Last April, Vladimir Putin visited the campus of Bauman Moscow state technical university, set on the banks of the Yauza River in the east of the city and home to some of the country’s brightest scientific minds.
He toured the campus, met undergraduates and boasted about Moscow’s ambitious plans for space missions to the moon and Mars. “You have everything it takes to be competitive,” Putin told the students.
What the Kremlin readout of Putin’s visit did not mention was a secret faculty inside the university, known simply as Department 4, or “Special Training”.
But why do they even need to hack elections? The folks over at .ml told me that elections are pointless and the rich already controls everything!
The folks over at .ml also said they have definitely never attended this particular Russian spy school.
Two parts of the same attack: Undermine election integrity while also pushing the idea that votes don’t matter anyway. Maybe you’re only partially successful with both approaches but a couple percentage points here and a couple there can tip previously well-balanced scales in the attacker’s favor.
Its called hedging and they are known for it
I thought that was when you- oh, wait! Hedging, never mind.
TBH it feels like the rich have so many politicians in their pockets that now they focus on election meddling to show the policies of authoritarianism are validated by the voter base.
Commie here with a point of view that Most such .ml comrades will agree with:
Of course Russia engages in propaganda, election manipulation, etc. The point we want to make is not that this does not happen or that this is somehow moral. The point we want to make is that, by constantly talking about Russia’s election meddling, hacking etc. and constantly forgetting about the US’s and Europe’s much more intense meddling, we are framing the issue as an “anti-Russia” problem instead of an anticapitalist problem and giving leeway to the west to engage in such behaviors.
If we were true to reality, we WOULD discuss Russian propaganda and election meddling, but we would discuss TENFOLD more the western propaganda and election meddling, firslty because it’s the one most pervasive where we live (most of us are westerners), and secondly because it’s much, much stronger, by virtue of the EU and US having a lot more resources to put into this than Russia, a comparatively smaller and poorer country does.
This is the real reason why it is imperative for leftists to engage in so-called “whataboutism”: because the media environment in which we move makes excessive focus on propaganda by declared enemy states and completely glosses over propaganda and meddling by our own or friendly states. By engaging in this “whataboutism”, we force the perspective closer to reality, with a bit more equal representation of the sins of both sides.
If the rich control the elections, doesn’t that make them meaningless?