Some Big Elections

I got gold stars on every stage, but Stuff still Happened.

So, what's up?

Programming Note

Hello, dear reader. This is just a quick note to say that Stuff Keeps Happening will be off for the next two weeks, returning on Thursday, November 19th. It's getting to be that time of year, ya see. I'll likely be posting something next week on YouTube, but it will be a smaller video rather than an SKH episode.

CAN'T CATCH ME

This is a very, very short section but it's important.

Researchers in Japan used a high speed camera to film the movements of a cartwheeling snake to study what the hell a cartwheeling snake is doing.

Apparently, the dwarf reed snake in southeast Asia uses a sort of cartwheeling technique to zip away from danger. It is truly among the silliest things I've seen in months, so please enjoy this short clip of a snake doing cartwheels.

Brazil's Election

Brazil mentioned.

Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ("Lula") won reelection against Flávio Bolsonaro in a runoff upset after having come in second behind Bolsonaro in the first round of elections.

Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of currently-under-house-arrest-for-having-tried-to-do-a-coup Jair Bolsonaro—the former president of Brazil who Lula originally unseated. His son Flávio had been running as a sort of surrogate candidate for Jair, both being far-right candidates closely aligned with the Trump regime.

The first round of elections was October 4th, where Lula took about 45% of the vote, trailing Flávio's 47%. Since neither candidate passed the 50% threshold, they went to a runoff scheduled for October 25th.

That day came and went, with the election results flipping on their head. Flávio ended with about 48% of the vote to Lula's 52%, netting the dub for Lula with around 4.4 million more votes at time of writing. The total voter turnout was about 80% at 128.24 million voters.

Lula's victory was a shock in many ways. It's the first time since direct presidential voting returned in 1989 that a first round "loser" came back to win in a runoff. Markets were prepared for a Bolsonaro win, as seen by a big shift in market trends after the election.

Lula's fiscal policy is less friendly to private business and likely includes more spending and borrowing than Bolsonaro would do. That, and people can't just pillage the Amazon under Lula.

According to the Associated Press…

During Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%, with over 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) cleared, according to official data. Under Lula, deforestation has fallen 45%, reaching its lowest level in more than a decade.

But hey, what is a high stakes election without some casual ratfucking? Or, perhaps, severe ratfucking?

On election day in Brazil, there was a mysterious and widespread reduction in public transit availability across several municipalities. People reported being unable to get to the polls while fleets of busses remained parked in garages rather than running their usual schedule. It is speculated that Bolsonaro-aligned municipal officials were using whatever power they could to undermine the election.

The Lula campaign petitioned the courts for extensions in voting time due to the reports of transit issues. The Bolsonaro campaign petitioned courts for extensions in voting time due to heavy rain in more conservative states to the south.

Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ultimately made a call to extend voting hours to 7pm for polling stations that hadn't yet closed.

In response, the Bolsonaro campaign decided to use that extension as grounds to question the legitimacy of the election after having lost to Lula, because nothing matters anymore, I guess. That said, Bolsonaro's party did ultimately accept Lula's victory.

As for Flavio himself, due to an ongoing investigation into him, his passports were revoked. Despite that, he fled the country after losing. He apparently went to Argentina (lol) but they said he left for Ecuador. We then heard that he went to the United States, where it seems the State Department has gotten involved in the "harboring a failed fascist" game.

Eventually, I was able to find confirmation from Reuters that Flavio is indeed in the United States, so get ready for a whole new chapter of "the Trump Administration cozies up to foreign strong-man politicians."

The cherry on top of all of this is external interference in Brazil's politics by state and private actors. Lula's campaign accused Meta (Facebook/Instagram) of favoring Bolsonaro in their algorithms, which Meta denies. The accusation came alongside statements from UN experts noting that Meta's algorithms seem to favor "one side" over the other as far as post reach goes. Meta agreed to a court order to treat both campaigns equally.

Lula is not going to solve all of Brazil's problems, and he's got his own suite of issues regarding corruption—or at least being corruption-adjacent. He was jailed in the past for over a year, and had convictions annulled, which is why he was able to run in 2022. The Supreme Court found judicial bias against Lula, and the UN Human Rights Committee found that his due process rights were violated. So he has baggage, but its messy. And yet, "not the outright fascist who wants to free his convicted dad from prison and suffocate the rainforests" is directionally better.

Serbia's Election

The students won in Serbia. Like, extremely big time.

We're gonna hop across a few miles of ocean over to Serbia, where another election on October 25th resulted in another upset, functionally ousting the longtime strong-man president Vučić and winning enough seats to form a government.

But howwww? It's actually wild.

We begin back in November of 2024 when a concrete canopy over a railway station in Serbia collapsed, claiming 16 lives. The public was outraged and demanded a resolution from the government who in turn did not deliver a satisfying result.

There were investigations and arrests, but charges have been dropped in some cases and others have stalled. Some charges were revived, though the case remains on hold pending higher court review.

This fueled anger over government corruption and transparency, ultimately sparking a wave of protests which surged across the country. These protests were in large part organized by university students who were in turn portrayed by pro-government media and government officials as terrorists.

President Vučić would even go on to pardon some of his supporters who had attacked protestors, preventing prosecutors from landing assault charges. That did not go over well.

Vučić resigned from the presidency in September of 2026. Surely he saw the error of his ways and had a change of heart, right? Nope—he's term limited and stepped down right after calling for a snap election so that he could try to become Prime Minister instead of President.

Enter the Student List (Students List? I've seen it both ways), a roster of candidates approved by the organized students and supporters of the movement. The roster contained experts, doctors, lecturers, social workers, and people across all sorts of industries. Career politicians from established parties were flatly rejected from consideration.

Organizers spent about two years routinely making in-person connections in more rural areas of the country. This was critical for them to reach people and actually spread their message to undercut a thick blanket of pro-government media.

It's a lot harder to call them "terrorists" when they're holding a bake sale down at the park and talking about the established professionals they'd like to see making decisions for the future.

And so the vote came and went. At time of writing, Student List won about 52.7% of the vote, while Vučić's coalition took in about 39.2%. Student List is projected to net 140 seats, needing only 126 for an outright majority. So uh, looking pretty likely! Now it comes down to actually putting rubber to the road and making it work.

Student List is not a specifically left or right leaning "party". It is a true coalition of common folk, and will likely have some trouble aligning on stuff like foreign policy. That said, they are strongly aligned on rooting out corruption, restoring democracy, and establishing better protections for their future.

Well done, students.

The Muskumentary

Elon Musk fucking sucks. I think we can hopefully all agree on this. Even Musk stans should hopefully agree. Like, I refuse to believe that people who like Elon Musk don't think he fucking sucks, still.

Anyway, he sucks so much that someone was able to make a movie about how much he sucks, and that movie is nearly four hours in runtime.

Alex Gibney's Musk is a documentary about the bi/trillionaire and the things he's been doing this whole time that many folks likely are unaware of. The film doesn't break a ton of new ground, instead it is largely a collection of stuff that is already public knowledge, but not something that the public, well, mostly knows. There are a few new bits of information, mostly around some of Elon's ex's interviews. But for the most part, it's three hours and forty five minutes of throwing a stark portrait of Musk right in your face.

That is, if you can see it.

The film released originally to just a few theaters before a weekend expansion to 472 domestic theaters. One week later, it became clear that the film was not available in many of the original locations, with as few as 63 theaters showing the film on a given day. That said, the film's streaming release has been pushed up by about a month as well, to November 6th.

Combine that with the news that TikTok banned the account for the movie, and Elon Musk investing $1,000,000,000 into Paramount/Skydance, and Universal Pictures nearly backing down from handling the international release, and it sure seems like this is a coordinated effort to keep us from learning the truth from this documentary.

Eh, kinda. I mean yeah, but not like that, but yeah.

There are a few things happening here:

1. The domestic theatrical release was curtailed very shortly after opening
2. Musk reportedly bought a stake in Skydance, who owns HBO, who owns the streaming rights for the film
3. Universal Pictures was shaky about releasing the film overseas
4. Various platforms have been refusing to run ads for the film

Let's take each one in order.

The theatrical release is managed by Bleecker Street, a company based out of New York. The film opened to pretty poor numbers during the weekend where it expanded to 472 theaters. I mean, it's a four hour long movie about Elon Musk. It got rave reviews from the film festival crowd, and I'm sure it's quite eye-popping, but it's not going to be an enjoyable moviegoing experience. It is not particularly surprising that theaters would choose to reduce their schedules for the film given the logistics. So for point number one, I'm willing to chalk it up to market stuff.

Musk's investment in Skydance is troubling. Partially just because Skydance is further becoming a sort of Franken-media-company run by a hydra of gameless billionaires, but mostly because Skydance owns HBO and HBO bought the future streaming rights for the documentary.

I should also note that the film also features Larry Ellison in a bad light. Larry Ellison's son is the head of Skydance, and Larry himself guaranteed $40 Billion in equity for the acquisition of Warner Bros by Paramount (now Skydance, I'm so sorry). It would not be a long shot to assume we'd see some foul play there, but streaming hasn't started yet, so it remains to be seen.

Universal Pictures is in charge of the overseas release, but has been dragging their feet on the film. After quite a bit of delay, they have finally announced a rollout starting next year. According to The Hollywood Reporter, sources say Universal was weighing just dropping it altogether and handing rights back over to the filmmakers.

As for the various platforms banning ads/accounts for the film, its not totally that straightforward, but it's like, also not not that straightforward:

• TikTok banned the advertising account on the expansion weekend, citing their "political content policy." The ban was lifted a couple of days later
• YouTube pulled the ad citing political content, but later stated it was only temporarily restricted by their systems
• Facebook/Instagram also cited political content for the removal, eventually reversing the decision and saying it was an error
• Elon Musk's Twitter has outright refused to run the ads in the first place, going further as to refuse to run any ads for any Bleecker Street upcoming film. They also threatened the production company with a lawsuit

I can't say what actually happened in each case aside from the obvious one. But the point here is that the world's richest man sure seems to be using his position of power and array of attorneys to undermine a documentary about the evil shit he does.

That said, I still don't know who the target audience is for this film. People who don't know about Musk's shittiness and are willing to spend money to spend nearly four hours at a theater to onboard to the cornucopia of bullshit that is Elon Musk's history? In my experience, once I talk about Musk for more than like five minutes in an episode, the view count drops.

The man is human joy repellant.

Fun fact: William Randolph Hearst tried to do something similar by preventing the release of "Citizen Kane," with allies of Hearst going as far as to try and buy the film to destroy it.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• Airbnb is cracking down on checkout chores. Some hosts are furious.
• Some researchers in Australia studied how spiders sleep, in part by trying to make them pull all-nighters by releasing flies into their habitat every so often. Who can resist a lil treat?
• Israel's elections happened yesterday with no clear majority outcome. It'll likely be a while before we know what their government looks like next, especially as Arab parties gain ground while the larger parties refuse to work with them
• RFK Jr. loudly stated that "Arabs don't produce science" or "win the Nobel Prize," despite, uh, algebra.
• The folding iPhone Duo screen is reportedly cracking for some users
• According to research from Oxfam, the richest 0.1% of people in the world create more carbon emissions than the bottom 3.5 billion