> Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion
This is key here and I think we should all take note because I see comments here that feed into their tactics. Their goal isn't to have a specific election winner, but to divide us as a nation (not just US but all Westerners and even countries like Japan) and create political shutdowns. The point is to further political extremism, on both sides, and to create in fighting so that no united formation can stand against them.
So the question is how to fight against this. There are things that the government can and should do, but there are things we the public NEED to do as well. We have to be aware that we're often in these battlegrounds. This thread is one itself. So when commenting we need to ensure that we're discussing in good faith. That we're avoiding mic drops and easy points. We need nuance and to discuss the complexities of the issues we face in a complex world. Shift away from the emotional reactions because that is what they exploit. They have super computers and trolls aimed at your brain to exploit this animalistic behavior and we all are ill prepared and highly vulnerable to it (yes me, yes you, and I mean all of you). So we have to slow down and think more. It's not easy and causes an internal battle, but I think my doing this we become stronger and this helps us fight any adversary who would like to make useful idiots out of all of us.
These should have bipartisan support. Things like paper votes for every election, random manual recounts to sample error rates and confirm they are low, funding improvements to security of voting infrastructure, etc.
According to Verified Voting (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEqu...), ~5% of votes are made with un-auditable "direct recording electronic" voting machines, where the votes are held in memory rather than printed to paper. When you actually do pentests, it turns out that these machines are sometimes connected to the internet (even though best-practices are to not do so), and they have been demonstrated to be hackable by someone with a USB drive even when air-gapped. Any such tampering is undetectable if done well. It's simply unacceptable to use such technology for voting IMO, and we should pass laws mandating paper-trails and banning DRE voting.
One problem is that much of the worry about election fraud is motivated reasoning ("my preferred candidate didn't win therefore there must have been fraud; let me find evidence of fraud to support my theory"), rather than actual concern based on an objective analysis starting with the facts. I do wonder if we can still make some changes to the system that strictly improve security and require zero trust of the opposition party, without destroying trust in the underlying institutions.
I believe you are focusing on a moving target. Electoral fraud is just the current wedge issue, it will become something else next when a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken to be causing such uproar.
You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole game against the firehose of bullshit. It's electoral fraud now, something to do with green energy plans next, then whatever welfare issue is hot in the moment. Something with immigrants and then start repeating.
Election security might be a moving target for you, but this is something I have been paying attention to for at least a decade. I think it's important to note that there is an underlying bipartisan issue here that has been known for a long time.
> a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken
This is certainly the blue-tribe talking point right now, but it's an oversimplification, and I encourage you to actually read and engage with the materials I linked. There are security vulnerabilities and auditability failures in the system which should be fixed, and this was a common blue-tribe issue prior to 2020, when it switched to being a red-tribe issue. I don't think these issues are catastrophic failures that invalidate the election results, but they are serious and worth attention.
I think one should separate out concrete claims of fraud in 2020 that have since been refuted by recounts (e.g. Antrim County) as examples of the motivated reasoning I referred to, vs. issues like un-auditable DRE machines which are actual problems that need to be fixed.
I do understand where you're coming from; the instinctive reaction in a low-trust partisan environment is that giving oxygen to the bad-faith/motivated-reasoning claims of election fraud does more harm than good. However for one example, I think if the red tribe has a good showing tomorrow (i.e. lose some of their incentive to cry fraud), then that would be an ideal time to get some bipartisan legislation in place to try to bleed the issue of salience ahead of the 2024 elections where it could be extremely dangerous.
> You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole
The point I was making is that there is some set of policy changes that the blue team thought were beneficial in 2016, and perhaps we could all agree to do them. It's not merely whack-a-mole if you leave the world a better place after whacking the first mole. The goal I'm advocating here is not to play zero-sum games to "whack the opponent", it's to actually make objective improvements to the system that in normal times would be uncontroversial bipartisan proposals. If we can execute the political Ju-Jitsu to redirect the current toxic discourse into actual improvements that would be a major win.
Sure, following that there will be another wedge issue; that's politics. But I think the important question is whether we make non-zero-sum gains during each issue cycle, and sometimes it is possible to do so.
It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. There is a reason even a high-trust, homogenous society like Taiwan does vote counting like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw
Lack of trust in the election system isn't a partisan issue. When I was a young Democrat, the kerfuffle was over how Diebold voting machines delivered Ohio for George W. Bush. In 2018, two thirds of Democrats polled said they believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President."
Programmers should understand this. When a system is opaque and hard to reason about, people won't trust it. We can't afford for our election system to be like that.
> It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts.
This is one of the big reasons I endorse cardinal style voting over ordinal systems. The act of counting the vote is trivial in comparison (singular round, no runoffs, trivially parallelizable). There are other reasons I advocate for it, but this is a major one: transparency.
I definitely a agree that creating a highly transparent system is integral to our elections. I think we need substantially more transparency than we have now. But not just with how votes are counted, but also in who has power and how they are making decisions. The left has been discussing quite a bit about how the right is trying to hijack the system. So I think even both sides would be highly in favor of increased transparency.
But like I said in my OP, complex problems require complex solutions. The original post was about one such need. I think this is another need under the same umbrella and I think there are many more too.
> According to Verified Voting (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEqu...), ~5% of votes are made with un-auditable "direct recording electronic" voting machines, where the votes are held in memory rather than printed to paper. When you actually do pentests, it turns out that these machines are sometimes connected to the internet (even though best-practices are to not do so), and they have been demonstrated to be hackable by someone with a USB drive even when air-gapped. Any such tampering is undetectable if done well. It's simply unacceptable to use such technology for voting IMO, and we should pass laws mandating paper-trails and banning DRE voting.
This is quite contrary to the ~~propaganda~~ trustworthy journalism take on the matter:
> One problem is that much of the worry about election fraud is motivated reasoning ("my preferred candidate didn't win therefore there must have been fraud; let me find evidence of fraud to support my theory")
Another problem is that much of the lack of concern about election fraud is based on bad epistemology ("my preferred candidate won fair and square [in an epistemically sound, absolute sense] because some people said it was the most secure in history).
> ...rather than actual concern based on an objective analysis starting with the facts.
In my experience, this (utilizing actual objective analysis) is a good way to collect downvotes and insults.
> I do wonder if we can still make some changes to the system that strictly improve security and require zero trust of the opposition party, without destroying trust in the underlying institutions.
I wonder if we will ever try, as opposed to simply repeating the same claim enough times so that people believe it to be true. The latter is certainly cheaper, and certainly gets the job done (where the job is persuading the public that their election system is secure in fact, regardless of whether it is actually true).
> This is quite contrary to the ~~propaganda~~ trustworthy journalism take on the matter:
I would note that it's possible for both to be true: A) this was the most secure election in US history, B) there are still some meaningful security issues to iron out. For example between 2016 and 2020, DRE machines were being phased out (28.9 -> 11.4%), so in that regard we do seem to be more secure than in the past.
And I want to be clear -- I think the detailed content of that Guardian article is broadly fair, even if they do engage in some sloganeering.
> The officials who signed the statement said they had no evidence that any voting system had deleted or lost votes, had changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
> They said all the states with close results have paper records, which allows for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors”.
I think this is an honest evaluation of the evidence RE: specific claims of voting fraud in 2020. (Though I'm always interested to hear folks' best evidence to the contrary.)
Importantly, absence of evidence _is_ evidence of absence (evidence != proof!). If there was vote tampering, it should have been detected by a recount somewhere. But we don't see that.
> I would note that it's possible for both to be true: A) this was the most secure election in US history, B) there are still some meaningful security issues to iron out. For example between 2016 and 2020, DRE machines were being phased out (28.9 -> 11.4%), so in that regard we do seem to be more secure than in the past.
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> And I want to be clear -- I think the detailed content of that Guardian article is broadly fair, even if they do engage in some sloganeering.
Perhaps, but these articles are misinformation (Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. It is differentiated from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive.)
I think it is very interesting how when our geopolitical rivals engage in misinformation, it's a super big deal (regardless of whether there is actual evidence supporting the claim), but when our politicians and media do it it's "fair".
> I think this is an honest evaluation of the evidence RE: specific claims of voting fraud in 2020. (Though I'm always interested to hear folks' best evidence to the contrary.)
It may be, but this does not erase the coordinated deception that took place - and this is just one instance of deceit.
And, there was a time not so long ago where the burden of proof lied with the one making the assertion, only recently has the convention changed to the burden of proof being on anyone who questions the official narrative.
> If there was vote tampering, it should have been detected by a recount somewhere. But we don't see that.
Similarly, I "should" quit smoking and join the gym, but I ain't seeing much of that either.
If "seems about right" is the standard election officials think is applicable to their role, I'd like for them to make an explicit announcement so everyone is on the same page about what kind of a show we're running here.
I'll admit, that is a major concern of mine too. But at this point I don't see another option. Our own governments (not just US mind you) have actively demonstrated to us that they revel in this same political discourse. That they thought they could wield the fire instead of stamping it out. So who is left? Corporations? Same story there I'm afraid. So as I see it, the systems we ,,should'' rely upon have failed us and thus we must take manner into our own hands. I think this strategy is infinitely better than the civil war people so eagerly discuss. But like the SAO/VR story from yesterday, I don't think people are actively internalizing the horrors that such an event would bring. So I'm going to keep my hope that we can solve things in a civil manner (which also means we can break the cycle). We don't need everyone to make these changes, but just enough.
The Democrats could abandon neoliberalism and put identity politics on the back burner and pass Universal Health Care, Child Care and College, along with a large boost in infrastructure spending in the midwest, and a reduction in certain obvious issues of regulatory capture (importing drugs from Canada and Europe) and tax hikes on the rich. That'd do a lot to fix the average condition of the worker in the United States, and many of these proposals are actually supported by a majority of Republican voters.
The reality is that we've had a divided population ever since the 90s, and this is by the design of both political parties in the United States, because we have two different competing corporate parties now. And the way we've been provoked to fight each other didn't start with the Russians, we were doing it back in the 90s with Limbaugh and Bill Clinton. They may have thrown a little gas on the fire, but we lit it a long time ago.
And trying to shift responsibility onto individuals doesn't really work. That's like trying to solve climate change by having everyone recycle harder and plays into the old individualistic puritan work ethic mythology which it should be obvious by now doesn't fix anything and just gets us yelling at each other and policing each other.
The government is going to have to change, and corporations are going to have to change and billionaires are going to have to recognize that unrestrained plundering of the economy will wind up tearing the country apart.
And I don't see any way out of this where everyone remains civil and nothing fundamentally changes. The fact that the best solution you've got is to just remind people to be civil at all costs suggests to me that we're going to hit some kind of really bad situation.
And the fact that the proposals that I suggest in my first paragraph are likely to catch a lot of flak and a whole lot of pushing for the status quo and expanations of how those ideas are fundamentally unthinkable and politically unreasonable are why I think we're heading for violence. If nothing changes then the pressure cooker just slowly continues to boil without any release and lecturing the people who are getting angry about the situation that they're not being civil isn't going to stop it blowing up eventually.
Yeah... I have no faith in the general public either. This is the same public that went full insane by reading grainy jpegs on Facebook and watching obviously terrible "news" networks.
Positive change requires much more time, effort and leadership. Changing in negative ways just rely on fear and stoking strong emotions, it's much faster and effective.
I think it's possible to fight back with positive changes but those take decades to generations to actually take hold while requiring political support throughout so plans set in motion can actually reap benefits by then. Any political thwarting from adversarial forces and those long-term plans just grind to a halt or are reversed.
It's an uphill battle, for years and years to come.
It doesn't matter whether the Russians want a specific election winnner because many Americans want a specific election winner and have found bad faith discussions, easy talking points and mic drops are an excellent way to achieve those results.
But that's also why it is so important that we fight back. That we don't let these bad faith "discussions" propagate. We push back. We provide the complexity and nuance to slow it all down.
It's a superbowl ad with a wild west showdown theme. Actors portraying Joe Biden, Sen. Mark Kelly, and Speaker Pelosi are having a high-noon style duel with the Republican candidate. The Republican manages to shoot the guns out of their hands and they flee defeated.
I think this is tacky more than anything else. I do not think there is some sinister subliminal message at play here. Nor do I consider this "shooting their political party's opponent", because those words conjure an image of an actual assassination and this looks like something fanciful.
The problem is that smart people, paying attention and putting national interest will now compromise, and people not in that category will just continue to refuse. So the "centre" will move closer to whatever that latter group believes. And will keep doing so until then former group stops compromising.
So this, like so so many issues, cannot be solves by appeals to individuals to change their own position. It REQUIRES a national level fix.
It is also passing the buck. We're representative countries, which means the individual always plays a role. Requiring a national fix means garnering national support. That of individuals. Which is exactly what I'm trying to do here.
I think you misunderstand the strategy of many moderates and centrists. Many have been unmoving over the years and we should note the stark rise in independent voters. There's this narrative that moderates and centrists compromise on everything and this too is propaganda. These people people just see value in some positions from each side. But the key here is cherry-picking. You don't take an issue like abortion and "compromise" on it, but rather you have an opinion that falls akin to one group. That may or may not be the same group who's opinions align with your opinions about taxes though. In fact, you even see the Libertarians trying to capture these groups by promoting themselves as "fiscally conservative, socially liberal." So don't buy into the propaganda.
> It REQUIRES a national level fix.
The US has a national election tomorrow. This requires individuals to vote for representatives that will adequately represent them in this manner. There is an individual role required to make a national fix.
I'd also ask, what to do when those national institutions fail? We've always, and always will, have to rely on individuals. This is both the power and vulnerability of a democracy (even democratically elected republics). It is the individual who votes. It is the individual who stokes or stamps the flames of extremism. Is always has been and always will be up to us. The alternative is autocracy. So please do not pass the buck. You have a role to play here and it is critical. Surely there are solutions that do not require us to go to civil war nor turn to autocracy. We're better than that.
I'm also going to leave this here: John Cleese's (of Monty Python) skit on Extremism. It is worth a watch, even just for a good laugh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90
The strategy I laid out is effective to all potential adversaries of this manner. That includes any institutions which try to wield the fire instead of putting it out.
I'd be careful with your words though. They have a defeatist attitude and may perpetuate said attitude. That is still a win for those trying to sow discord within our societies. You get people to either fight one another or shut up, but that still leaves no one to fight the dragon pulling the strings (in this case, many dragons). So I'm actively encouraging opening our voices, but to do it with care. Staying silent may not be akin to actively engaging in the inter-fighting, but it is enabling it. We're at a point where the fire won't put itself out and if we don't act accordingly, it will burn the whole house down.
The goal is to poison the well. If you convince people that Russia has no specific goal except spreading evil and discord, you can 1) ascribe any act to Russia without having to come up with any reason why they would do it, and 2) not-so-subtly turn him to Satan in the Protestant mind, the only being whose only object is chaos.
Putin does the same thing in Russia (as US intelligence agencies do in the US.) With one of his major power centers being the Russian Orthodox Church, he can frame every external attack as an attack on religion, and a sign of the end-times - one of the reasons for the extremely homophobic policy and culture he's helped grow. The West is trying to turn us gay to destroy our religion.
Very likely this is a domestic message to underline their political relevance and prowess. Worst thing you can do and have already done in your first paragraph is to put everyone on the suspect list for being potentially influenced. This ironically would align with their goal in the first place.
> The point is to further political extremism, on both sides, and to create in fighting so that no united formation can stand against them.
> So the question is how to fight against this.
I think our political parties and media are responsible for 99% of the political extremism, unwillingness to compromise, and placing their self interests over the well being of the country.
And frankly, I think posts like yours contribute to the problem. Rather than taking responsibility as a country for where we are, we constantly resort to blaming external actors. If not the Taliban, then now Russia. Or we blame China.
And the narrative from those in power is always the same. The Taliban isn’t attacking us for our freedom? Well you support terrorists then. Russia isn’t responsible for Trump getting elected? You must be a Russian shill. You say Russia did exactly what they said they would do if NATO didn’t stop expanding eastwards? Oh you’re a traitor or must work at a Russian troll farm.
No. Take responsibility for once. We’re in this situation because of our own fault. We elected leaders who divide us. In the last election, the party of liberal and forward thinking ideas elected a man who’s been in politics longer than my children and grand children have been alive. What new ideas does this man have? What’s he going to do now in the executive branch that he couldn’t influence his party to do over his many, many decades long career? Is all that Russias fault too?
To be frank: I don’t care for either party. I’m just tired of the constant blame game and passing on the buck to someone else.
> I think our political parties and media are responsible for 99% of the political extremism, unwillingness to compromise, and placing their self interests over the well being of the country.
FPTP usually creates this polarisation. I don't agree with your take that both parties are equally responsible though, one of them has consistently used political gridlock as a weapon, since Obama years. To the point where one of these parties fillibustered their own bills just to spite the other side.
There are differences in level and scale.
> You say Russia did exactly what they said they would do if NATO didn’t stop expanding eastwards? Oh you’re a traitor or must work at a Russian troll farm.
I have a huge grievance with this line, it's literal Russian propaganda you are repeating.
> I don't agree with your take that both parties are equally responsible though, one of them has consistently used political gridlock as a weapon, since Obama years.
Is political gridlock the root of the problem? Help me understand how only one party is responsible.
Interesting you mention Obama. He ran on an anti-war platform, which was fairly out of line with the media and general American politics at the time. That alone was a big reason to vote for him.
But what did he do? An unprecedented increase in drone attacks. By all measures, Obama let the military industrial complex grow.
> I have a huge grievance with this line, it's literal Russian propaganda you are repeating.
How is it propaganda? Are you staying this IS NOT exactly what Russia stated, repeatedly since the early 2000s?
> Interesting you mention Obama. He ran on an anti-war platform, which was fairly out of line with the media and general American politics at the time. That alone was a big reason to vote for him.
> But what did he do? An unprecedented increase in drone attacks. By all measures, Obama let the military industrial complex grow.
I don't care and there was nothing in my comment that led to this segue about Obama. This is purely soapboxing around an issue that wasn't in discussion, thanks anyway.
> How is it propaganda? Are you staying this IS NOT exactly what Russia stated, repeatedly since the early 2000s?
That's exactly the point, you are repeating this which is Russian propaganda. Why should Russia dictate what Ukraine can or cannot do? NATO didn't expand eastwards, countries to the East asked to join NATO. Should NATO say "no, thanks, Russia doesn't allow us"?
You are performing a bizarro form of victim blaming and not seeing an issue with that. Are you subscribed to Mearsheimer's real politik/offensive realism stuff? It really does feel like you are repeating his lines...
> I don't care and there was nothing in my comment that led to this segue about Obama.
Hold on a second. You’re saying that Republicans have been gridlocking since the Obama years. So clearly, you’re saying one side is at fault. But you don’t want to discuss the merits of Obama’s actual policy. Barack Obama did hypocritical things, but clearly your expectation is that Republicans just go along.
That’s not how a democracy works.
You brought up Obama and Republicans gridlocking, but the minute we dive deep into a more nuanced look, away from your binary/black and white narrative, you say this:
> This is purely soapboxing around an issue that wasn't in discussion, thanks anyway.
Now you’re on a borderline personal attack. I’m not sure you’re here to discuss in good faith.
> That's exactly the point, you are repeating this which is Russian propaganda.
> Why should Russia dictate what Ukraine can or cannot do? NATO didn't expand eastwards, countries to the East asked to join NATO. Should NATO say "no, thanks, Russia doesn't allow us"?
I’m not sure if you understand what “propaganda” means.
Russia doesn’t want NATO at its doorstep, and it sees NATO as an existential threat. You don’t have to agree that this belief is justified. You can say those countries have a right to join NATO. That as sovereign nations, it’s entirely up to them to do as they please.
But that’s not the point here. The Soviets brokered a deal with us. We agreed NATO would not expand eastwards.
Again, Russia is doing what they said they would do, given the present circumstances. Whether you agree with what they’re doing or not, does not make it propaganda.
You could try to argue that the world has changed. That the US and Russia cannot single handedly make decisions in the 1990s and have them enforced on a modern day Europe, that those countries can decide for themselves.
But it’s besides the point. Russia sees NATO at their door step. The real terrifying thing is that our media paints Putin as a dictator, terrorist, a mad man. He probably is all three of those things, but why we’re playing fire with someone sitting on the worlds largest nuclear arsenal is beyond me.
Regarding Russia’s views: It’s the same way we (the US) instilled the Monroe doctrine, and you can bet money that if China gets real cozy with South American countries, we’ll be sending navy carriers down the Pacific.
Two other thoughts:
Your linked “sources” are well known liberal and left of liberal - progressive - organizations. To say this is a GOP specific problem is your ideology yelling out loud. The reality is that both parties are hyper polarized. Neither party has American interests at heart. The biggest ideas any Democrat or Republican has is on how to fan the fear mongering flame and divide people.
Again - the party of forward thinking and liberal ideas literally elected a dinosaur who probably doesn’t even know how to use e-mail.
> The Soviets brokered a deal with us. We agreed NATO would not expand eastwards.
This is simply not true. It is a talking point developed for Putin's speech at 2007 Munich security conference to justify the shift to genocidal wars against its neighbors. It did not exist before 2007 and was not brought up when, for example, Poland joined NATO in 1999. There was an endless stream of whining and unspecified threats from Russian diplomats at the time, but not once do I remember talk about any deals.
It's nothing more than a simple, yet effective hook for catching western self-flagellants into their net, while the truth is that western governments went above and beyond to accommodate Russia and build cooperation, and it still lead to a maniacal dictatorship carrying out genocide in Europe and threatening rest of the world with hunger and nuclear armageddon.
No, their goal is indeed to have a specific election winner and to foment division. The IC has been quite clear that Russia had a strong preference for a Trump victory at least in 2016. [Removed a section on GOP preference for defunding Ukraine since this is not a party position, just a growing position within the party]
Everything else you've said is true though - no reason to stick our heads in the sand about their preferences or to hate our fellow Americans because an adversary picked their side (worth noting Russia has also been involved in far leftist movements in the US for quite a long time).
> GOP's stated preferences for defunding Ukraine's defense
The voting record shows their preference is to continue funding it. I don't know why your information sources are saying the opposite. Maybe they do it to polarize us.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats paint each other as insufficiently committed to attacking Russia and China. It's because they both, wisely, don't respect the intelligence of the people who vote for them.
edit: not that both don't have a huge base that is against WWIII, but with the Republicans, having a far more democratic internal process that was a concession to Tea Party activists, some of that base actually gets to have a say in Congress. The Congressional Democratic Party is completely impenetrable to anyone in their base who isn't an extreme nationalist hawk, whereas Republicans can't realistically exclude isolationists/paleocons.
There you go, I've removed it, despite Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene all expressing in the last few months that if the GOP were to win the House, that funding would either slow or be halted completely.
The point remains that indeed Putin did prefer a Trump victory, as he himself publicly stated [0], which of course is 50% bullshit propaganda itself. However this was also confirmed by the US's Intelligence Community in 2017 [1].
> We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. *We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.*
I think given the gravity of the atrocities being committed, and the imminent threat to democracy, things like audits should be a distant secondary concern.
I'm certainly not concerned about the dollars being used to fight Putin because I think the costs of not doing otherwise would far outweigh them.
When we see any indication whatsoever of abuse/lost weapons/etc, then we can discuss audits. So far there has been not one single photo anywhere of any US-provided weapons leaking from Ukraine.
That is not entirely true. According to Ukrainian sources (Kiev Independent) there were at least 2 high profile incidents. 1 - US supplied weapons popping up in Finland, 2 - someone tried to ship a helicopter out of Odesa. But this is not what I am saying at all. How would you even know how funds are being used? A manufacturer can hike prices of say ammo 10x, and as result Ukraine would get 10x less of it
Not sure if you’re shilling on purpose but 1) no, Kiev Independent never reported on foreign supplied guns in Finland, “New Voice of Ukraine” did, using a statement by Finnish FBI (NBI) that was mischaracterized and explicitly corrected by NBI about 7 days ago. They say they are watching closely but have no evidence of what you’re alleging. 2) Couldn’t find anything about the helicopter, link?
You can “just ask questions” like that one about any item in any budget on the planet with the net effect of stalling everything we need to accomplish as a society, so I don’t really give that approach much credence. No reason to suspect a particularly bad or particularly important instance here and it’s especially suspect coming from people who’ve already indicated they don’t support US involvement in such conflicts.
I wonder how much of this is "divide and conquer" and how much of this is just the Putin administration trying to export its own flavor of governance, which doesn't really directly translate to Western democracies. What comes out are ultimately sentiments of anti-liberalism / anti-rule-of-law / anti-individuality and the political factions who tend to embrace that live on the fringes.
It's both. I think it is easy to get caught up in which and that can add to the distraction. In my opinion it is still essential to teach our citizens to become aware of this practice and to be able to defend against it. We don't even need anywhere near 50% of citizens for this to be effective. I'd assume that between 10% and 20% could be more than sufficient, as long as we learn how to make our voices powerful. This number comes from the fact that a small minority of people have demonstrated the ability to capture the narrative and use it to dive and confuse us. So how do we instead harness this power to create good in our society? That's the real question here.
It is neither. Just like in case of "second most powerful army in the world" this is just buffooning to atract attention of western press.
Regime that is absolutely financially and morally corrupt is absolutely incapable to implement anything like that on scale. It is not important how much money they have when 99% will always be stolen in process.
Unfortunately it does not make overall situation any better because there are less corrupt, more stable, but even more totalitarian regimes that capable of doing this.
So much of this. A lot of us underestimate how powerful modern propoganda is and how easy it is to manipulate people. A lot of research been done on human behavior and phychology in recent decades and opressive regimes makes good use of it. It takes time, but unfortunately it's still possible to turn a lot of normal people into zombies on Nazi Germany level.
With internet and social networks spreading all kind of manipulative information became so much easier. If someone thinks that living in democracy alone makes you immune to propoganda that just not the case.
So yeah "Divide and Rule" still work in modern age and it's crucial to keep political discussion alive even if society is really polarized. Otherwise one day we'll all wake up in another version of China, Russia or something even worse.
Disclaimer: I am Russia citizen who been in opposition for decade, immigrated immediately once war began and I financially supporting Ukraine armed forces. So I well aware what I am talking about.
> If someone thinks that living in democracy alone makes you immune to propoganda that just not the case.
I think more commonly what people do is see propaganda that is ineffective on them and inaccurately conclude that propaganda overall is ineffective on them. Often citing their intelligence. In reality you just weren't the target of said propaganda. We're all vulnerable to it, no matter your IQ. If one wants to demonstrate their intelligence they need to demonstrate their realization of their (intellectual) weaknesses. This is what I see happen with HN users a lot: "Well I'm not vulnerable to it, but others are." (often in context of ads and discussions of surveillance capitalism. But that's the same tool as in this discussion).
> it's crucial to keep political discussion alive even if society is really polarized.
Importantly that said conversation is done with good faith. Meaning we try our hardest as the listener to interpret the intent of the speaker's words (and vise versa). These people will sell simple solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately complex problems require complex solutions and nuanced discussion. Because of that, it is critical that we discuss from different points of views.
> Disclaimer: I am Russia citizen
The difference between you and me is smaller than the distance between us and our respective leaders. An old cold war hippy saying, but still true. It is our leaders who cause good men to go to war. To live through atrocities that need not be. Atrocities worse than hell. But in the end we are accountable because we are the power that they wield. A sheep tricked by a wolf in sheep's clothing is still a dead sheep. We can't always rely on the shepherd to keep us alive.
I honestly dont know real solution to this problem. It is easy to blame a nation, but even talking of people in opposition to regime things become weird when terrible happen. A lot of smart people stay passive and unable to protect themselves let alone resist. Propoganda did not make them support war and regime, but it was perfectly capable of breaking their will.
Honestly speaking I not even sure if political discussion alone is enough. I just wish more people understood this is the big problem for modern civilization. We need better education on these topics so average Joe is better suited to resist manipulation.
That may have been true pre-2016 but it's clear at this point that one of the major parties (starts with an R) is the pro-Putin party. They may have got to that point by dividing, but now they're reaping the benefits.
Various opinions on the matter are documented, but that is not the same of documenting what is objectively true in base level reality.
There is an old and sophisticated discipline that studies this phenomenon that unfortunately (but also: conveniently, for some) does not get much attention these days for some reason:
I've been looking at the "Russian meddling" not as an attack on the plebs, to get the masses to substantially change their votes, but as a psyop against the rulers, enraging them by being seen meddling with their subjects. It's been highly effective though I have no way of knowing if things worked out this way by intent or chance
My impression (mostly from coverage that I've seen at UnderstandingWar.org ) is that Yevgeny Prigozhin might be happy to admit to quite a few things - whether or not he'd actually done them - so long as doing so advanced his public image (hint - neither "weak" nor "pro-American") and political ambitions.
This guy is known for saying ridiculous and highly sarcastic things. They also left out key parts of this specific statement:
> My answer will be delicate, sophisticated, and forgive me - ambiguous. We have interfered, are interfering and will continue to interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.
This is pretty much non-news coming from this guy. He said it to rile up the reporter. And the US media is eating up like a bunch of fools.
> And the US media is eating up like a bunch of fools.
I am truly curious whether they are genuinely this naive.
A lot of people seem to be responding as per normal to this obvious troll, and a fearful public is an easier to manage public. Public relations doesn't come cheap, so any external help is (or should be) good for the public budget.
mostly from coverage that I've seen at UnderstandingWar.org
Fair warning, that site is a blog run by a neocon think tank, headed by the King NeoCon himself Bill Kristol. This is the weapons of mass destruction crew, nothing they say should never be taken seriously.
On the contrary - for succinct day-by-day, "play-by-play" commentary on the conflict, they are quite professional (and extremely guarded in their statements).
OTOH, I'm old & well-read enough to know that they are working from limited information sources, within a narrow analysis framework, and even the best-resourced and -intentioned military-style war reporting has a pretty iffy record.
I think as long as people wishing to know more about the situation with the fox in the hen house don't mind reading the latest updates from the actual fox itself, then sure.
These aren't just war cheerleaders, the ISW is literally the architects of war. Sure they know a lot about it, look at their Board of Directors. It's filled with warmongers.
If "fox" == "Russian military" and "hen house" == "Ukraine"...well, the ISW folks strike me as far too sympathetic to the hen side to be shills for the fox side, as you seem to believe.
In my analogy the fox is war profiteers and the hen house is the rest of society.
ISW is always pro-war. They are Neocons, it is a foundational part of their ideology. Any drivel coming from that place needs to be viewed through that lens.
In other news, McDonalds thinks we should eat more burgers.
Yep, Prigozhin is a bullshitter on the level of Elon Musk.
The guy spent years publicly denying the existence of the Wagner group, then opened a patriotic co-working space literally called The Wagner Group Centre. (meanwhile, the group itself is still illegal under Russian law)
I'm not saying he didn't interfere in the elections, but whatever he says is no proof either way.
Hate Musk all you want, but comparing him to war criminal? Come on!
This kind of comments are both both help Russian gangsters and downplay actual war crimes that happen in Ukraine. Your petty hatred toward US billionare have nothing to do with what happening to millions of people suffering because of war.
Yeah this is all an internal power game. Shoigu is a laughingstock, and everyone is angling to be next-in-line by advertising what they've actually accomplished (and presumably, for the presidency after Putin retires).
I'm not sure why everyone assumes this. It seems like he'd have much more ability to shape the future of Russia and protect those close to him if he chooses a successor and oversees the succession. He could also ensure better conditions for himself (i.e. not being executed) in case he ends up being unable to continue ruling due to sickness/old age.
Do we have any examples of this actually happening in the Soviet times until now? He's going to be worried about the groomed successor doing him in earlier than natural death. That paranoia is what keeps them from doing what you suggest.
Lenin isn't a good example. He had a stroke while still in power and never effectively regained it. He was reduced to reading the newspaper in his wheelchair and crying about developments, while being unable to effect real change any more. He arguably did not want Stalin as his successor, but was powerless to prevent it by then.
Yes, but did they groom a successor? Yeltsin did (Putin). Krushchev - not sure, I think there was a bit of a tussle. Gorbachev was probably too young to be thinking about a successsor - and he was essentially shutting down the Soviet Union.
Yeah I think casual observers miss the fundamental political apathy of most Russians.
Overthrown leaders don't have a power base; mobs aren't going to turn out to return a deposed leader to power. Once they are irrelevant, they're going to stay that way, and everyone knows it.
The odds of a full on anti-Putinist purge seem a lot higher with a disorderly succession compared to one that Putin orchestrates himself. There are risks either way of course, but it doesn't seem like such an obvious choice for him as many imply.
Most folks "know" far more about succession in authoritarian regimes from heroic fiction, TVTropes, and the Evil Overlord list than they do from actual history.
Because propaganda has convinced every American that they know Putin personally, and understand his internal thoughts and drives. Those thoughts and drives are to cause evil everywhere, and a bottomless ego that can only be satisfied by conquering the world. It's not really a subtle caricature.
If Putin were interested in either ruling from the shadows or appointing a successor then he had his chance with Medvedev. The fact that he ousted Medvedev to re-assert himself reveals that prefers to be seen as the one in charge.
Yes, but by the same token, won't he want to maximize the chances of an ideologically aligned successor so his influence continues beyond death? He doesn't strike me as someone who'd be content to let the chips fall where they may once he's gone.
That's my understanding. I think Putin would probably get killed if he found himself similarly weakened, but that's not certain. Assuming he's not killed, he'll get old and weak too eventually.
A number of dictators ending up being dethroned (without a full-blown civil war): Robert Mugabe (already in his 90s though), Suharto, Pol Pot, Pinochet, a bunch of others whose names escape me at the moment.
I'd be interesting to gather some data on this, but I suspect it's more common that casual perception might indicate.
One possible reason for the mysterious Russian Modified Gravity that causes people to fall to their deaths might be that Putin's position is not as secure as he might like us to think. He doesn't even need to be assassinated: once he's no longer in a position to order around force, what is he going to do? Some of the above lived for decades after being deposed.
He could potentially still hold power for decades to come, into his 90s. So forever? No, obviously not. But we might have to look at him for a long time.
The timing of this information suggests that while it may be true, its very disclosure may also be meddling in foreign elections -- i.e. casting doubt on their legitimacy helps many within the US who are actively trying to propagate that narrative.
I doubt russia has any interest in swaying results in democrats favour. If anything republicans have already said they would reduce sent to ukraine. To win, putin needs a few weeks or months of ukraine undersupply.
While I agree that the findings would be "Putin helped the Right by meddling in foreign elections" -- the ability to plant the idea "your elections should not be trusted" may on-balance make it irrelevant to Russia's ends which party the meddling was initially associated with. The events of January 6th make it evident that many on the right are of the belief that elections are no longer free or fair.
All that is to say it's kind of ironic. If I'm correct, the information that Putin helped the right by meddling, will be reduced and spun by many outlets to go from "there was meddling in our elections that helped the right" into just "our elections are untrustworthy".
That is what a lot of people are missing with this: The goal of Russian propaganda has always been to create chaos and get people to disengage by creating a feeling that nothing is true, or at least that the truth is unknowable. Hence the constant stream of extremely transparent lies and BS.
In other words, the point of their election interference is not primarily to manipulate the election successfully, but to create the belief that they did.
This. What a powerful tool - try to get people to believe what you want, but if you fail, steer the landing so it just further adds to the confusion, rather than being evidence of dishonesty.
I've seen that narrative in Conservative circles. However i've seen just about everything over there, so it's really difficult for me to know what is "sticking" and what is just clumps of people agreeing to random things.
Ie what i'm referencing is more than just a single comment, it was many in agreement; but i've tended to see these "pockets of fringe" where in any larger thread i can expect to see just about anything being discussed and agreed upon.
It is already well documented that while part of what you say is true (favouring maga gop) that sowing the divisions in any way, shape or form is a goal is also true.
It is officially documented that Russia's campaigns have supported varying ideologies. While they do have some preference for foreign policy, it is also in their interest to increase division.
I think you're thinking short term. I don't think Russia cares democrat or republican, they want exactly what's happening - lack of confidence in the election process. Trump benefitted because he's reading from the same playbook - push a lack of confidence in the election process.
From Russia's standpoint, they can't take down the US. The US can certainly destroy itself from the inside though.
If we assume the GOP is already questioning all election results, then this most recent comment from Russia will bring more of the left in to question the results. When everyone questions the results, the US has a big problem.
You think Russia has no preferences between option a) party that has been providing Ukraine with weapons systems that are demolishing their military and option b) party that has vowed to end all aid to Ukraine?
Really?
The war in Ukraine is obviously the #1 most important, most critical issue for Putin right now. It is as close to do-or-die as a dictatorial nationstate can get and the situation is getting worse by the day for Russia.
If someone were to believe what you're saying is true then Putin would have invaded Ukraine under a Republican President, Trump. Russia only seems to fuck with Ukraine when a Democrat is President. Why would Putin invade Ukraine or fuck with Ukraine when the party in power hates Russia and will spend untold billions to stop Russia.
> Why would Putin invade Ukraine or fuck with Ukraine when the party in power hates Russia and will spend untold billions to stop Russia.
Wait so... why would he? Considering this is exactly what he did?
Could it be that there are other components to a decision to invade than merely who is in power halfway around the world? There's nothing incompatible with this and the idea they he'd prefer Trump, or any NATO-withdrawing and foreign-aid withholding party, in power.
We'll IF Trump is so "friendly" to Russia and he is Russia's pocket why wouldn't Putin invade when Trump (Putins ally according to the left) is controlling the US military.
Why would Putin invade when a Democrat is president. It makes zero sense.
I didn't claim any of those things my dude. I claimed that Putin has a preference for Trump, at least in 2016, as stated by Putin himself and as confirmed independently by the USIC after investigating Russia's influence campaigns.
The party that spent 20 years complaining about the billions we spent on military support to prop up corrupt but US-friendly regimes now claims that not spending billions to prop up a corrupt but US-friendly regime is evidence of collaboration with the enemy.
Fun fact, many, many other foreign governments have "interfered" in our elections also. In addition the US has interfered in their elections as well. Its been happening for a very long time.
The point of these warnings is not to say "oh gosh it happens whatever" or "we need to launch the ICBMs directly at Moscow right now." The point is to gird the public so that they know the manipulation is happening and can try to compensate for it. There is a lot of denial about this interference happening out there (please do not make me link to it, it's five seconds on Google) and people who are in denial about this stuff absolutely cannot defend themselves.
* Obviously this entire reply assumes an ideal world where people are responsible and prominent political movements want to prevent foreign interference (even when the interference arguably benefits them.) I realize we don't live in that world anymore, but how about let's pretend we do for the purposes of this thread.
There's a significant segment of the population who don't care about the manipulation, so long as it helps their "team".
There isn't really any way to compensate for it. All that does it encourage voter apathy at best, or at worst, people start to think "both sides do it, so it evens out."
This is essentially what Estonia does I believe. They for years have been making it clear to their citizens that factions outside of its nations borders are directly trying to manipulate their elections. I don't think they discredit any particular sources, it is more of public service announcements for people to do their due diligence.
> There is a lot of denial about this interference happening out there
I would argue there’s a lot of creative interpretation of how much “interference” actually happens. Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling. Hence why before and after every election we’re warned repeatedly about foreign interference in our elections. And you would be lying if you said that if the expected red wave materializes that there won’t be large amounts of ink spilled over how Russia pulled it off yet again.
Yet if Democrats were to unexpectedly come out on top in a few days, do you think the same people going on about foreign interference would insist that we have to see what role it played in helping certain Democrats win their respective races? Somehow I doubt it. Which is why I think “interference” is a very useful political tool. It’s vague in nature, if we’re being honest it’s impossible to measure its impact, and it serves a very useful purpose — to cast doubt on the victories of political opponents.
> Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling.
WTF. Our voting system is so fundamentally broken and all any party needs to do to get a government majority without a popular majority is to push on the cracks. No foreign interference necessary, though, it helps.
The USA is so heavily gerrymandered that the vast majority of congressional races don't even need to hold actual elections, the outcome is 99% certain. There are 10 seats in the up-coming midterms which could be considered competitive out of 435. [0]
For the presidential election, the electoral college makes it possible for a candidate to win the presidency with a mere 23% of the popular vote.
> For the presidential election, the electoral college makes it possible for a candidate to win the presidency with a mere 23% of the popular vote.
_Possible_ does a lot of work for you here. You have to assume all the losing states vote at 0% toward the winning party and all winning states vote at 50%+1 for that to happen. Something that is absurdly unrealistic given that California only voted 65% Biden and 35% Trump in the last election.
The EC doesn't favor one party over the other except for the fact that Democrats refuse to move their national politics to the center to win the EC and use words like "populist" to describe the candidates that do.
Realistically, the popular vote "problem" you bring up isn't the issue with the EC. The issue is that it allows candidates to ignore the vast majority of the country, causing all candidates to cater to the same minority of the population. There's nothing wrong with the EC except that the states are mostly "winner-take-all", essentially gerrymandering the presidential elections.
There are a lot of things I'd like to see done to increase the veracity of our elections (ranked choice voting, open primaries, etc.) but, I think, if we could solve or make progress in the reduction of gerrymandering it would make a sizeable difference in the quality of politics in the country. And, notably, gerrymandering is very much a "both sides" issue, ask Californian politicians if they would favor splitting California EC votes proportionally by vote. That would make California more represented in Presidential elections and would also force candidates to try and win votes in California, moderating national politics. The only downside would be to the Democratic party itself.
Politicians in Texas and Florida are just as unlikely as California to unilaterally switch proportionally allocating electors, and for the same reasons. A more representative national politics requires coordinated, national reform.
However, the first-past-the-post issues you're talking about have very little to do with gerrymandering? EC / Senate politics are unrepresentative of population-majority preferences due to where people have decided to put themselves; House politics are unrepresentative due to how the districts for each seat are drawn. Gerrymandering is the political manipulation of the latter.
> EC / Senate politics are unrepresentative of population-majority preferences due to where people have decided to put themselves;
Senate politics aside, winner-take-all EC states are mostly gerrymandered to the majority party. It has exactly the same effect as gerrymandered house districts. some states are just not worth putting any effort into winning for the losing party and all focus/money/attention/politics is aimed at persuaded a small subset of constituents, the only difference is scale.
The inaction of the party in power to undo the winner-take-all EC model in a uncontested state shares the same motivation (more power to the party) and has the same outcome (worse representation for the people).
Using the example of California because it's a one-party state (so the advantages and disadvantages are more clear), if they were to proportionally allot EC votes, it would be good for every single Californian. The national Democratic party would move toward California Democrat values and the same situation for Republicans. And, since the state is so blue, it might even provide some incentive for the national Republican party to try and persuade purple Californians, moving them even further left. That's also good for California Democrats. People are led to believe that it would be worse for them, as individuals but that isn't the case. It would be better for _everyone_ in California if California wasn't winner take all.
The only group that it's bad for is the Democratic party.
> Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling.
I’m trying to be generous in my interpretation here but are you using “trickery” to include the gerrymandering and voting restrictions Democrats spend most of their time on? In particular, I’d like some citations about who is saying specifically what about “interference”.
This comment comes off as malinformation. Malinformation isn't information that is incorrect, but correct information used in a way to create a misleading context. There's 2 problems here. 1) You're implicitly dismissive of a foreign government interfering in our elections. I think most of us here will agree that any interference from any entity is not okay. 2) It muddles the conversation with more noise. A more in depth version of this wouldn't, and could add more context, but this comment is not doing that.
I don't think this was done on purpose, but I'm noting it because it seems to be becoming the common way we speak these days and that isn't healthy to our abilities to solve these issues. We need to discuss the nuance and complexities of these events or else others will control the narratives and make us fight within ourselves instead of uniting to solve these issues.
> Malinformation isn't information that is incorrect, but correct information used in a way to create a misleading context.
Good, now we finally have an accurate, single-word description of all non-tabloid journalism.
> It muddles the conversation with more noise.
I agree with GP and I believe that this whole conversation is noise. The biggest red herring there ever was (no pun intended). Yes, Russia is interfering with US elections. So does US with Russia's. I can point at any news article and claim foreign interference and, unless you're literally NSA and can map-reduce the entire Internet in an afternoon, there's no way for you to conclusively prove me wrong. And whether a given article is a result of foreign interference or not, it's creating a misleading context anyway.
The right answer is to understand that the news articles, particularly on hot topics, are always manipulated by some combination of: {your party, other party, foreign influence, The Elites, advertising money} - and to treat it accordingly. That is, don't update your views on the world based on second-hand recycled soundbites. Either try to dig in and understand an issue, or accept the fact that you don't know enough to have an opinion. Yes, it's OK for an adult to not have a strong opinion on a topic. And be very careful about any argument that lets you preferentially dismiss things you don't like as malicious interference by third parties.
You didn't engage with the other person's point at all, you just called it "malinformation". Looking forward to the spread of this one. I'm expecting it to triple "whataboutism".
Please do not normalize the use of a term that is being pushed by the government to justify censoring information they don’t like [1]. I understand that there is such a thing as “true information presented out of context in a manner meant to mislead”, and I even grant that the comment might be guilty of it. But “malinformation” and “misinformation” are just becoming labels for “information that is inconvenient”, and I don’t think normal internet commenters adopting their use is doing us any good.
I do want to point out that the word was more frequently used in 2004[0], the furthest back Google Trends will let me go. Our usage today is even substantially lower than that in 2009.
I'm not saying that the government isn't trying to manipulate the topics and use the same words too. After all, that's the entire thing we're discussing. But that doesn't mean that they get to control words either. That's an unwinnable battle because the adversary has such an easy path to victory. All you need to do is take language people are using and incorporate it into your own, but with slightly different (but reasonable) meaning. You're actively engaging in their strategy. Words are defined by how they are used and understood by the public. So if you understand my intention and that I am not using it in this same manipulative manner, then we're pushing back and ensuring they do not take control of our language.
This is why it is important to understand the distinction between misinformation and disinformation. The former being an idiot, the latter being a manipulator. But those that want to sow discord want us to conflate the two, which is rather easy. I'd say it is pretty common with any word that becomes a hot button itself.
I agree. But, to be clear, I consider any accusation of "whataboutism" I see to be disinformation by default, until proven otherwise from context, because by far most use of it I saw was as a way to shut down good discussion points. I have a short list of such words/phrases; another notable one is "dog whistle", which I have never seen used in good faith on-line.
My default position is misinformation because I think people being dumb is more likely then them attempting to gaslight others. They get the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, but it definitely raises suspicion.
The same goes for dog whistling. It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's its entire purpose: to hide within normalized speech. Covert speech is not covert if the only ones using that speech are manipulators. But that's why fighting it is so hard, because you don't know who's a useful idiot and who's a manipulator. But it is clear that the manipulators hide in a sea of useful idiots and parrots.
So I think good faith is trying to extract the signal from the noise and to differentiate the two rather than assuming maliciousness.
> It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's its entire purpose: to hide within normalized speech.
It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's the phrase's entire purpose: it's a weapon. It's an accusation that's cheap to make, and near-impossible to disprove.
Sure, legitimate cases of dog whistling probably exist. It's impossible to tell for sure, because the "test" has near 100% false-positive rate. Or, put another way, talking about dog whistling being a thing is itself malinformation - technically the phenomenon exists, but bringing attention to it is between confused and malicious.
Whatever happened to "wrong"? As in, "that's wrong". Ideally followed by some reasoning.
All of these fancier words like whataboutism or misinformation are just attempts to assert authority via the word. They don't convey additional meaning.
Misinformation and disinformation are just nuanced versions of wrong. The former means unintentional and the latter means intentional. The distinctions are useful here because the latter is a claim that the person spouting the information is corrupt and knowingly trying to propagate lies. This is more universally considered bad. People are wrong all the time, but most people aren't intentionally spreading lies.
Malinformation doesn't mean something is wrong but that it is misleading. This distinction is important because if you claim malinformation you actually aren't claiming that the information used is wrong, but the way it is is. A classic example of this is white nationalists using the phrase "despite being 13% of the population black people <insert something about crime here>". While the statistics may be accurate it does not incorporate the complexities involved which end up decoupling race from the statistics. To put it more accurately, this is an aggregation error (more specifically ascertainment bias, a form of collider bias on conditional probabilities). Without the deaggregation here it is natural to assume that the conditional variable here is ethnicity (the intent of the malinformation) but in reality this is misleading because the way the information was presented is not entirely accurate.
Malinformation is specifically difficult to defend against because one can google to confirm accuracy of claims. But in reality it takes expertise to dismantle the claims. It is preying upon people's naivety and inability to process information that they are not intimately familiar with (which is all of us, just in different subjects). So it is important to recognize that this form of manipulation exists. The defense is to maintain skepticism and consult experts. Looking for consensus among experts specifically.
These words do in fact convey a significant amount of additional meaning and the distinctions are important. Especially if we're trying to encourage more meaningful and nuanced discussions.
Who said I was encouraging that? I'm saying you have to use nuance to explain how something is malinformation in the first place. I even did this in my example. We need good faith discussions and I do think you need to step up your game here a bit.
"Misinformation" might (sometimes) be a synonym for "wrong".... but "whataboutism", "disinformation", "malinformation" are not. They mean different things.
Disinformation actually does mean wrong. But it also is an accusation of maliciousness. That's the distinguishing feature between misinformation and disinformation: intent and prior knowledge. But with the other two I agree. Whataboutism is non-sequitur arguments. Malinformation is cherry-picking data with intent to deceive.
I don't know many educated people who are surprised that countries are meddling in foreign elections. Money has been funneled to opposition groups probably since time began. What did surprise me was the effectiveness and return on investment that has come about with technology, as well as the long term effects that seem to continue well beyond the elections. There are plenty of resources out there to discover meddling and disprove misinformation, but people are seemingly adverse to using them.
Yes. Nobody seems to care that the US interfered in the 2000 Russian election. Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin and forcing him to step down. In effect, the US is responsible for putting Putin in power. The media demonizes Putin getting everybody to hate him, and the average person (including HN) goes along with it, because they don't know any better, even though HN considers itself to be smarter than the average person.
> Yes. Nobody seems to care that the US interfered in the 2000 Russian election
I'd be interested to hear more about this ... do you have links to a summary ?
> Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin
I'm not clear if you mean Putin blackmailed Yeltsin or the US blackmailed Yeltsin ? What was the blackmail over ?
From a brief bit of reading and what memory I have Yeltsin was having various ...
- health ("months in hospital" [1]),
- political (four prime ministers in eighteen months [2])
- and, allegedly, criminal (government contractor providing Yeltsin and family with "we pay the bills" credit cards [3])
... problems so him going of his own accord doesn't seem impossible ?
Also wasn't it the case that you could only do two terms as President until Putin fixed it so he could reign for ever ? If that was the case then Yeltsin wasn't going to be able to run again anyway ?
I'm open to the idea that the CIA was, as is traditional, shooting itself in the foot, and there may have been US elements who felt that Boris was dangerously unpredictable but it does seem that there was other things going on which might have led to his demise ?
Yeah, everyone's so mortified when the US has been legitimately couping South American nations for a few decades. Like election interference is just an aspect of the global political chess game. America isn't immune from it just because we're "egalitarian" (which it really isn't, we have terrible health outcomes and literacy that have been spackled over by large financial success, we're essentially seeing our decline from a global superpower to a middle-tier player in real time)
After the cold war ended (last three decades), I'm not sure of any case where America has been coup'ing countries in South America. Do you know some cases?
The particular election interference in question was "couping" and the question was where the US had done it recently.
You can be outraged at what happened to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba and all that. I think you should be! And at the same time you can realize that was some time ago and if you don't believe in eternal collective punishment (everyone in Mongolia must suffer for what Genghis Khan did!), then it is relevant that the US is behaving better now and Russia isn't.
And regardless of all this, whataboutism is a counsel of despair: no good can ever be done by anyone because everyone's nation has done bad at some point. Everyone should silently take the abuse. If you truly believe there is such a thing as bad behavior, you don't silence criticism of one act by pointing to another act. You criticize both acts. And your criticism is proportional to the relevance of the act. It sucks that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove out the Britons, but that isn't the top problem to solve anymore.
That's obviously not logically sound, because there's a ton of people in the middle east who would say these exact words about the US and their military actions. The morality of state level actors varies substantially across populations, it's why in countries with higher education, you find lower rates of nationalism
The soviet union was evil by design - genocide is their way of working. They still work this way as we've seen untold amount of times in Ukraine, in Bucha, Izyum and Mariupol.
US fuckups like Iraq were accidents, aka unplanned. Overwhelming majority of civilian victims is work of their opponents, like Iraqi religious insurgents, suicide bombers or ISIS.
Wait, this comment explains a lot. People literally are here thinking that public discourse in hn threads is just an elaborate game of League of Legends and not trying to understand perspectives
Brazilian here. The Biden administration and the CIA openly pressured our president to accept the election results before they happened. I gotta at least wonder if they knew he was going to lose.
Now there's nation-wide protests, calls for military intervention, election denialism with some rather convincing evidence, blatant censorship of anyone who's so much as asking if this is going to be investigated.
Biden, and presumably every other governmental official in every nation who truly believes in democracy, wasn't saying that Bolsonaro should step down regardless of whether he lost. They were saying he should step down if he lost. Basically, don't retain power by civil war. If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.
CIA person "urging" a president of a soverign country to stop doubting voting machines? Calling his doubts "baseless"? I mean, the USA has paper ballots to this day because of the exact same "baseless" doubts. It's essentially world wide consensus that voting machines are a bad idea, some countries straight up declared them unconstitutional. But these USA officials pressured our president not to question the system of his own country. A CIA guy at that, from a country known for compromising the world's security and spying on everyone.
I'm sorry but there's so much wrong with that it's not even funny. If that's not interference I don't know what is. The more I research these elections the uglier it gets.
> If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.
Right now it doesn't seem like this election legitimitized either government. The unprecedented censorship is not inspiring confidence. I wonder what will happen now...
If Brazil is anything like the US, there are many, many safeguards in place whenever an election machine is certified and used.
Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims.
In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
> So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election
This isn't what he was doing though. He wanted the voting machines to have a printer function so that an auditable paper trail was established. I've seen highly voted comments arguing for this exact same thing here on HN not even a week ago.
> and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims
I did doubt those claims. At first.
Some serious evidence has surfaced though: discrepancies in the election data set showing older less thoroughly audited voting machines clearly favoring the winning candidate by as much as 15%.
I was still skeptical, tried to reproduce the results on my own dataset... Then I watched the government's election website go down for hours, then come back up with the data set modified. Then I watched a supreme court judge censor anyone asking questions about this on Twitter.
It's not exactly inspiring confidence.
> In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
The 2020 voting machine models seem to have been thoroughly audited. However, we're still using older models and I don't think they were audited recently. There were discrepancies in the voting patterns of the 2020 model and older models and nobody has been able to refute that at this time.
Yes, you should say you will accept the results of an election before you know whether you will win it. This is the basis of the peaceful transfer of power. It shouldn't be hard to accept this. To accept only those elections you win is to deny the legitimacy of democratic governance altogether.
If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
> If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object.
So saying that you will "accept the results of an election" is just a chant or a ritual that doesn't mean anything, because you can still declare the election was not fair after the results come in?
> If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object.
Obviously.
> But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
Of course not. I have some real reasons for doubting the results.
Three days ago, an argentinian man streamed a video where he analyzed our election's official data set. He found that the older models of our voting machines, less thoroughly audited, displayed a clear advantage to the winning left-wing candidate, something between 8% and 15%.
After I watched this, I went to the government website and downloaded the entire election dataset and attempted to reproduce his analysis.
Then I saw the website go down for hours.
An API for data set changes notifications remained up though. I monitored that API and saw them pushing changes to the 2022 and 2018 elections datasets. I saved that data too.
Then I witnessed that API go down.
Next day, it was back up, the data was modified and there was a bullshit note on the website explaining it went down due maintenance.
Then this supreme court judge started censoring everyone who even so much as asked if he was going to investigate any of this. Last weekend I counted at least 10 influential people censored, including a doctor in economics, elected politicians and policemen. It got to the point people on Twitter got Elon Musk to look at it.
I'm very worried about this. If it's so false, why can't they just refute it? It seems to me like they're all in damage control mode. Media is pretending nothing's going on.
Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models? I assume those districts would be the poorer districts, and Lula did have more support among the low income, correct? I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.
> Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models?
If I understood correctly, they were compared to other machines in the same electoral zone. Each zone can have 2020 models and pre-2020 models. The older models had more votes compared to 2020 models even in the same geographical locations.
> I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.
Look I honestly don't know anymore. Can you help me make sense of it? It was published here:
Attempting to discuss this anywhere else, I was met with censorship and heavily biased political discourse. I know the electoral court has not made any statements regarding it, they're just censoring everything. I've never seen anything like this in my country before.
The argentinian man made a video presentation but I don't have access to it anymore due to censorship.
Depends on what you mean by same geographical locations, but that can vary a lot. If you’re looking over 100’s of kilometers, there will be both poor and wealthy districts. If you’re looking within a single city, there will be poor and wealthy districts. This really only gets informative if you’re looking at different models used in the exact same polling place and even then it could be no more than correlation for other reasons (maybe for example poorer people prefer the older machines because they’re more familiar while wealthier people prefer newer machines because it matches their iPhone).
If voting preference is at all correlated to income, and what models of voting machines used at a polling place are correlated to the wealth of that district, then you will likely find a correlation between voting machine model and voter preference, with the older/cheaper model showing a preference for the candidate more favored by poorer people.
It’s not a sign there was fraud. Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?
What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?
> maybe for example poorer people prefer the older machines because they’re more familiar while wealthier people prefer newer machines because it matches their iPhone
The machines look the same to the voter and we can't choose which machine to vote on. Each citizen is assigned an electoral zone and a section within that zone. One voting machine captures the votes of every section. In my neighborhood, for example, the voting took place at a school and every classroom had a different voting machine, one for each section.
It'd be extremely suspicious if it turned out that the people voting one room away from me showed statistically significant differences from the other sections.
> Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?
Looks like Bolsonaro wins if only 2020 models are evaluated.
> What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?
Clearly we'd be having the same election denialism problems we're having now...
Frankly, I'm shocked. The US would never do such a thing and to discover that others may want to influence american politics for their benefit is astonishing.
It’s notable because he was indicted by Muller for election interference, so it’s confirming the accusation that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election. It’s also newsworthy because many people didn’t (or still don’t) believe any election interference happened, and that it’s the first time (that I’m aware of) where a foreign nation was accused of so directly and materially attempting to influence a US election.
But you’re right, I’m sure lots of countries do this all the time, including the US.
The reason russian influence entered the zeitgeist was a PR push from people who worked in the HRC campaign and DNC insiders who needed to blame Trumps win on external factors to distract from their "pied piper" strategy of deliberately elevating trump during the primaries because they thought he would be easy to beat.
Election interference need not be measured by its impact to be illegal. Maybe it swayed the election maybe it didn’t, but the individual in the article just admitted to the crime he was indicted for as a result of the Muller report.
To foreign entities, it probably only matters in terms of international relations.
To domestic entities, the laws of the land certainly matter. If an adversarial foreign entity is breaking domestic laws without penalty, then domestic entities can focus more on the preventative aspect of enforcement of the law.
But yeah, if you have no enforcement and no deterrence then the law might as well not exist.
Three years before this Clinton, the US Congress and corporate media cheered as Yeltsin shelled the Russian parliament with the help of the Russian Army. The idea was to support a strongman Russian president with tight connections to Russia military and military intelligence against the elected parliament. He appointed Putin to take over for him when he left.
Nowadays the same US politicians and press bemoan Putin and the lack of democracy in Russia. It's a complete farce.
I'm going to assume that your "shock" is of the same kind as Captain Renault's when he says he is shocked, shocked to find that there's gambling going on at Rick's.
> Я вам отвечу очень тонко, деликатно и прошу прощения, допущу определённую двусмысленность. Господа, мы вмешивались, вмешиваемся и будем вмешиваться. Аккуратно, точно, хирургически и по-своему, как мы это умеем. Во время наших точечных операций будем удалять сразу обе почки и печень.
In English:
> I will answer you very subtly, delicately and I apologize, I will allow a certain ambiguity. Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.
---
As a native speaker, I tend to believe that he was trolling the press. This is very similar to what Putin replied to a question asked by one of the interviewer's from the US whether Russia has plans to interfere:
In Russian:
> По секрету вам скажу: да, обязательно будем это делать! Чтобы окончательно развеселить вас там как следует. Только вы никому не говорит.
In English:
> I’ll tell you a secret: yes, we will definitely do it! To finally cheer you up there properly. Just don't tell anyone.
It’s basically the US clutching its pearls, because of course we never meddle in other countries elections, or overthrow their governments and install dictators, or start a war on false premises.
Reading though the comments, it seems like another form of exceptionalism where US folks think if not for Russia, there would be no extremism. I feel Russia is trolling here and it is flying above some people's head.
People need to realize that if your goal is to destabilize the United States, insinuating you are interfering with elections while not actually doing anything, is sufficient to cause national upset
If it is possible to cause people to have doubt then the election system and rules need to be fixed. From what I can gather almost all US elected laws (except the partisan and some racist voter id laws) are from the 1800s.
From what I can tell I would state that Brasil has a better election system than the US. Millions voted and everything was counted in just a few hours. There seems to be a whole system to make absolutely sure the results can be trusted even when looser claim the other one cheated or votes are contested.
In the US it appears each state does their own thing. I remember "hanging chads" back in 2000, what a disaster.
Many countries the size of us states get their ballots counted in a day. It used to be the expectation that elections are decided immediately instead of over the course of weeks. The first time I saw that normalized was in 2020 and we were told to look the other way. Luckily my memory is slightly better than that of a goldfish so I remember previous elections where votes were counted until the last ballot that night
This is not in dispute. A reminder that 34 people were charged as a part of Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in our election, five of which were high level parts of Trump's campaign staff (Papadopoulos, Manafort, Gates, Flynn, and Cohen): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th.... Roger Stone was also later indicted and imprisoned. Trump pardoned Flynn, Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Stone.
Musk recently posted his "solution" to the war with stamps of russian propaganda (e.g. mentioning "Khrushchev's mistake" and nuclear war threats). Now he urges everyone to vote for republicans, who publicly against helping Ukraine in the genocidal war of Russia. What is it if not interference from the very top?
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. It doesn't matter that the US does this or not (at least not to this case). What matters is that there is still a large part of the US population who thinks only the US does it, and that it doesn't happen to us.
A lot of people with strongly held beliefs got those from foreign propaganda, and it's important to realize that. And it's not just the right wing. A lot of left wing propaganda comes from outside as well.
Their goal is to cause discord and infighting, because as long as the US is infighting it won't be effective projecting its power outside, which is their ultimate goal.
Ya. Unironically, if you were trying to destabilize the US, taking advantage of things like the fact that 30% of the country kinda has fundamentalist views on women's rights is super smart. It basically tears the nation in half with super little effort, of course they would leverage it.
It's a perfect game to play because dividing a country along the contractions in it's own ideology is unresolvable, beautiful political maneuvering. To have countered something like this, the US would've needed to probably triple it's investing in universal education 20 years ago.
At this point, they don't actually have to do anything because half of the country is convinced that the Russians interfered enough to get Trump elected. Thus every time that they make these statements they're just rubbing salt in the wounds of the 2016 election. I personally don't believe that the Russians are or ever were capable of running such a sophisticated operation based on how poorly their military has performed in Ukraine. Now, China on the other hand....
An absolutely despicable individual, but it's quite interesting how he ran a catering business, then a troll farm and currently a private army.
I happen to have just finished reading "Trump / Russia: A Definitive History" Seth Hettena. I think it's a good book and it covers, among other things, Prigozhin's role in some of the past goings-on that are relevant for the present.
He's not literally Putin's chef. He owns restaurants, but he's Putin's fixer and also owns a large mercenary military company that has committed atrocities around the world.
He's more like the head of Putin's SS than the head of his kitchen.
Soros is an American citizen. Thanks to a conservative SCOTUS decision, he apparently has every right to exercise political free speech via cold hard cash. Are you going to say anything similarly conspiratorial about Robert Mercer? Robert Uihlein? The Koch brothers?
> Are you going to say anything similarly conspiratorial about Robert Mercer? Robert Uihlein? The Koch brothers?
I'm going to say that if these creeps donate millions and billions to Republican campaigns, cycle after cycle, with no effective objections from the court or Congress, that "foreign interference" is a nationalist dogwhistle and not a serious concern.
I 2-party system you can just act based on the facts and hurt your party or ignore the facts of current topic and try to shift the focus - like you are doing now.
Don't know why I'm going to bother, but from the intro to Volume 1 of the Mueller Report:
"The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and
systematic fashion. Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016. In June, the Democratic National Committee and its cyber response team publicly announced that Russian hackers had compromised its computer network. Releases of hacked materials—hacks that public reporting soon attributed to the Russian government—began that same month. Additional releases followed in July through the organization WikiLeaks, with further releases in October and November."
Russia doesn’t even have to do anything achieve their goals. The credulous media will lap up even the most thinly supported theory. Is it any wonder that after the 2016 election, two thirds of Democrats believed Russia had “tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President?” https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
Obviously Russian interferes in US elections. So do many other countries.
And the US interferes in other countries elections. It's always been this way.
It's just an issue now, because interference in the 2016 election was spun by domestic political groups to delegitimize an elected president and subvert the democratic process by attempting to remove the president.
Probably the most memorable was the Russians hacking the Democrats emails. Also Trump's lot meeting with the Russians before hand and the 100s of Russian troll accounts with names like American Patriot. I mean I know a lot of countries try to influence elections but is was all getting like something from a spy novel.
I'm not American and not hugely partisan on the right/left thing but I think the whole world was watching that one and thinking it a bit odd. Obviously the Russians were trying to help Trump and may have swung things a little given that the vote was so close.
The Russians trying to help their prefered candidate wasn't so different to any number of other people and organisations trying to do similarnexcept they broke some laws.
Salvador Allende was nearly 50 years ago. I think the US does a lot less of this now.
IMO The Iraq War was the last colossal bullshit thing to date. Many Americans (self included) were against it and we're a few presidents removed from that shitty decision. Around the time of the invasion, Putin cited it as something that excuses his current behavior. But saying the US did something years ago does not justify one's own bullshit.
The reason why you think it happens less often is because the US declassifies its foreign activities after a long delay, at which point we have government admissions of what was done. Until then, we have only media reports that are labelled as conspiracy theories, etc.
But US was certainly behind a wave of color revolutions that just happened to occur in many of the former Soviet Republics and just happened to install pro-US governments that adopted anti-Russian policies (when successful). There is a whole book written about it:
The US was also behind the "Arab Spring" revolts that spread chaos to the Arab world (but not much democracy), as well as periodically stoking revolts in Iran. For some reason, there are a huge number of well armed foreign men murdering police in Iran in the name of women's rights, when Saudi Arabia or the other gulf states aren't exactly known for women's rights, but strangely have had no similar movements. I wonder why that is.
In Southeast Asia, the US is funding violent groups in Myanmar that have been killing school teachers, hospital employees, emergency workers, police, etc in an attempt to overthrow the junta and replace it with a government in exile that is headquartered in Virginia.
In Pakistan, the US is funding Baluchi rebels that have been attacking Chinese engineers working on belt and road projects, and recently tried to assassinate the Chinese Ambassador.
We overthrew the government of Ukraine twice, in 2004 and 2014, installing a repressive anti-Russian government in its place. We tried to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan and Byelorussia earlier.
My father's family came from what is now a post-soviet republic, which you probably do not understand was previously, before unpopular annexation, a pre-soviet republic. You are not going to convince me with pro Putin horse shit. There are plenty of post-soviet republics, Ukraine included, who are favorable to NATO and not due to a US conspiracy. Many of these were brutally oppressed not just by the Soviet Union but the Russian Empire, and a lot of those conflicts predate the existence of the United States.
Well, despite the trenchant analysis, the point is not that the US creates completely fake movements. There are real issues of racism, religious tensions, women's rights, etc, and the point is to exploit these, arm the various groups, raise the temperature, and ultimately orchestrate a coup.
For example, the US had a program to arm tibetans and train them to commit sabotage in China in the 1950s. That's not to say that Tibetans did not exist as an ethnic group or that they had no grievances against Han Chinese. That's not how this stuff works. So the point is that by drawing boundaries to include large Russian populations in the 1920s, this created exactly the recipe for racial conflict when the provinces became independent nations. Then appeals could be made to people like your father to take up arms and foment violence. It just requires a steady stream of funding, propaganda, buying media, stoking up long standing hatreds, etc. That's the recipe of color revolutions. It's also how the British operated in many parts of the empire, exploiting existing ethnic dividing lines.
Similarly in the Arab world, there were legitimate grievances, for example in Libya. Of course the end result was the dismemberment of the nation, but that's how the US operates -- they pry open existing grievances and create chaos and violence in order to further geostrategic goals.
To be fair, The Soviet Union did the same thing during the cold war, famously providing funding for various radical racial groups in the U.S. in an attempt to create chaos in America in the 1960s. So it wasn't just the US and Britain that operates this way. The point is to leverage whetever fractures there are in society and make those larger.
You just told me that Ukraine wanted to be pro-Russia, anti-west in 2004-2005, and the CIA intervened. That's horse shit.
As I re-read you are also saying the protests against Lukashenko were a US led coup attempt. Sorry, that is just nuts. I'm going to hazard a guess that if you aren't deliberately lying, you don't know very much about Lukashenko. You are just repeating all the Kremlin type stuff without skepticism. I really don't have polite words.
In the mid 2000s I thought Chavez was OK (democratically elected after all) and the criticism was mostly Bush Administration bullshit.
I don't want to presume too much of you. Do you speak Spanish?
Because what changed my mind about that wave of leaders was listening to them speak unfiltered in Spanish. They came across to me as not having any idea what they're doing. The ideas sound good on the surface (power to the people!) but they are corrupt, incompetent, narcissistic bullshitters. Like your sibling comment says, their inadequate leadership was for some time covered up by the high price of oil. When oil prices fluctuate, they have problems. They blame all their internal problems on the United States.
Many Americans (right wingers on the right, tankies on the left) mix up US politics with all this, or in the case of the left, believe this last point about how every internal problem is somehow caused by the devilish US, glorifying chavismo as some kind of "enemy of my enemy" thing; I myself was guilty of this last point in the past. But Chavistas don't need any help from the US in achieving poor outcomes. They do it themselves.
They do have popular support in their country. So does Vladimir Putin. So did Hitler. It just goes to show that it's OK to personally disagree with the will of voters in other countries. That is quite a bit different from a coup.
Venezuela imports most of their food. When their crummy oil lost its market they were soon bankrupt. Their oil-supported socialist government did nothing, and their economy collapsed.
These things are all larger than some individual actor.
It's funny how the media were all over russian meddling into the 2016 elections but not a whisper of russian meddling in the 2020 elections. Either a) russia behaved in 2020 (which is not what this article suggest), or b) these interferences are background noise that don't have much of an impact (2020 elections treatment but then what about 2016?) or c) these interferences have a material impact (2016 elections treatment but then what about 2020?).
a) is highly improbable, b) and c) are proof that the media narrative is all bullshit to push a political agenda.
these days the only two media I "trust" is apnews and reuters, all the rest are biased one way or another, I simply ignore all of them.
I read axios once a while because it's short, and, it seems more objective than all the rest(except for APNews and Reuters that is), so it's the 3rd site I visit.
I used to do the same, trust news agencies, which until recently were neutral and had much higher standards. But those are going fast. I think the most shocking example for me is when Reuters embargo-ed a story about Beto O'Rourke's hacking past, until after the 2018 election to not risk helping Cruz. And I have seen countless news agency articles that were clearly politically biased since.
not aware of that, that's a shame indeed. I hope there is still true journalism on earth, problem is, where is it? as an independent, all I want is to read the facts, like it used to be, long long time ago though.
This is key here and I think we should all take note because I see comments here that feed into their tactics. Their goal isn't to have a specific election winner, but to divide us as a nation (not just US but all Westerners and even countries like Japan) and create political shutdowns. The point is to further political extremism, on both sides, and to create in fighting so that no united formation can stand against them.
So the question is how to fight against this. There are things that the government can and should do, but there are things we the public NEED to do as well. We have to be aware that we're often in these battlegrounds. This thread is one itself. So when commenting we need to ensure that we're discussing in good faith. That we're avoiding mic drops and easy points. We need nuance and to discuss the complexities of the issues we face in a complex world. Shift away from the emotional reactions because that is what they exploit. They have super computers and trolls aimed at your brain to exploit this animalistic behavior and we all are ill prepared and highly vulnerable to it (yes me, yes you, and I mean all of you). So we have to slow down and think more. It's not easy and causes an internal battle, but I think my doing this we become stronger and this helps us fight any adversary who would like to make useful idiots out of all of us.