[HN Gopher] Romanian court annuls result of presidential electio...
___________________________________________________________________
Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round
Author : vinni2
Score : 295 points
Date : 2024-12-06 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| OkayBuddy44 wrote:
| So annoying when the proles don't vote the way they're told
| mariusor wrote:
| I mean, the proles _did_ vote the way they were told. The
| problem is that they didn 't vote the way "the party" wanted
| them to.
| bamboozled wrote:
| They voted for a candidate who broke established Romanian law
| ?
| throwaway655368 wrote:
| The next logical step should be to jail these pesky bad voters.
| If they supported the candidate, whose crime was to campaign on
| TikTok, then they are clearly complicit in that crime and put
| the democracy in danger. May be they even use TikTok
| themselves!
|
| I'm sure all this can be convincingly justified using the
| "paradox of tolerance" phrase.
| tim333 wrote:
| The problem is they were told which way to vote by the
| Kremlin's proxies. And in a sneaky way. There's some history
| there:
|
| >During the Soviet occupation of Romania, the communist-
| dominated government called for new elections in 1946, which
| they fraudulently won, with a fabricated 70% majority of the
| vote.
|
| and that stuff went on until
|
| >Ceausescu greatly extended the authority of the Securitate
| secret police and imposed a severe cult of personality, which
| led to a dramatic decrease in the dictator's popularity and
| culminated in his overthrow in the violent Romanian Revolution
| of December 1989 in which thousands were killed or injured.
|
| After that they probably thought enough with Russia rigging
| elections and imposing dictators already.
| anon291 wrote:
| The article presents no evidence that the election was
| fraudulent.
| piva00 wrote:
| You can go read the CCR decision yourself:
| https://www.ccr.ro/comunicat-de-presa-6-decembrie-2024/
|
| Please do some research before the knee-jerk reactionary take,
| it's more conducive to any discussion than inviting the mouth-
| frothers to fester about something you and they have no idea
| about.
| anon291 wrote:
| I cannot read Romanian. Given the language barrier one would
| expect the BBC to at least do a bit of translation for its
| English speaking audience.
| simion314 wrote:
| There should be links to other artciles on BBC, like TicTok
| admitting the bots farms used, a big one from Ruzzia.
|
| We here in Romania are following this for weeks so we know
| all this details, hard to find now english links, but
| imagine some candiate having the guts to declare zero
| spending in campaign, like how is this possible?
|
| I will try to find the tTic Tok admitting the issue, maybe
| then the skeptics can accept it or maybe they will claim
| Romanian gov controls Tc Tok
|
| Edit
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-
| removed-3-influence-c...
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/eu-probes-tiktok-after-surprise-win-
| in...
|
| I am sure there is more but Tic Tok found this "by
| mistake", they also did nothing about electoral content not
| being labeled correctly.
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean, even if his campaign finances are declared wrong,
| it's still shocking that this leads to an election being
| overturned.
|
| Using my own experience in America, misdeclaring finances
| (which has been done by Clinton, Trump, Biden, Harris,
| etc) leads to fines from the FEC, not an election being
| overturned.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| To be fair, your link lacks this info also.
|
| Firefox's translation (also, apparently FF can now translate
| from Romanian, nice!): > The arguments
| retained in the reasoning of the solution given by the Plenum
| of the Constitutional Court will be presented in the
| decision, which will be published in the Official Gazette of
| Romania, Part I.
|
| Basically "we'll tell you later"
| mionhe wrote:
| Simpler translation would be that the entire decision,
| including all of the arguments that led to it, will be
| published in said gazette.
|
| Still "we'll tell you later", but a little easier to parse
| than the ML.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Did you read it? It's a complete joke.
|
| PRESS RELEASE, December 6, 2024 In the meeting of December 6,
| 2024, the Constitutional Court, in order to ensure the
| correctness and legality of the electoral process, exercised
| its attribution provided by art. 146 letter f) of the
| Constitution and, with unanimity of votes, decided the
| following: 1. Pursuant to art. 146 letter f) of the
| Constitution, annuls the entire electoral process regarding
| the election of the President of Romania, carried out on the
| basis of Government Decision no. 756/2024 regarding the
| establishment of the date of the elections for the President
| of Romania in 2024 and Government Decision no. .1061/2024
| regarding the approval of the Calendar Program for carrying
| out the necessary actions for the election of the President
| of Romania in the year 2024. 2. The electoral process for the
| election of the President of Romania will be resumed in its
| entirety, with the Government going to set a new date for the
| election of the President of Romania, as well as a new
| calendar program for carrying out the necessary actions. 3.
| This decision is final and generally binding, it is published
| in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, and is brought to
| public knowledge. * The arguments retained in justifying the
| solution pronounced by the Plenary of the Constitutional
| Court will be presented in the content of the decision, which
| will be published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I.
| The Department of External Relations, Press Relations and
| Protocol of the Constitutional Court
| braincat31415 wrote:
| Mind pointing out where is the evidence at the link you
| provided? Maybe you should take your own suggestion.
| kadabra9 wrote:
| I don't know a lot about this specific situation, but this seems
| to set a dangerous precedent where governments can just claim
| "election interference" or "misinformation" any time their
| candidate loses to get a do-over.
| tokai wrote:
| Its not the government doing it. Its the constitutional court
| on the basis of some kind of evidence. That's how its supposed
| to work. It would be way more dangerous to let other states
| meddle in your elections. If the results was true the first
| time around it'll be the same next time. So in many ways there
| is no good reason to not have a redo if there is anykind of
| evidence of foul play.
| anon291 wrote:
| The court is the government.
|
| > If the results was true the first time around it'll be the
| same next time.
|
| Not necessarily. Given that the opposition party now knows
| what the people seem to want, they can do all sorts of
| things, especially given the knowledge that the court will
| strike it down should the election not go in their favor.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Not necessarily. Given that the opposition party now knows
| what the people seem to want, they can do all sorts of
| things, especially given the knowledge that the court will
| strike it down should the election not go in their favor.
|
| Like what? they will make the opponents praise Putin and
| make China and Ruzzia send them funds to cancel the
| election again?
| anon291 wrote:
| A country is actually allowed to vote for a pro-Putin
| politician.
|
| You may not _like_ it, but that 's not what this is
| about.
|
| Also, it's actually _okay_ to be against democracy. You
| should just say it instead of dancing around it though.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| People are simply lacking in empathy. Imagine you living
| so close to a proxy war. Imagine you have children. Which
| way would you vote?
| sfjailbird wrote:
| I think it's the _" some kind of evidence"_ that's the
| important part.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| The right wing party literally made TikTok's that the
| governing part(ies?) didn't like, but which apparently
| resonated with the people they labelled them as
| misinformation. Have you heard that one before?
| tzs wrote:
| What do you mean by "the" right wing party? Romania has
| several right wing parties, none of which supported
| Georgescu. He ran as an independent.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Looking like that was the correct choice.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Under your theory, could the Supreme Court have canceled the
| 2016 election result because of Russian interference?
| dataflow wrote:
| What does the US constitution say about the court's role in
| elections? What does the Romanian constitution say?
|
| (Though to be honest they could still make whatever ruling
| they want in the US. It's probably cause chaos as people
| try to figure out if they're bound by it.)
| piva00 wrote:
| You can read about it, the decision just came out and it's
| public. Georgescu declared spending _zero_ euros in funding
| while investigations found about 50mEUR spent.
|
| The Constitutional Court has determined election interference
| based on what they got, it's better to do a do-over rather than
| allow Russia interference in the democratic process.
|
| You can claim the slippery slope fallacy but given the
| potential catastrophe of allowing Russian interference I'll
| side with the CCR on this case.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| But we are wary of giving up fundamental democratic
| protections of our votes for the boogeyman of Russia. There
| will always be a Boogeyman. There won't always be free and
| fair elections.
|
| Campaign finance violations are serious. Why is the vote
| allowed to continue if they happen? Why is this not probed
| well before the election?
| mariusor wrote:
| In fairness he can't declare funds that haven't passed
| directly through his campaign accounts. It's a transparent
| loop hole, but it needs to be patched, not used as post-
| factum evidence supporting wrong doing.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That would have been a good argument sometime while the
| campaign was still in progress. Once the votes were cast, any
| court would recognize this is a fait accompli. It's crazy to
| annull elections (a procedure which no law whatsoever, nor
| the Constitution, even mentions, it was invented wholesale by
| the CCR during their meeting today) based on campaign finance
| violations, even ones involving outside interference.
|
| What would have happened if the interference were discovered
| only next year? Would you have been ok with annuling the
| elections after the new president was already in office? This
| is no different whatsoever, after the first round was
| finished.
|
| I hated and feared CG as much as anyone, but this court
| decision is obviously crazy and undemocratic (as pointed out
| by the other candidate in the second round as well).
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The supposed campaign on tiktok ran days before the
| election. It is remarkable for state organs to be able to
| act within a week or so. Annulling the election in this
| situation seems the right thing to do. A similar
| cancellation of results happened in Austria in 2016. A year
| later it indeed would have been too late.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, the supposed campaign started one month before the
| elections. It ramped up maybe in the last few days before
| the election. But you don't convince 2 million people to
| vote for a crazed maniac like CG in two days of
| manipulation.
| gred wrote:
| Agreed. You do your best to counter and mitigate this type of
| foreign influence, but once people have voted, they have voted.
| Once you start to rationalize "but they only voted this way
| because X", it will be tempting to expand X in a way that
| disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Agreed. You do your best to counter and mitigate this type
| of foreign influence, but once people have voted, they have
| voted. Once you start to rationalize "but they only voted
| this way because X", it will be tempting to expand X in a way
| that disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.
|
| And you ignore the laws? You discover that the candidate do
| illegal stuff?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Is there a law that calls for election annulment if a
| candidate does illegal stuff? I doubt. In fact, usually
| there are specifically no such laws to avoid initiatives
| for political prosecution.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Over in Japan, the newly re-elected Hyogo Prefecture
| Governor is being sued for violating electoral laws
| concerning his use of social media, with the penalties
| including voiding of the election and the stripping of
| his electoral rights.
|
| Incidentally, the Governor was re-elected in an upset
| victory after being ousted by the Hyogo Prefecture
| Legislature over alleged power harrassment scandals. Yes,
| the Japanese establishment _hates_ him and are doing
| anything possible to get rid of him.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > and are doing anything possible to get rid of him.
|
| As long as it's legal, there is nothing very wrong with
| it. If he committed crimes that influenced the election,
| then the election is void and he should be banned from
| politics.
| gred wrote:
| No, I'm taking a step back and saying that if the law
| provides for nullifying the election, it's a bad law. It's
| an even worse law if no due process is involved (i.e.
| "nothing has been proven against this candidate in court as
| of yet, but we're going to go ahead and nullify the
| election because he benefited from foreign interference, as
| far as we can tell based on what our intelligence services
| are telling us").
|
| For what it's worth, it sounds like the runner-up candidate
| agrees:
|
| > Lasconi condemned the court's ruling as "illegal" and
| "immoral", saying "today is the moment when the Romanian
| state has trampled on democracy".
| simion314 wrote:
| >No, I'm taking a step back and saying that if the law
| provides for nullifying the election, it's a bad law.
| It's an even worse law if no due process is involved
| (i.e. "nothing has been proven against this candidate in
| court as of yet, but we're going to go ahead and nullify
| the election because he benefited from foreign
| interference, as far as we can tell based on what our
| intelligence services are telling us").
|
| Sorry, this is the constitution, it does not allow for
| years of appeals and dragging your feat. Are you really
| believing that the guy used zero funds and you need a
| court and 3 appeals to prove to you that he used more
| then ZERO funds ?
| gred wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the Romanian constitution, but due
| process is fundamental to the US constitution:
|
| > No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or
| property, without due process of law.
|
| The US constitution does not just "allow" for years of
| appeals, it _guarantees_ your right to defend yourself
| through that process.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, you prosecute and send for trial the people that
| committed the illegal acts. If that means deposing the
| acting president, the you do that - but you do it when you
| have the proof and a legitimate trial. Not the
| Constitutional Court inventing a power for itself that it
| doesn't have, based on vague wording in the Constitution
| (specifically, they based this decision on an article of
| the Romanian Constitution that says that "[the
| Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the
| election of the Romanian President are followed, and
| confirms the results of the vote", with no further
| stipulations - article 146, paragraph f).
| dataflow wrote:
| > Not the Constitutional Court inventing a power for
| itself that it doesn't have, based on vague wording in
| the Constitution (specifically, they based this decision
| on an article of the Romanian Constitution that says that
| "[the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures
| for the election of the Romanian President are followed,
| and confirms the results of the vote", with no further
| stipulations - article 146, paragraph f).
|
| What powers do you believe this grants, that would make
| logical sense in a situation like this?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| None essentially. It just enables other specific laws
| that organize the functioning of the court in this area,
| and perhaps it enables the court to settle questions on
| whether electoral processes have been followed.
|
| For example, there is a specific law that specifies how
| the CCR can verify the results of the election (that
| certain institutions send the vote counts to it, in some
| specific format, within X days etc). The same law also
| specified what happens if the CCR finds that the vote
| counts are suspect - who can raise such concerns, within
| what dates, and most importantly, what happens next, when
| the elections are re-done and by whose decisions. This is
| how the court is supposed to function.
|
| In contrast, the court has trampled on its own
| jurisprudence, where it only yesterday night (local time)
| declared that it can't hear any new claims about the
| elections until the end of the next round.
| dataflow wrote:
| > None essentially. It just enables other specific laws
| that organize the functioning of the court in this area
|
| > [the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures
| for the election of the Romanian President are followed
|
| I have no context on this beyond what you're writing, so
| I'm taking everything you're saying at face value. But
| even when I do that... don't you feel "the legislature
| shall have the power to organize the functioning of the
| court regarding elections" is a manifestly different
| sentence from "the court ensures that the procedures for
| the election of the Romanian President are followed, and
| confirms the results of the vote"?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Our constitution [0] uses this verbiage a lot. For
| example, here is what it says about the President:
|
| > (2) The President of Romania shall guard the observance
| of the Constitution and the proper functioning of the
| public authorities. To this effect, he shall act as a
| mediator between the Powers in the State, as well as
| between the State and society.
|
| The official English wording of the role of the court is:
|
| > f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the
| election of the President of Romania and to confirm the
| ballot returns;
|
| Note the similarity of the verbiage. I don't think the
| first one can be read to mean that the president can
| interfere with any authority they think might not
| properly be respecting the Constitution. I don't believe
| this is the intended reading, and definitely no one
| recognizes such a power for the President of Romania. So,
| I don't think the equivalent verbiage in the article on
| the power of the CCR should be read to give them the
| power to decide anything they want on the electoral
| process.
|
| Of course, I'm not a lawyer, just a citizen of this
| country. But to me it doesn't seem proper that a Court
| can devise procedures that are not specified in any law.
|
| [0] https://www.presidency.ro/en/the-constitution-of-
| romania
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I have long since come to the conclusion that democracy as a
| power system is merely an excuse for the Powers That Be to
| obtain and maintain power, it just has better plausible
| deniability than other means like monarchies, dictatorships,
| etc. at the cost of not having fine-grained control.
|
| Occasionally there are aberrations like Trump, which
| subsequently lead to the Powers That Be doing everything they
| can to make sure the vote is made "right".
| avmich wrote:
| How this theory would explain the changeability of Powers
| That Be, the fact that they regularly also lose the power?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| They're all just different heads of the same hydra.
| "Uniparty" might be a term you're familiar with. All the
| political catfighting is just kabuki theatre to give the
| notion power is changing hands.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the Powers That Be didn't want the
| Fair Labor Act, or the Clean Air Act, or the Pure Food
| and Drug Act, or a number of other things. They may not
| care who is president, but on issues that they do care
| about, they still take some losses.
| bombcar wrote:
| Large companies _always_ fight against laws regulating
| them that didn 't exist before; but once they exist they
| always fight _for_ extending them so that new competitors
| can 't arise.
|
| "Democracy doesn't effect _much_ " is not the same as "it
| does nothing at all".
| oneshtein wrote:
| > They're all just different heads of the same hydra.
|
| s/hydra/nation/
| pphysch wrote:
| > they regularly also lose the power?
|
| TPTB aren't limited to one political party.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Trump was not outside the Powers that Be, he was just a
| different faction that won.
| kranke155 wrote:
| He took aid from Russia which is against Romanian law.
| mariusor wrote:
| There's quite a large difference between us all knowing
| something and it being proven to a degree to make a
| national level decision on it.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| They had to make a quick call, in my book they acted
| boldly, the risks of the alternative were greater.
| Everyone has time to cool down and think about it, and
| the candidate can win if he is good. In the last few days
| all new information has pointed in the opposite
| direction.
| mariusor wrote:
| > quick call
|
| They sat on this info for almost three weeks. Doing it
| now discards so much money and effort invested by people
| working the election stations, the people in other
| countries that already voted, etc. Not to mention that it
| communicates to the everyone that their vote doesn't
| count if it's not for the right candidate. A vote made
| under wrong assumptions is still a vote cast
| democratically. In my opinion this late decision makes a
| mocking of a real democratic process.
|
| It's also very likely to have the side-effect of
| destroying Mrs. Lasconi's chances at the presidency. Who
| do you think that the Georgescu voters will vote for now?
| Not her for sure. I bet there will be a Simion vs.
| Ciolacu battle next time, and there we'll go again with
| choosing the "lesser of the two evils".
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| On the second point I completely agree with you. She
| appears to be collateral damage at this point. Perhaps
| that will raise sympathy and she can get into the second
| round again.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Theres been a lot of kurfuffle about it and apparently
| even the other politicians think this court decision was
| too much.
|
| Im not sure why and how this works, just saying that
| having Russia create 10 million fake accounts (that we
| know of) in a country of 19 million is clearly foreign
| interference.
| 4bpp wrote:
| Funny enough, the EU is currently calling the election
| results in Georgia illegitimate because they passed a
| similar sort of law (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-
| georgias-foreign-agent-law...). This is not doing a good
| job of dispelling the accusation that the media now uses
| "democracy" as code for outcomes that are desirable for US
| globalists and their allies.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Russians did the same in Georgia. :-/
| goneri wrote:
| The Russian foreign agent law is used to attack the
| public personalities and NGOs, and have nothing in common
| with the Romanian Electoral Laws. Georgians are
| absolutely right to be scared.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
| braincat31415 wrote:
| Have _you_ seen the proof, or are you repeating what was
| written by someone else? There is a big difference. I bet
| this is the usual "credible information from anonymous
| government sources".
| KaiserPro wrote:
| First it's not the government its the supreme court
|
| second a democracy needs to follow laws. If the candidate broke
| a law, then that can, if the law stipulates, invalidate an
| election result.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Why was the election allowed to proceed if one candidate declared
| $0 in campaign funding and that's apparently impossible and
| obviously a lie?
|
| Annulling an election is never a good look, rarely ever instills
| confidence in the citizenry or those abroad, so it needs to be
| done in absolutely necessary circumstances.
|
| I don't want pro-Russian candidates to win anywhere after their
| invasion of a sovereign nation, bombing of hospitals and schools,
| and other brazen acts of destruction as well as the warrant from
| the ICC for the arrest of their head of state. At the same time,
| I don't want democracies to backslide to avoid election of
| candidates I don't like, and I'm seeing a lot of democratic
| backsliding these days in various countries.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Wait so one party filled out a form wrong? I thought this was
| about russian TikTok accounts?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The candidate ran a large campaign just days before the
| election without declaring a campaign budget. It took the
| services and the constitutional court a few days to figure out
| what happened and take this decision. Give them some credit,
| this is not an easy problem to navigate.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| Courts can sometimes be used by Deep State actors to bring about
| political change.
|
| https://www.voanews.com/a/timeline-of-events-leading-to-the-...
|
| Here is a timeline of events leading up to the prime minister's
| resignation.
|
| July 2: Demonstrations take place in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka,
| to demand the cancellation of a quota system in civil service
| recruitment, which reserves 56% of jobs for people from various
| categories. Students say this is discriminatory.
|
| The demonstrations started after the * _High Court reinstated the
| quota system in June, overturning a 2018 government decision to
| abolish it*_. While the government appealed the decision to the
| Supreme Court, students refused to wait for the outcome and
| demanded a new executive order canceling the quotas.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Hasina of Bangladesh was not ousted by deep state actors
| though...
|
| Maybe your point is that courts can play a significant role in
| changing the leadership?
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Alternate title: Romanian Court annuls election results on a
| technicality because they don't like the outsider candidates
| TikTok powerlevel
| jbirer wrote:
| Romanian here. Discussions of cancelling the election happened
| way before the cyberattack. AFAIK for the first time in a very
| long time the largest two parties did not win and they started
| panicking and scrambling to re-do the vote count.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Do you think the protest candidate will do better or worse in
| the rerun?
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| He's going to be arrested his TikTok's were too good
| cbg0 wrote:
| It's unclear if he will be allowed to participate again, due
| to his sympathy for the Iron Guard
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard) which is outlawed,
| and some pending criminal cases for money laundering, as he
| reported 0 expenses in the election campaign, which is
| impossible.
| autoexec wrote:
| Did tiktok convince 20% of the voters to vote for a racist,
| or did they trick 20% into unwittingly voting for a racist?
| Hopefully now that everyone is talking about him and his
| affection for religious fascism a lot of those voters will
| realize what they voted for and change their vote in the
| future.
| H8crilA wrote:
| They voted for him because he speaks pretty well for a
| politician. Also some of his messages really land -
| consider that Ukraine is losing (very very slowly, and
| can still win), so it makes sense to talk to both sides
| since it's unclear who will be calling shots in the
| region. Moldova is definitely next, right after Ukraine,
| and it cannot defend itself even from one mechanized
| brigade.
| AustinDev wrote:
| >Ukraine is losing (very very slowly, and can still win),
|
| This is not remotely true, Ukraine can't retake what it's
| lost they have no men left. If it were true Zelensky
| wouldn't be contemplating ceding territory to Russia. It
| sucks but Ukraine lost in 2014 when the world let Crimea
| get annexed with no response.
|
| https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/zelensky-says-for-
| first-...
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Just depends on how you define "winning". Right now both
| Russia and Ukraine are losing a lot compared to before
| 2022.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| By their own goals, Russia already lost this war 2 years
| ago. They may end it with a little extra territory and
| people, but that's not a victory, again, by their own
| claims.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _Ukraine can 't retake what it's lost they have no men
| left._
|
| You're extremifying.
|
| You could have said "they don't have enough people". But
| instead you had to dial it up to "they have no men left".
|
| No matter what is actually happening on the ground -- you
| definitely won't be able to make heads or tails of it, if
| you keep confounding yourself with rhetoric like this.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> You could have said "they don't have enough people".
| But instead you had to dial it up to "they have no men
| left"._
|
| The realities of war are not LGBTQ-friendly.
|
| My male cousin has not been allowed to leave the country
| for almost 3 years. His wife is in Germany.
| aguaviva wrote:
| I'm sorry you got triggered, but that was absolutely in
| no way what I was getting at.
|
| That line had nothing whatsoever to do with this
| "people"/"men" nonsense. I was referring simply to the
| quantifier.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| You're missing the forest for the trees. You claim "they
| have no men left". This is false, and reduces trust in
| everything else you say. You might be right about your
| main point, but the argument you provide is not
| convincing.
|
| As one datapoint I'd love to hear a convincing argument,
| and really don't have a strong opinion on who will win.
| If you make a more trustworthy argument for why Ukraine
| will lose, I promise I'll read it
|
| Edit: truthfully, this is the most convincing argument
| I've seen so far
| https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-ukraine-
| win-t...
| AustinDev wrote:
| "War does not determine who is right--only who is left."
|
| You're right that there are men still living in Ukraine,
| Zelensky is still alive after all. However, the manpower
| situation has been pretty bleak for a while. [1] I'm in
| regular contact with people in theater and I'm not far
| off in saying 'there are no men left'. Russia is still
| advancing albeit slowly. We'll likely have new borders in
| a few months. Almost time to update your globe.
|
| [1] https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2024-03-16/uk
| raine-v...
| aguaviva wrote:
| We're broadly on the same page it seems. I just found
| that the original choice of wording tiltied more into the
| territory of spin than a sober assessment of the state of
| things. That is all. Unfortunately, this kind of blurring
| has permeated the general discourse.
|
| Best to luck to whomever in your in contact with.
|
| I won't be changing my globe for anyone, however.
| AustinDev wrote:
| People do put a lot of spin on this topic. Your initial
| reaction is completely understandable.
|
| Thanks, hopefully they'll be home soon. I've been mowing
| his grass for nearly 3 years, hardly a commensurate
| sacrifice I must admit.
| r00fus wrote:
| This is why Russia invaded - the World bank required
| concessions for the $15B loan that Ukraine needed,
| whereas Russia asked for none. Yanukovych went with
| Russia, then got couped.
|
| https://x.com/ricwe123/status/1864057997036597260
| cbg0 wrote:
| His messaging regarding Ukraine was not something that
| positively affected his campaign, on the contrary it
| ignited political opponents over his anti-NATO views.
|
| His campaign landed better because of his palatable way
| of speaking and saying a lot without saying anything, as
| most people that voted for him were not really aware of
| his positions on any serious subject.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Yes, I said multiple times he was Schrodinger's
| candidate, he could hold multiple mutually contradictory
| positions at the same time. Pretty ridiculous.
| poloniculmov wrote:
| His campaign messages weren't outright extremist, just
| your casual populism, impossible promises and a dash of
| dogwhistles. Once he won the first round of elections,
| people really started to look into his past and it's
| pretty insane.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I think he is legitimately insane. He fits schizotypal
| personality disorder to a T. Multiple psychologists told
| me he fits.
| wyager wrote:
| Our Democracy(tm) is when elected candidates are judicially
| removed due to accusations of having unfavorable
| "sympathies"
| cbg0 wrote:
| This has not happened yet, it's merely a speculation at
| this time, but the accusations have a solid foundation in
| videos of him talking about the subject and even
| plagiarizing speeches by famous Iron Guard members.
|
| Romania does not have free speech like the US, we have
| protected speech and there are some sympathies which are
| simply illegal, whether you agree with it or not.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I know nothing about this situation, but I bet it's like
| when they say Trump = Hitler, because he had a rally at
| MSG.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Nobody's calling him Hitler, there's a lot of very weird
| things the guy says though, as he's pretty heavy into
| religious mysticism and a bit of a nutjob, some of his
| hits:
|
| - Pepsi contains nanochips that enter your body
|
| - water isn't actually H2O
|
| - capitalism is communism, there is no difference
|
| - everybody accepted that Covid exists, there's no such
| thing, there never was
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, it's way beyond that.
|
| He got booted out of one of the other far right wing
| parties when he publicly praised Romania's 1930s-1940s
| fascist/nazi dictators as "heroes, who maybe did some bad
| things, but a lot of good". He has refused to diaavow
| them every time he has been asked about them.
|
| One of his major campaign leads wears Romanian nazi
| symbolism (think the Romanian equivalent of a swastika).
| The other one often posts about those same dictators,
| especially in commemoration of their deaths.
|
| He has started one of his speeches with an exact quote
| from one of said dictators.
|
| This is beyond all of the insane conspiracies and
| religious mystic declarations, from seeing aliens to
| "C-sections interrupt the divine cord", "water is not
| just H2O, it is information, that is why _they_ bottle it
| to keep this information contained ", and so many more.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Uhm, you have "sympathies which are simply illegal"? Wow.
| You trust the government to tell you where you can lay
| your personal sympathies? I sometimes run into casual
| statements like this that make me SO GRATEFUL I live in
| the United States.
| cbg0 wrote:
| I don't trust the government, but I do trust history on
| this. If you're curious about the movement:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard
|
| I'm very grateful to live in Romania and have a lot of
| things about the US that I disagree with, but I
| understand it's a different country with a different
| history & culture.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| At least they have more than 2 candidates (and less than 14).
| logicchains wrote:
| That sounds pretty anti-democratic, that the election can be
| cancelled because the incumbents disapprove of where the people
| who voted against them got their information from.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| The court members are politically appointed by exactly these
| people. This is a corrupt system, has nothing to do with
| democracy. The Constitution was rigged from the day it was
| created by former Communist regime people.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| No, there are clear laws that candidates have to mark their
| campaign ads as such and that they have to declare their
| campaign finances. One candidate did not do this.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Who is considered the establishment in Romania?
|
| As far as I can see, modern Romania appears to be ruled mostly
| by the Social Democrats whose candidate came 3rd and was
| disqualified from the second round. They also appeared to have
| roots in the Communist era, is that right?
|
| Can we say that this move was to save the Social Democrats? Who
| were supposed run agains't the liberals and win I guess, but
| this pro-Russia candidate came from nowhere and the 2nd round
| turned into pro-Russia vs pro-West, right?
| cbg0 wrote:
| PNL & PSD are establishment parties in Romania. We are a
| young democracy, since the end of 1989 when we ended
| communism with people rising up to fight in the streets for a
| better tomorrow, so the aforementioned parties do have roots
| in communism, but they are by no means communist parties.
|
| The Social Democrats haven't won the presidency in decades
| and their current candidate sunk them in this election
| process even though he was sure to win, but some missteps he
| took associating himself with people connected to a huge real
| estate scam sunk his campaign.
|
| Whether this move helps Social Democrats (PSD) is unlikely,
| as their current candidate is still just as unpopular and
| would most likely not win.
|
| You are correct that because of this Russophile candidate the
| runoff turned into a pro-EU vs pro-Russia fight.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Why the Romanian diaspora is so much pro-Russian? I have
| some idea from the Bulgarian diaspora but I don't know how
| much it aligns with the Romanian.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Not as much pro-Russian as they are anti-establishment
| and also surprisingly anti-EU, even though they live in
| EU outside of Romania. Many of them are working minimum
| paid jobs in tough working conditions, plus they have
| trouble integrating there, so they dislike their current
| situation and find the blame in EU & the country they're
| living in.
|
| There's also tremendous amounts of anti-EU propaganda on
| social media which they're subjected to and most people
| in today's age don't bother fact checking anything so
| they just trust whatever's showing up on their screen.
| zsombor wrote:
| I think it is more about urban vs rural voters. Latter
| group is more likely to vote with CG, even after
| emigrating. It takes more time for them to pick up
| western values simply because they are economically
| disadvantaged at home and to a lesser degree abroad as
| well.
| mebcitto wrote:
| Georgescu's voters don't see themselves as pro-Russian.
| They think of themselves as "patriots", anti-LGBT, and
| anti-establishment. They also think that we are helping
| Ukraine too much, at the expense of domestic issues.
|
| These are the messages that were used on TikTok, an open
| pro-Russia message would have been buried quickly.
| sincerecook wrote:
| Romanian culture is pretty conservative by modern Western
| standards. All the gay stuff is completely foreign and
| anathema to someone who grew up in it (most Romanians are
| orthodox Christians) and the political
| correctness/liberal propaganda is a return to the
| communist system but as applied to culture rather than
| economics. Russia is seen as the last bastion in Europe
| willing to stand up for traditional values.
| alephnerd wrote:
| What is his stance on Moldova? Doesn't pan-Romanian nationalism
| have a strong undercurrent in Romanian politics? And how does
| that play in with Romanian-Russian relations?
| cbg0 wrote:
| Every politician in Romania has a "pro Moldova" attitude and
| even a pro-union attitude (there's no legal mechanism to make
| this happen, so it's very shallow).
|
| In Moldova, where lots of people have Romanian citizenship as
| well, Lasconi received 56.5% of the vote, while Georgescu
| received 3.11% of the vote.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Makes sense. I'm very curious as to why Romania was caught
| so off guard in comparison to Moldova despite a very
| similar disinfo campaign barely a few weeks ago against
| Sandu (heck, I'd assume this disinfo campaign used the
| exact same personnel).
|
| On which note, was there any reuse found in comparison to
| the campaign in Moldova?
|
| I'm predicating this on Georgescu's anti-NATO stance (that
| said, I don't really follow EE politics that closely).
| cbg0 wrote:
| We don't have all the answers yet and there's a bunch of
| speculation that the intelligence services were a bit
| incompetent or even supported him in hopes of taking
| votes away from other candidates, but things may have
| gotten a bit out of control and they underestimated his
| popularity.
|
| Georgescu's stance wasn't super well known to most of his
| supporters and it's not what was being pushed, he's
| mostly flag-waiving, talking about sovereignty and God,
| not really saying much of substance, but he's palatable
| if you don't know his views and he was something fresh
| compared to the other candidates that were more known,
| thus giving him a boost among anti-establishment types.
|
| He's not completely new to the scene as he was touted as
| potential PM by a minority political party at some point,
| but they also distanced themselves from him to clean up
| their own anti-EU image.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| To be honest, I think this guy just had more charisma. He
| really feels like a very natural salesman, with a smooth
| voice, gray hair, catchy turns of phrases, etc. While I
| think what he said was ultimately shallow, I see why many
| felt hypnotized by him. You can check out his video
| swimming in an icy lake, talking about your immune system
| just being an extension of your freedom as an individual,
| etc. He is definitely talented as a cult leader.
| simion314 wrote:
| Romanian here too, anyone with a bit of a brain and not biassed
| would tell you that this unknown guy growing in 2 weeks was not
| normal.
|
| Any person in any country with a bit of inteligence could also
| tell you that this guy did not used ZERO funds in his campaign
| as he declared , so if you are his fan go pray he will not go
| to jail for fraud or treason, but probably politicians already
| have their jail cells upgraded for their fat asses, he will
| write some book and get out a bit faster.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > AFAIK for the first time in a very long time the largest two
| parties did not win and they started panicking and scrambling
| to re-do the vote count.
|
| This is what it sounds like. Everyone's talking about
| "democracy vs Russian interference" but I think it's
| realpolitik.
|
| The top two candidates who were to compete in the final
| election were Georgescu (a lunatic) and Lasconi (SRU, a
| moderate outsider). Lasconi was second only by a small margin
| to Ciolacu (SPD, current president).
|
| Immediately after the first election, the court (mostly
| consisting of SPD) ordered (EDIT: one) controversial recount
| they blocked almost everyone from seeing. Some suspect the plan
| was to declare a miscount and get Ciolacu into second place.
| Then the first election would not be rerun and the final
| election would be Georgescu vs Ciolacu.
|
| Except if it came down to them there's a good chance Georgescu
| would've won, since people would know SPD corrupted the
| results. And Georgescu really is a lunatic, so perhaps SPD
| decided they'd rather have Lasconi then him.
|
| _Except_ now it seems SPD hasn 't fully decided this. This
| election seemingly gives them one more (albeit small) chance,
| while still ensuring Georgescu won't win (unless he out-votes
| even someone like Lasconi, but I can only hope not. Georgescu
| makes Trump look like Abraham Lincoln).
| cbg0 wrote:
| > Immediately after the first election, the court (mostly
| consisting of SPD) ordered a recount.
|
| The recount was ordered after two complaints were lodged, one
| which was rejected and the one that was accepted was from
| another contender in the first round of elections. Only one
| recount was performed. Only 4 of the 9 members of the court
| were proposed by PSD (SPD), 4 were proposed by PNL and
| another by UDMR.
|
| > Except now it seems SPD hasn't fully decided this. This
| election seemingly gives them one more chance
|
| While they do have another chance, the fact that they were at
| the wheel while this happened, and the fact that their
| candidate was in 3rd place even after the recount will not
| help them in a new election.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Only 4 of the 9 members of the court were proposed by PSD
| (SPD), 4 were proposed by PNL and another by UDMR.
|
| You forget to mention that PSD/SPD and PNL are running the
| government together now, and UDMR (minority hungarian
| party) will ally with anyone who gives them a few
| government positions. Usually with SPD.
| r00fus wrote:
| You know if this ever happened in another European country
| where the main parties were asleep at the wheel and a newcomer
| takes the stage - this sounds like a trial balloon to see how
| Europe likes cancelling democracy when it doesn't suit the
| ruling players.
|
| France is another case where the main ruling parties (PS, LR
| and even ENS) have lost legitimacy but they paint the newcomers
| in ascendancy (RN, LFI) as both "useful idiots of the Russians"
| and "antisemitic". Then the President decides to break norms
| and not follow the will of the people in his choice of PM
| (typically should go to the party with most votes in assembly)
| - and faces no reprimand from the institutions.
|
| Both of these are tests what needs to happens so Europe remains
| tied to NATO and the US. But these are both symptoms of a
| decaying order.
| jowea wrote:
| Meh, IMHO the actually important rule is that parliament has
| to consent to the PM. He appointed someone else that had a
| majority tolerating him, and then parliament changed its mind
| and now Macron has to pick someone else. The left only has a
| plurality not a majority. Why should that guarantee they get
| to pick a PM?
|
| If the results were 30% centrists, 30% leftists, 40% RN would
| you be calling for a RN PM?
| r00fus wrote:
| Macron chose someone from the lowest-vote party (LR) to
| spit in the faces of the voters. The largest bloc was
| leftists, so they should have gotten an opportunity to form
| a government. But even if he decided his future was with
| the extreme right, choosing an RN PM would have made sense.
|
| But no, he chose a personal ally who nobody liked.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Russia and China rigged Romanian Elections using 10M fake
| TikTok accounts_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334325
| Leary wrote:
| Are they going to cancel the parlamentary elections, which were
| held one week after the Presidential election?
| cbg0 wrote:
| Doesn't look like it at the moment.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Russians paid tiktokers, let's nullify the election - Democracy
| ROCKS
| abraxas wrote:
| There have been breaches of vote counting systems.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| So recount should take place, not another vote.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Recount does not exist in the relevant Romanian law. And
| recount was done, with no change of the outcome, so they
| cancelled it completely.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| No, that is not what happened. Not at all.
| codedokode wrote:
| Shouldn't election be organized such that it cannot be disrupted
| by Internet attacks from abroad? At least not so easily.
|
| Also, I tried opening the PDF [1] with so called "declassified
| report" and while I cannot read Romanian, the first header
| contains "TikTok" and I am left wondering how can one hack an
| election system using Tiktok? Did they count the votes using
| TikTok videos? And what about Telegram (mentioned nearby)? It
| doesn't even have a newsfeed. Oh those powerful hackers!
|
| Judging by "distribuite numeroase imagini" and "blockarea
| accessului visual" (which almost sounds English), TikTok hacked
| their elections by simply refusing to block a video (or by
| blocking it?).
|
| > Access credentials for election websites were stolen by threat
| actors and leaked on a Russian hacker forum
|
| What a sad state of European cybersecurity. But this threat seems
| to be real, unlike the TikTok attack.
|
| [1]
| https://www.presidency.ro/files/userfiles/Documente%20CSAT/D...
| evilfred wrote:
| if you can't read Romanian then your insights into a Romanian
| report aren't very useful.
| stefanv wrote:
| There are two separate issues: (1) TikTok favoring one
| candidate even after the campaign was over, and (2) an IT
| systems breach.
| logicchains wrote:
| >TikTok favoring one candidate even after the campaign was
| over
|
| This shouldn't be an issue because, the mainstream candidates
| where heavily favoured by the conventional media. If TikTok
| isn't allowed to publish media supportive of one candidate
| then the mainstream media shouldn't be either.
| cbg0 wrote:
| That's not how the law works in Romania. As a political
| candidate, your paid ads have to marked accordingly with a
| number that can be traced back and all donations and
| spending must be reported to a government authority.
|
| One of the issues with this TikTok business was that many
| ads for Georgescu were not marked correctly, and thus in
| violation of electoral law.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _And while I cannot read Romanian,_
|
| If you can use a mouse, and you know how to cut-and-paste --
| you can read Romanian.
|
| If you can't be bothered to do that, then I doubt anyone will
| be interested in your complaints about content of report, or
| your inferences as to its broader implications.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| There is no hacking. There was a massive campaign on TikTok for
| a candidate, that campaign was surprisingly effective, putting
| someone that most people never heard of, in the first place.
| That is now hacking, that is trolling grandmaster level.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Oof.
|
| What a precedent. You don't like the result, so you claim "muh
| Russia" and cancel democracy.
|
| Big oof.
|
| So maybe a foreign adversary did weaponize our values against us.
| What do you do? You can't just keep cancelling elections when
| they don't go your way. So what do you do?
|
| You'll end up sacrificing one vow or another - which one do you
| choose? Do you sacrifice free speech? Do you sacrifice democracy?
|
| In this case, we sacrificed democracy. Is that ok? Would it be
| more preferable to sacrifice free speech?
|
| What do we do here?
|
| EDIT: I get it, they're hard questions. That doesn't mean you
| should censor or ignore them though. These are real problems that
| need real solutions. This isn't r*ddit, so please contribute
| constructively.
| cbg0 wrote:
| This is a very weird take. The candidate in question broke
| electoral law and gained an unfair advantage in the election
| process. The constitutional court is obligated to step in and
| cancel the election, as per the constitution. The decision was
| unanimous.
|
| I agree that he should have lost at the voting booth, but the
| law is pretty clear on this subject.
| greenavocado wrote:
| "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime"
|
| "Let them bring me prisoners, and I will find them law"
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Couldn't the constitutional court have acted before the
| election took place? Forbid that candidate from running in
| the first place?
|
| The reason this looks sketchy in the first place is that it
| happened after they saw the election results, and one gets
| the feeling that if another candidate won they would not have
| annulled it.
| cbg0 wrote:
| He wasn't exactly super popular before the race, polling
| below 5% so nobody was really concerned about him, plus the
| court needs to be called upon to act, as they can't
| intervene without a complaint being lodged.
| Svoka wrote:
| even weirder take. Let me rephrase it like "What if crime
| discovered after the fact it was committed?"
|
| Or elections is somehow different?
| Svoka wrote:
| You know elections have rules and they was clearly violated.
| Russia is in habit of illegally intervening with elections. Not
| sure how you think it should work?
|
| If they didn't caught it before election whatever happened is a
| fair game? You should read more on the topic, why this ruling
| was made. No dangerous precedent here. Honestly, this is the
| opposite.
| knowitnone wrote:
| "The election will be re-run, likely with closer oversight over
| systems and social media" Except the opinions have already been
| formed based on whatever false information they have been fed. So
| without providing "true" facts, the new votes won't change much.
| margalabargala wrote:
| This assumes that the earlier votes were legitimate, and it's
| the people whose opinions were affected.
|
| If the voting systems themselves reported different vote counts
| than the population actually cast, then the new election would
| be radically different.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| They weren't, the vote systems (which are manual, and were
| counted by ~150,000 people, representatives of the political
| parties, independent observers, and others) were verified and
| a successful recount was already carried out. If anything is
| clear, it is that the people's votes were correctly counted.
| brabel wrote:
| People are always going to be influenced, that's the whole
| point of political campaigns, to influence you to vote for
| them. If they claim Russia tried to influence the Romanian
| people, and that they did it successfully enough to have
| their chosen candidate win, I think that shows more a
| failure of the other candidates than anything. You can't
| just tell every country in the world: please don't
| interfere with our opinions!!! We want our people to only
| be influenced by ourselves!!! I would love to see exactly
| what they claim Russia did to influence so many people to
| affect the result of the elections. Last time they claimed
| this in the USA, it has been shown that the influence was
| actually widely blown out of proportion. The 2024 results
| seem to show that people would've voted the way they did
| anyway, and maybe even in larger numbers. There's very
| little evidence to the contrary.
| sebastianz wrote:
| > You can't just tell every country in the world: please
| don't interfere with our opinions!!! We want our people
| to only be influenced by ourselves!!!
|
| You can indeed, and countries do indeed have laws
| governing this, as does Romania[1]. The sources of
| spending for electoral ads have to be very transparent,
| and adhere to various regulations, such as that foreign
| governments, institutions and companies cannot finance
| local elections.
|
| [1]:
| https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/73672
| margalabargala wrote:
| > If anything is clear, it is that the people's votes were
| correctly counted.
|
| No, that's not clear at all. There were numerous other
| cyberattacks on Romanian voting infrastructure, per other
| articles about this event [0][1]
|
| From Reuters:
|
| > The intelligence service also said login data for
| official Romanian election websites was published on
| Russian cybercrime platforms. It added that it had
| identified more than 85,000 cyberattacks that aimed to
| exploit system vulnerabilities.
|
| It sounds like this is about a lot more than tiktok
| preferentially showing one candidate. There were also
| denial-of-service attacks that would have suppressed
| certain votes, unauthorized access to the voting systems,
| and more.
|
| Perhaps the votes reported were all cast, i.e. not literal
| fabricated numbers, but that doesn't mean that they were
| cast by the person they were supposed to be cast by, or
| that votes for other candidates were all counted.
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/thousands-attend-
| pro-eu...
|
| [1] https://www.rferl.org/a/lasconi-georgescu-runoff-
| romania/332...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| First of all, the main way Romanian elections work are
| based on manual counting of ballots, in the presence of
| representatives from all political parties and outside
| observers, filled in on paper forms signed by all who
| observed the count. Then all those paper forms are
| centralized at the district (judet) level, and then to
| the central electoral bureau. This is all done on hand,
| with paper forms, with numerous observers all along the
| process. There is a digital process based on scanning
| these paper forms, but that is only done to report
| partial results faster to the public (and the count only
| happens after the vote has ended everywhere in the
| country, so false information in the partial results
| can't influence other voters).
|
| So, even if the digital systems had been entirely
| compromised and under Russian control, that wouldn't have
| mattered one iota for the final results. And even after
| all this, a full hand recount was carried out last week
| which found the same results, with very little difference
| and no doubt whatsoever that CG won more votes than any
| other candidate).
|
| And even the news stories you shared, which are anyway
| irrelevant to the final paper results, have misunderstood
| what our authorities are saying. The part of the our
| secret services which handles the cybernetic parts of the
| election (named the STS, Special Tellecomunications
| Service) has been very explicit, both in public
| declarations and in the classified briefing they gave to
| the President, that there were no risks to the core
| infrastructure, and that checks have been made before,
| during, and after the elections to confirm this.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to lay this
| out; as all I have to go off of is global news articles,
| if those misunderstand Romanian authorities, then I'm not
| getting good information.
|
| So the annulation is indeed based purely on the social
| media algorithmic skew, then?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Edit: the motivation was just published [0], here is a
| translation of the most relevant part:
|
| > In the present case, the Court notes that, according to
| the aforementioned "Information Notes", the main aspects
| imputed to the electoral process regarding the election
| of the President of Romania in 2024 are those regarding
| the manipulation of the vote of voters and the distortion
| of equal opportunities for electoral competitors, through
| the non-transparent use and in violation of electoral
| legislation of digital technologies and artificial
| intelligence in the conduct of the electoral campaign, as
| well as through the financing of the electoral campaign
| from undeclared sources, including online.
|
| The court has not yet published the motivation of its
| decision (its expected to be published tonight), so we're
| not sure yet.
|
| Still, given that the same court unanimously decided on
| Dec 2nd, after receiving the results of a full recount,
| that the vote was fair and that the first round was
| valid, it seems extremely unlikely that they would cast
| any doubt on the vote count today.
|
| Also, all of the discussions in the local press are about
| Russian influence on the campaign process. This includes
| allegations of algorithmic skew by Tik Tok, allegations
| that Tik Tok ignored Romanian campaign laws that require
| electoral clips to proeminently show some registration
| numbers, of illegal contributions to CG's campaign
| (including foreign, probably Russian, financing), of
| foreign nationals (again, probably Russians) coordinating
| to spread his campaign on Tik Tok and other social media,
| etc. The Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT)
| papers that were declassified that triggered this late
| decision by the court were mostly about this.
|
| To my mind, all of these might well have been
| disqualifying before the election, but give that the
| people have voted for him fairly, even if manipulated
| through social media, it's absurd to cancel the entire
| process and restart it. Especially considering that this
| will move the elections to at least February or March,
| months past the regular end of the current President's
| term. Consider also the huge costs for redoing this whole
| election, which we as taxpayers will cover.
|
| I will note that the campaign financing fraud allegation
| is almost self-evidently true itself - CG has filed in
| official papers that his campaign was run for 0 RON. The
| fact that the authorities who received these filings
| months ago were unable or unwilling to do anything about
| it is absurd. I still don't believe that canceling the
| entire process when it was two days away from finishing
| is an acceptable moment to right this.
|
| [0] https://hotnews.ro/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/12/HCC-32-2024.PD... - PDF by a news
| source, couldn't find it yet on the official site
| culi wrote:
| There is nobody that is alleging the vote counts were
| illegitimate. Not the voters, not the courts, not the
| politicians. That allegation isn't even relevant to this
| discussion
| margalabargala wrote:
| As I mentioned in a different comment, there are other news
| articles about this event that imply illegitimate vote
| counts. Those are what I based my comment on. Another
| commenter pointed out that those are misleading.
|
| Without reading news in Romanian it's difficult to get
| accurate information.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The facts were emerging faster than people could follow. Now at
| least people have a few weeks to cool down and think about it.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| How would you vote if there was a chance your country was to
| become a Ukraine situation? Would having children influence
| that vote. Would that sort of thinking invalidate the votes. I
| dunno personally.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Facts don't sway opinions.
|
| Persuasion does.
|
| And once one has been duped, good luck convincing them they
| were...
| tensor wrote:
| But they have been provided with true facts: that the candidate
| is actually backed by Russia, and that the supposedly "true"
| facts that they were provided were in fact not true facts.
|
| The election has still been influenced for sure, but it's a
| false statement to say that voters have no new information.
| kioku wrote:
| The frontrunner was an independent candidate who claimed to have
| spent nothing on his campaign, asserting that it was entirely run
| by "volunteers."
|
| Romanian secret services, under the directive of the current
| president, released reports concluding that both state and non-
| state actors had been involved in manipulating public opinion.
|
| The candidate holds extreme right-wing views aligned with
| Romanian neo-Nazi groups. He has repeatedly referred to Romanian
| Nazi leaders as heroes and has expressed admiration for Putin,
| calling him a hero as well. His speeches often included mystical
| elements and rejected modern medical science, denying the
| existence of viruses and questioning the effectiveness of
| chemotherapy for cancer. While he has made other controversial
| statements, I will leave it at that.
| 4ad wrote:
| The candidate seems to be more of a communist than anything[1],
| he wants 51% state control of all large corporations operating
| in Romania. Labelling him as right-wing is asinine. Actual
| communist parties are supporting him.
|
| Perhaps if people wouldn't demonise any anti-globalist public
| figure as "far right" we wouldn't have ended with this clown of
| a candidate. People haven't voted for him as a person, he was
| totally unknown as of a couple of weeks ago, they've voted
| against the status quo, and more importantly they voted against
| the establishment that regulates what constitutes acceptable
| opinion.
|
| [1] https://calingeorgescu.ro/program
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I think they only pushed away the issue.
|
| In the end according to polls he was _leading_ them in second
| turn. You can 't come back as a society from this. :|
|
| If this was Norway or any country where people have some trust in
| govt, it'd be one thing. But Romanian society has (mostly
| rightly) reasons to not trust PSD and other major parties. And
| what does this tell them? That they were right. :(
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| No, they had to take a decision quickly and they took it. They
| knew that one side will cry foul, but the alternative would
| have been worse. Before you start mocking those ignorant low-
| trust eastern europeans, notice that a similar thing happened
| in Austria in 2016 where an election outcome was cancelled on
| illegal campaign financing grounds.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| i am myself Eastern European too, I'm Polish :<
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Yes, one of the common pastimes of eastern europeans is
| being very critical of themselves and their countries,
| sometimes missing that others have largely the same
| problems, but with better press.
| cedws wrote:
| It feels like Europe is asleep at the wheel. We are in a cold war
| with Russia, right now. Why is there barely any resistance to
| blatant attempts to undermine democracy?
| n1b0m wrote:
| A Cold War? I don't think it feels very cold to the Ukrainians
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, the US cold war had several "real" wars as a result
| of it. Korea and Vietnam were actual wars with humans
| shooting at each other, but they're considered part of the
| "Cold War" because both of them were sort of indirect, since
| the real enemy was the USSR.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| But Ukrainians aren't part of any "We", from my perspective.
| We prudently formed no alliances with them.
| jowea wrote:
| Just a proxy conflict. Just need to figure out if Russia is
| the main power or the Chinese (or NK) proxy.
| fridder wrote:
| Money and nukes. The worst thing Europe did was get addicted to
| cheap Russian gas. It was a trojan horse that encouraged
| governments to look the other way.
| AustinDev wrote:
| Just 5 years ago Europeans were laughing in derision when
| this was pointed out.
| monkeyfun wrote:
| Which is sadly how it goes -- you have to be willing to
| take a stand against people without capital-V Vision
| sometimes. They'll only ever perceive what's right in front
| of their eyes, and only ever believe that what's possible
| is what's already recently happened (and nothing more).
|
| Totally unrelated but now I wanna jab my elbow at Ariane 6
| (rocket)...
| bboozzoo wrote:
| Not all of Europe. The immediate neighbors were always wary
| of Russia's game, but attempts to bring that up only got
| them labeled as rusophobic.
| krhaf wrote:
| The immediate neighbors collected transit fees for
| Russian gas and oil. Ukraine itself collected transit
| fees for gas deliveries to Austria until very recently.
|
| The Drushba pipeline through Poland was open at the same
| time that Sikorski congratulated the U.S. for blowing up
| Nord Stream. It remained open long after that. Both
| France and the U.S. were buying uranium from Russia until
| 2024. No complaints from Sikorski about that.
|
| Nordstream was owned by Russia, Germany, _France_ , and
| _The Netherlands_. There was a pipeline from the German
| terminal to Britain.
|
| There are many hypocrites of the first order in the
| oil/gas game. In the context of this submission, it is
| appropriate to note that so called "far right" or "far
| left" parties are the only ones who point out facts like
| the above in public.
|
| Voters notice this and blaming Russian interference is a
| very weak game that endangers the democracies in the EU.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Yeah, it was so frustrating.
|
| Some guy from Eastern Europe: "You don't know Russians.
| Let me tell you about my experience with them..."
|
| Some guy from Western Europe: "LOL, I see you believe
| American propaganda completely uncritically."
|
| The guy from EE: "What? No, I was telling you what
| happened to my family..."
|
| The guy from WE: "Let's talk about how America sucks
| instead."
|
| Seems to me that for many people Russia wasn't even a
| real country, just some boogeyman that American
| propaganda made up. Then they suddenly woke up, and now
| they are like "oh no, we must not escalate!". Guys, you
| don't even know that making concessions to Russia is the
| fastest way to escalate. (You didn't expect North Korean
| soldiers attacking a European country, did you? That's
| what you get for your non-escalation. There will be
| more.)
| KaiserPro wrote:
| None of us were laughing in derision. If we were laughing
| its because we knew we were fucked.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Imma be honest, I was pretty convinced by the "if we have
| strong trade relations where it's almost codependent, they
| will not try stuff". That was probably wrong, but we were
| also way more dependent on them than the other way
| around...
| ossobuco wrote:
| > The worst thing Europe did was get addicted to cheap
| Russian gas.
|
| True, it was really bad for us to be able build a decent
| industry and export all over the world. Much better to be
| addicted to expensive USA gas and let our industry and
| economies crumble.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Actually much better to leave perfectly functional nuclear
| power plants online so you don't have to pick one vs the
| other.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The entire world is based on cooperation even with nations
| one may not like. China, for instance, is the manufacturing
| backbone of the world - to say nothing of being the primary
| source of many critical elements, such as those used in
| electric batteries, solar, and so on.
|
| And war between the US and China will also happen as soon as
| China moves to reintegrate Taiwan, and the EU will again be
| expected to work as a tool of the US, to its own detriment.
|
| Will you then say that the EU should have done away with
| cheap Chinese manufacturing and resources earlier? And claim
| it was some sort of a Trojan Horse? Or will at some point the
| EU consider putting EU interests first?
| empiricus wrote:
| I think Merkel thought that if pay Putin fairly, he will
| learn it is better to cooperate, everybody wins. EU addicted
| to gas, but make Putin addicted to money. It seems that Putin
| was not this kind of rational.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| This news shows exactly that the constitutional court was not
| asleep. They took a bold decision.
| cedws wrote:
| But as comments have said, even acknowledging interference
| after the fact and rejecting the result _is_ a failure in
| democracy, because it 's ripe for abuse. Thus, the Russian
| interference has still succeeded.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| This is a bit like a football referee looking at the videos
| after a goal and deciding that it was a handball, thus
| invalidating the goal. It is not an easy decision to make
| but better to do it quickly.
| creer wrote:
| We'll have to see the replacement election to decide that.
| Will the population change their vote in response or not.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| At least everyone has some time to cool down and think
| and absorb all the information that came out in the last
| few days.
| ossobuco wrote:
| Wait, you voted the wrong way! Here, take a few days to
| think about it, and then let's try again, ok?
| tomp wrote:
| Unlikely. The leading candidate is already being
| investigated by the police.
|
| Chances are he'll be jailed or otherwise prevented from
| running.
| creer wrote:
| I did not mean to imply that the population should vote
| again for the same candidate to demonstrate their
| independence. New evidence was presented to and by a high
| court and it's fair to expect it to be considered (for
| example for how convincing it is, and for what all the
| candidates have to say about it, and even for who
| presented it and for what reason).
|
| If the evidence was serious it also would not make sense
| to let the election continue.
|
| Finally I don't know about Romania, but in a few other
| countries in Europe, no matter what happens to that
| sullied candidate, these votes are not too likely to
| shift to the incumbent party. See for example the
| circumstances that enabled Macron to be elected the first
| time in France.
| tremon wrote:
| _acknowledging interference after the fact and rejecting
| the result is a failure in democracy_
|
| Citation very much needed. It seems you're desperately
| arguing towards a pre-determined conclusion. Especially if
| you're then equating this with a foreign government
| successfully installing a puppet regime.
| ocschwar wrote:
| Okay, so the interference has succeeded. So what?
|
| If the success is limited to repeating the first round of
| voting, that's a lot of Ukrainians who will still be alive
| next year.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Far from some bold decision in defense of democracy, this is
| almost a coup by our constitutional court.
|
| First, there is no process or even mention in any Romanian
| law about annuling an election. The Constitutional Court of
| Romania has two specified roles in an election: it validates
| candidates (or rejects them, as it did with another far right
| candidate in this very election), and it validates the
| election results (or invalidates them if there is a
| significant suspicion of fraud in the vote counts, after a
| recount). They issued a recount order for this same election
| as well, and then decided based on the results that the first
| round was valid. If they had decided it wasn't valid, there
| are laws for when it would have been repeated. However, they
| later came back to this decision, and quoting a vague article
| in the Constitution that says that they assure the electoral
| procedures are followed, they invented this concept of
| annuling the entire electoral process, from the very
| beginning (so even the candidate registrations have to be re-
| done).
|
| Secondly, they did this based on evidence that was public
| knowledge for two weeks, including the last few times they
| met and validated the counts.
|
| Thirdly, the evidence in question is vague accusations of
| Russian interference with no specifics. There are no names,
| no identified groups, no sums of money except for one lump
| payment by a businessman. The only clear accusation is
| campaign finance violations (which the authorities had
| already blatantly ignored, as the candidate in question had
| registered his campaign costing 0 RON, which was known to the
| relevant authorities since last month and to the public for
| two weeks).
| nottorp wrote:
| The two ruling parties that are governing in a coalition
| right now aren't known for either competence or honesty
| either.
|
| Incidentally, their presidential candidates did not make it
| to the second round of elections.
|
| So one can legitimately ask if this is because of the
| russian interference, or because they want another chance
| at the presidency?
| sebastianz wrote:
| OK, but what could they have done instead?
|
| There is a very surprising, out-of-nowhere win by an
| independent, that declared he spent 0eur on his campaign,
| as a result of what looks to be a large scale (presumably
| expensive to run) campaign on TikTok, that nobody knows who
| financed, which will await trial, commissions and
| investigations to figure out.
|
| What could the court have said when they were prompted?
| Ignore this? I'm not really a 'Constitutional Court'
| apologist :). I am genuinely curious... what would have
| been the alternative here?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The court had already validated the first round of
| elections. This was a fait accompli. They could have let
| it stand, noting that people had voted and their votes
| were correctly counted, and that matters more than any
| other manipulation.
|
| Consider we don't have any decision by any court (before
| this one) that confirms that any illegal action of any
| kind has taken place. It's only isinuations and beliefs,
| but nothing proven to the extent required by law.
|
| The elections should have been allowed to continue. If
| needed, some special prosecutor whose independence from
| the next president, even if CG won, could be guaranteed
| could be appointed to continue investigating the facts of
| this campaign. Then, CG could be tried based on the
| findings, could be suspended by Parliament while this was
| going on, and he could be deposed if he indeed was found
| guilty, and new elections held at that time (in Romania,
| if the president's mandate ends suddenly for any reason,
| there is a temporary presidency, but only until snap
| elections are called).
|
| Let's not forget that he might not even have won - the
| race was tight, but not unwinnable. So in that case, he
| could easily be investigated as a private citizen.
| sebastianz wrote:
| But if you believe it is highly likely this would happen
| (which presumably the CCR do believe, along with various
| state-defense relevant institutions), how is this whole
| process you described better than just cancelling them
| now?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Because it's legal. And what they did now is not legal.
|
| They don't even have may proof that anything that
| happened in the first round campaign was illegal. The CCR
| is not even qualified to rule on the facts, on the
| legality of anything that happened.
|
| So if nothing illegal is proven by any court to have
| happened, if there isn't even enough evidence to get a
| tmeporary arrest warrant in his name in a regular court
| of law, how can we annul the whole electoral process? The
| costs alone should require a much higher level of
| justification.
|
| The court has not even ruled that he is not allowed to
| participate in the re-made elections.
|
| I was mortified that he might win, don't get me wrong. My
| entire family was going to vote for Lasconi, even those
| that didn't really like her, just to make sure this idiot
| madman didn't win. But that doesn't make this decision be
| any closer to the rule of law.
| sebastianz wrote:
| > Because it's legal. And what they did now is not legal.
|
| I am not an expert on this, so I'm _not_ saying you are
| wrong, but why would they not have the prerogative to do
| this? Do you have any sources for that?
|
| I know at least that there is precedent in the EU -
| Austria cancelled a round of elections in 2016, also for
| some electoral law incongruities / technicalities (that
| at least superficially by my knowledge were less serious
| than this scandal), done also by their constitutional
| court.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Romanian law also has provisions for ca celling the
| results of an election. The CCR followed the process,
| heard challenges to the validity of these results for the
| first round of elections, ordered a recount, and found
| based on the recount that all was well, and it certified
| the results.
|
| What they found afterwards, on their own without any case
| brought before them, is that the campaign that preceded
| the first round of elections (which lasted for one month
| before the first round two weeks ago now) _may_ have been
| influenced by outside forces, that a candidate _may_ have
| flaunted campaign finance laws, and similar matters, and
| that because of this, the _entire_ electoral process is
| invalid and annulled. The government has to restart this
| process from scratch, with anyone who wants to
| participate registering their candidacy again from
| scratch.
|
| There is no procedure or standard in any law or in the
| Construction to specify such a process. The Court
| invented it from whole cloth, based only on a vague/broad
| power to oversee the election.
| sebastianz wrote:
| I still do not understand how it can be illegal for them
| to do this, if they do have the prerogative to cancel an
| election result. (In the sense that you can disagree with
| a judge's decision, he might even make an objectively
| wrong decision, but it does not make him taking that
| decision illegal, just perhaps wrong.)
|
| I am curious to read more about this in the coming days.
| I do remember previous scandals related to the CCR and
| their (often said too close) relationship to the parties
| in power. But I guess in this case I just don't see why
| their decision would be illegal, and when compared to the
| alternatives I don't see why it would be wrong.
|
| To also clarify, despite thinking this might be the
| correct decision, I actually think politically there is a
| higher probability now of yielding a worse president,
| since Ciolacu & Simion will probably end up in the
| secondary, the latter having chances, instead of Lasconi.
| Not that I think she's the greatest candidate either, but
| again... compared to the alternatives...
| Aloisius wrote:
| How is annulling an election any different from their power
| to invalidate results?
|
| The power cited to ensure election procedure doesn't seem
| vague. It appears to be quite broad:
|
| > The Constitutional Court shall have the following powers:
| ... (f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the
| election of the President of Romania and to confirm the
| ballot returns;
| tsimionescu wrote:
| For the ballot returns, there is a whole law that details
| how that process works, what documents are to be sent to
| the court, who and how and when can contest the results,
| what happens if the results are annulled and so on. The
| court can't make up its own rules, there is a whole
| legislative cadre that specifies their powers,
| responsibilities, and their interaction with other
| institutions.
|
| They trampled over all of these with this new decision:
| they didn't observe any time limits (they gave this
| decision out of the blue, while the voting for the second
| round had already started; could they have decided this
| same annulment two months from now? Nothing in this
| decision or motivation says they couldn't). They met to
| decide on this matter with no request from everyone, they
| brought this matter before themselves by their own power,
| which no court has the power to. They had no legal
| framework to demand this from any other institution.
|
| Worse of all, they have specified no limits to this broad
| power they have found they have, nor any legal standards
| for what type of allegations are grave enough to
| objectively determine this annulment. What if next time a
| candidate that won 1% of the vote had a suspicious
| campaign, will that lead to annulment? What is the
| standard of evidence to be evaluated for this decision?
| The documents they based this decision on wouldn't even
| have constituted admissible evidence in a court of law,
| they are hearsay by institutions which aren't even making
| them under pain of perjury.
|
| And related to that article of the Constitution, there is
| no reason to interpret it as a broad, decisional power.
| It is clearly meant to guide law makers to create
| specific laws for determining the CCR's specific role in
| the electoral process. There are many similar articles in
| the constitution about other institutions that don't
| grant them any direct powers in this way. For example,
| article 80, title 2 says:
|
| > (2) The President of Romania shall guard the observance
| of the Constitution and the proper functioning of the
| public authorities. To this effect, he shall act as a
| mediator between the Powers in the State, as well as
| between the State and society.
|
| If the President took the same approach as the court, it
| stands to reason that he could go into any public
| authority in Romania and block their decisions based on
| finding that they are not properly observing the
| Constitution, right?
| cowpig wrote:
| Europe?
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| "The truth is that the Americans will eventually make
| themselves hated by everyone, even by their most unconditional
| allies. All the manipulations the Americans imagine are
| contradicted by events."
|
| -- Charles de Gaulle
| coliveira wrote:
| And now you know why they need to spend so much money to buy
| and influence media outlets all over the world. Tip: it is
| not because media is such a profitable industry...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| France under de Gaulle is hardly a bastion of freedom and
| liberal democracy, I have a hard time taking anything he said
| or did post-WW2 seriously
| georgeecollins wrote:
| By "France under de Gaulle" do you mean the French Fifth
| Republic which was proposed by de Gaulle?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic
|
| Hint: That's the current government of France to this day.
| To me, that is a liberal democracy.
|
| I would recommend reading "When France Fell" for more
| context on de Gaulle. You are talking about a complicated
| figure. I also would point out that he faced attempts on
| his life for getting France out of the former colony of
| Algeria.
| stracer wrote:
| > All the manipulations the Americans imagine are
| contradicted by events.
|
| What does this mean?
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| WMD in Iraq is an instance of this.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > Americans will eventually make themselves hated by everyone
|
| Who's everyone?
| Aloisius wrote:
| Your quoting _way_ out of context.
|
| "See, even in NATO, which the Americans built with their own
| hands, which is their thing, have you seen that? The NATO
| parliamentarians declare that the Multilateral Force is
| nothing but a big joke. The truth is that the Americans will
| end up being hated by everyone. Even by their most
| unconditional allies. The Multilateral Force would be one
| more trick. All the tricks that the Americans imagine are
| denied by events. It is more and more true. Look at their so-
| called detente."
|
| -- Charles de Gaulle, November 6, 1963,
| mrtksn wrote:
| Europe is just getting adjusted to the new reality and the
| reality is not black-and-white.
|
| Russians didn't discover magic words that they use to hypnotise
| people and make them vote for pro-Russia candidate. In fact,
| everywhere in the world the incumbent politics are losing
| ground because the system is in crisis and people are looking
| for a change everywhere and Russia appears to be able to propel
| politicians who are closer to the their politics simply because
| the incumbent ones screwed up.
|
| Is America different? Just a month ago in the American election
| - those who are anti-establishment and pro-Russian won.
|
| US and Europe will go through a soul searching and hopefully
| will come out of this in a better shape. It has to go through
| this because the ideology collapsed, economy doesn't perform
| and the hypocrisy is unbearable anymore.
|
| For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the
| environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are
| blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making
| the world better place better than they do?
|
| Can you tell me if US is about freedom and respect of the
| international law, borders and trande? If so why they support
| Ukraine against Russian invasion and then support Israel who
| occupies Palestinian territories since many years?
|
| Can you tell me why people should drink from paper straws when
| the rich fly private jets?
|
| Can you tell me why the capital can go anywhere but people
| should be stopped at the borders?
|
| Can you tell me how the economy is s great when so many people
| suffer?
|
| The west is in crisis, the ideology doesn't hold and the
| economy doesn't provide and all the Russians have to do is to
| point it out. They don't use spell, they just tell what
| everyone sees. This needs to get fixed, let's hope that the
| damage wouldn't be too big.
| cowpig wrote:
| Technology has changed the landscape of possibility very
| quickly, and our institutions are not keeping up.
|
| The world will need to figure out ways to deal with the new
| reality. Social media have made it far more lucrative to make
| up whatever than to report on facts. Meanwhile it's harder
| than ever to run a sustainable business in journalism.
|
| Meanwhile autocrats have noticed that it's cheaper than ever
| to run massive campaigns of propaganda and misinformation
| abroad, because they don't have to involve anywhere near the
| number of local accomplices.
|
| LLMs are accelerating the trend.
|
| You're right that the US democracy is in crisis as well.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Ukraine [?] Palestine.
|
| Ukraine was brutally attacked by Russia, Israel was brutally
| attacked by Hamas/Palestine.
|
| Ukraine is like Israel.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Only of your history goes 1 year back.
| starik36 wrote:
| You can keep on going back decades and centuries - none
| of it is going to solve problems today.
| mrtksn wrote:
| What's your point? Who said that going back in history
| solves today's problems?
| amszmidt wrote:
| Ukraine is nothing like Israel.
|
| It is a known fact that Israel is committing genocide
| against Palestinians.
|
| While Ukraine is tip toeing a very fine line defending
| itself and Europe against Russian aggression (e.g., barely
| allowed to neutralizing military targets in Russia).
| typon wrote:
| This is exactly why the West is in decline. Basic morality
| and reality no longer make any sense. The average person
| can see reality with their own eyes and the wack-a-mole of
| shaping reality by the elites just doesn't work with social
| media anymore. The only way forward for the Western elites
| to stop this bleeding is to implement mass censorship on
| social media (they're doing a fine job with mainstream
| media as it is)
| mrtksn wrote:
| Exactly. When there's no morality then there's no social
| contract and when there's no social contract you don't
| have a society that can function without explicit stick
| or carrot. This is a horrible way to live.
| YZF wrote:
| The funny thing is that I can't tell what side you're
| supporting from your statements.
|
| I agree the west has lost its morality.
|
| I disagree the average person is seeing reality with
| their own eyes. The average person is seeing whatever
| some interested party wants to frame as reality.
|
| That's why Russians support Putin. In their reality they
| are fighting Nazis in Ukraine and protecting the rights
| of ethnic Russians. And there is some stream of social
| media you can be on where that is reality.
|
| What you have right now is that state actors and money
| shapes reality. Do you want China to say what reality is
| or do you want democracies in the west to say what
| reality is and specifically the US.
|
| With all the problems, I prefer to have the Americans be
| the source of truth if I have to pick between them,
| Russia and China.
|
| I reject the framing around "elites" shaping reality.
| While we've always had issues around this the western
| democratic way is the best we know, with all its issues.
| Moving this power to China and Meta is making things
| worse.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42207414
| stracer wrote:
| > the ideology collapsed, economy doesn't perform
|
| Economy doesn't perform, but ideology has collapsed only in
| minds of ordinary people. Politicians, stakeholders and
| various media outlets are very much invested, and still push
| that the current course is the only correct way and the
| bright green future as designed is unstoppable. Reminds me of
| the arrogance of the ruling party slogans from before 90s.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| In Moldova the magic words were bribery. Thankfully they
| didn't work.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I'll bite.
|
| > For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the
| environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are
| blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making
| the world better place better than they do?
|
| Because the EU is a bunch of democracies, and a few of the
| biggest ones do not want to accelerate electrification bad
| enough to threaten parts of their industry/economy right now.
| This tracks with the electorate; support for green policies
| is rather low across the board, almost every nation has
| different primary issues.
|
| > Can you tell me if US is about freedom and respect of the
| international law, borders and trande? If so why they support
| Ukraine against Russian invasion and then support Israel who
| occupies Palestinian territories since many years?
|
| The Ukraine war is the most clear-cut aggressor/victim
| situation in a long time, even compared to setups like the
| Vietnam war: There is not even a puppet government with any
| legitimacy that the Russians could be claiming to act in
| support of, and there is no credible casus belli either. It's
| just blatant expansionism at the cost of a sovereign nation.
|
| Israel/palestine is a complicated mess-- it is basically a
| civil war of sorts, and the Americans DO support people in
| Gaza/Westbank a ton (humanitarian aid).
|
| > Can you tell me why people should drink from paper straws
| when the rich fly private jets?
|
| Note: The non-private jets are a much bigger problem
| actually, but since there's not enough popular support to
| curtail air travel significantly, the easy pro-environmental
| actions happen first.
|
| > Can you tell me why the capital can go anywhere but people
| should be stopped at the borders?
|
| Because the people inside those borders don't want other
| people with no capital wandering in. The capital alone (or
| its owners) they don't really mind as much.
|
| > Can you tell me how the economy is s great when so many
| people suffer?
|
| Can you be more specific on this? I'd say the economy is not
| great, not terrible, and its about the same for the people
| (talking about central Europe here).
| mrtksn wrote:
| > few of the biggest ones do not want to accelerate
| electrification bad enough to threaten parts of their
| industry/economy right now
|
| Do you see the problem? Those in control screw up and they
| expect to get bailed out by forcing people to buy their
| inferior and expensive products.
|
| > The Ukraine war is the most clear-cut aggressor/victim
| situation
|
| It's actually not that clear cut and if you apply the same
| filters for both of the countries you will see it. Try
| testing for internationally recognized borders and the
| situation is same for the Israeli invasion and Russian
| invasion. Test for separatist movements and you will find
| very similar things, test for minorities getting attacked
| and you will see that its quite similar. Not the same but
| when you pick something like "Russia must respect the
| internationally recognized borders" and you don't apply the
| same for Israel then you are a hypocrite, you are not doing
| it from standpoint of a principle but due to your own
| interest and if you are doing it out of your own interest
| people start asking why I'm paying for it? Where's my cut
| if this thing pans out?
|
| > The non-private jets are a much bigger problem actually
|
| I don't know if that's true or not but you ask people to
| sacrifice their comfort for a common cause, then everyone
| should do it.
|
| > Because the people inside those borders don't want other
| people with no capital wandering
|
| But then people start noticing that it's not the poor
| immigrants who want to work who buys al the properties.
| Some people want the poor stopped at the border and the
| rich welcomed. Others want different things, a lot of
| people don't want oligarchs buying all that property and
| leave it empty.
|
| > I'd say the economy is not great, not terrible
|
| In the case of the US elections, there were many opinion
| polls showing that people are not satisfied with the
| economy. They are also not satisfied with many other things
| related to the economy. Just yesterday someone killed an
| insurance CEO at a filthy rich location and so many people
| were cheering for the killer.
| ponector wrote:
| > It's actually not that clear cut and if you apply the
| same filters for both of the countries you will see it.
|
| Pretty much clear. Unless you watch Russia Today
| everyday. If you throw away tons of Russian lies it is
| clear expansion invasion.
|
| Russians did this many times. Annexation of Poland,
| Finland, Baltic states and more recent annexation of
| Ichkeria and occupation of Georgia.
| mrtksn wrote:
| >Pretty much clear. Unless you watch Russia Today
| everyday. If you throw away tons of Russian lies it is
| clear expansion invasion.
|
| You are misrepresenting my argument. I don't say that
| Russian are innocent, I say that Israel is just as
| guilty.
| nopurpose wrote:
| How is it "expansion invasion" if peace terms offered by
| Russia, which are now public knowledge with recent
| documents leak, shortly after invastion didn't include
| any new territories for Russia? Ukraine walked away from
| that offer.
| ponector wrote:
| It was a bluff to make a weaker Ukraine.
|
| Just a reminder to that moment:
|
| 1.Russia sponsored separatist movement in Donbass with
| money, weapons and agents. 2. Russia directly occupied
| Crimea while lying they do not. 3. Russia signed a
| Budapest memorandum to respect Ukrainian independence and
| sovereignty in the existing borders and restrain to use
| force against it. 4. Russia signed a series of Minsk
| peace treaties.
|
| Why you think that they really offered a peace in a good
| faith? History of modern Russia, USSR and empire show any
| peace treaty or other international documents with
| nothing, just a waste of the paper.
|
| Russians always lie. That's putty western world are blind
| because Russian bribes are too good to miss.
| flerchin wrote:
| What is this?
| myrmidon wrote:
| > Try testing for internationally recognized borders and
| the situation is same for the Israeli invasion and
| Russian invasion.
|
| I do not understand your point. Ukraine has borders that
| were recognized by Russia itself (Budapest Memorandum).
| They violated those borders when they annexed Crimea--
| their excuse: those people want to be part of our
| empire-- ok.
|
| 8 years later they marched on Kyiv-- whats even the
| excuse for that? Do you think the people in Kyiv want to
| be liberated from their president, and governed by some
| Russian oligarch?
|
| If Russia is in a similar situation than Israel, then
| were are the massive acts of terrorism against Russian
| citizens comparable to October 7th? Where are the
| missiles fired towards Moscow, before 2014?
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't know why you interpret my comment like that, I
| don't support Russia, I say that Israel is just like
| Russia from that standpoint.
|
| Are you by any chance assuming that Israel is absolutely
| innocent, therefore I must be claiming that Russia must
| be also innocent? It's the other way around, they are
| both aggressor and invaders. Anyone claiming that
| countries shouldn't invade other countries and respect
| the internationally recognized borders then should
| support Ukraine and Palestine.
| myrmidon wrote:
| It is unclear to me what you actually expected from
| Israel. I'm not saying that the Israeli government never
| did anything wrong-- far from it. But their reaction to
| Octover 7th is mostly in line with my expectations-- it
| is a shit situation, that Israelis themselves most
| certainly contributed to at multiple points, but if you
| get hit by a massive wave of terrorism against civilians
| from part of your own population, your army certainly
| _will_ have to react somehow...
|
| Russias invasion of Ukraine on the other hand, does not
| _have_ an October 7th-- there were no waves of rockets
| fired towards Moscow, and the Ukraine also was _not_ part
| of Russia, giving them no real excuse to send soldiers
| there in the first place...
| mrtksn wrote:
| They should have solved it before 7th of October and if
| that was not possible they shouldn't have been committing
| AI assisted genocide. Sometimes you screw up with your
| intelligence and diplomacy, you take a hit and this still
| doesn't give you a right to genocide. The same for the
| Palestinians BTW, you screw up lose a war get occupied
| and you still don'y get right to do terror attacks.
|
| I'm actually fan of Israel, It's a country I want to
| visit a lot and I actually admire the things they
| achieved in that barely livable land. Which makes me
| extra sad too see into what they have turned.
| pphysch wrote:
| > Russias invasion of Ukraine on the other hand, does not
| have an October 7th
|
| Zelensky massed the largest land army in Europe excluding
| Russia, and then in March 2021 officially declared
| imminent war on Russia. Only then did Russia start
| heavily militarizing its border and a year later, after
| many failed attempts at diplomacy, formally invaded.
|
| Gaza can't even do many of the these things because they
| don't have statehood, much less a real army.
|
| It is offensively disingenuous to argue that Israel's
| genocide and illegal occupation is justified by Oct 7,
| but Russian military operations can never be justified
| even by an official and credible declaration of war by
| military-peer Ukraine.
| myrmidon wrote:
| What was the justification for annexing Crimea in 2014
| then? Your timeline seems a bit biased to me, because
| having a big part of your nation annexed by a neighboring
| army seems like a reasonable cause for shoring up your
| land defenses to me.
|
| Do you also dispute that there were Russian troops on
| Ukrainian territory before 2021, fighting alongside
| Ukrainian separatists with Russian provided materiel?
| Because there is a long report on this, since they
| accidentally shot down a civilian airliner...
| pphysch wrote:
| > thinks Israel-Palestine conflict started on October 7.
|
| > "but what about 8 years before 2022 Russian invasion?"
|
| I'm not going to engage further with this obviously bad
| faith trolling. No point. Have a good weekend!
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| The new Ukrainian pro west, government was ethnic
| cleansing the local pro Russian population in the pro
| Russian villages. So It's not so clear cut. Also Ukraine
| is not getting helped for free. More like they've
| mortgage their land and resources to the likes of
| Blackrock and other banking interests. That will keep the
| future generations in indebted servitude, while they rob
| them of their resources. This is just Western
| colonialism.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| [flagged]
| Symbiote wrote:
| There were huge protests for the Iraq and Afghanistan
| wars.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| Did any of the governments protesting the war decide to
| arm the Irakis while they tried and failed to defend
| their homeland? No.
|
| SH was a dictator for sure but these wars were illegal
| just the same and I did not see the EU kicking the US out
| of the swift payment system of impose sanctions on them.
|
| The moral posturing of the west is a show. The west is
| happy to go to war when it pleases it but should anyone
| else do it, then that is a problem.
| empiricus wrote:
| "had 10 years to get ready decided that it was better to
| keep building diesel engines than invest in EVs". I
| actually think EU has no chance to compete with China on
| manufacturing. The energy is too expensive and taxes are
| too big. Maybe if they had built 100 nuclear plants (with
| the money they paid Putin in a year) they would have had
| a chance.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| Believe it ir not, we've had superior electric vehicles
| for decades. They are called electric velomobiles and
| they are amazingly hard to google. You can buy them but
| they are made in such small quantities that they cost as
| much as a car.
|
| Here is some random example.
|
| https://www.sinnerbikes.com/en/modellen/comfort/comfort-e
| /
|
| 1990
|
| The electric versions are somewhat lagging behind the
| human powered velo
|
| https://en.velomobiel.nl/snoek-l/
|
| They are not cars but for transporting yourself from a to
| b they should do more than fine. Almost no power
| consumption very little danger als they are to light to
| do the infamous car crash. They use almost no space on
| the road and the road lasts much longer.
|
| You also get physical activity which extends life span.
| Travel normally consumes life span. Under 30 minutes per
| day you get to the destination in 0 minutes.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > You cannot be serious. The EU has put up tariffs on EVs
| because the EU car industry who had 10 years to get ready
| decided that it was better to keep building diesel
| engines than invest in EVs.
|
| Voters in Europe are not screaming for cheaper Chinese
| EVs-- they want economies improved, mostly, and anything
| weakening the local (automotive) industry (even
| electrification itself) is regarded very skeptically
| (especially in countries like Germany, France, Italy).
|
| > You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake
| WMDs.
|
| I'm not saying that those were justified (especially not
| in hindsight), but the Americans had gotten hit very hard
| before and had a somewhat credible justification at the
| start.
|
| Russia, on the other hand, never experienced a Spetember
| 11-- they only shot down those civilian airliners
| themselves (MH17).
| petre wrote:
| > Russia, on the other hand, never experienced a
| Spetember 11
|
| Maybe not on that scale but they had a few major terror
| attacks of their own: Budyonnovsk hospital hostage
| crisis, the 1999 apartment bombings, the Moscow theater
| hostage crisis, the Beslan school siege, and most
| recently the Crocus City Hall attack.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Yeah sure, but those had absolutely nothing to do with
| the Ukraine.
|
| And honestly, Russians have their current and past
| governments much more to blame for this, considering all
| the shit they did in Chechnya (starting with mass
| deportations in '44, followed by 2 wars and a bunch of
| warcrimes).
|
| Not saying that the US was blameless with all the middle
| east messups, but IMO Russia collected a lot more karma
| debt in Chechnya over the last century by comparison...
| gspencley wrote:
| > You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake
| WMDs. It's funny how people are quick to point that
| Russia is the aggressor but when the US was invading
| countries, few people opposed them.
|
| This is not nearly as hypocritical as people want to
| think it is.
|
| I suspect that the philosophical root of this position is
| cultural relativism. The idea that all countries, by and
| large, are both good and bad and that one country's
| politics and culture is not necessarily better or worse
| than another. That a country that throws journalists in
| prison and doesn't recognize freedom of expression or
| religion, for example, is on par morally with the United
| States of America.
|
| Fuck that. That position is literally evil as far as I'm
| concerned, because it dispenses with the very concepts of
| liberty and morality, putting the worst of the worst
| dictatorships on a level footing as free, rights-
| protecting countries.
|
| In my world view, government is a necessary good but it
| is necessary because human beings have the capacity for
| both reason and force. When people deal with one another
| through reason, we get peace, prosperity and life
| flourishes (reason is a human being's primary tool of
| survival). When people choose force we get gang warfare,
| anarchy, death, destruction and life struggles.
|
| My working definition of "liberty" is an environment
| where all interpersonal relations are consensual. This is
| achieved by removing the element of force from civil
| existence, placed into hands of a monopoly (the
| government) that recognizes that an individual has rights
| and uses that monopoly to protect and defend those
| rights. Never to violate them.
|
| Therefore, and I know this will be controversial (I'm
| certainly not trying to troll as I genuinely hold this
| position), a free, rights respecting country, even one
| that is imperfect, has every moral right to invade and
| liberate a dictatorship if and when it decides that it is
| in its best interest to do so.
|
| A country that routinely infringes upon the rights of
| others is morally illegitimate. It is certainly
| unfortunate that every country in the world today does
| that to some extent (taxes are theft). Still, that
| doesn't mean that you can't evaluate a country based on
| how well it implements this raison d'etre.
|
| So in any conflict between the USA (or any other rights-
| respecting country) and <pick one: Iran, China, Russia,
| Afghanistan, Iraq etc.>, I will side with the USA 10 out
| of 10 times and I see no hypocrisy. The USA, as a
| government, is imperfect but still better than China in
| every single possible way and I have no problem saying
| that, in my opinion, the Chinese population at large
| would be better off if the CPP were taken out by a free
| nation. And yeah, I know that the USA has ended up making
| things worse, practically, in many countries through
| interventionism. Iran is a great example. I'm not saying
| that they should invade any country and I'm not saying
| that they wouldn't screw it up if they tried. I'm just
| saying that morally and rationally I would be on their
| side every time.
|
| I will happily criticize the USA when they lie to us
| about weapons of mass destruction or anything else. I
| think that any lie is immoral and they were wrong to do
| so. This is one of many things that makes the USA
| imperfect. But I also don't think that they should have
| NEEDED that lie to justify invading Iraq and ending
| Saddam Hussein's reign. There are valid arguments to be
| had about whether or not Iraq is better or worse for
| liberty today than it was pre-2003. But morally they had
| every right to go in and should have done it even harder.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Yes -- put another way, some cultures are better than
| others. I want cultures that prioritize individual
| freedom, liberalism, and egalitarianism to be "dominant"
| on a global scale, even if that requires some level of
| domination. Moral relativism is the true evil.
| triceratops wrote:
| > You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake
| WMDs
|
| Stop lumping Iraq and Afghanistan together. I see this
| everywhere and it's tiresome. It's either outright lying
| or people who weren't old enough to make memories when
| these things happened.
|
| Afghanistan harbored Osama. They refused to give him up.
| NATO invaded the country to get him. It was justifed.
|
| The fake WMDs were in Iraq (or not, since they were
| fake). Only the US, UK, Australia, and Poland invaded
| Iraq. Literally all the other "Western" countries were
| very strongly opposed and refused to participate. It was
| an unjust war.
| churchill wrote:
| The Taliban very openly offered Osama up, provided he'd
| be granted transit to a 3rd-party nation where he'd get a
| free trial.
| triceratops wrote:
| That's not how extradition works, even for a common
| criminal. They knew that would never be acceptable, which
| is why they offered it.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'm sorry this is revisionist history. The Taliban
| offered to try him in an Islamic court of law, under the
| very same government that had offered him sanctuary while
| he trained terrorists. This was not a good faith offer.
| To be frank, they f'd around and found out.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Afghanistan harbored Osama. They refused to give him
| up. NATO invaded the country to get him. It was
| justified._
|
| Strange that the NATO did not invade Pakistan, then?
| triceratops wrote:
| He was in Afghanistan when they invaded. Even the Taliban
| admitted he was in the country. He fled to Pakistan
| later. And the US did in fact capture him using military
| force inside Pakistan.
|
| I really don't understand how this question can come up,
| honestly. This is 1 + 1 = 2 stuff.
| woah wrote:
| > You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake
| WMDs. It's funny how people are quick to point that
| Russia is the aggressor but when the US was invading
| countries, few people opposed them.
|
| Pretty facetious comparison. Iraq and Afghanistan were on
| the whole a mistake, but completely different from
| Ukraine. There was never any idea that the US would take
| the territory. It was just a huge waste of money for the
| US.
|
| The very best case scenario for the US (which everyone
| realized was never going to happen within 2 years) was
| something like Japan and South Korea, setting up US-
| friendly democratic governments and corporations. There
| was absolutely no element of expansionism. Ask the
| Japanese and the South Koreans whether they are mad about
| being oppressed under the thumb of "US imperialism".
|
| Contrast this with Russia's actions in Ukraine. They are
| taking over economically and militarily valuable lands,
| directly expanding their borders, expelling or re-
| educating Ukrainians who won't pretend to be Russian, and
| nakedly pursuing the revanchist fantasy of reclaiming
| lands that were ruled brutally by a totalitarian
| Muscovite empire for hundreds of years.
|
| Conflating the two situations betrays an extremely
| shallow understanding of current events and a complete
| ignorance of history.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > and the Americans DO support people in Gaza/Westbank a
| ton (humanitarian aid).
|
| Humanitarian aid doesn't help preventing bombs kindly
| donated by the US from falling. The large difference in
| casualties (what is it? 40 Palestinians for every Israeli?)
| tells me it's not a civil war, but an extermination.
|
| Israel settling occupied territories doesn't earn them much
| sympathy either. If you want a buffer to feel safe, annex
| and protect the people who live there while fully
| demilitarising the land.
| YZF wrote:
| There is no way the international community would support
| Israel annexing a security buffer. (EDIT: Israel actually
| did this in the Golan heights, annexed it and gave
| everyone citizenship, and also in East Jerusalem, annexed
| and gave everyone citizenship. Most of the world does not
| recognize either.)
|
| Difference in casualties is not a measure of who is
| right. What was the ratio of casualties in the war
| between the US and ISIS? or between Japan and the US in
| WW2? That's not how wars work. You kill one of mine I
| kill one of yours.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Difference in casualties is not a measure of who is
| right
|
| It is a certain indication one side uses disproportionate
| force and that it's not a "war".
|
| > You kill one of mine I kill one of yours.
|
| It's more like "You kill one of ours, we kill 40 of
| yours. Or their neighbours. Or someone who looks like
| them"
| Aunche wrote:
| The only country that has ever granted Palestinians
| concessions without deaths is the US (e.g. the
| desettlement of Gaza), and that is only possible because
| we have leverage over military aid.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| > For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the
| environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are
| blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making
| the world better place better than they do?
|
| Personally, I think that the goal of a vibrant, thriving
| democracy is to allow and encourage participation from many
| groups of citizens. This will result in the government
| pursuing multiple objectives at the same time.
|
| This necessarily means that you're going to have to make
| trade offs. Is it more important to have cheap EVs or is it
| more important to keep good jobs in country?
|
| Maybe in this case we'll decide on good jobs in our country,
| and then look at other ways that climate change can be
| addressed. Maybe we won't.
|
| Asking why an entire country doesn't do 100% of the things it
| could to address a single issue seems almost intentionally
| naive.
| newspaper1 wrote:
| Maybe it's the idea of a "country" that's flawed? Certainly
| it is, we live on a planet and are all impacted by the
| environment. Previous social structures are no longer
| applicable and are causing damage. It's only a matter of
| time before they're rethought.
| etangent wrote:
| > For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the
| environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are
| blocking the Chinese electric cars?
|
| This is a very strange criticism. Why is it wrong to try to
| make impact on the environment without fully destroying the
| domestic industry? Let's follow up on this a bit further. If
| the EU counties did in fact become hardliners on the
| environment to the point of fully destroying their own
| industries, then you would no longer attack the perceived
| "hypocrisy" but would instead attack their policy of
| deindustrialization. So you don't seem to have problems with
| hypocrisy, you instead seem to have a problem with
| environmental movement/policies as such or at least insofar
| as they are implemented by the EU block.
|
| If the EU countries completely abandoned their environmental
| slogans, and went on an ultra-industrial path, would you
| still be a critic? Given your other comments (why can capital
| travel but people cannot?), something tells me that yes, you
| would. It is difficult for me to perceive your criticism as
| anything other than coming from a supporter of an _ipso
| facto_ enemy economic block. You are not interested at
| constructively helping EU countries anymore, you are looking
| for a hammer to destroy your chosen target with.
|
| One thing about social media is that it allows anyone to have
| a voice. The problem of "anyone" is that it ignores the fact
| that we do not live in a post-human utopia, we live in a real
| world where the concept of an "enemy" is real. There are real
| people out there who seek our destruction. This is not a
| pleasant thing to speak about but it is something that seems
| to be unfortunately the case. Because English is such a
| popular language, chances are the enemy speaks English and is
| on social media. What content do you think he posts?
| mrtksn wrote:
| This is a fallacy. People are not buying Chinese instead of
| European because they want destruction, they buy it because
| the European industry failed in making better or cheaper
| products.
|
| If we are bailing out an industry, this can't be on the
| shoulders of the public who doesn't have anything to do
| with the failure. If we are going to save it, make sure
| those responsible for the failure are paying too. You are
| asking for Europeans to pay almost half a year of their
| salaries to save these industries, then at least take away
| the properties of those involved in the failure. Maybe it
| wouldn't change much but are in this together or not?
| layer8 wrote:
| They are bailing out industries when a lot of local jobs
| are bound to it, so it's not correct that the public
| doesn't have anything to do with it.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Tell me again why 400M people should pay a half a year
| worth of salary as extra to buy an inferior car to save
| the jobs of those who failed to make a good product? Let
| them fail, pay them unemployment to prevent social issues
| then go get the cheap good cars and pay a bit more tax
| for social security. Cut out the shareholders and
| executives.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you do that often enough, at some point the state
| won't have enough money to pay the unemployed any more.
| Also, there are reasons why the same product can be
| manufactured more cheaply in China than (say) in Germany,
| that have to do with different standards for labor
| rights, safety standards, and so on, not with anyone
| failing to make a good product. And it's not like China
| doesn't subsidize its automotive industry as well.
| chupy wrote:
| A lot of the things that we buy in Europe are already
| manufactured cheaply in China with different standards
| etc. We are moving a lot of manufacturing back to Europe,
| mostly in the eastern part of it. That part is still
| 'cheap' aka they can put the made in eu logo on the box,
| pay employees eastern Europe prices and ask buyers
| western Europe prices.
|
| The same thing with the eu car companies... they even
| took the money from the states where they had factories
| (Germany, Belgium, France) which greatly subsidized them,
| increased their profits and margins then moved to the
| next EU state and beyond.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| At a certain point, if you don't approve of another
| regions labor policies, you have to buy less of their
| exports, otherwise you won't be able to produce your own
| goods.
| Ringz wrote:
| Better? That needs a proof and I bet you won't be able to
| find a peer reviewed example.
|
| Cheaper? You raise an easy target here if you ignore the
| massive subsidies, completely different financial systems
| and politics. China ignores international trade rules and
| Europe, USA etc. can't ignore this if they want to save
| their industry and - at the end - democracy.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Peer review for cars? Interesting mental gymnastics. Just
| let people buy whatever they want.
|
| > you ignore the massive subsidies, completely different
| financial systems and politics
|
| Cool, China subsidizing EU's fight against climate
| change. Get the free money, save the climate and spend
| the money you saved on something that you want instead of
| forced.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > if you ignore the massive subsidies
|
| The EU subsides their car makers just the same. Part of
| Renault belonged to the French government for the longest
| time and all the governments are providing incentives to
| drive the sales of new cars.
|
| See the cash for clunkers program that was running for
| years after the 2008 crisis.
|
| Using tax payer money to artificially reduce the cost of
| a new car, If that is not a subsidy, then what is it?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > Russians didn't discover magic words that they use to
| hypnotise people and make them vote for pro-Russia candidate
|
| Well, someone else discovered not the magic words but the
| magic timing of when to tell them and how to surround people
| with the right words: i.e. the social media algorithms.
| newspaper1 wrote:
| Don't shoot the messenger. The actual problems being
| pointed out are the root cause.
| rbanffy wrote:
| People were unhappy before and nothing like this happened
| because of it. International interference was always very
| difficult.
| newspaper1 wrote:
| More transparency is a good thing, even if that comes
| from "international interference". The problems exist,
| try to hide them at your own political risk.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The point is foreign election interference is no longer
| difficult, dangerous, or expensive, and is incredibly
| effective.
| newspaper1 wrote:
| It's not "dangerous" to expose the truth, even
| selectively. More information is better, especially when
| it pertains to things our government is keeping from us.
| aatarax wrote:
| The world sucks for most people. The world is better than its
| ever been for most people. The world can be improved a lot
| for most people. Those three things can and are all
| simultaneously true.
|
| Unfortunately, improving the world requires engaging deeply
| with issues and many people now prefer to speak in terms of
| grand historical narratives and emotional arguments that
| stitch sparse data points into a large story far vaster than
| the data can support.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Incumbents losing elections is what is supposed to happen.
| It's a sign of normal times, not of a crisis.
|
| One of the key principles of a republic - both ancient and
| modern - is that personal power is bad for the society.
| Leaders are a necessary evil that must be tolerated (if only
| barely), but they also must be changed regularly.
| simion314 wrote:
| >One of the key principles of a republic - both ancient and
| modern - is that personal power is bad for the society.
| Leaders are a necessary evil that must be tolerated (if
| only barely), but they also must be changed regularly.
|
| In Romania not only we change them regularly but we also
| have PMs and ministers in jail for crimes they commuted, we
| are not like other countries where same president or prime
| Minister was in power for 30 years.
| close04 wrote:
| Incumbents losing elections can be fair. But only if the
| winner played by the rules at least loosely and the win
| wasn't orchestrated by a foreign party, especially an
| adversary.
|
| Unless you are Russian or Chinese you shouldn't have a
| president 'chosen' by them. So props to the Romanian
| authorities for taking action and not allowing a president
| beholden to Russian interests.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Nobody is claiming the candidate didn't play by the
| rules. Rather, some agency has asserted there was "a mass
| influence operation" in his favor - apparently they're
| not even asserting an organized conspiracy.
|
| There's a big problem with that claim. Intelligence
| agencies have a long history of making this claim of
| Russian control over elections all over the world, and
| it's always been lies and nonsense. What even _is_ a
| "mass influence" operation? Sounds like the same thing as
| a political campaign to me? If it's really on a mass
| scale it should be pretty easy to prove and work out how
| to stop it next time, shouldn't it?
|
| Such claims are never proven because they aren't true.
| Back in 2016 when Trump and Brexit were still fresh, the
| sort of people who didn't like those things were trying
| to explain their loss. The Clinton campaign came up with
| the Steele dossier and the American press ran with it.
| This was the origin of the "Russian influence" claim and
| back then it was usually described as being done through
| social media bots. Academics flooded the literature with
| papers that claimed to prove the existence of such
| Russian bots. I used to work in bot detection so was
| interested to read some of these papers, and found they
| were all based on academic fraud:
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-
| ad66f...
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-
| are-n...
|
| Given the long history of this type of claim, a rational
| person will have to assume that it's a plot by Romanian
| intelligence to overturn an election and treat it
| accordingly.
| petre wrote:
| > Russia appears to be able to propel politicians who are
| closer to the their politics
|
| Not really, they propel useful idiots. In the US that would
| have been Robert Kennedy Jr. In Germany it's whatever clows
| AfD has, in Austria it's the FPO leader Herbert Kickl.
| Basically anyone that would either auto sabotage that
| country, the EU, like Viktor Orban or be pro-Russia, like the
| Georgian Dream.
|
| In Romania it's a RFK Jr. like nutcake figure with new age,
| peace and love, vaccines bad, water has memory, nazis are
| patriots, etc beliefs and with a discourse that sounds all
| right at the surface but practicaly says absolutely nothing
| except that it's littered with trigger narratives, just as if
| it were the Heaven's Gate website. His campaign was pumped by
| Russia on Tiktok using dormant accounts two weeks or so
| before the election. Also on other US based social networks
| and on Telegram to a lesser extent. 2M people voted for him
| out of 9M, some because they hate the current establishment,
| others saw him as an outsider, when in fact he's actually
| part of an old boys network, others actually believe his
| mumbo jumbo. It turns out he's also linked and promoted by
| fascist groups, some of which are actual former French
| Foreign Legion soldiers, run a mercenary group in the DRC and
| _survival_ training workshops in the mountains. These are
| also linked to a rather controversial Eastern Orthodox bishop
| who is known to be pro Russian, so this candidate also got
| promoted through church networks. His campaign was in part
| financed by a crypto entreprenour with dual Romanian and
| South African citizenship who currently resides in ZA. The
| candidate declared zero political advertising expenses.
|
| Anyway, I hope Tiktok gets massively screwed by the EU after
| this. Because this is in the Comission's hands now. The
| candidate's fascist friends might be soon visited by a SWAT
| team and they'll probably find firearms. The candidate, I
| dunno, he's probably going to flee to another country if he
| ever gets indicted.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > In the US that would have been Robert Kennedy Jr
|
| We should not forget about the orange elephant in the room.
| zjalnxb wrote:
| In Austria, Haider took over the FPO in 1986. In 1999, when
| Russia was completely weak and had other priorities, the
| FPO already had 26% nationally.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Party_of_Austria
|
| In Germany the AfD rose to around 10% after Merkel let in
| millions of refugees in 2015. It had nothing to do with
| Russia at all. It is currently polling around 18% because
| the economy is bad and people are tired of U.S.
| subservience and want Germany to make its own decisions.
|
| The concept that right wing parties are somehow beneficial
| to Russia in the long run is absurd to the extreme.
|
| In Ukraine, literally the Bandera supporters are the best
| fighters and the most anti-Russian. When in history has it
| ever been beneficial for a country to support nationalism
| in an enemy country. It does not make any sense.
|
| This whole thing is just a narrative of the forces who want
| to keep down "EU-first" movements.
| simion314 wrote:
| I disagree with your defense of Ruzzia
|
| 1 there is well known that social media and itnernet
| companies can target content for each person
|
| 2 we known from Cambridge analitica and similar that if
| social media company wants he can make a user depressed, sad
| etc
|
| 3 we also observer that irelevant bullshit is pushed very
| hard in social media, as an example transgender stuff, it is
| pushed so hard that my family thinks that Romania is in
| danger because of EU and their transgender agenda, children
| will be manipulated to change their gender, You can see how
| fake stuff about thois topic is pushed on social media, my
| family never had contact with transgender people, maybe they
| know one gay person in their entire live but LGBTQ is such an
| important topic in election that they might decide whot o
| vote based on this Ruzzian bullshit
|
| 4 we also seen same shit with COVID , yes the virus exists
| even if the pro Ruzzian candidates do not belives it or
| thinks God send him the naturalistic cure, based on how hard
| this conpiracies were pushed in last years you have
| conspirationist vote conspirationists, so if you want their
| vote you either lower yourselves to that level or try to
| fight Ruzzia and china to bring a bit of intelligence back.
|
| 5 anti emigration is a big push on social media, and fascists
| in Europe really push on this, but tell my, will italians or
| Spanish people in the city that studied at the university go
| and work in the farms, in the hot summer instead of the poor
| immigrants? Did you also seen how crimes are immediately
| blamed on the immigrants by the internet trolls before the
| identity of the criminals is known, and sometimes the
| criminal is a native, but the trolls pushed so hard on the
| fake news that it was immigrants that sometimes the
| immigrants were attacked based on fake news started by
| Ruzzians and belived by right wing less inteligent people.
|
| So in Romania the people that voted for the Kremlin guy ,
| voted him because they want a strong man that is anti
| transexuals and LGBTQ, anti minorities, that belives in the
| same conpirations and hate same groups as they hate all
| because Ruzzia trained them to hate those groups of people
| and believe those conspiracies.
|
| They did not vote because of economical policies the fascist
| guy proposed.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I did not defend Russia. Let's stop pretending that
| everything is perfect but the adversary found magic words
| that can show to people and sway their opinions.
| Influencing people is indeed possible and Russia definitely
| doing it but this tale about showing social media posts and
| making them vote the way they like is just a caricature.
|
| They are able to do it only because of the failure of the
| others to address the concerns of the electorate. Sure,
| they lie but they all lie. The Russian propaganda is very
| well crafted and does address the concerns that others
| don't want to touch. It's not a spell, it's not magic
| words, its not hypnosis.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| >>For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the
| environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are
| blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making
| the world better place better than they do?
|
| Because China Gives Two Shits about the environment. Them and
| their "developing country" tag. They will burn the coal until
| there is no more, along with India.
|
| Because China Gives No Shit about democracy, or human rights.
|
| China isn't shy to show force. The "west" is already at war
| with China but hasn't realized it. Heck, they still don't
| accept war with Rusia started over a decade ago
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the
| environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are
| blocking the Chinese electric cars?"
|
| This is talked about in many treasury departments. China
| supports some businesses an order of magnitude beyond the
| competition because they are a state/corp hybrid model and
| this allows those businesses to sell below material costs.
| This eventually destroys competition for future price raises
| and is a good long term strategy that only authoritarian
| countries can afford.
|
| Other Countries like in the EU are hesitant to let China
| destroy war machine production capability so they apply
| tariffs to right-size the actual cost.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Each of these are a result of neo-*ism constituencies
| failing. Dialectically, we've reached the point where the
| contradictions are so great they have become impossible to
| maintain. Each of these crises are a direct product of those
| contradictions. The only viable path forward is addressing
| these contradictions head on. Any attempt at doubling down on
| existing ideology will inflame the contradictions further.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > The west is in crisis, the ideology doesn't hold and the
| economy doesn't provide
|
| So democracy (the ideology) doesn't hold? And the US economy
| is currently the envy of the world - yes there's a big
| housing problem that needs addressing, but if anything the
| losing party was the one that put up some kind of plan to
| deal with it, I don't see the winning party reducing
| housing/rental costs as they're from the landlord class.
|
| > Can you tell me if US is about freedom and respect of the
| international law, borders and trande? If so why they support
| Ukraine against Russian invasion
|
| Because Ukraine was invaded by Russia thus impacting
| Ukrainian freedom and borders? It seems pretty obvious.
| ossobuco wrote:
| Isn't it democracy when a candidate gets more votes than the
| rest? The only way to undermine democracy is to reject the
| results of the elections.
|
| If propaganda from the "enemy" really is that effective, then
| either it's rooted in truth and resonates with the electors, or
| we have to admit that the general public is so easily
| influenceable that allowing them to vote is a danger for
| democracy, which means democracy isn't really worth much in the
| first place.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| No, this is about common rules for everyone. Campaign
| material had to be marked as such and campaign finances had
| to be declared. One candidate blatantly failed to do so and
| won the first round. The court took a bold decision.
| jdasdf wrote:
| Can you show me where the EU disclose its compaign
| financing for the romanian presidential election? They've
| certainly been putting the finger down in the scales far
| more than the russians
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The Romanian court had evidence of Russia putting the
| finger down and breaking the rules. You, on the other
| hand, are just accusing.
| jdasdf wrote:
| Oh? Is there some dispute that did EU called Tik Tok
| about these elections?
| https://apnews.com/article/romania-tiktok-elections-
| european...
|
| If Russia had called them in for not blocking or
| censoring pro-EU candidates would you not have called
| that election interference?
| cbg0 wrote:
| The EU don't have to disclose something like that, as
| Romania has a central authority that handles this stuff,
| as per the law:
|
| > The collection of electoral contributions and the
| payment of electoral expenses may be made only through
| bank accounts notified in advance to the Permanent
| Electoral Authority.
|
| The EU is not involved in directly financing candidates
| or political parties in Romania, they've already given us
| tens of billions of dollars to develop our country.
| jdasdf wrote:
| >The EU is not involved in directly financing candidates
| or political parties in Romania, they've already given us
| tens of billions of dollars to develop our country.
|
| Wow, seems like they're spent tens of billions of dollars
| in long term election interference campaigns. Are we
| going to see the politicians elected going to jail over
| it?
| cbg0 wrote:
| Your facetious comment doesn't really add anything to the
| conversation, this isn't Reddit.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Tens of billions of dollars of development funding, which
| Romania obviously wanted, given they went through the
| trouble of joining the EU, and then went through the
| trouble of getting hold of the EU cash and spending it.
|
| Not quite the same as external party spending huge
| amounts of cash running political campaigns, while
| ignoring all the local rules about campaigning. After all
| Romania didn't have to accept the EU cash, or spent it.
| The EU doesn't force countries to join, just so they can
| give them billions of euros in the hopes of interfering
| in a political process years later. A political process
| that's only important, because of the development
| funding. Much easier and cheaper to simpler not get
| involved, and allow those countries to struggle alone.
| jahewson wrote:
| That implies campaign material and finances are capable of
| swinging an election, surely that affirms the statement
| you're replying to? Namely:
|
| > the general public is so easily influenceable that
| allowing them to vote is a danger for democracy
|
| I hate to admit it but he's got a point. My counter would
| be that the recent US election was not won by the biggest
| spender.
| ben_w wrote:
| If campaign material was not capable of changing the
| minds of the electorate, nobody would waste time effort
| and money on it.
|
| Free speech is valuable and worth defending specifically
| because it has the potential to change minds, not just
| because people like the sounds of their own voices.
|
| (For the recent US election, people also point to Musk
| buying Twitter and getting his president of choice and
| saying this demonstrates why Musk is smart and $44bn was
| worth it, so are you sure it wasn't won by the biggest
| spenders?)
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| We're slowly getting towards this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
| kadabra9 wrote:
| Democracy is when the candidate the globalists want gets the
| most votes.
|
| If they dont, then you can claim "election interference" and
| misinformation and then call for a do over.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Who are these "globalists" and what does that word really
| mean for you? Because the wikipedia article is a doozy.
| ConspiracyFact wrote:
| The term doesn't have to be a dog whistle. The financial
| and corporate elite want open borders in order to
| maximize rent-seeking and depress wages.
| cbg0 wrote:
| But we already have open borders in the EU. If you're
| referring to allowing in migrants freely, that's deeply
| unpopular in Romania and no candidate is in support of
| it.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > The financial and corporate elite want open borders in
| order to maximize rent-seeking and depress wages.
|
| I want open borders so we can put a taco truck on every
| corner. Immigration is good.
| theultdev wrote:
| Open borders means open to illegal immigration.
|
| No one is arguing that immigration isn't good.
|
| You can have taco trucks with legal immigration.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > Open borders means open to illegal immigration.
|
| I know what it means ;)
|
| > No one is arguing that immigration isn't good.
|
| You'd be surprised how many people argue exactly that.
| But I digress, I was just making a poorly-timed joke.
| vasac wrote:
| No biggie, they'll have another chance to pick a correct one.
| And another if they don't choose wisely
| ben_w wrote:
| That is almost the definition of democracy -- when they
| stop getting additional chances, that's when it stops being
| a democracy.
| vasac wrote:
| "Almost" is doing heavy lifting there.
|
| Why would they need additional chances when they have
| already expressed what they want? Oh, they dared to vote
| for a candidate that doesn't suit the powers that be, so
| they'll vote again and again until they choose the
| preselected candidate.
| Eumenes wrote:
| The cold war communist boogie man hasn't gone away. Russia is
| apparently all power and has infinite reach into global
| elections, but at the same time, getting destroyed on the
| battlefield and about to lose the Ukraine conflict any moment
| now.
| ben_w wrote:
| Russia is well balanced against the aid everyone else is
| giving to Ukraine; it's a war of attrition, where both
| Ukraine and Russia are being worn down and nobody's quite
| sure which side will collapse first.
|
| Other than just being cheapskates, the west has a fear that
| {if Putin fears his regime may collapse, he may personally
| order the use of nukes}, and also that even if he doesn't
| and Russia does collapse then rogue actors may steal some
| of the nukes.
| Svoka wrote:
| building military is much much more expensive than paying
| influencers.
|
| Russian propaganda machine is incredibly strong, because
| it was perfected on their own citizens for basically
| century now. They spend billions on pure propaganda.
|
| While with military - they relied on propaganda as well.
| They projected power while not picking conflicts with
| anyone who can punch back.
|
| Ukraine appeared too big to swallow this time and
| everyone can see, that king is naked. Russian military is
| a sham compared to US. Like, incomparable to be honest.
| But problem is that propaganda is much stronger than
| military. So west made a mistake dismissing russia
| because of their weak corrupt military while being
| invaded by propaganda.
|
| West has nothing against russian propaganda machine and
| this is what thrtuthly terrifying to be honest.
| layer8 wrote:
| Many people _are_ easily influenceable, which is why there
| are rules around campaign funding and transparency. It
| doesn't mean that we have to give up on democracy (what would
| be the alternative?), it means that the rules have to be
| enforced.
| hagbarth wrote:
| > The only way to undermine democracy is to reject the
| results of the elections.
|
| Do you actually believe this? Voter suppression and
| intimidation tactics don't exist? Elections are always valid,
| no matter how they were facilitated?
| gtech1 wrote:
| Yep, you've stumbled upon a 'secret' fallacy that most know.
| People can be made to believe anything, or you can arrive at
| any conclusion you want from pretty much any premise. Not
| even in science is there consensus.
|
| What kept things in check so far has been that in the West,
| the elites have been benevolent. But now the masses, thx to
| social media and global comms, can be influenced by others.
|
| Welcome to our post truth planet.
| mns wrote:
| Because this is what happens when the country is ran by corrupt
| and/or incompetent politicians. I've seen what people are
| posting and commenting here, blaming everything on Russia, but
| this is exactly the same message that the far right uses when
| they blame everything on the EU.
|
| The thing is that when the 2 biggest parties in the country
| come to govern together, they have no opposition, they weakened
| out justice system, weakened the secret services to gain power
| and be able to do whatever they want, they allowed and ignored
| the rise of far-right parties thinking they would use them to
| scare people into still voting for them and now we're here.
|
| There was so much evidence that both this guy and the other 2
| extreme parties are doing a lot of crap and getting all kind of
| external support, but they just ignored them and hoped to use
| them, thinking they will never get above a certain level. You
| had vloggers and online people showing signs of all the fake
| accounts and crap that was being promoted and the authorities
| just pretended not to see anything. Then they banned one of the
| 3 heads of the far right side, and this just made things worse,
| because instead of letting the far right eat themselves up
| (because they are so insane, that they can't help but fight
| each other and fragment their share of the votes), they allowed
| this absolutely insane (in the worst way possible) charismatic
| guy gather even more votes.
|
| Now all of the sudden, after ignoring and pretending not to see
| anything, thinking that these far right candidates will help
| them, the establishment realized they messed up and now decide
| to take extreme measures and basically say that 9 milion votes
| don't matter. This won't end well...
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| A similar thing happened in Austria in 2016 where election
| results were cancelled due to campaign finances violations.
| mns wrote:
| Yeah, but here it's so obvious. The BEC (Central Electoral
| Bureau) should have checked constantly the campaign
| spending. They didn't do that, probably also not to upset
| the ruling parties that were doing their own financial
| "optimizations" for campaign spending, and completely
| ignored the fact that this guy that was doing influencer
| campaigns and was promoted all over TikTok was declaring
| nothing, so 0 spending. When you ask the institutions that
| are supposed to guard our country and democracy to close
| their eye so you can do whatever you want, you shouldn't
| act surprised when someone even more evil will take
| advantage of that.
| wumeow wrote:
| > Why is there barely any resistance to blatant attempts to
| undermine democracy?
|
| Because of normalcy bias[0] after the fall of the USSR. The
| West assumed that we'd all hold hands and walk together into
| the future but that was not the case.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
| protomolecule wrote:
| Yeah, right. Holding hands.
|
| Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a
| New Rival' [0]
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-
| penta...
| jaimsam wrote:
| You misspelled "hot war".
| byyll wrote:
| Ah, yes, we must protect democracy by... checks notes..
| canceling the democratic elections because we don't like the
| results.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Because we are afraid to call the war being a war, because our
| armies have gone to shit and the US won't back us.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Because just as much effort is spent by Russia to present the
| appearance of a broad variety of demographics all uniting to
| mock and make light of the very idea that Russia is spending
| great effort to undermine democracy and get their people in
| there.
|
| That's pretty fundamental. I've seen these efforts be real
| heavyhanded. It's almost more important to hide their tracks as
| it is to push 'vox populi' that appear to advocate for a
| political outcome. They really try very hard to not be
| publically associated in these things.
|
| What with various things out of TASS, MTG etc recently, I think
| they're trying to have it both ways, and both ride on general
| public skepticism of their role while also publically
| threatening those who are privy to their works.
| wyager wrote:
| "Undermining democracy" is when you win an election.
| "Protecting democracy" is when an unelected court unilaterally
| removes an elected candidate.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| In most locales, courts being unelected is _by design_. It 's
| how a system based on checks-and-balances is supposed to
| work.
| amaurose wrote:
| Because these attempts are mostly coming from the left, and the
| population has been indoctrinated to believe the left is
| automatically the good guys. That leads to some confusion, and
| to a lot of re-evaluation of old beliefs.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| Democracy: keep politicians who are failing the people and
| their countries economies in office because of the goodness of
| their hearts and the virtue of their stated values.
|
| If the people vote differently, cancel the result because
| that's not democracy. For definition of democracy, see above.
| mmooss wrote:
| Democracy has worked exceptionally well, relative to any
| other option, for generations. Far more free, prosperous, and
| safe and stable. The idea that it's somehow incompetent or
| incapable or uncertain is bizarre, on a factual basis.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| 'But Brawndo has what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!'
| '...Okay - what are electrolytes? Do you know? Yeah. It's
| what they use to make Brawndo.' 'But why do they use them
| in Brawndo? What do they do?' 'They're part of what plants
| crave. 'But why do plants crave them? 'Because plants crave
| Brawndo, and Brawndo has electrolytes.'
|
| Also: you forgot to disagree with my definition of
| democracy and basically said "yeah, but this hypocrisy
| works"? So if the only valid vote is for "the right
| people", why bother with voting at all? Just put them in
| charge and be done. That would still be democracy, right?
| cbg0 wrote:
| Do you have a different solution than democracy? We've
| already tried communism in Romania for like 45 years and it
| was garbage.
|
| For the parliament election that happened last week, the
| winning parties of parliament were the establishment parties.
| They did lose some support compared to 4 years ago, so
| democracy is definitely working, but they still have
| reasonable backing by the people.
| elorant wrote:
| So when Russia interferes with our politics it's cold war, but
| when CIA does it's just another day?
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| Europe has made it's own bed and now it has to lie in it.
|
| Why is the far right rising on the old continent? Is it
| because:
|
| A: everybody is stupid B: people realize that the mainstream
| media has been feeding them propaganda for the last 30 years
| and decided that they want change.
|
| You can't keep ignoring a part of the population and then claim
| that they are not voting properly. At some point some kind of
| reckoning is inevitable.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Options A and B are definitely not the reason why far right
| is on the rise in my opinion. It boils down to more basic
| things, like a healthy economy, immigration, health care,
| rising cost of living, and various country specific issues.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >It feels like Europe is asleep at the wheel
|
| Obviously not, because a European court literally just
| overturned the results of a democratic election due to foreign
| influence on the voting population.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Because only the French know how to deal with their government.
| metalman wrote:
| this looks like a, korean scale:), miscalculation and about to be
| corrected, korean style, and for the "court" involved, they
| better hope its south rather than northern methods
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I see many comments signaling the facts are not known and the
| situation confusing. Here is a summary:
|
| In the election, a previously unknown candidate had a massive
| TikTok campaign and got the first place, qualifying for a second
| round. The campaign funds were not declared, it looks to be
| funded by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems
| quite credible.
|
| A recount was decided and performed, no change in results. So the
| Constitutional Court, highly politically biased (appointed by the
| parties that lost), decided to annul the result and do it again.
|
| That guy was democratically elected. This is showing how fragile
| the entire idea of democracy is, people elected a really bad guy,
| but they voted for him by the millions. Practically democracy was
| trolled big time. The guy has no chance to win the finals, every
| other candidate's voters will vote against him, it's just
| trolling.
| sebastianz wrote:
| > The campaign funds were not declared, it looks to be funded
| by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems quite
| credible.
|
| Because of what you wrote in this sentence, he was not
| democratically elected according to the laws of the country. He
| was elected through a tiktok campaign funded by foreign (dirty)
| undeclared money.
| starik36 wrote:
| There has to be more to it than that. I seriously doubt that
| the entire country of Romania is sitting on TikTok, and was so
| easily swayed.
|
| Also, when I hear "looks to be funded by Russians and Chinese,
| no proof so far but it seems quite credible". Sure, anything is
| possible. But how can it be credible, if no proof so far, as
| you say.
|
| I am no expert on anything Romanian, but my skeptical bells are
| going off when I hear this.
| sgm_ro wrote:
| He'd have had a chance if not for the "$0 campaign" publicity
| stunt, and the hidden trail of money coming from very
| suspicious places. Who is supposed to believe that he invested
| nothing, and got top position in the first round, while having
| absolutely nothing to do with the "benefactors". That and it
| seems tik tok favoured him, beyond the advantage of comment
| spam. And none of the content was labeled with the campaign id
| according to the law. If he spent at least a decent amount of
| money for the campaign, $100.000 or whatever, he'd have a
| better chance at plausibly denying the connection with the tik
| tok amplifier people, who in truth, could very well be just
| "fans", like Elon Musk was for Trump. And there's also the Iron
| Guard connections all over the place, that pretty much make you
| incompatible with the function, same reason the other candidate
| got removed from the list. So the decision isn't really
| undemocratic, although the moment it was given in was probably
| not quite legal/right, should have been done after the second
| round, but that would have caused more uproar and give him more
| legitimacy if he had won, and the odds are that he would have,
| so that's why they decided to cut it early, to minimise damage.
| cbg0 wrote:
| There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the
| candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the
| election". I'm Romanian and I'll provide some more details on
| this:
|
| The country has been a powder keg ever since the results of first
| round of the presidential elections, with Calin Georgescu coming
| out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling
| showing him below 5%.
|
| The candidates need to report spending to a state organization
| overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing
| on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been
| flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is
| against the law.
|
| There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward
| claiming to have received payments through a third party company
| to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is
| that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral
| ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.
|
| With TikTok being owned by China and their imminent ban looming
| in the US, there is strong suspicion that state actors are behind
| this, pushing Calin Georgescu through the algorithm, though this
| is tricky to prove.
|
| This is not a strong grass-roots movement supporting this guy, it
| was a targeted effort of massive network of bots spamming his
| name & tiktok page on random videos on Romanian tiktok videos to
| push his popularity (this comes from the Romanian equivalent of
| CIA & other security structures). Tiktok themselves when asked to
| comment have investigated themselves and found nothing wrong,
| though they do agree that there are bots on their network and
| they've removed millions of fake likes & followers in Romania.
|
| In a video posted this summer, Calin Georgescu expressed anti-
| NATO sentiment which he recanted after winning the first round of
| the elections. He has also previously declared that we could do
| with some "russian wisdom" and he's a big fan of the Iron Guard
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard), which killed a bunch
| of political figures in Romania during their time. This
| organization as well as other fascist groups are illegal in
| Romania.
|
| Candidates have to declare their assets as part of transparency
| and it seems Calin Georgescu has not declared all of his assets,
| which is illegal. There's also suspicions about money laundering,
| with a house he bought for 250K in 2006 and sold for 1M in 2011
| which is unusual. This is somewhat besides the current
| discussion, just adding some context that this guy is not exactly
| squeaky clean.
|
| A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme
| Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous
| administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution
| with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous
| decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and
| national security. This is right now in the first stages with no
| single person being put under indictment.
| ImJamal wrote:
| > he candidates need to report spending to a state organization
| overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent
| nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there
| have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social
| media. This is against the law
|
| Does Romania have the equivalent of US PACs? In the US an
| organization not related to the campaign/party can receive
| donations and make flyers, ads, etc.
| redleader55 wrote:
| No, this is not a thing in Romania.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Not really, and all the money needs to be declared anyway.
| I'll give you an excerpt of relevant law text, some stuff
| removed as there's a lot of fluff:
|
| Election campaign expenses shall comply with the following
| conditions: a) come solely from contributions by candidates
| or political parties; b) they shall be incurred only with the
| prior approval of the competent financial trustee; c) they
| must fall within the limits provided for by this law; d) to
| be made by electoral competitors only for the promotion of
| their candidates and electoral programs. (2) The collection
| of electoral contributions and the payment of electoral
| expenses may be made only through bank accounts notified in
| advance to the Permanent Electoral Authority. [...] (11)
| Candidates' contributions for their own election campaign or
| that of the political party that nominated them may come only
| from donations received by candidates from individuals, from
| their own income or from loans taken by them from individuals
| or credit institutions. [...]
|
| In the event of the commission of an offense provided for by
| this Law, in violation of this Article, the sums of money
| related to the electoral expenses incurred in violation of
| this Article shall be confiscated and paid into the state
| budget
|
| The financing of the electoral campaign, directly or
| indirectly, by natural persons who are not Romanian citizens
| or by legal entities of a nationality other than Romanian, is
| prohibited, with the exception of financing by citizens of
| Member States of the European Union who are domiciled in
| Romania and are members of the political party to whose
| electoral campaign they are making a financial contribution.
|
| Translated with DeepL.com
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Thank you for doing the research. There seems to be an
| awful lot of people that just can't get the fact that other
| countries can have different laws. ...and that the EU has
| many different countries, too.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| This is not a thing in most of the developed world.
| tensor wrote:
| PACs are one of the biggest problems with the US system.
| Thank god most democracies outlaw them.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| What if a rich supporter prints flyers and buys ads without
| telling the candidate? If that automatically disqualifies a
| candidate, his enemies have a strong incentive to do the same.
| cbg0 wrote:
| It's possible but spending has to be reported to the
| electoral authority, which it wasn't.
| jdasdf wrote:
| If i spend money on all the other candidates and don't
| declare it, will they get disqualified? Or is this a rule
| that only gets applied when the wrong person wins=?
| cbg0 wrote:
| You would be in legal trouble for breaking electoral law.
| Based on what happened today, if there is proof that the
| electoral process was tainted, the elections can be
| annulled by the constitutional court.
| jdasdf wrote:
| >You would be in legal trouble for breaking electoral
| law. Based on what happened today, if there is proof that
| the electoral process was tainted, the elections can be
| annulled by the constitutional court.
|
| So, your stance is that any foreign nation can disqualify
| any candidate they like by running a few ads for them?
|
| Think seriously about what you're saying.
| cbg0 wrote:
| This is not a "stance", I'm mostly talking about the law,
| and that's something that judges decide on, not myself.
|
| Foreign nations are not allowed to be involved in the
| electoral process in Romania by law and could lead to the
| annulment of the electoral process, which is what
| happened. The process will start again from scratch,
| nobody was disqualified.
| username332211 wrote:
| Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
| tensor wrote:
| Yes. That's how it is in North America too. "A few ads"
| probably no, but if it's enough to be significant then
| yes.
| ccozan wrote:
| look, the law requires this declaration of funding. There
| is a constitional article in which the elections must be
| correct. By doing this, there is an unfair situation and
| the corectness of the elections is no longer guaranteed.
| Also, there is no natural growth of a candidate from 5%
| to 22% in two weeks. It was a massive attack on the
| people minds with very well crafted messages, practically
| saying what the people want to hear. This is no work of a
| person, it points out to a state actor with such vast
| resources.
| culi wrote:
| Yeah but the consequences would be for that rich person,
| wouldn't it? Not the candidate themselves
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| So any third party can spend a bunch of money without the
| knowledge of the candidate that they purport to support,
| purposefully not report it, and then that candidate can be
| disqualified?
|
| If that's how the system works, it incentivizes abuse.
| cbg0 wrote:
| No, you would still be on the hook for breaking electoral
| law by not reporting spending, even as a private
| individual not part of the election. This wouldn't be
| relevant for making a few flyers as the law won't come
| after you for that, but spending hundreds of thousands on
| tiktok bots will definitely cause a stir.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Right, so what about if I don't like a candidate and I
| intentionally pump 1 million euro into her campaign so
| she gets disqualified? This is what the parent is asking
| about.
| cbg0 wrote:
| I don't have a clear answer on that for you, but nobody
| was disqualified in this situation as the election was
| annulled and will restart from scratch.
|
| This hypothetical situation though is a bit unlikely, as
| we're talking about quite a lot of money to pump into
| someone's campaign and anyone doing this will still be
| subject to attempting to manipulate the electoral process
| if they do not abide by the law, which could land them in
| jail and lead to an annulment of the electoral process.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Sure, but right now we're talking about a situation in
| which quite a lot of money has been pumped into someone's
| campaign! This situation is proof that people are willing
| to interfere in the election. The problem is that once
| you introduce the idea that the election can be
| "annulled" a bunch of people are going to be motivated to
| hack the election to get it "annulled" in some way.
| sebastianz wrote:
| > a bunch of people are going to be motivated to hack the
| election to get it "annulled" in some way.
|
| There will be trials for this, and both the people who
| bought the ads (if they can be found), but more
| importantly the media publishers who pocketed the
| millions will have to answer questions to prove this was
| legal.
|
| You can't unilaterally "pump some millions" to buy some
| electoral ads. Someone pocketed some millions and will
| need to show receipts.
| chupy wrote:
| As you well know since you are Romanian there are not
| many cases of people tried and in jail in Romania for
| corruption. Now take a state actor and imagine that they
| are responsible. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend
| there will be repercussions for this mess except - if
| possible - make people trust even less the 'system'.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Not many cases? There are _many_ people tried and jailed
| for corruption, including previous mayors, senators,
| ministers, more than one prime minister even. Of the many
| possible critiques of Romania, not jailing corrupt
| politicians is among the weaker ones.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >and lead to an annulment of the electoral process
|
| That would be the goal.
| dh2022 wrote:
| "but nobody was disqualified in this situation as the
| election was annulled and will restart from scratch" -
| how is this logical?
|
| Nothing will change from the annulled election to the new
| election (candidates will not be invalidated, TikTok will
| still be there). So if the annulled election was invalid
| on whatever criteria, the new election would also be
| invalid on the same criteria...
| xuhu wrote:
| Perfectly fine, as long as the supporter and candidate are
| not part of the same well known group of interest.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| > There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as
| "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the
| election".
|
| I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN too.
|
| (I am also curious whether Dang et al. use any relevant
| monitoring tools.)
| Applejinx wrote:
| Don't know about the latter, but I notice your question seems
| mighty grey... I'd be shocked if HN, of all places, was
| exempt from internet meddling. It seems to me to be fruitful
| ground for manipulation, and for years now I've seen an
| interesting 'double face' of Hacker News: on the one hand,
| inclined towards techno-optimism, but on the other hand, the
| pressure to manipulate viewpoints seems nearly Reddit-like in
| its focus and determination. It's a bit like Fight Club: the
| first rule of downvoting suggestions of interference is that
| you must downvote any suggestion of coordinated interference
| even before you use voting to push any other desired purpose.
|
| I think this is salient to the question and to the fact that
| it's a discussion on the subject of interference causing a
| Romanian court to annul the results of an election, but I'll
| accept correction if my observations are out of line even in
| this conversation :)
| bamboozled wrote:
| At this point, assume it's everywhere. Russia has declared
| war on the west, random sabotage attacks, election
| interference, information campaigns etc.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| HN is full of all kinds of fun influence, and Dang swears it
| doesn't exist.
|
| Are you aware that every HN user account associated with a
| YCombinator company is visible as an orange username to every
| other HN account associated with a YCombinator company? They
| sell this as a "Perk". It's a secret club.
| lukan wrote:
| "and Dang swears it doesn't exist."
|
| Citation needed. I am aware of statements, that influence
| campaigns are not as elaborated, as you would expect. Not
| that it does not exist.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| It certainly has a strong Randian influence, despite that
| particular ideological leaning being beneficial only to a
| tiny fraction of the population. That could be indicative of
| tech culture in general though and not necessarily outside
| influence.
|
| TBH I'd be surprised if any high-traffic public forum isn't
| heavily influenced by foreign or ruling-class interests at
| this point.
| oblio wrote:
| Libertarianism is rampant here but it's due to
| demographics: geeks, (actual or wannabe) entrepreneurs,
| skewing young and male.
|
| It kinda comes with the territory :-)
| tim333 wrote:
| Bound to be some - I was debating a pro Russian guy a couple
| of days ago. But there doesn't seem to be an organised
| campaign as such as far as I can tell.
| hollerith wrote:
| >I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN
|
| What exactly is the worry? Undeserved downvotes?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN too.
|
| Yes, and it's very easy to identify. People who make comments
| that go against Western or NATO policy, or make comments that
| question Western or NATO policy in any way are usually bots
| who have been bribed by Russia to sow disinformation, or many
| times it is Russian Red Army generals and lieutenants
| themselves who post those comments here on the Hacker News
| forum.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| I appreciate the details, but ultimately I still don't buy it.
| The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for
| themselves. Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-
| actor campaign. But they still have agency, they liked what
| they were being presented with, and made the final call
| themselves on who to vote for.
| cbg0 wrote:
| That's not what's being disputed and I completely agree with
| your sentiment. The issue is that electoral campaign law was
| not respected and thus the elections were not considered
| "free and fair", but tainted by this shady candidate.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| I feel this is kind of stretching the phrase "free and
| fair". The election e.g. in Venezuela earlier this year was
| not "free and fair" because the votes simply weren't
| counted and made-up tallies were published. This is not
| what's happening here. Here, there is no doubt that people
| wanted to vote a certain way and the votes were accurately
| counted to reflect that.
| tremon wrote:
| You don't get to use your own definition of the phrase
| "free and fair" here. Romanian law prescribes that
| political campaigns need to be transparent in source and
| funding. They weren't, as per the Romanian court. End of
| discussion.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Yes, I do.
|
| By your argument if a country (e.g. China?) outlaws
| competing political parties then the rubber-stamp single-
| party elections are "free and fair" because they are in
| accordance with law. In general the whole point of a
| "free and fair" election is that the government can't
| just change the law and rules to get the result it wants.
| There is an independent notion of "free and fair"
| election that is rightly independent of country specific
| law.
| tensor wrote:
| No. There is not. Canada also has campaign spending rules
| because most civilized nations recognize that equal
| speaking time is required for a fair election. Otherwise
| you can't consider the people to be well informed.
|
| There is no "independent notion of a free and fair
| election". Personally I think your idea of a fair
| election is highly unfair and unethical.
| xuhu wrote:
| Just like the umpire at the tennis match can grant
| victory to player X, and then take their title away when
| the doping tests come back.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| His electoral campaign posts weren't marked as electoral
| material. As a voter I thought they are not paid but true
| opinions of journalists/ influencers that I respect. It
| turns out that they were actually paid and not marked
| properly. So he broke the rules. Now I am going to change
| my vote.
| dlt713705 wrote:
| So, you agree with the opinion stated in electoral
| material if it is marked as official campaign material
| but disagree with the same opinion if it is marked as
| paid marketing material?
|
| I would like to quote Spock here: "Fascinating..."
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I'd argue that if you accept that the results were "likely
| influenced by a likely state-actor campaign" then the means
| by which they achieved their objective are not above
| scrutiny. Elections are a mean for obtaining as fair (that
| is, unbiased) a measure as possible of the "true" will of the
| people, and yet we're starting from "yes, the sample has been
| altered maliciously, but...".
|
| There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws
| designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the
| candidate apparently broke. If the courts throw their hands
| in the air and say "whelp, what can you do?" they would be
| setting the precedence that foreign election interference is
| only wrong when you lose.
|
| Of course, the analysis rests on fair authorities trying to
| do good which is a high bar to clear. But letting a cheater
| get away with it in plain sight doesn't seem fair either.
| mihaichiorean wrote:
| I agree. he can be prosecuted for not reporting his spending
| probably, but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake
| ballots it doesn't warrant cancelling the election. the
| authorities should put a stop to the interference, and if the
| interference to influence was his advantage, the 2nd round,
| without interference, would have him lose. Just let the
| people vote.
|
| I still believe that the main "problem" was that the front
| runner party that has been in the 2nd round for 10s of years
| and which has the prime minister as the candidate, didn't
| make it to the 2nd round. Someone wanted this fixed.
| Obviously the prime minister who was 3rd in the 1st round
| made declarations in support of the ruling.
| lukan wrote:
| "but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake ballots it
| doesn't warrant cancelling the election."
|
| Why do you think you can decide for romanians? They made
| their voting laws - he violated them. They sort it out.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad
| this guy was. On the political front, on the science front,
| on the logical consistency front.
|
| After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to
| vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's
| sleep.
|
| Someone should document the amount of absolute insanity that
| the candidate was and maybe then you'd get it. I just feel
| relief at this point.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how
| bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science
| front, on the logical consistency front.
|
| We're in the same place in the US.
|
| > After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people
| not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good
| night's sleep.
|
| How many of us felt after the US election.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I never thought I would say this, but this guy was,
| honestly, way way worse than Trump. Not to diminish your
| torture. But it was off the charts insane. Like... A
| compendium of conspiratorial beliefs.
| Terr_ wrote:
| In a broader sense, the exhaustive storm of BS is
| deliberate: When the people are too damn _tired_ to care
| about which story is really true, it changes the playing
| field to favor whoever is willing to tell the most-pleasing
| lies.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| That is classic Russian disinformation isn't it? Fill
| every channel with contradictory information, until no-
| one knows what to believe.
| gretch wrote:
| Under this framework, what if you simply bribed people to
| vote for your candidate of choice: e.g. Here's 20 euro, vote
| for this guy.
|
| You could still say "The people who voted for this guy have
| agency and decided for themselves."
|
| But this doesn't really pass a smell test for what we want
| democracy to look like.
|
| Similarly, if you live in a country and you see billions of
| dollars poured into your election advertisements from USA,
| Russia, China, etc, you'd be like "wtf are we even
| sovereign?"
| miohtama wrote:
| That's why there is voting secrecy. You can pay someone 20
| euros but they vote someone else.
| tomp wrote:
| _> he 's a big fan of the Iron Guard_
|
| This is quite typical character assassination, and it's sad
| that people still fall for it.
|
| I looked up how he's _actually_ associated with the Iron Guard,
| and it looks like he literally said that they _' also did "good
| deeds"'_ [1]. This is literally on the level of "fine people"
| hoax that the mainstream media perpetrated against Trump!
|
| Why do I think that Calin's right that "far right" also "did
| good deeds"? Because the same thing literally happened in my
| country, Slovenia.
|
| Look, WWII was a shitty time. War, and it wasn't necessarily a
| fight of "good versus evil". In Slovenia, there were
| "partisans" who were communists, fighting against Hitler's
| occupation. Of course, having seen the evils of communism, a
| lot of Slovenians (farmers, city businessmen) opposed
| communists (and they were right, from a historic perspective!).
| They formed the "white guard". Unfortunately, Americans allied
| with _partisans_ (communists), so the _white guard_ allied with
| Nazis.
|
| Communists won, and wrote history. _White guard_ is almost
| uniformly - in media, education etc. - known as the bad guys,
| traitors to the nation, etc. where in fact they were simply
| people fighting for their lives against communists (rightfully
| so, communists killed a lot of wealthy owners etc. after the
| war). Fortunately, the WWII and the aftermath is literally _in
| living memory_ , so if you talk to the right people, you learn
| about it...
|
| Looking back, I wish the "Nazi-collaborators" White Guard won.
| Hitler would have lost regardless, but then maybe Slovenia
| wouldn't be subjected to another 40 years of totalitarianism
| and repression by the communists...
|
| [1] https://balkaninsight.com/2022/02/01/romanian-nationalist-
| le...
| cbg0 wrote:
| This isn't character assassination, we're talking about his
| own words. He even plagiarized a speech by Ion Antonescu
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu):
|
| https://www.euronews.ro/articole/calin-georgescu-se-
| dezice-d... - he goes back on some of the things he said and
| tries to distance himself, but the Internet is forever.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > I looked up how he's actually associated with the Iron
| Guard, and it looks like he literally said that they 'also
| did "good deeds"' [1]. This is literally on the level of
| "fine people" hoax that the mainstream media perpetrated
| against Trump!
|
| What hoax?
|
| https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-
| trump...
| TMWNN wrote:
| The hoax was and is that Trump called white supremacists
| "very fine people". As the transcript shows, that remark
| was specifically in regards to people disagreeing with the
| notion of removing statues of slaveholders and
| Confederates. Trump went on to say
|
| >And you had people -- and I'm not talking about the neo-
| Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be
| condemned totally
| lukan wrote:
| "Communists won, and wrote history."
|
| Not in the west, so you can look up what actually happened.
|
| "Americans allied with partisans (communists), so the white
| guard allied with Nazis."
|
| This for example would be news to me from a parallel
| universe. Or from the wiki of alternative facts.
| tomp wrote:
| Did you try searching online? https://www.quora.com/Did-
| the-Allies-ever-help-Josip-Broz-Ti...
|
| actually, you can even read about it on wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-
| Yugoslavia_relat...
| lukan wrote:
| Did you read the part, why the allied rather supported
| their ideological enemies, than the iron guard? What I
| understood, they aligned with the Nazis quite naturally.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Never thought I would see someone defend Iron Guard on here.
|
| One thing you see these days in Romanian But Written In
| English twitter these days is defense of the good character
| of Corneliu Codreanu.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corneliu_Zelea_Codreanu
|
| He led one of the WW2 Fascist anti Communist groups that were
| so committed to Nazi ideals, that the actual Nazis asked them
| to tone it down a bit because they were making them look bad.
| wyager wrote:
| > this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election
| campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with
| his face on them, plus ads on social media
|
| Anyone can buy ads and flyers.
|
| If your rejoinder is "It's against the law to buy ads for a
| candidate if you're not officially part of the campaign" - who
| cares? Nothing is stopping e.g. me from buying tiktok ads in
| elections (domestic or foreign).
| cbg0 wrote:
| > Nothing is stopping e.g. me from buying tiktok ads in
| elections (domestic or foreign).
|
| Yes, and that's a big part of the problem, which is why
| tiktok is also under fire in this whole situation.
| morkalork wrote:
| Depending on where you do that, yes, you are breaking local
| laws. Not every where like America sees money equating to
| speech.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| You would be breaking Romanian law if you did that, which you
| may or may not care about of course.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The part that I don't buy is that this is the way that campaign
| finance violations would ordinarily be handled. Would an
| election that was won by one of the mainstream parties be
| completely overturned and rerun if it were found that they
| violated some campaign procedure laws? I doubt it.
| cbg0 wrote:
| This isn't a few forgotten expenditures, this is a candidate
| which reported no spending on their campaign and which
| allegedly had support from a foreign state. You can get away
| with some things, but we're not just talking about a
| technicality.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first
| round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.
|
| Harris +3 in IOWA was not an oopsie accident. Now you get to
| learn that your media runs your polls and they'll say whatever
| they need to, too.
| TMWNN wrote:
| You mean Harris +3 in Iowa.
|
| But yes, I agree that a 17-point miss by "the gold standard
| of Iowa polling" is almost inexplicable unless it was done as
| a last-minute act to persuade marginal voters to vote for
| Harris. (Selzer herself says that she thinks the poll's
| result motivated Trump voters, the preposterousness of which
| is all the more indication that she intentionally skewed the
| result.)
| permo-w wrote:
| am I understanding correctly that you're suggesting that an
| Iowa poll was artificially made to favour Harris in order
| to get more people to vote for her?
| TMWNN wrote:
| Yes. People naturally like to vote for winners, and those
| who look like winners.
|
| There was * _massive*_ news coverage of the Selzer poll
| 's surprising result, with accompanying breathless
| commentary discussing how this was proof that hordes of
| Republican women were indeed secretly[1] voting for
| Kamala. Cue the tens of thousands of Redditards' comments
| on how Harris would surely win not just Iowa but Texas,
| Florida, Ohio, etc.
|
| Governor Pritzker of Illinois told an audience at Duke of
| the poll before its release. In other words, it was
| leaked to those who would be pleased by the findings.
| <https://www.semafor.com/article/11/10/2024/gannett-
| probes-po...>
|
| [1] For example, the Julia Roberts-starring TV ad
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCPck2qDhk> showing how
| women could and should secretly vote for Harris and not
| tell their horrible husbands.
|
| (Beware; the cringe level is so overwhelming that if your
| brain doesn't shut down in self-defense your computer
| might explode. There is a reason why the ad is not linked
| directly _anywhere_ on Reddit except a handful of posts
| with a half dozen comments. If Redditors saw it as truly
| "stunning" and "brave", it would have been reposted 100
| times, each time with 20K upvotes and 3.5K comments.)
| cbg0 wrote:
| We're not talking about an established candidate with pre-
| existing support, and this was just the first leg of the
| election with multiple presidential candidates, not the run-
| off, so don't compare this to Trump v Kamala.
|
| I'm also not talking about a single poll, or ones run by just
| the left/right, he wasn't polling well anywhere.
| oblio wrote:
| This is different. He was basically unknown, last visible in
| politics in 1996 or so. He isn't a member of any big party
| and by that I don't mean just the mainstream ones, but like,
| the top 10 parties in the country.
|
| He's a nobody.
| miohtama wrote:
| As far as I undertand that there is no voting fraud involved.
| It tells a bit about the establishment candidates if you can
| become a president by buying TikTok likes with 1M EUR. Someone
| has a time to take a look at a mirror.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Romania needs some more American political thought leadership.
| Such an neglected area.
| netbioserror wrote:
| The imperial psychosis of the American liberal seems to be the
| waters in which we swim. It's no wonder populism is winning.
| The blind are at the wheel.
| indigoabstract wrote:
| I am reminded of the commotion over this way back in 2016:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
|
| They said Trump won with Russia's help.
|
| I wonder, are voters so easily manipulated that some other
| (hostile) country can make them vote like sheep?
|
| And should people in the state administration (who are appointed,
| not elected) have the power to cancel valid election results
| because of suspected foreign interference?
|
| What if they make a mistake? Will they ever be held responsible
| for it?
| Applejinx wrote:
| 'easily' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. As an American
| who maintains multiple friendships all over the political map
| due to significant nonpolitical shared interests, I've got more
| perspective on that commotion.
|
| While it's true Trump won with Russia's help both times, it
| took an extraordinary effort with extraordinary results,
| patterned after internal Russian political manipulation (so
| it's not like it was just made up haphazardly). It required
| attentive siloing of Americans into camps isolated from each
| others' worldviews and the concealment of what the other camp
| was seeing. This is not remotely 'easy manipulation', it's
| lengthy hard work requiring great effort and attention, toward
| a goal of confusing both sides against each other, and
| eventually removing the very concept of reality.
|
| Sounds impossible, but it works... at least to the extent of
| getting results, and tearing apart a country. That's why 'civil
| war' is constantly invoked by these forces: you can't do
| anything constructive this way but the goal is to spur internal
| conflict.
|
| That's why it's relevant that it's foreign interference: the
| interferer isn't hobbled by a need to survive in the resulting
| damaged country. They can do whatever they want, because
| they're doing it to an enemy.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Also part of the reason the interference is so succesful is
| that America ISN'T some magical wonderland and people in the
| US know that, so they are inherently sympathetic to any
| message that says something bad about the current
| administration. It's a lot easier to have a strong effect in
| a very muddled situation than say, if it was 1944 and
| Americans were strongly united.
|
| America is having pains. It's easier to stoke that fire than
| light one anew.
| indigoabstract wrote:
| I understand that concern. Ideally, internal politics should
| remain internal, without outside interference.
|
| But when it gets to a point where a country's administration
| (the long term one, not the 4 year one) doesn't trust its
| citizens to make the correct and informed choice and be loyal
| to their own country and interests and actively tries to
| meddle with the results, then the name is all that's left of
| that democracy.
|
| Might as well start putting "People's" or "Democratic" before
| that country's name. Like in DPRK or PRC. At least they're
| being honest about it.
| tim333 wrote:
| Trump did win and Russia did help, at least as far as hacking
| the Democratic party emails.
|
| I guess overturning things depends on the laws of the
| countries. Obviously it didn't happen in that case.
| ossobuco wrote:
| So no evidence to show, except a "declassified document"
| allegedly proving that TikTok gave preferential treatment to
| Georgescu.
|
| I'd be curious to know what preferential treatment means, how
| preferential, and how it balances out if we include treatment of
| all candidates across all media, but alas, that is not for us to
| know. Even Georgescu's opponent, Elena Lasconi, condemned the
| court's ruling as "illegal" and "immoral".
|
| This just looks like a soft coup to me.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The documents explain clearly that thousands of sleeper
| accounts were activated days before the election and shared and
| promoted campaign material that was not marked as such in a
| highly coordinated way that suggests a state actor.
| ossobuco wrote:
| So what is the problem here, that a state actor tried to
| influence the elections? Then why aren't we talking about the
| influence of NATO&co as well? Because that can be found
| everywhere, starting from google search results. Search
| "elena lasconi campaign donors" on google, you'll get
| exclusively results about "far right kremlin backed election
| interference". Repeat the search on yandex.ru and you'll get
| actual results about Elena Lasconi.
|
| The problem isn't really a state actor here; it's that people
| didn't vote the right way(tm).
|
| As to the effect a last minute campaign on TikTok can have on
| the elections, I wonder can you really sway 9 milions of
| votes in a few days on a platform that basically nobody over
| 30 years old uses? That must have been some incredibly good
| propaganda!
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| It was only ~2 million votes, as it was a first round with
| 10+ candidates.
|
| I disagree it was about voting the right way, it was about
| campaign law violation.
| cbg0 wrote:
| > Then why aren't we talking about the influence of NATO&co
| as well? Because that can be found everywhere, starting
| from google search results. Search "elena lasconi campaign
| donors" on google, you'll get exclusively results about
| "far right kremlin backed election interference". Repeat
| the search on yandex.ru and you'll get actual results about
| Elena Lasconi.
|
| NATO is a defensive military alliance. Has there been any
| proof that they're manipulating search results or social
| media sites?
|
| Also, regarding your Google search: the reason why you're
| getting poor results is because you're searching in English
| for a subject predominantly connected to romanian language
| sites.
| ossobuco wrote:
| > NATO is a defensive military alliance. Has there been
| any proof that they're manipulating search results or
| social media sites?
|
| Plenty, if you accept the possibility[0]. The US army is
| openly recruiting for PSYOPs[1]
|
| - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63731751
|
| - https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-
| careers/sp...
|
| > the reason why you're getting poor results is because
| you're searching in English for a subject predominantly
| connected to romanian language sites.
|
| Easily disproven by repeating the search in Romanian.
| Again, on google I get mostly results about Kremlin
| foreign election interference, while on yandex I only get
| relevant results. I tried several combinations of
| keywords.
| exe34 wrote:
| how about filing your expenses according to the law?
| culi wrote:
| This happens all the time on major social media sites
| including reddit (in fact, it's quite easy for anybody to buy
| a reddit account with high karma). In the Depp vs Heard case
| that swept the internet it was found that both sides heavily
| used online bots to influence online dialog (tho Depp was
| better funded and obviously more successful)
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| When your astroturfing is targeted at an election, and you
| get caught, the election can be annulled to ensure its
| integrity. What's the problem here, exactly?
| ossobuco wrote:
| The problem is simple, either that astroturfing is so
| effective because it's rooted in truth and resonates with
| the issues the electors are concerned with, or electors
| are so easily influenceable that we can't have democracy
| without giving up free speech. Pick one.
| sebastianz wrote:
| There are electoral laws that state how political
| advertising can be done, and how it can be funded for an
| election campaign.
|
| Social media companies have to adhere to these laws - for
| example to say when something is an "Ad" paid by someone
| for the benefit of the candidate.
|
| In this case, apparently although TikTok was notified
| that a bot network controlled and paid for by nobody-
| knows-who was spamming election ads (untagged as such),
| and they ignored everything.
|
| This is all illegal.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Nothing this dude said is rooted in truth. It's just
| we're so stupid we'd turn out country into a dictatorship
| for nothing.
|
| There are real grievances, no doubt, but this guy was so
| full of hot air there is no reasonable explanation for
| buying into him except us being irreparably dumb.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > we can't have democracy without giving up free speech
|
| Social media does not equal free speech. It's clear by
| now that giving everyone "equal standing" in the ability
| to reach millions is a recipe for disaster, manipulation,
| hysteria, amplification of extremism, mental health
| decline, and on and on...
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I take it you voted for Meloni?
| ossobuco wrote:
| Do you take it that Elena Lasconi voted for Meloni as well?
| Because she's stated that the court ruling is "illegal" and
| "immoral".
| scythe wrote:
| >Even Georgescu's opponent, Elena Lasconi, condemned the
| court's ruling as "illegal" and "immoral".
|
| This seems like pretty important information as an observer
| with little knowledge of Romania's inner workings.
| culi wrote:
| Elena Lasconi would be highly favored to win in a 1v1. Also
| keep in mind that both of these candidates are rightwing.
| Also keep in mind that the leading candidate only got 22.94%
| of the vote while Lasconi only got 19.18%
|
| If they do a redo and a center, liberal, or leftwing
| candidate makes it to the second round, Lasconi would have a
| much more challenging battle
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >Elena Lasconi would be highly favored to win in a 1v1.
|
| Not according to polling[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2
| 024_R...
| mariusor wrote:
| > both of these candidates are rightwing
|
| Just curious by what metrics do you consider Lasconi to be
| a right winger?
| RealityVoid wrote:
| The USR party is liberal right wing. They get accused of
| being "sexomarxisti" but that's mostly brainless chants.
|
| They're pro free trade, freedoms, equality, all your
| runoff the mill liberal stuff.
| mariusor wrote:
| Yeah, I would call that a centrist party. To me the
| "right" includes trampling on individual and social
| freedoms. But maybe I've been brainwashed by American
| politics.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Well, they are for privatizing health care I think?
| That's pretty right wing? But, yes your right wind is
| waaaaay more to the right than the norm.
| arandomusername wrote:
| Wouldn't that qualify a lot of the democratats as right
| wing since they are pro-censorship?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| She would definitely consider herself a right wing
| candidate, and has even tried before the election to
| convince multiple right-wing parties to form an electoral
| alliance and run a single candidate (presumably either
| herself or the president of the National Liberal Party,
| the largest right wing party in Romania, Nicolae Ciuca).
|
| This should not be confused to the far-right parties that
| backed her opponent for the second round, Calin
| Georgescu.
|
| Basically Romania's political scene has one nominally
| left wing party, the Social Democratic Party (though
| their economic policies are often centrist, and their
| social policies are often right wing, with opposition to
| civil partnerships and even some resistance to abortion
| rights)*. They are quite hated as representatives of the
| pre-Revolution communist Romania, and as very corrupt.
| Their traditional electorate are those living in rural
| areas, those living in poverty, those working in the
| state apparatus, and generally with a lower education.
|
| Then there is one traditional right-wing party, the
| National Liberal Party (liberal here in the "classical
| liberalism" sense, basically free market), that is slowly
| dying off, mostly due to the extremely unpopular current
| president who was elected on their lists; and due to
| governing in alliance with the SDP. They also have often
| been accused of corruption. They are relatively right
| wing both on economic and social issues.
|
| Then, there is a much newer centre-right party, the Save
| Romania Union, which has similar economic policies to the
| NLP and is more socially liberal. They coasted to some
| success on a powerful anti-corruption, Change message,
| but have since become embroiled in internal infighting.
| There are also several small parties that split off from
| them that have very similar policies. For both these and
| the NLP, their traditional electorate is people living in
| larger cities, wealthier, especially white collar
| workers, with higher education.
|
| All of the above parties are pro-EU, pro-NATO
| collaboration, agree on providing funds to Ukraine and so
| on.
|
| Then there's the newest force, the hard right Alliance
| for the Union of Romanians (AUR, which also means "gold"
| in Romanian). They ran on populist somewhat left-wing
| promises (cheap houses for everyone!), hard right social
| conservatism (anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, very religious
| minded). There's also a splinter party with virtually the
| same promises, the SOS Romania Party, and a newer force,
| The Young People's party. All of these three are various
| degrees of euroskpetic, NATO skeptics and against
| providing resources to Ukraine.
|
| Typically when someone in Romania says "the left", they
| mean the SDP; when they say "the right" they mean "the
| NLP and SRU", and when they want to refer to the other
| group, they'll either say "far right", "ultra
| nationalists", or their own preferred term
| "sovereignists" (from "national sovereignty").
|
| * There is one small European-style left-wing party that
| ran in this election for the first time, but they only
| won 2,3% of the vote
| fidotron wrote:
| > If they do a redo and a center, liberal, or leftwing
| candidate makes it to the second round, Lasconi would have
| a much more challenging battle
|
| Right, so the players want to change the rules of the game
| because they lost, when the left wing problem is the
| classic: they're splitters.
|
| Had the left not been split so many different ways then
| they wouldn't be in this position. And they cannot say they
| didn't understand the process in advance.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| It's less important than seems at first. It was a tight race
| with 10+ candidates, these two went into the second round. If
| the entire procedure is annulled and repeated, the other
| person in the second round is also disadvantaged as her
| chances to get to the second round again are smaller. Her
| frustration is understandable, she seems like collateral
| casualty here.
| cbg0 wrote:
| There is no doubt in my mind that while the decision today is
| backed by the law it still erodes democratic principles in my
| country.
| sebastianz wrote:
| The main issue is he declared his election campaign cost 0.
|
| Literally, that is what he declared he spent on his election
| campaign.
|
| The million euros for the TikTok & social media storm that got
| him elected has to have been paid by someone though, and
| according to law this money has to be clean and have clear
| sources.
|
| He does not have clear sources. Probably also does not have
| clean money. The source of this dirty money is what is
| suspected to be Russian-adjacent actors that wanted him to win.
| jdasdf wrote:
| >Literally, that is what he declared he spent on his election
| campaign.
|
| >The million euros for the TikTok & social media storm that
| got him elected has to have been paid by someone though, and
| according to law this money has to be clean and have clear
| sources.
|
| What if he did indeed spend 0EUR ?
|
| If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2 main
| parties, and don't report it, do they also get disqualified?
| sebastianz wrote:
| > If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2
| main parties, and don't report it, do they also get
| disqualified?
|
| If you pay money to run electoral ads, for someone's
| campaign, this money has to be declared, and the ads should
| be marked as such.
|
| In this case, neither has happened.
|
| TikTok also did not ban these bot networks as they should
| have according to the electoral laws, so there will be a
| separate investigation that I think the EU commission has
| started to find out why they are not complying with
| electoral laws in the countries they operate in.
| jdasdf wrote:
| I see you didn't answer the question i asked (probably
| because it would make it obvious how untenable your
| argument is), so I will ask again.
|
| If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2
| main parties, and don't report it, do they also get
| disqualified?
| sebastianz wrote:
| I have no idea, but if you illegally want to get someone
| elected as president in a foreign country, I suggest
| talking to a very smart lawyer, not to a rando on hacker
| news :)
| theultdev wrote:
| He's not talking about getting someone elected, the
| inverse actually.
|
| An analogy would be buying github stars or reddit upvotes
| for an adversary to get them banned.
| xuhu wrote:
| It all depends on whether the candidate asked for the
| help.
| theultdev wrote:
| Okay, so where is the proof he asked for the help?
| xuhu wrote:
| https://snoop.ro/cazul-bunelu-firma-sustinatorilor-lui-
| georg...
|
| Explains the money trail, and there's even a nice picture
| with one of the sovereign candidates and the Tracia Unita
| group who paid for the campaign.
| theultdev wrote:
| That's not proof, it's the ramblings of a conspiracy
| theorist trying to put loose connections together.
|
| They even threw in a tirade about Trump to top it off.
|
| But yeah, let's throw away an entire country's election
| because of the ramblings of Victor Ilie.
|
| Thank God he put it all together and saved Romania. No
| investigation needed, he figured it out.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Probably depends on how much money you spend. But spend
| enough and at a minimum it'll be considered election
| interference (the exact rules depend on the country). If
| there's evidence the candidate that benefited
| collaborated with you in any way, then it's likely
| they'll face sanctions as well.
|
| Europe is like the U.S. We don't have Political Action
| Committees here, or anything similar. Political
| campaigns, particularly in the lead up to an election,
| are tightly controlled and limited to ensure candidates
| have to compete on an even playing field. They can't just
| try and outspend their competitors.
|
| Heck in the UK, it's illegal for political campaigning to
| occur outside the few weeks before an election. Obviously
| politicians will do everything they can to demonstrate
| their value to the people all the time. But they can't
| engage in explicit campaigning, with calls to actions
| about how to vote, outside of the time limited campaign
| period. It's all done to keep as much money as possible
| out of our political system, and prevent our politics
| becoming ruled entirely by money, like we see in the U.S.
| Hell there recently been huge controversy in the UK
| because out PM accepted some _clothes_ (literally a few
| suits) from a party donor, and that was considered as
| being potentially illegal campaign support.
| wyager wrote:
| > If you pay money to run electoral ads, for someone's
| campaign, this money has to be declared, and the ads
| should be marked as such.
|
| Do you really think this makes sense as a justification
| for a court to depose a candidate, or are you just being
| disingenuous for rhetorical purposes?
|
| If we actually apply your logic as stated, then anyone
| could unilaterally "disqualify" any candidate by buying
| political ads on their behalf and not reporting the ads.
| TheRoque wrote:
| How can you advertise yourself if you spent 0EUR ? What
| genius trick is at play ? Come on, it's much more plausible
| there's something fishy.
| theultdev wrote:
| Elon companies spend $0 on traditional advertisements and
| only advertise through word of mouth, viral/social
| campaigns, etc.
|
| Many celebrities do the same as well via their social
| media presence.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I don't think anyone is getting disqualified. The elections
| will be rerun with the same candidates, because the
| authorities were unable to do it properly the first time.
|
| If you pay a small amount of money for some political ads,
| nobody is going to care, because it obviously didn't affect
| the results substantially. If the amount is large enough,
| the situation may be different. And then both you and
| Google may face consequences for illegal election
| interference.
| theultdev wrote:
| So next time Russia should buy ads for the candidate they
| want to lose.
|
| 1. Buy ads for opposition.
|
| 2. Opposition reports invalid figures not accounting for
| russian ads
|
| 3. People accuse opposition of being helped by russia and
| misreporting funds.
|
| 4. Opposition wins, recount stays the same, courts annul
| it because _russia_.
|
| Am I missing something here?
| jltsiren wrote:
| You are missing two things.
|
| First, the elections will be rerun. If people think the
| annulment was unfair, the opposition candidate may get
| even more votes due to organic publicity.
|
| Second, you can't just buy ads. You must also find
| someone with wide enough circulation willing to show the
| ads. And that someone may be liable for the consequences.
| theultdev wrote:
| No those two things are clear to me.
|
| First, yes they will be re-ran, and it's doubtful the
| winning candidate will even get to run. Also, where does
| it end, do we keep re-running it until we get the _right_
| candidate? What if it was the candidate you voted for,
| how would _you_ feel?
|
| Second, yes apparently you can, it happened. If the whole
| country was able to be swayed by TikTok ads but
| apparently no politicians noticed then they aren't very
| good at politicking or governing. If they noticed an
| issue they should have dealt with TikTok earlier.
|
| So far TikTok hasn't been held liable, only the voters
| who choose to vote for this candidate.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Right now, TikTok is under EU level investigation, which
| will take much longer than a few days. If found guilty,
| it can face a fine up to 6% of worldwide revenues.
| theultdev wrote:
| Yes, as I said, as of _right now_ they have not been held
| liable, only the voters have been punished by having
| their votes revoked.
|
| The voters were apparently too stupid and got tricked by
| scary russian ads, so we must re-do the elections until
| they come to their senses and pick the _correct_
| candidate.
|
| It's TikTok's fault for letting Russian ads in, so we'll
| take some of their money and we'll also stay in power.
| Win-win for the establishment.
|
| It couldn't possibly be that the voters knew exactly what
| they were voting for... They're too gullible, that's it.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The point is that in the future, TikTok / Google /
| whatever will have to be more careful with political ads,
| because they can be bad for business.
|
| Whatever your opinion on the candidates is, it's a fact
| that many people didn't consider the election results
| legitimate. In a situation like that, it's impossible to
| make them legitimate by any administrative action. Courts
| can make the results legal, but legitimacy is something
| people decide on their own. If legitimacy is considered
| important, the only way to regain it is to run new
| elections. It may take a long time and many attempts, and
| it may not work at all. But you can't have legitimate
| elections if the losers don't accept that the elections
| were fair and they lost.
| theultdev wrote:
| > it's a fact that many people didn't consider the
| election results legitimate
|
| it's a fact that _more_ people considered it legitimate,
| otherwise the candidate in question wouldn 't have won
| the election.
|
| let me ask you this about your "fact" how "many people"
| didn't consider it legitimate? should be easy to answer
| since it's a fact.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Legitimacy is not determined by majority vote. It's
| determined by the people who don't like the results for
| whatever reason. If the vast majority of them accept that
| the elections were legitimate, they were legitimate. If a
| substantial minority of them don't accept the results,
| the legitimacy is questionable at best, and the country
| is in a lot of trouble.
| theultdev wrote:
| > Legitimacy is not determined by majority vote.
|
| > If the vast majority of them accept that the elections
| were legitimate, they were legitimate.
|
| ???
|
| > determined by the people who don't like the results
|
| So I guess I have to ask, which _people_ and how are you
| determining majority legitimacy if not by vote?
| jltsiren wrote:
| Legitimacy is fundamentally about trust. Trust that the
| elections were fair, even if you don't like the outcome.
|
| If your candidate won, your opinion on the legitimacy
| doesn't matter much. If your candidate lost, your opinion
| matters more. If you think that the elections were
| legitimate, your opinion doesn't matter much. If you
| think they were not legitimate, your opinion matters
| more.
|
| It doesn't really matter if the elections were fair. If
| the losers don't trust the system, the elections were not
| legitimate.
|
| A society can handle a small number of people who
| question its legitimacy. Maybe 5%, maybe 10%, maybe even
| 20%, depending on the overall level of trust. If too many
| people don't trust the system, the society doesn't really
| work anymore. Laws, constitutions, and other institutions
| are only as strong as people's faith in them.
| dh2022 wrote:
| That is the thing I do not get: the basis for
| disqualifiying the first round is there for the second
| round. Second round would be as valid (or invalid) as the
| first round. Which makes this looks like a soft coup.
|
| It should be noted that Romanian Constitutional Court has
| a long tradition for yielding to political influence.
| Read and weep [0]
|
| [0] page 93 onwards Corruption https://commons.lib.jmu.ed
| u/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1317...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > The elections will be rerun with the same candidates,
| because the authorities were unable to do it properly the
| first time.
|
| No, the whole electoral process will be restarted, as if
| it had never happened, starting from potential candidates
| gathering signatures to validate their registration.
| Anyone who wishes to run has to start anew.
|
| And it's almost impossible to believe that the candidate
| whose campaign was found to be so illegally run that the
| entire process has been corrupted and has to be restarted
| could be allowed to run again. This would be pantomime of
| the highest level. And I'm saying this as someone who
| thinks this decision was a soft coup.
| newspaper1 wrote:
| Annulling the results of an election on an accounting issue
| is not democracy. They could prosecute him for fraud if he
| committed it, that's not the same as revoking the vote of the
| population.
| sebastianz wrote:
| If a foreign state actor gets someone illegally elected in
| a separate country with dirty money, this is not an
| "accounting issue".
| empiricus wrote:
| So the next step for russia is to invest some tiktok
| money for the the person that would be elected anyways
| but they hate the most, and this way discredit that
| person?
| sebastianz wrote:
| Well hopefully they cannot do that in the future, since
| TikTok is also being investigated in the scandal. They
| are the ones who pocketed the money for the ads after
| all, and are required to comply with the electoral laws
| of the country, which they did not.
|
| (later edit: Actually probably they did not pocket the ad
| money, since I think the accusation is most of it was not
| legitimate ads, but puppet-account posts from some
| service. Of course, TikTok could still be be held
| responsible to better police these, but perhaps is not
| the direct destination of the money.)
| xuhu wrote:
| If my university proves I cheated on my entry exams, I
| fully expect them to throw me out, before or after the
| first day of school.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What if they think you might have cheated, so they cancel
| the entire entrance exam for everyone because your
| potential, unproven, cheating _would_ have given you an
| unfair advantage over the other students?
|
| Because this is what our court did.
| troupo wrote:
| If large scale fraud is suspected, results of exams will
| be annulled.
|
| If a person is found cheating (and no other
| interference), that person's exam results will be
| annulled.
|
| Why do you think this is not the case?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In this case, one person suspected of cheating (only
| suspected, he is not convicted or even charged with
| anything at all!) has led to the annulment of the entire
| exam. Only one of the candidates was found to have
| cheated, during their campaign. The voting process was
| found to be perfectly secure and to accurately reflect
| the intention of the people who voted. And yet, the
| entire election, starting not just from the vote, but
| from the moment that all candidates registered and
| started their campaign, has been annulled and started
| from scratch.
|
| Any party who wishes to participate in the elections will
| have to start from step 0, from collecting 200k
| signatures of people who support their candidacy.
| fp64 wrote:
| > The million euros for the TikTok & social media storm that
| got him elected
|
| I just read that it was approximately 360000 Euros paid to
| TikTok influencers, not millions. Doesn't change the fact
| that somebody paid them, yes, but apparently not Millions. Or
| my source was wrong, am I missing something?
|
| EDIT Thanks for downvoting - I did not want to defend
| anything, I just read in an article about the court ruling
| that it was this number that appeared quite low to me, that's
| all, I was wondering.
| piombisallow wrote:
| Why the scare quotes on declassified document? It's a
| declassified report from the national intelligence agency,
| which was made public.
| xg15 wrote:
| I'm not sure about this particular case, and absolutely no
| question that the specific interest in this case probably has
| very little to do with concern about democracy and a lot with
| power struggles in that new cold war we're in.
|
| (Gonna agree with it being a soft coup if they limit the new
| election to only pro-western parties. So far, it's "only" the
| repeat of an election)
|
| But, having said that, there really is a lot of pro-russian
| propaganda on TikTok and the way the algorithm selects it can't
| always be explained with user preferences.
|
| An Austrian newspaper recently posted results of an experiment
| they did themselves: They added a bunch of brand new accounts,
| pretending to be teenagers. The given interests were diverse,
| but all of them unpolitical and typical kids stuff.
|
| Nevertheless, after a short habituation period of benign posts,
| the feeds of all but one of the accounts quickly shifted from
| typical teenager stuff to "political" content, mostly hard
| right-wing, islamist and pro-russian clips. All of that without
| any of the users ever having given any indication that they
| were interested in political posts, let alone pro-russian ones.
|
| The report is here (in German) :
| https://dietagespresse.com/selbstversuch-so-radikalisiert-ti...
|
| The newspaper usually posts satire, but this article was about
| a real self-experiment.
| jowea wrote:
| Medium hot take: this is why closed-source social media post
| promotion algorithms should be banned. We should not let a
| foreign private company with government links influence
| society in a hidden way like that.
| mihaic wrote:
| It pretty much is a soft coup, yes. The general population is
| apologetic for it, since the concept of rule-of-law is not that
| important to Romanian culture.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I do not think it was a soft coup. I look around me and all I
| can feel around except the most diehard CG or Lasconi fans is,
| honestly, relief.
|
| You can't really get the atmosphere in the country when that
| fascist was about to be voted in. I listened to a couple of
| journalists in the last couple of days, they were tearing their
| hairs out in frustration. Radio broadcasters and political
| commentators were saying the closing of their shows like it was
| a funeral and the end of free speech.
|
| Me and many people around me could not sleep for 2 weeks
| straight because we knew what this meant. CG victory would have
| meant we needed to flee the country, sooner or later.
|
| I am fully convinced we narrowly avoided something terrible.
| I'm also not convinced that we're out of the woods yet.
| stop_nazi wrote:
| Georgescu, go back to your Georgia!
| fidotron wrote:
| The interesting things about these claims of manipulation via
| social media platforms is we are no longer on the side of the
| coin saying "my side is censored" but very much "the other side
| is visible and should not be".
|
| Interfering by censorship is bad because you deny people
| information on which to base their decision. Interfering by
| allowing all candidates to be heard is not negative interference
| at all. This decision by the court is yet another blow for the
| credibility of democracy in the west.
|
| The UK with Brexit was an interesting case: highly contentious,
| counted promptly, the establishment acknowledged they didn't like
| it and reluctantly eventually followed through. That was when
| democracy went too far, and now the plebs must pick only between
| pre approved options.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > "the other side is visible and should not be"
|
| The other side is visible in millions of ads, despite
| officially declaring that 0 money was spent on visibility.
| fidotron wrote:
| Aka "when people look at us it is entirely organic but the
| only reason they would look at that guy is he is paying for
| it".
| cbg0 wrote:
| The other parties reported spending as per the law, and
| this guy didn't. You can't run a campaign with no money,
| and he had no real grass-roots support (he was polling
| below 5% in all polls).
| fidotron wrote:
| > You can't run a campaign with no money, and he had no
| real grass-roots support
|
| The fact he won the first round contradicts you on both
| points.
|
| You seem to think your statements are axiomatic, but they
| have no basis.
| cbg0 wrote:
| They do have a basis, as the candidate had flyers printed
| out, paid ads on social media as well as paid ads that
| were not marked as political ads, which is against the
| law, and so is not reporting campaign spending.
|
| Political polls from across the spectrum showing him
| polling poorly as well as not being an established
| candidate is what led to this whole investigation
| starting up to figure out exactly how he garnered so much
| support so fast.
| fidotron wrote:
| > They do have a basis, as the candidate had flyers
| printed out, paid ads on social media as well as paid ads
| that were not marked as political ads, which is against
| the law, and so is not reporting campaign spending.
|
| Did he pay for them? And we all know polls miss things
| they don't know about or want to find. As long as the
| ballots were counted accurately the problem was not the
| campaign he was running, but the ineptitude of the
| pollsters.
|
| As discussed at length elsewhere in this thread this
| whole thing opens up so many new ways to abuse the system
| Romania simply will not be able to have an election
| anyone believes in again for a generation.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yeah the whole thing very much sounds like "this guy's platform
| is actually really popular with voters, but he should have
| remained an unknown because he shouldn't have been able to
| spread his message that effectively."
| mihaic wrote:
| Seeing this election unfold from the inside the country has
| turned me simultaneously more anti-establishment and anti-
| democratic.
|
| The candidate that could have potentially won is an imbecile that
| dresses well, has good diction and spouts jingoism about God and
| country. He also says stuff like maybe we didn't land on the moon
| and soda's have microchips. The voters are poor and uneducated
| and just like Trump seems like the poor's man idea of a rich
| person, so was he the uneducated person's idea of an
| intellectual. TikTok did not sway them much, it just presented
| the candidate.
|
| The political establishment has been gorging itself on public
| funds and the urban intellectuals (who had the other hopeful
| candidate) are simply copying US left-leaning ideology in a
| country that has vastly different problems. For instance,
| abortions are perfectly legal in Romania, yet they keep bringing
| reproductive rights onto their agenda, instead of focusing on
| massive corruption and on improving the economy.
|
| Each political faction seems to filter for candidates that are
| either unrealistic ideologues or the most corrupt individuals in
| the European Union.
|
| Let this maybe be a warning for the future: an uneducated
| democracy is not easier or harder to manipulate, it's simply
| random and unpredictable.
| bamboozled wrote:
| This is why Romans used to actually appoint dictators for some
| periods of time, some how they were often good people who'd
| come into power , fix a bunch of stuff, then go back to their
| tomato growing.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Isn't it about time that the EU banned TikTok?
| cbg0 wrote:
| I don't think banning outright is the solution, but I do think
| that social media has a tremendous amount of power and can
| impact things like elections if you have control over the
| recommendation algorithm on one of these sites.
|
| I think more transparency into how these recommendation
| algorithms work is required especially when it comes to
| elections, as well as mechanisms to verify that they aren't
| being tampered with.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Boy, that was a stupid place for TikTok to blow their wad. I
| suspect that this will result in some fairly serious pummeling of
| their operations in many places.
| culi wrote:
| The court didn't provide any evidence that this was somehow
| coordinate by TikTok themselves. Rather a state actor that made
| hundreds of TikTok accounts just before the election. This kind
| of stuff happened on Twitter all the time. It'll probably
| happen on Bluesky as well if they succeed
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> hundreds of TikTok accounts_
|
| I read a much, _much_ higher number. One that suggests that
| TT knew _exactly_ what was going on.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| The Georgescu trend was no.9 world wide and exploded 2
| weeks before the election
|
| What I learned from this is that people are much more easy
| to influence than previously thought. Especially if you
| come up with something that is a blank slate. Me included.
|
| I was literally crying for my country these last 2 weeks.
| codedokode wrote:
| Interesting that a winning candidate was allegedly not marking
| his promotion videos. Does it mean that people generally distrust
| everything officially marked and skip the video instantly (like I
| skip ads on Youtube)? And so, marking the video makes your
| campaign inefficient? Or it wasn't an important factor?
| cbg0 wrote:
| Seeing "sponsored campaign ad" is an instant skip for most
| people.
| shmerl wrote:
| Putin paid candidate should not be just disqualified - prison is
| proper for that.
| FlyingBears wrote:
| I am getting 1989 flashbacks, but this time this is a coupe that
| subverts institution to its purpose.
| fuoqi wrote:
| Attempts to ban AfD (which is projected to take the second
| place), "firewalled" LePen's party which has won with 33% of
| votes and has zero political power, and now this. And people
| wonder why trust in the "democratic" system gradually falls and
| anti-establishment sentiment is on the rise.
| cbg0 wrote:
| I would contend that the anti-establishment movements are the
| reason why parties like AfD and LePen's sprouted in the first
| place.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| That is not entirely true. Le Pen just brought down the french
| government yesterday. She has some power as a King maker in the
| current configuration.
|
| But she does not govern nor does she want to. However, the left
| wing coalition won the most seats in the national assembly but
| Macron refused to appoint a prime mister which was from this
| coalition as it is normally customary.
|
| In July, he called on the left wing coalition to safeguard
| democracy by instructing his party to drop out of the races in
| which they had no chance to win so that the left could win
| these races against the National Rally.
|
| Now he saying that the left wing coalition is extremist and
| that the National Rally is extremist just as well and that he
| won't have a government with either of them. Basically he just
| told half of the population to get stuffed.
|
| Then people wonder how democracy dies, that is how it dies.
|
| We can disagree with the right and with the left but if the
| will of the people is not respected, then the consequences will
| be dramatic.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I'm not saying those parties are fascists but they lean that
| way. Once fascists gain power, they undermine the entire
| democratic system and stay in power. So how does one deal with
| this situation? Do you just hand over a democracy over because
| a certain percentage of the population voted for them or do you
| play dirty back?
| dtquad wrote:
| I dislike the anti-immigration far-right in Denmark but for the
| past 25 years they have been electorally and influentially more
| successful with one simple trick: Don't support the
| geopolitical adversaries of the West. Maybe the AfD and LePen
| should have listened instead of publicly fellating Putin.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Maybe the AfD and LePen should have listened instead of
| publicly fellating Putin.
|
| They're winning, though. Why would they do anything
| differently? The reason why people vote for them is because
| they hate _you._
| mmooss wrote:
| Why are we suddenly screwing around with democracy? We know how
| to do it - we've known for generations. Nothing else compares
| morally, or in terms of results - freedom, prosperity, or
| security - or in terms of competency of government (yes - it's
| very flawed, but no other form of government compares).
|
| Everything else is 'influence campaigns' and BS, designed to
| distract people and keep them inert - and it's doing an effective
| job!
| bamboozled wrote:
| Yes it's a properly scary time. I think people are just waking
| up to it and are becoming more vigilant, it might be too late
| for the USA though.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Why are we suddenly screwing around with democracy?
|
| Suddenly? We've been doing this for 60 years, most
| particularly, in South America. It's now just made it's way
| fully into Europe.
|
| > We know how to do it - we've known for generations.
|
| We know how to do mob rule. We're not particularly good at
| Democracy. Sometimes the two would produce the same outcome and
| people do not struggle to notice the difference.
| A_Serious_Man wrote:
| Did they just do the barman that kicks out the first fascist in a
| pub? Wish Hungary, Poland and USA had guts to do this ...
| bamboozled wrote:
| These countries are more familiar with these tactics and are
| not wiling to accept it, South Korea too.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| "The elections will repeat until managed democracy prevails."
| radiator wrote:
| In a european democracy, things are pretty clear: Influence from
| Russia and China is forbidden. Influence from the USA, Germany,
| France is permitted. There are countless examples.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Care to name a few examples? Also, USA, Germany and France are
| allies to Romania as part of either NATO or the EU.
|
| Russia has invaded Ukraine, our neighbor and we have a pretty
| good reason to stay far away from them, not to mention some
| historical bad blood with many tons of gold we gave them for
| safe-keeping in WW2 that they never returned, or the crimes the
| red army did while retreating through Romania at the end of
| WW2.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Sounds like you're agreeing with the comment above, but just
| saying that it's a good thing.
| cbg0 wrote:
| It is a good thing to stick with your allies and not side
| with potential enemies. We've been warring in Europe for
| centuries and we've managed to stop and get along, but
| Russia is still at it for some reason.
| pessimizer wrote:
| When people pretend to be confused about why Russia
| wouldn't want Ukraine in NATO, or why Putin would be
| under immense pressure to defend the Russians in the
| east, it's not because they intend to have a good faith
| discussion.
|
| Centuries of war are irrelevant. Talk about this one. And
| start in 2014, or even before if you're in the mood.
| victordevt wrote:
| Indeed. Well-established parties created an aggressive media
| campaign against CG over these last two weeks. The problem was
| that even today, the odds were clearly for CG. So they had no
| choice but to take this last solution, an anti-democratic
| decision. Undeclared money should not be more important than
| people's votes.
| Svoka wrote:
| Building military is much much more expensive than paying
| influencers.
|
| Russian propaganda machine is incredibly strong, because it was
| perfected on their own citizens for basically century now. They
| spend billions on pure propaganda: - discrediting
| news agencies without actual reasons - cultivating "free
| thinkers" festering on real problems - offering variety of
| narratives and providing state sponsored falsehoods to justify
| them - overloading people with information to point where
| they don't care - generating so much outrageous (false and
| true) news that people spend all their attention on bogus -
| supporting 'nobody cares' atmosphere where people feel no agency
|
| While with military - they relied on propaganda as well. They
| projected power while not picking conflicts with anyone who can
| punch back.
|
| Ukraine appeared too big to swallow this time and everyone can
| see, that king is naked. Russian military is a sham compared to
| US. Like, incomparable to be honest. But problem is that
| propaganda is much stronger than military. So west made a mistake
| dismissing russia because of their weak corrupt military while
| being invaded by propaganda.
|
| West has nothing against russian propaganda machine and this is
| what truly terrifying to be honest.
| dtquad wrote:
| Something that makes the Russian propaganda machine so
| effective is that they have the multiple departments at Russian
| universities at their disposal to produce both international
| and domestic propaganda. The West is up against Russian
| propaganda refined by psychiatrists, psychologists,
| anthropologists etc.
|
| In the West the academias are contrarian. We are not used to
| adversaries that can put every single intelligent educated
| person in their country to work to undermine our countries.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Isn't there still the possibility of beating the guy in the
| second round? Would that be more fair?
|
| (disclaimer: I'm a random Canadian on the internet who's out of
| the loop on this)
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Places like Reddit or HN are so funny considering the "red scare"
| attitude of "everyone who doesn't fall in line is a russian or
| influenced by Russia".
|
| We saw for year of Russiagate and now we see, every time, the
| same pro-NATO/pro-war propaganda and we're supposed to be fully
| xenophobic towards russians.
|
| "Fuck democracy when it doesn't suit me". The CIA would be proud.
| eximius wrote:
| I don't think anyone is advocating xenophobia towards
| _Russians_. However, skepticism towards stances known to be
| propagated by the _Russian government psyops groups_ meant to
| destabilize... well, just about anything they can... sure.
| tim333 wrote:
| >every time, the same pro-NATO/pro-war propaganda and we're
| supposed to be fully xenophobic towards russians
|
| They've done a fair bit of bad stuff beyond pro-NATO/pro-war
| propaganda.
| huqedato wrote:
| So that's the right formula of democracy, in a nutshell: we keep
| voting until the 'correct' candidate is chosen.
| tlogan wrote:
| This seems to be exactly the outcome Russia desired: undermining
| the democratic process.
|
| It also sets a dangerous precedent, suggesting that anyone with
| sufficient resources can invalidate election results.
| morkalork wrote:
| Yes, any motivated bad actor with money, resources and willing
| or unwitting patsys can get an election invalidated. What is
| the alternative, turn a blind eye to it and disregard
| regulations for how elections should run? Why even have
| regulations at all if an election can never be invalidated?
| zzzboring wrote:
| whatever happens, russia is to blame
| pessimizer wrote:
| I've gone through this entire comment thread, and I keep reading
| that voters were influenced by "false information," but nobody
| seems to mention what that false information is.
|
| "Tiktok", "right-wing", "Putin", "anti-NATO sentiment", "Iron
| Guard" and "Russia" isn't false information. Why are people
| repeating this over and over again? Has any Romanian in this
| thread asked someone who voted for the winner why they voted that
| way? Was there any lie involved, or do you just hate that they're
| allowed to vote?
|
| Trump won twice in the US by spending half the amount of his
| opponents. The internet now means that constant media saturation
| is infinitely less valuable, so elections aren't linear functions
| of the amount of donor cash. People can just choose the person
| they agree with. If he's the only anti-NATO candidate, and if for
| 25% of the population this is their main issue, why wouldn't he
| win?
|
| Feels to me like the goal is to restrict the amount of
| information people can get about candidates that will not be
| allowed to win, in favor of an array of candidates with identical
| opinions on the _important_ issues, but that come in a range of
| different colors and flavors.
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