I can’t? Well, drat. I mean, here I was, angry because Russian hackers – apparently directed by Putin and the highest levels of government – acted on a candidate’s behest to influence the election, resulting in a racist, xenophobic failure who got the minority of the vote the presidency, something that the vast majority of the country doesn’t want, but have no say in reversing. But I guess I’m misguided, and I should be mad at myself?
7 Likes
You can certainly get angry because Russia tried to influenced our election. That’s different. And you can get angry at GOP apologists who apparently care more about getting elected than they do about the integrity of our system, or at Democratic milquetoasts who aren’t doing everything in their power to block the illegitimate result, but choosing the Russians as a focus of your anger seems misdirected to me.
5 Likes
And yet, the level of Cold War rhetoric has managed to give me goosebumps. To me (Austrian, not American), that sounded way over the top, and not at all “directed inward”. I’m not talking about your contributions in particular, though.
That’s part of the issue my problem.
The other part is that things seem to be blown out of proportion. Partisan hackers leaking DNC emails would be OK, partisan hackers paid for by some shady billionaire would be OK as well, but OMG it was done FOREIGNERS.
Which leads straight back to the cold war rhetoric again, because it was not just any kind of foreigners, it was Russian spies…
Foreign politicians interfere in European elections all the time, we just call that free speech. Our politicians have open ties to politicians from similar parties in other European countries all the time. Of course, this wasn’t Putin smiling on a photo-op for his friend Trump - this was a covert operation that broke the law.
The actual act that might have influenced the election was the publication of true facts that exposed misdeeds (or were construed by others as misdeeds, I haven’t double-checked) by one candidate. In a democracy, such a publication should be, by definition, considered to be in the public interest, and it should be up to the voters to decide whether the damning evidence is outweighed by the fact that the misdeeds of the other side remain unknown.
If the voters decide badly, well, tough luck.
So if all they do is selectively exposing misdeeds, the misdeeds themselves might still be worse than the foreign interference. No Cold War rhetoric needed.
BTW, how would you rank this kind of interference (revealing ill-gotten embarrassing truths and denying involvement) wrt. to
- open support for a candidate by a foreign head of state (“I, the president of country X, hereby recommend that the American people vote for candidate Y”)
- financial support for a candidate by a foreign government
- operating/financing a news outlet that sticks to the truth but might tend to see things in a certain way
- operating/financing a news outlet that sometimes publishes outright lies
So, you are convinced that by a small dose of illegitimate interference, the American election process has been totally delegitimized and that a non-Trump result is now more legitimate than Trump? Are you serious?
As I personally have more of a stake in American foreign politics than in America actually being a democracy (or “republic”), you might be able to convince me that ending American democracy is preferable to a Trump presidency, but I need a lot more than a few leaked emails to convince me that the election result is “illegitimate”.
[citation needed], but probably depends on your definition of a nation state. I’m thinking of the rise of the “modern” nation state during the 19th century, and I would have thought that those played a vital role in most of those areas, although public education and regulation were often already put in place by Enlightened absolute monarchs in the 18th century, and environmentalism didn’t really become a thing until the late 20th century. Also quite a few European nation states were essentially re-founded after WWII, with many of those goals being very central to the endeavor.
1 Like
It’s true, the evidence available can only help sort out a most likely account, and help determine what aren’t likely accounts. Unfortunately that article did a poor job presenting all the evidence, did a terrible job contextualizing it, and made a few claims that are really just stupid, for example suggesting evidence is less reliable because it came from private security firms is just mind-bogglingly ignorant.
And there it is…
4 Likes
I was sticking to nation-state in terms of Westphalian sovereignty. While most modern Western liberal democracies have those goals, not all nation-states are modern Western liberal democracies. There are plenty of nation-states ruled by brutal illiberal kleptocratic regimes.
- Not interference; 2. Illlegal under US law; 3+4 If you mean like Murdoch, yellow journalists trying to influence politics is an old tradition in the US
So, you are convinced that by a small dose of illegitimate interference, the American election process has been totally delegitimized and that a non-Trump result is now more legitimate than Trump? Are you serious?
I said “totally”? Where?
The election was close enough that this kind of intereference could be effective, That isn’t the fault of the people engaging in the interference. However, it represents a distortion of the electoral process, and that shouldn’t just be shrugged off.
1 Like
Didn’t they also hack the Republican Party? I wonder what they’re sitting on for a rainy day?
4 Likes
Да, товарищ. Время пришло!
1 Like
I was thinking more of Russia Today than of Murdoch; RT is actually paid for by the Russian government, after all. Although RT does has far better journalism than Murdoch in areas that are not in the focus of Russian propaganda.
And then it can get even more complicated: What if Murdoch paid some hackers to hack the DNC? What if RT did? What if the BBC did? (Never mind that it would be illegal for Murdoch & the BBC to pay hackers to do their thing; the question is, would the election be tainted?)
You didn’t say “totally”, but the situation is rather binary. We can complain about distortion all we like, but the real question is whether you think the result has been delegitimized enough so that it has become illegitimate, so that inaugurating a different president instead would be more legitimate. It’s either “slightly” delegitimized, but still legitimate, or “totally” delegitimized, so that the opposite result would be more legitimate.
Anyway, the US consitution does not offer a convenient way out (different situation, different place: we just repeated our election here in Austria), so you either get to heed the results of the vote, or you ignore it. So, my question, rephrased: has Trump been democratically elected to be the next president of the USA? Unfortunately, no in-between answers are possible.
Ah, yes, as I thought, definitions. Not all Westphalian sovereign states are nation-states in the sense that I was using the term. And while not all nation-states are modern Western liberal democracies, many modern Western liberal democracies were built on nation-states and inherited a good part of their social safety nets, regulation, public education, etc. from them.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with your questions, and I’m not a fan of arguments which take the form of raising questions rather than asserting a position.
There are many ways that individuals and organization, both domestic and foreign, can affect an election. These live on several spectra, ranging from the honest (a candidate accurately characterizing his or her stands) to the dishonest (a candidate lying through their teeth), from the appropriate (an American newspaper making an endorsement) to the slightly inappropriate (a foreign newspaper making an endorsement) to the grossly inappropriate (the case under discussion) to the illegal (a foreign entity contributing money to a candidate). If a candidate has won an election through either illegal or inappropriate means, I do not believe in simply shrugging and saying, “too late, election over”. Contrary to one of your assertions, there are many stages at which a candidate can in principal be removed or encouraged to resign, not all of them have happened in practice lately but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Moreover, even if pressure on a candidate for electoral abuse has no immediate effect, it can be the cause of later removal; for example, this is what happened to Nixon.
1 Like
Sorry, I’ll try to be clearer.
I was basically following two lines of questioning:
- Clarifying your position in some matters, especially whether you think that someone other than Trump should be inaugurated on Jan 20th.
- Trying to prove that the definition of “illegitimate foreign interference” is not as clear-cut as some people might think, and (see 1.) trying to find out what definition you follow.
Now, for some assertions:
- The Cold War rhetoric used by some people here is way over the top.
- The Cold War rhetoric is especially inappropriate as you don’t get to declare people to be your “Enemy” for doing things that you yourself do to everyone else.
- We don’t know how big the influence by the DNC leaks actually was.
- Undue weight is given to a relatively minor case of foreign interference, above and beyond all the other things that are wrong with the US electoral system.
- It seems that (4) is a result of a tendency to view things in terms of America vs Everyone Else, and that is a world view that is very scary when held by the electorate of the world’s #1 military power.
- Donald Trump has been democratically elected to be the next president of the USA.
- If the emails had been leaked by a non-state actor, no sane person would doubt the previous point.
- The Nixon situation was different; Nixon was impeached for abusing his power as a president; Trump is accused of profiting from Putin abusing his.
- If anyone but Trump is sworn in on January 20th, then the US does no longer look like a democracy.
A foreign newspaper making an endorsement is no more inappropriate than a domestic newspaper making an endorsement. I do not think that the rest of the world has any moral obligation at all to watch silently while Americans choose who they want to be in control of their nukes for the next four years.
The situation here is that a candidate has won and has been aided to a slight but unknown degree through inappropriate events beyond the candidate’s control.
I asserted that there was no “convenient” way as there is in Austria. The convenient thing about the repetition of the Austrian election was that we did not need to agree on how much the election result was tainted by the problems during the election, instead the people were just asked again. All the options that are available per the American constitution are not so convenient. See my claim #9.
1 Like
The Nixon impeachment was an aftereffect of illicit political activity which is rather similar in spirit to email hacking.
As for your other assumptions, 2 ignores what has happened in every relationship between rival states everywhere throughout history, 5 and 9 see our election from the POV of its effect outside the US, which is completely irrelevant; the fact that you think you should have a say in our election does not make it so. 4 is a value judgment that many Americans evidently do not share.
The only thing I fully agree with is #1.
1 Like
There’s a lot of unknowns packed into that statement.
The problem is, that’s reducing it to just a blip on the radar and waving away Russian influence as if it’s just a mis-read headline or a Weekly World News story. Is it coincidence that Trump’s son-in-law was holding talks with Russia about Syria? Did Trump’s very public request for Russia to hack Hillary’s emails have any effect on Russia hacking the DNC and the RNC? What role does Wikileaks have in this; are they collaborating with Russia? Why did Trump’s lawyers prevent the recounts in the specific swing states he won to clinch the Electoral vote, specifically blocking recounts of individual precincts in Michigan where over 75,000 blank ballots were recorded and nearly 60% of precincts had reported ballot discrepancies and voting machine failures?
There are so many incredibly important unanswered questions that your assertion #6 is widely doubted by an increasing number of Americans, especially the vast majority who didn’t vote for him.
1 Like
Didn’t Austria re-ran their presidential election because of a close result and voting irregularities?
3 Likes
Not really. You’re just raising additional points that I did not include in that assessment.
Okay, so your additional points seem to be:
- Holding Talks with Russia about Syria
- Trump’s very public request for Russia to hack Hillary’s emails
- Is Wikileaks collaborating with Russia?
- Recounts in swing states/Voting machines in Swing States
Number 1: Why the hell should they not???
Actually, I would expect them to, if they claim that they want to come to a reasonable agreement with Russia.
Some people seem to be working under the assumption that talking with the “Enemy” is strong evidence that you are a “Traitor”.
Number 2: That “request” came after the publication of the DNC emails. Personally, I interpret it as another one of Trump’s bad jokes, but who knows?
Number 3: Maybe. Wouldn’t blame them after how they’ve been persecuted by the outgoing US administration.
Also, they have every right to be biased in every way they please. It’s called free speech.
Finally, it does not really matter. They passed on material that they had received. Whether they knowingly received that from Russian sources, or whether they just didn’t care where it was from, really doesn’t make a difference.
Number 4: Yes. The way voting is organised in the US is at third-world level or below. This has been well known since 2000. Apparently, no one really cared about fixing it.
After counting the votes of the people who managed to properly register for voting, using unreliable machines, and then possibly recounting and fighting at court about when to stop recounting, the result is a random variable that still strongly correlates with the actual will of the voter.
When the election becomes close, that means you don’t know the real result. But you can’t conclude that therefore, the result should have been the opposite.
You agreed to those rules going in.
So, my assertion #6 is being widely doubted. Well, no one near me believed that Bush won fairly in 2000, but that didn’t keep Americans from going all patriotic on Iraq. Does anyone make the opposite assertion, that Clinton was actually elected democratically?
And are there any opinions on my assertion #9?
Indeed we did. I mentioned that earlier - our constitution gave us a convenient exit. There where no actual voting irregularities, but there were irregularities during counting of absentee ballots. Things like the counting starting too early (must start at Monday 9AM after election day, according to law), of unauthorized persons helping with the counting. In all cases, representatives of all political parties certified that the counting had happened correctly and according to the law (the latter was not always true). The constitutional court found that there was no evidence for any attempt at manipulation, but that the law had been broken in several cases that, in total, exceeded the difference in votes.
So we re-ran it, and the result was the same but more clear, and everyone’s faith in democracy was restored.
Some points: The roles were reversed. The sane guy (Van der Bellen) won, the guy whose party has just signed a cooperation agreement with Putin’s party (Hofer) lost and challenged the result. The irregularities actually happened, but were unlikely to have actually changed the result. Just appointing someone else to be president would not have been a solution.
There seems to be no provision for repeating a vote in America, but there seem to be some provisions for making Someone Else president instead. See my assertion #9 earlier.
1 Like
You don’t find it at all disconcerting that a presidential candidate’s son-in-law was secretly flying to a war zone to negotiate quiet business arrangements with countries who are actively involved in influencing the American election? Or that Trump himself was negotiating business with Putin before the fact, and then denying he did so? You can’t see any possible connection between secret transactions and hacks of an opponent’s database? Okay.
And before further Wikileaks publications of emails and the discovery of increased hacking. Yes, he did claim it was a joke, as he tends to do after saying something horrible.
We agreed to not look into the discovery of 75,000 mysteriously blank ballots and widespread voter fraud? No, I didn’t. Trump’s lawyers certainly did.
Clinton most certainly won the popular vote by a very wide margin. The question we’re facing is whether Trump, with the help of a foreign power, utilized the quirks of our Electoral system and gerrymandering to win specific contests that made him President despite actually losing the vote. Much as we did in 2000 where Bush won the contest thanks to widespread voter fraud in Ohio (the investigation into which was blocked by Ken Blackwell, who is now domestic policy advisor to Mr Trump).
Absolutely, and I agree. That’s the horrible issue we face: even though Trump almost certainly won the election unfairly, if he isn’t elected, or someone else is elected, it’ll look like a sham anyway. There is no good outcome here. My only wish is that the Electors and Americans in general are better educated as to the actual facts of what interference occurred so that when Trump is sworn in, there’s less speculation and more reality to move ahead with.
4 Likes
[quote=“zathras, post:95, topic:91329”]
- The Cold War rhetoric used by some people here is way over the top.
- The Cold War rhetoric is especially inappropriate as you don’t get to declare people to be your “Enemy” for doing things that you yourself do to everyone else.
- We don’t know how big the influence by the DNC leaks actually was.
- Undue weight is given to a relatively minor case of foreign interference, above and beyond all the other things that are wrong with the US electoral system.
- It seems that (4) is a result of a tendency to view things in terms of America vs Everyone Else, and that is a world view that is very scary when held by the electorate of the world’s #1 military power.
- Donald Trump has been democratically elected to be the next president of the USA.
- If the emails had been leaked by a non-state actor, no sane person would doubt the previous point.
- The Nixon situation was different; Nixon was impeached for abusing his power as a president; Trump is accused of profiting from Putin abusing his.
- If anyone but Trump is sworn in on January 20th, then the US does no longer look like a democracy.
[/quote]1. In bbs? That seems like an extreme opinion. Has anyone advocated for a great increase in offensive military positioning to combat Russia interfering with the media surrounding the 2016 election? Because the Cold War was about giving blank checks to the military and intelligence agencies, and the current push is for the US to investigate the election results thoroughly and publish a report outside an extreme minority. - I have the right to oppose the Cold War (historically), oppose the intelligence community’s behavior as a whole, and I can still say all signs point to Russia influencing the US election in 2016 and be mad about it. Again, who is reducing it down to “us versus the Ruskies?”
- We know that is had an influence, and we know that the electoral college win was by an significantly slim margin. It doesn’t take much influence to sway elections that are within the 5 digit margins.
- That’s just bullshit. Election tampering has been front and center for over a year, and Trump’s relationship with Russia has been touched on multiple times before allegedly conclusive evidence surfaced tying Russia’s support directly to Trump instead of against Clinton. Those are very different things. People still talk about Gerrymandering (I have posted my voting district), Comey’s ridiculous stunts, the political influence of institutions like Judicial Watch or more recently Project Veritas, the great weight given to memes generated from the alt-right and other assholes, how voting should be changed to more accurately reflect the public’s opinion, and the issues with voting itself like unchecked electronic ballots and fraud. In fact your later posts directly contradict your own assertion as people talk about the broader problems with the US election.
- Well #4 was bullshit, so this is your real point. The handling of Russia’s influence has mostly turned the US inward, not outward. People are not advocating taking the fight to Russia’s front door, they are advocating investigations and exposing the truth to be published and then the US itself handling the political ramifications. The entire reason Russia is mentioned at all is because there is no better terminology that would fit. How do you phrase “Russia was behind one of the largest media events in the election cycle” that doesn’t make it sound like there is a foreign body to point to?
- President-elect Trump was not democratically elected president. That happens today, and the populace voted for his opposition and not for him. He will be elected by the representations of the people either through the electoral college or congress.
- There was a lot of partisan interference with the process this election (it was the actual subject of the leaks!), so this point is bullshit as well.
- If Trump had prior communication with Russia about influencing the election (a big if), then he broke the law and would be impeached assuming there wasn’t a partisan effort to stop it (that is debatable, the GOP probably wants Pence).
- This is impossible. If anything no one is sworn in on January 20th and eventually Trump get sworn in or someone else after a very nasty set of court battles. That’s been the case historically, the inauguration gets pushed until the election result is finalized. Either way, it makes the US look more like a democracy than it actually is.
4 Likes
In this election there were multiple layers of targeted voter disenfranchisement that prevented significantly more Dem-leaning voters from participating than the margin of wins in many swing states (OH, FL, NC, MI, et al.), major electoral discrepancies in several with ~100k ballots discovered uncounted in MI due to faulty voting machines with draconian GOP legal efforts to impede recounts, and in which the winner got millions fewer votes than the loser. To me that doesn’t look like democracy. YMMV.
10 Likes
The passive voice here is a puzzle. Someone is overweighting, but who? The mainstream media? BoingBoing? The commenters here? I have no idea. But let’s stick with discussions participants here.
I’d say the foreign electoral interference is so serious and of such a large scope and influence that it’s not minor in any sense, and merits widespread awareness as a very serious, very damaging attack.
Let’s flesh out the vectors of interference:
Russia, primarily through their military cyberwarfare division, attacked three main targets: the DNC, the DCCC, and Podesta. There were some others, but those were the big ones.
Once they were caught in their attack on the DNC, their first response was to release all the DNC’s oppo research on Trump. They did this before the general election had even started. They also released dozens of internal strategy docs for both the Clinton campaign, and for every Dem. Senate race. The DCCC dumps weren’t widely discussed in the media, but gave every GOP member in a Senate race the internal strategy docs of their opponent as well as material to exploit for political attacks. This was done five months before the election.
Russia then sent the DNC emails to Wikileaks (or at least claimed they did, and after they made that claim Wikileaks posted them). As a result of the Russian doc dump, highlights on the DNC’s internal politics on pushing Sanders out became one of the most discussed topics of the election, not only on left-leaning sites, and as a talking point for Jill Stein, but also the topic was a favorite for Trump to bring up on Twitter and during the debates, with Wikileaks consistently referred to as the source when the topic came up.
Later in the election Russia apparently sent Podesta’s emails to Wikileaks (or at least Wikileaks posted docs that were the same as those exfiltrated by a Russian attack). In those emails Donna Brazile’s apparent discussion of a debate question with Clinton before the election was discussed, and this blew up into a minor scandal. Since Podesta was Clinton’s campaign chair, the mails also discussed visually every aspect of campaign strategy, and contributed further to the ongoing media character assassination of Clinton as a corrupt Wall Street insider (despite not substantiating that claim well), as well as giving Clinton’s opponent’s team valuable data.
You really need to take into account that the release of virtually all significant campaign materials for Clinton and most Senate Dems was not only an issue for how this got to the public at large, but in the fact that these docs were made available to their opponents. That’s huge.
On top of their interference by hacking and releasing docs that would help the GOP/harm the Dems., Russia also engaged in a few other layers of propaganda cyberwarfare they’d developed by contributing to the online “fake news” epidemic which had major a impact in creating biased, distorted, and false public perceptions leading up to the election. This interference was not only in mass scale creation and posting of propaganda online, but through ongoing mass-scale sock puppet driving trollies, and apparently gaming social media to help propaganda to trend. At this point researchers are still trying to understand the details of this mass scale propaganda campaign, but it’s clear Russia had some influence in many aspects.
Together, those are not a “a relatively minor case of foreign interference.”
Certainly there were many other aspects that also delegitimized the election: mass disenfranchisement, the SCOTUS’s overturning of key portions of the Voting Rights Act, Comey’s (probably illegal) manipulation, etc.
8 Likes
Though there is a case to be made that there simply wasn’t anything as damning in Trump’s emails as there was in his public statements. From what I saw, the DNC emails revealed that some shitty idiots were working for the DNC but actually made Clinton look pretty good.
The scariest thing said during this election was people talking about Trump’s call for Russia to release more emails. The phrase that was used was that he was calling on a “hostile foreign power” to influence the election. Are we calling Russia “hostile” now? Le’ts not.
I get why people are angry that Russia helped Trump win, but if they weren’t using mind control lasers or actually hacking vote counts, I agree that it doesn’t really delegitimizes the election. One issue with democracy is that people can vote for whoever they want for whatever reason they want. If we had some long tradition of everyone being scrupulously truthful during elections and then a foreign power came in and used lies to sway towards one candidate, I could imagine people being shocked and questioning the outcome. But the “Only Americans should be lying to Americans during American elections” thing is a head scratcher to me.
2 Likes
