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‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

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Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#221

Post by [deleted] »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #99
DFHippie wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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,…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#222

Post by SXX »

spamizbad wrote: post #208
godelski wrote: post #77

> 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 creat…

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 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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#223

Post by lamontcg »

godelski wrote: post #110
mooneater wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are things we the public NEED to do I dont disagree, but my take is relying on public changing its behavior is not exactly a hopeful strategy.

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 a…

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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#224

Post by ethanbond »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #213
bjhartin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if the prices are inflated and we are not sending as much as we could?

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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#225

Post by yucky »

bell-cot wrote: post #200
yucky wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#226

Post by SQueeeeeL »

kahrl wrote: post #145
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang, I didn't realize confirmed election interference stopped mattering if we were at war with another superpower.

Take your L.

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

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#227

Post by godelski »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #219
godelski wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#228

Post by ethanbond »

factsarelolz wrote: post #157
ethanbond wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-withdr…

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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#229

Post by woooooo »

godelski wrote: post #227
TeMPOraL wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#230

Post by theptip »

mistermann wrote: post #202
theptip wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing we could do would be to implement some common-sense election integrity improvements such as those recommended in https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the... , or similarly by the advocacy group: https://verifiedvoting.org/annual-report-2021/advocating-for... . These should have bipartisan support. Things like paper votes for every election, random manual recounts to sample error rates an…

> 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 bee…

> 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.

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