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Fun fact, many, many other foreign governments have "interfered" in our elections also. In addition the US has interfered in their elections as well. Its been h

Fun fact, many, many other foreign governments have "interfered" in our elections also. In addition the US has interfered in their elections as well. Its been happening for a very long time.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Yeah, everyone's so mortified when the US has been legitimately couping South American nations for a few decades. Like election interference is just an aspect of the global political chess game. America isn't immune from it just because we're "egalitarian" (which it really isn't, we have terrible health outcomes and literacy that have been spackled over by large financial success, we're essentially seeing our decline from a global superpower to a middle-tier player in real time)
- orm 4y ago
  After the cold war ended (last three decades), I'm not sure of any case where America has been coup'ing countries in South America. Do you know some cases?
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Dang, I didn't realize confirmed election interference stopped mattering if we were at war with another superpower.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      It did matter because evil soviet union was a threat to whole world. Thanks to mainly US actions my country is now free of russian torturers.
      - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
        That's obviously not logically sound, because there's a ton of people in the middle east who would say these exact words about the US and their military actions. The morality of state level actors varies substantially across populations, it's why in countries with higher education, you find lower rates of nationalism
        KptMarchewa 4y ago
        The soviet union was evil by design - genocide is their way of working. They still work this way as we've seen untold amount of times in Ukraine, in Bucha, Izyum and Mariupol. US fuckups like Iraq were accidents, aka unplanned. Overwhelming majority of civilian victims is work of their opponents, like Iraqi religious insurgents, suicide bombers or ISIS.
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      The particular election interference in question was "couping" and the question was where the US had done it recently. You can be outraged at what happened to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba and all that. I think you should be! And at the same time you can realize that was some time ago and if you don't believe in eternal collective punishment (everyone in Mongolia must suffer for what Genghis Khan did!), then it is relevant that the US is behaving better now and Russia isn't. And regardless of all this, whataboutism is a counsel of despair: no good can ever be done by anyone because everyone's nation has done bad at some point. Everyone should silently take the abuse. If you truly believe there is such a thing as bad behavior, you don't silence criticism of one act by pointing to another act. You criticize both acts. And your criticism is proportional to the relevance of the act. It sucks that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove out the Britons, but that isn't the top problem to solve anymore.
    - kahrl 4y ago
      Take your L.
      - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
        Wait, this comment explains a lot. People literally are here thinking that public discourse in hn threads is just an elaborate game of League of Legends and not trying to understand perspectives
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Brazilian here. The Biden administration and the CIA openly pressured our president to accept the election results before they happened. I gotta at least wonder if they knew he was going to lose. Now there's nation-wide protests, calls for military intervention, election denialism with some rather convincing evidence, blatant censorship of anyone who's so much as asking if this is going to be investigated.
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      Biden, and presumably every other governmental official in every nation who truly believes in democracy, wasn't saying that Bolsonaro should step down regardless of whether he lost. They were saying he should step down if he lost. Basically, don't retain power by civil war. If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.
      - matheusmoreira 4y ago
        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/cia-director-bolsonaro-brazil-voting-system-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/cia-director-b... CIA person "urging" a president of a soverign country to stop doubting voting machines? Calling his doubts "baseless"? I mean, the USA has paper ballots to this day because of the exact same "baseless" doubts. It's essentially world wide consensus that voting machines are a bad idea, some countries straight up declared them unconstitutional. But these USA officials pressured our president not to question the system of his own country. A CIA guy at that, from a country known for compromising the world's security and spying on everyone. I'm sorry but there's so much wrong with that it's not even funny. If that's not interference I don't know what is. The more I research these elections the uglier it gets. > If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government. Right now it doesn't seem like this election legitimitized either government. The unprecedented censorship is not inspiring confidence. I wonder what will happen now...
        divided 4y ago
        If Brazil is anything like the US, there are many, many safeguards in place whenever an election machine is certified and used. Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims. In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Ecuador (Morales), Brazil (Rouseff), Honduras (Zelaya) off the top of my head. They certainly tried their best in Venezuela. edit: oh, I spaced out, you're asking about the last three decades? I thought you were asking about the last few years.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Recently the CIA pressured Brazil's president to accept the election results before they even happened. Even US media took issue with that.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    Yes, you should say you will accept the results of an election before you know whether you will win it. This is the basis of the peaceful transfer of power. It shouldn't be hard to accept this. To accept only those elections you win is to deny the legitimacy of democratic governance altogether. If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      > If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. Obviously. > But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda. Of course not. I have some real reasons for doubting the results. Three days ago, an argentinian man streamed a video where he analyzed our election's official data set. He found that the older models of our voting machines, less thoroughly audited, displayed a clear advantage to the winning left-wing candidate, something between 8% and 15%. After I watched this, I went to the government website and downloaded the entire election dataset and attempted to reproduce his analysis. Then I saw the website go down for hours. An API for data set changes notifications remained up though. I monitored that API and saw them pushing changes to the 2022 and 2018 elections datasets. I saved that data too. Then I witnessed that API go down. Next day, it was back up, the data was modified and there was a bullshit note on the website explaining it went down due maintenance. Then this supreme court judge started censoring everyone who even so much as asked if he was going to investigate any of this. Last weekend I counted at least 10 influential people censored, including a doctor in economics, elected politicians and policemen. It got to the point people on Twitter got Elon Musk to look at it. I'm very worried about this. If it's so false, why can't they just refute it? It seems to me like they're all in damage control mode. Media is pretending nothing's going on.
bink 4y ago
I don't know many educated people who are surprised that countries are meddling in foreign elections. Money has been funneled to opposition groups probably since time began. What did surprise me was the effectiveness and return on investment that has come about with technology, as well as the long term effects that seem to continue well beyond the elections. There are plenty of resources out there to discover meddling and disprove misinformation, but people are seemingly adverse to using them.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
The point of these warnings is not to say "oh gosh it happens whatever" or "we need to launch the ICBMs directly at Moscow right now." The point is to gird the public so that they know the manipulation is happening and can try to compensate for it. There is a lot of denial about this interference happening out there (please do not make me link to it, it's five seconds on Google) and people who are in denial about this stuff absolutely cannot defend themselves. * Obviously this entire reply assumes an ideal world where people are responsible and prominent political movements want to prevent foreign interference (even when the interference arguably benefits them.) I realize we don't live in that world anymore, but how about let's pretend we do for the purposes of this thread.
- tcmart14 4y ago
  This is essentially what Estonia does I believe. They for years have been making it clear to their citizens that factions outside of its nations borders are directly trying to manipulate their elections. I don't think they discredit any particular sources, it is more of public service announcements for people to do their due diligence.
- xienze 4y ago
  > There is a lot of denial about this interference happening out there I would argue there’s a lot of creative interpretation of how much “interference” actually happens. Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling. Hence why before and after every election we’re warned repeatedly about foreign interference in our elections. And you would be lying if you said that if the expected red wave materializes that there won’t be large amounts of ink spilled over how Russia pulled it off yet again. Yet if Democrats were to unexpectedly come out on top in a few days, do you think the same people going on about foreign interference would insist that we have to see what role it played in helping certain Democrats win their respective races? Somehow I doubt it. Which is why I think “interference” is a very useful political tool. It’s vague in nature, if we’re being honest it’s impossible to measure its impact, and it serves a very useful purpose — to cast doubt on the victories of political opponents.
godelski 4y ago
This comment comes off as malinformation. Malinformation isn't information that is incorrect, but correct information used in a way to create a misleading context. There's 2 problems here. 1) You're implicitly dismissive of a foreign government interfering in our elections. I think most of us here will agree that any interference from any entity is not okay. 2) It muddles the conversation with more noise. A more in depth version of this wouldn't, and could add more context, but this comment is not doing that. I don't think this was done on purpose, but I'm noting it because it seems to be becoming the common way we speak these days and that isn't healthy to our abilities to solve these issues. We need to discuss the nuance and complexities of these events or else others will control the narratives and make us fight within ourselves instead of uniting to solve these issues.
- md2020 4y ago
  > malinformation Please do not normalize the use of a term that is being pushed by the government to justify censoring information they don’t like [1]. I understand that there is such a thing as “true information presented out of context in a manner meant to mislead”, and I even grant that the comment might be guilty of it. But “malinformation” and “misinformation” are just becoming labels for “information that is inconvenient”, and I don’t think normal internet commenters adopting their use is doing us any good. [1] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I'm not a latin expert, but "malinformation" seems like an etomogically perfect word to describe a "whataboutism"
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Or an accusation of one.
      - godelski 4y ago
Ekaros 4y ago
I would care lot more about if everyone who ever meddled in foreign elections in USA would be on death row or at least extradited to those countries.
kahrl 4y ago
What is the point of your comment? Is it to excuse other countries using whataboutism? Is it to say that the behavior in general is normal?
ihatepython 4y ago
Yes. Nobody seems to care that the US interfered in the 2000 Russian election. Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin and forcing him to step down. In effect, the US is responsible for putting Putin in power. The media demonizes Putin getting everybody to hate him, and the average person (including HN) goes along with it, because they don't know any better, even though HN considers itself to be smarter than the average person.
- glaucon 4y ago
  > Yes. Nobody seems to care that the US interfered in the 2000 Russian election I'd be interested to hear more about this ... do you have links to a summary ? > Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin I'm not clear if you mean Putin blackmailed Yeltsin or the US blackmailed Yeltsin ? What was the blackmail over ? From a brief bit of reading and what memory I have Yeltsin was having various ... - health ("months in hospital" [1]), - political (four prime ministers in eighteen months [2]) - and, allegedly, criminal (government contractor providing Yeltsin and family with "we pay the bills" credit cards [3]) ... problems so him going of his own accord doesn't seem impossible ? Also wasn't it the case that you could only do two terms as President until Putin fixed it so he could reign for ever ? If that was the case then Yeltsin wasn't going to be able to run again anyway ? I'm open to the idea that the CIA was, as is traditional, shooting itself in the foot, and there may have been US elements who felt that Boris was dangerously unpredictable but it does seem that there was other things going on which might have led to his demise ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#1996%E2%80%931999:_Second_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#1996%E2%80%93199... [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/415087.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/415087.stm [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/28/russia.iantraynor https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/28/russia.iantray...

Fun fact, many, many other foreign governments have "interfered" in our elections also. In addition the US has interfered in their elections as well. Its been happening for a very long time.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

Yeah, everyone's so mortified when the US has been legitimately couping South American nations for a few decades. Like election interference is just an aspect of the global political chess game. America isn't immune from it just because we're "egalitarian" (which it really isn't, we have terrible health outcomes and literacy that have been spackled over by large financial success, we're essentially seeing our decline from a global superpower to a middle-tier player in real time)

orm 4y ago
After the cold war ended (last three decades), I'm not sure of any case where America has been coup'ing countries in South America. Do you know some cases?
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Dang, I didn't realize confirmed election interference stopped mattering if we were at war with another superpower.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    It did matter because evil soviet union was a threat to whole world. Thanks to mainly US actions my country is now free of russian torturers.
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      That's obviously not logically sound, because there's a ton of people in the middle east who would say these exact words about the US and their military actions. The morality of state level actors varies substantially across populations, it's why in countries with higher education, you find lower rates of nationalism
      - KptMarchewa 4y ago
        The soviet union was evil by design - genocide is their way of working. They still work this way as we've seen untold amount of times in Ukraine, in Bucha, Izyum and Mariupol. US fuckups like Iraq were accidents, aka unplanned. Overwhelming majority of civilian victims is work of their opponents, like Iraqi religious insurgents, suicide bombers or ISIS.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    The particular election interference in question was "couping" and the question was where the US had done it recently. You can be outraged at what happened to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba and all that. I think you should be! And at the same time you can realize that was some time ago and if you don't believe in eternal collective punishment (everyone in Mongolia must suffer for what Genghis Khan did!), then it is relevant that the US is behaving better now and Russia isn't. And regardless of all this, whataboutism is a counsel of despair: no good can ever be done by anyone because everyone's nation has done bad at some point. Everyone should silently take the abuse. If you truly believe there is such a thing as bad behavior, you don't silence criticism of one act by pointing to another act. You criticize both acts. And your criticism is proportional to the relevance of the act. It sucks that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove out the Britons, but that isn't the top problem to solve anymore.
  - kahrl 4y ago
    Take your L.
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      Wait, this comment explains a lot. People literally are here thinking that public discourse in hn threads is just an elaborate game of League of Legends and not trying to understand perspectives
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Brazilian here. The Biden administration and the CIA openly pressured our president to accept the election results before they happened. I gotta at least wonder if they knew he was going to lose. Now there's nation-wide protests, calls for military intervention, election denialism with some rather convincing evidence, blatant censorship of anyone who's so much as asking if this is going to be investigated.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    Biden, and presumably every other governmental official in every nation who truly believes in democracy, wasn't saying that Bolsonaro should step down regardless of whether he lost. They were saying he should step down if he lost. Basically, don't retain power by civil war. If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/cia-director-bolsonaro-brazil-voting-system-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/cia-director-b... CIA person "urging" a president of a soverign country to stop doubting voting machines? Calling his doubts "baseless"? I mean, the USA has paper ballots to this day because of the exact same "baseless" doubts. It's essentially world wide consensus that voting machines are a bad idea, some countries straight up declared them unconstitutional. But these USA officials pressured our president not to question the system of his own country. A CIA guy at that, from a country known for compromising the world's security and spying on everyone. I'm sorry but there's so much wrong with that it's not even funny. If that's not interference I don't know what is. The more I research these elections the uglier it gets. > If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government. Right now it doesn't seem like this election legitimitized either government. The unprecedented censorship is not inspiring confidence. I wonder what will happen now...
      - divided 4y ago
        If Brazil is anything like the US, there are many, many safeguards in place whenever an election machine is certified and used. Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims. In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Ecuador (Morales), Brazil (Rouseff), Honduras (Zelaya) off the top of my head. They certainly tried their best in Venezuela. edit: oh, I spaced out, you're asking about the last three decades? I thought you were asking about the last few years.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Recently the CIA pressured Brazil's president to accept the election results before they even happened. Even US media took issue with that.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  Yes, you should say you will accept the results of an election before you know whether you will win it. This is the basis of the peaceful transfer of power. It shouldn't be hard to accept this. To accept only those elections you win is to deny the legitimacy of democratic governance altogether. If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. Obviously. > But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda. Of course not. I have some real reasons for doubting the results. Three days ago, an argentinian man streamed a video where he analyzed our election's official data set. He found that the older models of our voting machines, less thoroughly audited, displayed a clear advantage to the winning left-wing candidate, something between 8% and 15%. After I watched this, I went to the government website and downloaded the entire election dataset and attempted to reproduce his analysis. Then I saw the website go down for hours. An API for data set changes notifications remained up though. I monitored that API and saw them pushing changes to the 2022 and 2018 elections datasets. I saved that data too. Then I witnessed that API go down. Next day, it was back up, the data was modified and there was a bullshit note on the website explaining it went down due maintenance. Then this supreme court judge started censoring everyone who even so much as asked if he was going to investigate any of this. Last weekend I counted at least 10 influential people censored, including a doctor in economics, elected politicians and policemen. It got to the point people on Twitter got Elon Musk to look at it. I'm very worried about this. If it's so false, why can't they just refute it? It seems to me like they're all in damage control mode. Media is pretending nothing's going on.

bink 4y ago

I don't know many educated people who are surprised that countries are meddling in foreign elections. Money has been funneled to opposition groups probably since time began. What did surprise me was the effectiveness and return on investment that has come about with technology, as well as the long term effects that seem to continue well beyond the elections. There are plenty of resources out there to discover meddling and disprove misinformation, but people are seemingly adverse to using them.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

The point of these warnings is not to say "oh gosh it happens whatever" or "we need to launch the ICBMs directly at Moscow right now." The point is to gird the public so that they know the manipulation is happening and can try to compensate for it. There is a lot of denial about this interference happening out there (please do not make me link to it, it's five seconds on Google) and people who are in denial about this stuff absolutely cannot defend themselves. * Obviously this entire reply assumes an ideal world where people are responsible and prominent political movements want to prevent foreign interference (even when the interference arguably benefits them.) I realize we don't live in that world anymore, but how about let's pretend we do for the purposes of this thread.

tcmart14 4y ago
This is essentially what Estonia does I believe. They for years have been making it clear to their citizens that factions outside of its nations borders are directly trying to manipulate their elections. I don't think they discredit any particular sources, it is more of public service announcements for people to do their due diligence.
xienze 4y ago
> There is a lot of denial about this interference happening out there I would argue there’s a lot of creative interpretation of how much “interference” actually happens. Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling. Hence why before and after every election we’re warned repeatedly about foreign interference in our elections. And you would be lying if you said that if the expected red wave materializes that there won’t be large amounts of ink spilled over how Russia pulled it off yet again. Yet if Democrats were to unexpectedly come out on top in a few days, do you think the same people going on about foreign interference would insist that we have to see what role it played in helping certain Democrats win their respective races? Somehow I doubt it. Which is why I think “interference” is a very useful political tool. It’s vague in nature, if we’re being honest it’s impossible to measure its impact, and it serves a very useful purpose — to cast doubt on the victories of political opponents.

godelski 4y ago

This comment comes off as malinformation. Malinformation isn't information that is incorrect, but correct information used in a way to create a misleading context. There's 2 problems here. 1) You're implicitly dismissive of a foreign government interfering in our elections. I think most of us here will agree that any interference from any entity is not okay. 2) It muddles the conversation with more noise. A more in depth version of this wouldn't, and could add more context, but this comment is not doing that. I don't think this was done on purpose, but I'm noting it because it seems to be becoming the common way we speak these days and that isn't healthy to our abilities to solve these issues. We need to discuss the nuance and complexities of these events or else others will control the narratives and make us fight within ourselves instead of uniting to solve these issues.

md2020 4y ago
> malinformation Please do not normalize the use of a term that is being pushed by the government to justify censoring information they don’t like [1]. I understand that there is such a thing as “true information presented out of context in a manner meant to mislead”, and I even grant that the comment might be guilty of it. But “malinformation” and “misinformation” are just becoming labels for “information that is inconvenient”, and I don’t think normal internet commenters adopting their use is doing us any good. [1] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
- kube-system 4y ago
  I'm not a latin expert, but "malinformation" seems like an etomogically perfect word to describe a "whataboutism"
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Or an accusation of one.
    - godelski 4y ago

Ekaros 4y ago

I would care lot more about if everyone who ever meddled in foreign elections in USA would be on death row or at least extradited to those countries.

kahrl 4y ago

What is the point of your comment? Is it to excuse other countries using whataboutism? Is it to say that the behavior in general is normal?

ihatepython 4y ago

Yes. Nobody seems to care that the US interfered in the 2000 Russian election. Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin and forcing him to step down. In effect, the US is responsible for putting Putin in power. The media demonizes Putin getting everybody to hate him, and the average person (including HN) goes along with it, because they don't know any better, even though HN considers itself to be smarter than the average person.

glaucon 4y ago
> Yes. Nobody seems to care that the US interfered in the 2000 Russian election I'd be interested to hear more about this ... do you have links to a summary ? > Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin I'm not clear if you mean Putin blackmailed Yeltsin or the US blackmailed Yeltsin ? What was the blackmail over ? From a brief bit of reading and what memory I have Yeltsin was having various ... - health ("months in hospital" [1]), - political (four prime ministers in eighteen months [2]) - and, allegedly, criminal (government contractor providing Yeltsin and family with "we pay the bills" credit cards [3]) ... problems so him going of his own accord doesn't seem impossible ? Also wasn't it the case that you could only do two terms as President until Putin fixed it so he could reign for ever ? If that was the case then Yeltsin wasn't going to be able to run again anyway ? I'm open to the idea that the CIA was, as is traditional, shooting itself in the foot, and there may have been US elements who felt that Boris was dangerously unpredictable but it does seem that there was other things going on which might have led to his demise ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#1996%E2%80%931999:_Second_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#1996%E2%80%93199... [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/415087.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/415087.stm [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/28/russia.iantraynor https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/28/russia.iantray...