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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 o

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.

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.