Dilmish 101: Crash Course on the Brazilian President’s Dilma Rousseff’s Speech Style

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Note: The quotes from President Dilma’s speeches were carefully translated from the Portuguese. What you are going to read is, unfortunately, an accurate rendition of her words and meaning (or lack thereof).

In a speech delivered last April, former Brazilian President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), manifesting his support for his successor, President Dilma Rousseff (2011-present), promised she would make the Brazilian people smile again. Most Brazilians would probably agree with that, but not for the same reasons he might have had in mind when he said it.

The truth is that President Rousseff has demonstrated her ability to produce mirth among the audience on the many occasions when she decided to speak her mind publicly without preparation. In almost every impromptu speech she has delivered, it is possible to find moments in which a rare combination of words, ideas, and images makes her audience think in astonishment: “No, she did not say that.” Thanks to her repeatedly disastrous and unintentionally comic speeches, she has become known as the queen of nonsense, and her peculiar oratorical style has been dubbed “Dilmês,” which can be roughly translated into English as “Dilmish.”

Her memorable lines in Dilmish have given rise to a new comedy genre on the Brazilian web, which essentially consists in simply compiling and exhibiting her gems of thought in articles, videos, memes, and songs. In her almost five years as president, she has said so many things, so badly put, and so often, that there is a true treasury of Dilmish wisdom available on the internet.

For example, last week, in a speech delivered at the ceremony that launched the First World Games of Indigenous Peoples to be held in Brazil in October this year, President Dilma Rousseff made her audience smile over and over again by offering them a remarkable series of sentences so badly crafted that they immediately became brilliant jewels of unintentional humor and major internet hits.

After ten minutes of standard welcome and praise to national and international guests, Rousseff finally decided to improvise and make some laudatory remarks about the indigenous peoples of Brazil, but with the Dilmish mode already fully on, what ended up coming out of her mouth was this:

“I believe that we need to be proud about the historical formation of this country, and going beyond the fact that each indigenous people represents a specific culture, we need to be immensely proud of being a mixture of many ethnicities in the make-up of the Brazilian nation. And here today, we hail one of them: we salute the indigenous ethnicity, which gave us, as the vice-governor of this state, here representing the governor, mentioned before, the flavor of the names that are present in all of our cities. True, but I also would like to hail something else, since no civilization was born without some form of staple food. And we have one here, as the American Indians and indigenous peoples have theirs, we have yuca. And here we are sharing yucca with corn. And certainly, we will have a whole series of other products that were essential for the development of all human civilization throughout the centuries. So, here, today, I salute yuca. I think it is one of the greatest conquests of Brazil.”

 

It is hard to find a real rational explanation for why she suddenly decided to go from praising Brazilian Indians to talking about yuca (AKA cassava) and why she uttered those last three sentences of her yuca- cheering speech. The whole thing becomes even more comical when you are informed that the word yuca is a vulgar synonym for the male sexual organ in Brazilian Portuguese (because of the suggestive shape of the yuca root).

But that was not all for the day.

During her speech President Rousseff kept under one of her arms a hand-made leaf ball that, according to her, was a gift from participant from New Zealand, and just after her yuca salutation, she proceeded to attempt a quite risky mental maneuver for a thinker of her class: to use the leaf ball as a symbol for the practice of sports as a characteristically human activity. Speaking her mind like there was no tomorrow, Rousseff, in a theoretical flight of fancy, managed to concoct the following narrative:

“I am sure about this, and here I would like to show our long-established relation with sports. Here is a ball that I have been testing all the time. It is ball that was given to me by Terena and that I will take with me—and it will last as long as it takes. This ball comes from far away, from New Zealand. And it is a ball that I think it is an example, it is extremely light. I have already tried it, and it bounces. I tried it myself, I did one kick-up, no, I lie, half a kick-up. Well, but I think that the importance of a ball is precisely this: it is a symbol of the capacity that makes us different as . . . we belong to the human genus, to the sapiens species. We are those that have the capacity to play games. For this is what playing is about: the important thing is not to win, but to celebrate. That is the human, ludic, capacity of taking part in an activity whose end is itself, the activity itself.

So, sports have this characteristic, this blessing. Sports are an end to themselves, and that’s why they are not about winning, but about celebrating, about participating in the World Games of Indigenous Peoples. It is to participate celebrating the meaning of this activity that first characterizes children. The ludic activity of playing, the ludic activity of being able of playing.

So, to me, this ball is a symbol of our evolution. When we created a ball like this, we became homo sapiens or women sapiens.”

 It did not take long, of course, for the yuca and “women sapiens” sections of her speech to take over the web in Brazil in the form of a variety of jokes. Perhaps one of the most delightfully creative comic pieces created was this songified version of President Rousseff’s statements (see an English translation for the lyrics below):

 

 

“I salute yuca.

I salute yuca.

We are sharing yuca with corn.

We are sharing yuca with corn.

And certainly, we will have a whole series of other products that were essential for the development of all human civilization.

I salute yuca.

I salute yuca.

I think it is one of the greatest conquests of Brazil.

I salute yuca.

I salute yuca.

When we created a ball like this, we became homo sapiens or women sapiens.

So, to me, this ball is a symbol of our evolution.

Yuca.

We are sharing yuca with corn.

We are sharing yuca with corn.

I salute yuca.

I salute yuca.”

 

Once again I must remind my readers that those quotations from President Rousseff are actually representative samples of her speech style. They are not simply a non-habitual poor choice of words that was made in a really bad day the President had, nor are they a selection of sentences carefully put together to misrepresent her meaning. There are literally dozens of other speeches that could be quoted here to bear out the existence of the Dilmish language, and some of them are as good (or bad) as the ones above. In short, make no mistake: the woman really talks like that.

As another example, consider an excerpt from the speech she delivered on Children’s Day (celebrated on October 12 in Brazil) in 2013. She was in an important capital city, Porto Alegre, of an important southern State, Rio Grande do Sul, and the bulk of her speech was really about the Federal Administration’s new public transportation program and the opening of that city’s first subway. However, since it was also Children’s Day, a date devoted to celebrate the rights of children, President Rousseff thought it would be nice to say some words about it. So, again, after the standard introduction of greetings and praises, she activated the Dilmish mode and fired away:

“And, in particular, since I am here in this city that is so dear to me, Porto Alegre, I would like to greet Mayor Fortunati and his wife, First-Lady Regina Becker. If today is Children’s Day, yesterday I sad that a child . . . (pause) Children’s Day is Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Teachers’ Day as well, but it is also Animals’ Day. Whenever you look at a child, there is always a hidden figure, which is a dog behind the child, which is something really important. So, Regina also praise you for your dedication to that cause.”

 That was literally it. She did not further elaborate upon it, nor did it become somewhat clear later on in her speech why she chose those words. That was all of it. And this is a perfect example of another important kind of Dilmish: the one in which she suddenly veers off-topic, and you have a slight hope she will eventually come back, put all pieces together, and make her point; but she never does. She just goes off-topic for no reason.

Another fantastic species of Dilmish is that in which she actually tries to make a point by stretching the resources of language to the outer limits of human logic, and the result is usually the verbal correspondent of a surrealist painting. A good example of that is the answer she gave in a TV interview in September 2010 when asked to give her opinion about the competition between opposing parties on a referendum to decide about the legalization of abortion in Brazil. According to her:

“I don’t think that whoever wins or loses, neither whoever wins, nor whoever loses, will win or will lose. Everybody will lose.”

That is also a good example of one of the beauties of Dilmish: you can make your own interpretation of the President’s words. Since you cannot really take what she says literally, you are free to exercise your hermeneutical skills and come up with the meaning you think she had in mind. It is not a game deprived of fun, if you have the time to spare, and there are many Brazilian websites and YouTube videos in which collection of sentences like that are grouped under the head “What the heck was President Dilma trying to say?” Here are some of my all-time favorites:

“All of us know that each of us choose—and life makes us choose—some of the days in which we will never forget that day.”

“The environment is, no doubt, a threat to sustainable development. And that means that it is a threat to the future of our planet.”

“It is interesting that in Brazil you are oftentimes, as Brazilians usually say, criticized for having a dog and sometimes for not having a dog. That is an interesting criticism that takes place in Brazil.”

“And we have created a program that I would like to speak with you about, which is the Science Without Borders program. Why would I like to speak about Science Without Borders to you? It is because in all others . . . because we are going to launch Science Without Borders 2. The number 1 is 100,000, but it will have to continue to do Science without Borders in Brazil.”

“By the way, once I was told by a friend that this issue of men and women was no problem at all because women are the majority, but the other part. . . the other part of the majority is made up of men, all of them being born of a woman, and that’s why everything was all right: women together with women. Because men can have boys and girls and wives, but they necessarily have—and that’s not just a possibility, it is a necessity—a mother.”

“Paes [Rio de Janeiro’s Mayor] is the happiest mayor in the world, who runs the most important city in the world and in the whole galaxy. Why the whole galaxy? Because our galaxy is Rio de Janeiro. The Milky Way is nothing compared to the galaxy of which our dear Paes has the honor of being the mayor.”

As I think my readers can see it clearly now, something is rotten in the state of Brazil, and the stench is coming from the top.

 

This post was written by Alessandro Cota, philosophy and political science researcher at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

Brazilians Take it to the Streets and Say: “Go Away, Left. This is not Cuba.”

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See video footage, for the first time translated into English, of the Brazilian popular demonstrations against the Workers’ Party and its power structure.

What you are going to watch below is a raw video footage of one of the many demonstrations that have happened in Brazil in the last two years. The 2015 March 15 demonstration, for example, according to the Brazilian Federal Police, gathered 3 million Brazilians in the streets, protesting against the Workers’ Party and its power structure. The amazing thing about the demonstrations is that they are truly popular. There are no political parties, pressure groups, or professional activists coordinating them; and they are not funded by big corporations. It is truly a legitimate popular movement. The Brazilian people, seeing that their political leaders were unable to give voice to their ailments and fight for what’s right, decided to take the lead and demonstrate against the Workers’ Party.

In this particular video, you will see a confrontation between two groups of demonstrators: ordinary Brazilian citizens and card carrying union members from CUT (Unified Workers’ Central Union), the main national union center in the country, an organization that gives its full support to the government party. The anti-government protesters chant against the Workers’ Party, express their disgust and indignation at the Brazilian Left, and burn red flags, showing in deeds what they mean in their words: “This is Brazil, we don’t want any red flags here.”

Viewer discretion is advised, since Brazilians mince no words when they can finally say (and be heard) what they really want.

Note: This video has gone viral on Facebook among Brazilian users. I have tried to find the exact date and place where this protest took place but I have not been able to do it so far. It looks like this video footage was taken in 2013, in São Paulo, at the beginning of the wave of anti-Workers’ Party protests.

 

This post was written by Alessandro Cota, researcher at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

Philosophical Notes and Remarks (1)

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Notes and remarks from Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophical journal, addressing a number of timeless and contemporary issues.

 

The Difference Between Christianity and Philosophy

All comparison between philosophies and Christianity—an incurable vice of historians of philosophy—is complete nonsense because a philosophy is nothing but a doctrine, a man’s thoughts, and Christianity is the acting presence of God Himself in the world. They are as different from each other as the idea of a thing is different from the thing itself. If you spend the rest of your life thinking about cats, that will not make flesh-and-blood cats spring from your thoughts. A philosopher may create the most reasonable arguments to support his philosophy, but he cannot produce a miracle to bear it out, multiplying loaves of bread or calming a storm. Aristotle said that the truth is a property of judgments, that is, of thoughts; however, when Jesus Christ said that He Himself is the Truth, that truth is not present in thought, but in the reality of the world. When Christianity confronts itself with the many philosophies, it competes with them, so to speak, on unequal terms, given the utter disproportion of ontological substance between being and thinking.

Mutatis mutandis, if a philosopher wants to refute Christianity, he can only do that in thought. In fact, to suppress the Christian miracles by means of an act of thought would be the most astonishing miracle.

 

Logic and Philosophy

Logical contradictions are mere formal errors which can usually be corrected through the rephrasing of a sentence. Material contradictions, on the other hand, are objective impossibilities, which become even more scandalous when one attempts to rephrase them. On the level of discourse, both kinds of contradictions may be confused, but there is nothing more frustrating to me than noticing that my readers perceived only a logical contradiction where I actually pointed out a material contradiction.

That distinction is the litmus test for anyone aspiring to become a philosophy student.

To pick and hunt simple logical contradictions in a person’s argument is not philosophy. It is just grumpiness. I NEVER devote any of my time to doing that.

In general, and save for a few exceptions that can be counted in the fingers of a one-handed man, philosophy professors of Brazilian universities are incapable of not only grasping that difference, but also of making a distinction, in practice, between equality and analogy—an ability that should be almost instinctive.

ALL gender ideology derives from that incapacity, which some are born with and others acquire as a hysterical symptom, inoculated into their minds by psychopathic professors.

 

On Walking Before God

In my whole 68 years of life, I have met only one human being whose actions were constantly inspired by his love of God. But I have never met a single person whose actions were eminently guided by his love of neighbor.

 

The Cultural War Against the West

Stalin launched the Soviet cultural war in the 1920s, and it has not stopped growing to this day. The American show business industry is not only the largest anti-American but also anti-Western civilization propaganda machine there is, in the broad sense of a designed civilizational destruction. No a single movie is produced, even if apparently “conservative,” where Western man is not depicted as the embodiment of evil materialism at odds with the superior spirituality of tribal societies and even animals (see for example The Bear, 1988, Never Cry Wolf, 1983, and way before those, Elephant Walk, 1954, among thousands of others).

 

Economy and Society

Ludwig von Mises taught that there was no difference between a state-run economy and a completely out-of-control economy. Today we know that the Soviet government simply made up its statistics because it had no idea of what was going on in the economy. It’s Murphy’s law: the more order there is, the more chaos there is as well.

 

Global Elites and the Catholic Church

We should have no doubts about what’s going on today. The powers of this world are implementing by force a comprehensive and complete program to bring about a new civilization, where the state, associated with a handful of big economic groups, will have total control over society. The largest number of families will be dissolved (in the USA alone, 50% of families have already been broken), reducing the masses to an agglomerate of isolated individuals, with no organic relations, only associated with one another through a mechanical and regulated juxtaposition, that is, by the mediation of the state, living in a state of permanent sexual and hallucinogenic excitement without a break, while only 10% of the population work to support them. That is the plan. Gay rights, abortion, environmentalism, and all other topics of the leftist agenda are nothing but instruments to realize that plan. Malachi Martin’s book, The Windswept House, describes the effort by the globalist elite to integrate and use the Catholic Church as an instrument for their plan; an effort that, during the papacy of John Paul II, was already almost victorious. The adaptation of the Church to the values of the new civilization is an integral part of that plan, and it is IMPOSSIBLE that Pope Francis does not know that.


Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.  Translation from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

The Violation of Language

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When language becomes corrupt, mankind is out of touch with reality.

In The Fourth Political Theory, Alexander Dugin says some profound things which need to be acknowledged (even by one who opposes his call for the destruction of the United States). “In political post-anthropology,” he writes, “all is reversed: leisure and work (the most serious occupation, actual work, is watching television shows), knowledge and ignorance…. Traditional male and female roles are reversed. Rather than being esteemed and experienced elders, politicians are chosen for their youth, glamour, appearance and inexperience. Victims become the criminals and vice versa….”

Dugin correctly sees that a kind of inversion has been taking place. And this inversion is fundamental. It is a symptom of mass transformation within the soul. Humanity, as it were, has two poles; and these poles are being disrupted, negated, and reversed. As odd as it may seem, when writing about the balance of power between the great bipolar actors (Russia and America), we are now accustomed to a denial of bipolarity which merely promises a reversal of this same polarity. This may have to do with mass neurosis and the denial of death, or it is the result of some black alchemical process.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court validated gay marriage as a nationwide right. Setting aside the nonsense that passes for debate on both sides of this question, the thing that is most troubling is that marriage is now defined without regard for male and female. According to the most ancient spiritual teachings, gender is a universal principle having to do with regeneration. Only the union of male and female has regenerative significance. Justice Kennedy rejected this idea when he wrote: “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.”

But Mr. Justice Kennedy, the fulfillment of marriage is found in children. And as for Mr. Chief Justice Roberts, who argued that the court’s ruling was short-circuiting the democratic process, I am afraid that even a majority vote in favor of gay marriage does not make it possible for men to produce offspring without women. All that such rulings or votes can do is eliminate the previous definition of the word “marriage,” which my grandfather’s 1943 Webster’s International Dictionary defines thus:

marriage, n. 1. State of being married, or being united, to a person or persons of the opposite sex as husband or wife; also, the mutual relation of husband and wife; abstractly, the institution whereby men and women are joined in a special kind of legal dependence, for the purpose of founding and maintaining a family.

As you can see, the Supreme Court has violated the English language; that is, the Court has assumed a power that no government authority may safely assume. It is the most arbitrary power imaginable; for the Supreme Court may now say that “up” is “down,” and “black” is “white.” We cannot tell what such a court will do next; for it is now certain that no property is safe, no contract protected. Anything may happen. We are no longer ruled by laws, for laws are made of words and now, as of this moment, words are made of nothing, having no intrinsic meaning. They are sounds only, with meanings that may be politically assigned or reassigned. For that is what our Supreme Court has done, and in doing so, they have turned all law into gibberish. And this, I maintain, is the most dangerous thing of all. It is not only marriage that has been undermined. It is the state, the Constitution, the English language, and public sanity. This, in fact, is the same practice which shows up in the neutering of our military power and our economic power. It is a symptom of inner dissolution, a collapse of instinct, and a descent into anarchy. What I have been writing these many years has never been primarily about the threat from Russia or China. My writings have been about the progressive falsification of reality, national self-deception and the corruption which attends our social decline. I merely picked the most clearly suicidal elements in our national self-deception as principle themes. The same distorted language we use for referring to enemies as “partners” is here replicated in our use of the term “same-sex marriage.”

The enemies of America can see this. They revel in it, even though their own societies are riddled with perversion. The Russians were the first to be victimized by insane leaders. Lenin and Stalin were psychopaths who modeled the Russian state on their own mental disturbance. But Americans were never ruled by Lenin or Stalin. So what is our excuse? How have we come to something that is worse than Leninism or Stalinism? For the dictator’s wickedness is something we can relate to. It is an old story, going back to the Caesars. But an evil that inverts reality, that violates language and mocks foundational concepts, is not an evil that can be understood in the same way. Here is a spiritual perversion that brings us to the doorstep of the occult; to something unseen, to something connected with the black arts.

On the day of the fateful decision Justice Scalia noted: “What really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.”

This new knowledge, which attacks the English dictionary, which attacks the foundation of legality itself, signifies the destruction of all law. The U.S. Supreme Court has committed an act of unfounding, of unraveling, of self-elimination. This act does not really speak to the issue of tolerance or intolerance for a particular minority. This act is only nominally about homosexuals. In fact, the gay community has been used as a political pawn to effect a kind of black alchemy. Now, at this point, any violence might be done to anyone. Each of the various “causes” may be activated against the others; for what restraint does the law now have? What reverence? What credibility? It has lost the sense of its own words, descending into madness itself.

There can be no justice when words are used in a perverse sense, when meanings can be inverted and the world turned on its head. No ideology can make a lie into truth. No special pleading will flip the earth on its axis. Universal Law always prevails. The nihilist who denies this law is a harbinger of his own destruction. The society that salutes this nihilist, who elevates him to the Supreme Court, who makes congresses and presidents out of his kind, cannot be saved.

Jeffrey Nyquist is the President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

This article was originally published at jrnyquist.com on June 29, 2015. The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.