is this election more about a vote against someone than rather for someone. As we heard the last guest say 'it's like look we don't really have any option one guy's been campaigning for 22 days so we got to go with this other guy'.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: You know I don't think it's been only 22 today because Haddadl, I think that's sort of been Haddad is the Worker's Party and everybody knew there would be some Hadda-like figure who would be the Worker's Party candidate. I can tell you a quick story. The first time that I ran into Jair Bolsonaro in person was in Congress the night that Congress voted to open the impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff in 2016. And different members of Congress were on the floor casting their votes in favor or against the impeachment process. They were saying 'I'm voting for my country, I'm voting for my constituents in this rain forest district...' They were all invoking something and when Bolsonaro's time came he strode onto the floor of the House, wrapped in a Brazilian flag - which is his big thing. He uses the flag imagery and nationalism as his kind of big marketing metaphor - And he cast his vote he said: "In honor of a military colonel." And the colonel that he named was the one who during the dictatorship personally oversaw the torture of political prisoners. And among the people that he personally oversaw the torture of Dilma Rousseff when she was an underground activist against the military dictatorship and a political prisoner. And I'm telling you that story, I get goosebumps again, because I remember even right leaning Brazilians in the in the hall that night were horrified that someone would openly praise the torture and the man who tortured the political leader that the house was there to discuss and his future they were considering. And so I think for each Hu we talk about a vote against, for some people, there's just the idea of you know 'Okay, you know maybe like a lot of things with Bolsonaro, but can you actually envision having this kind of a person as your president?' And for some people that's an impassable line.

PC: Well as you say many say a win by Bolsonaro can mean a return or a new military dictatorship in Brazil that that is a possibility. And on the other hand that if not then Brazil could be the next Venezuela.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: So I think both of those are kind of wild hyperbole. The Brazilian right love to invoke Venezuela. You know had has a doctor of philosophy and has been an education minister. He is not Hugo Chavez. Obviously a lot of the Worker's Party policy has been responsible for the problems in Brazil but the economic problems we see today. The country is not going to become Venezuela tomorrow and that's frankly kind of insulting to the people living through the actual humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. On the other hand I don't think to say that we're going to elections on Sunday and then on Monday there is going to be tanks in the street. I think is also hyperbole and not very constructive. However it is true that Bolsonaro, and especially his vice presidential running mate who is the military general who also speaks openly and very favorably of the dictatorship years, I don't think that they're not going to turn the place into a dictatorship on Tuesday. They are in favor of a lot of very authoritarian changes in the way the country is run right now. That certainly makes it a much less democratic space.

PC: Brazilians, like people in many many countries we see these days, deeply divided, almost polar opposites. What hope do you see that eventually Brazil will be able to unite around a winner whoever it is?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: To be honest, I don't. And I've lived in Brazil for five years now and I am damned if I can tell you what this is going to look like in a month. I think you're going to end up with one or the other. At this point it looks like probably Mr. Boltsonaro and he's not only not going to feel like my president to half the country, but he's going to feel unbearable to half the country. And I honestly just don't know what that's going to look like when we wake up the day after voting day.

PC: Stephanie Nolen, as always, thank you very much for your analysis and your expertise I appreciate it.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: It's a pleasure. Thanks for calling.

PC: Stephanie Nolen is a Latin America correspondent for The Globe and Mail. She has covered Brazil and lived there for five years. But today we've reached her in Mexico City. Well that is The Current for this Friday. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Singer/songwriter Lucas Nelson is on the show. He is the son of Willie Nelson and his work appears on the soundtrack to the new film A Star Is Born. Finally for us the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to two people who have dedicated their lives to fighting sexual violence as a weapon of war. Denis Mukwege is a doctor who has treated thousands of victims of gang rape in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad Basee Teha is a Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by ISIS and since her release has become an activist against sexual slavery and human trafficking. The Current guest host Laura Lynch spoke with Nadia Murad through translation back in 2016 and she asked her why she was willing to tell and retell her own horrific story of sexual captivity in the hands of ISIS, also called Daesh. We will leave you with part of that conversation. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay. Thank you for lending us your ear here on the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

I do this because I want justice because I don't want these crimes that are committed to be committed against any woman or any child. I want to help these thousands of people who are still in captivity. If we do not stop these crimes they will be repeated in other places. Whether I say it or don't say it I still live it. I'm speaking out on behalf of so many people who are suffering. This must be told. My dream is that every woman and every child lives free and doesn't have to see herself or himself as something that has no value. My dream is that all people live in peace and that what happened to me doesn't happen to anyone else.

[Music: Theme]

Friday October 5, 2018 Full Transcript

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