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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   30776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Romanian Supreme Court Cancels Election, Overthrows Results of First Round

Recently, unknown dark horse anti-NATO candidate Călin Georgescu shocked the world by winning a plurality of the vote in the first round of Romania's presidential election. Key to his victory was an intense social media campaign, with a particular emphasis on Tik-Tok.

Romania's Supereme Court has today declared these results null and void. The full opinion setting out their reasoning has yet to be published, but this is almost certainly due to allegations of Russian interference. I have not seen any credible accusations that votes themselves were fraudulently cast, only that Georgescu's campaign recieved improper (illegal?) assistance from Russian media operations. This is IMO the most important outstanding question.

That "Interference" is likely no different from how European politics is influenced by American media. Politics has become global, things simply influence eachother. And I'm sure no left-wing victory will be cancelled because of outside influence. This merely seems like the attempt to make anything sufficiently right-wing illegal, with the argument "Their politics overlap with what some people bad people of the past believed".

This seems like the old, tired, western leftist playbook by now. Russia is both feckless and a bogeyman simultaneously. They both subvert democracy, almost prophetically, every time some left wing party loses an election, but also will soon be beaten by NATO's wallet and the long arc of history.

The allegations of Russian media operations seems to stem from Calin Georgescu's social media success on TikTok. I've previously discussed how the TikTok ban was ultimately determined by Zionist support for deplatforming a source of highly-successful anti-Israel content, with accusations of China manipulating the algorithm to boost pro-Palestine content only being substantiated by pointing to the success of those content tags. China was a scapegoat for the TikTok ban in the US, and Russia appears to be the scapegoat for the cancelled elections in Romania based on a very similar logic, as @theSinisterMushroom pointed out the actual evidence of content manipulation on TikTok in Georgescu engagement is basically non-existent.

On that note, it was only a few days ago that the American Jewish Committee, uh, wrote letters that they were very concerned about the first round of the election:

AJC Expresses Concern About Romanian Presidential Candidate with History of Antisemitism and Holocaust Revisionism:

Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Jewish Affairs for American Jewish Committee, has written a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Romanian Foreign Minister Luminita Odobescu expressing concern about the victory in the first round of the Romanian presidential election by Cailin Georgescu.

In the letter, Baker called Georgescu a “person who fuels the flames of anti-Semitism, who personally promotes Holocaust revisionism, and who, through his political views, defies the essential purpose of NATO."

The full text of the letter is below:

...

The first round of the Romanian Presidential elections last week has seen the victory of a candidate who is anathema to everything that we have worked for together. He is someone who fans the flames of antisemitism, who personally promotes Holocaust revisionism, and who by his political views challenges the essential purpose of NATO. Surely, this cannot be indicative of Romania today.

Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu, who was in the 90s still well-regarded among anti-Communist sympathizers. Antonescu's image was dinged some as Elie Wiesel Commission did its relentless Holocaust guilt-tripping campaign. Western-aligned media focused on maligning the Antonescu administration due to deporting Jews to the East in Transnistria without the proper supplies, doing mass reprisal shootings in response to partisan attacks and other stuff, grossly exaggerating the intentions behind it. After a while it had become increasingly untenable to make positive statements about Antonescu's leadership in the presence of the left, in high society or among politicians. (And of course it's illegal "Holocaust denial" too.)

So the question of Russian interference in TikTok is likely the least important question, as that issue is a scapegoat for other problems, as alluded to by Reuters:

Also of concern to European allies is Georgescu describing as national heroes and "martyrs" Ion Antonescu, Romania's de facto World War Two leader, sentenced to death for his part in Romania's Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, a pre-World War Two leader of the Iron Guard, one of Europe's most violent anti-Semitic movements.

The EU diplomat said Georgescu's views on the pair, as well as on NATO, would increase tensions both at home and abroad if he came to power. "Imagine the discussions in the (European) Council, imagine the polarisation he would bring at home," said the EU diplomat.

EU "Democracy" is just the biggest lie there is. On another note, that Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania referenced by the Rabbi in his letter expressing, uhm, concern over the first round of the election? That exact same institute is now, as of last month, a Trusted flagger under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the EU. The line between Holocaust studies and outright legal censorship of political dissidents no longer even exists, the same "institutes" just have both jobs at the same time officially, now.

Where is the evidence that the election was cancelled because the AJC and Elie Wiesel institute wrote letters ‘expressing concerns’ about the candidate? You’ve often done this, arguing that anything that is supported by some Jews that subsequently happens must have been set in motion by those Jews, which is rather fallible logic.

The election was cancelled to prevent the growth of a European right wing, because EU "Democracy" cannot allow a real Right Wing. The AJC pressure with the accusation of Holocaust Denial, the Elie Wiesel Institute in Romania being delegated official EU censor, those are examples of how this political suppression is actually happening. Of course there are other factors as well. But Reuters has admitted the pressure is coming from this direction, and the story of Russia manipulating TikTok holds no water whatsoever.

because EU "Democracy" cannot allow a real Right Wing.

It's interesting that "right wing parties in the EU are necessarily anti-semitic" is such a horseshoe statement.

What is your definition of 'a real Right Wing'?

The Reuters article said one EU official ‘expressed concern’ with his views on that historical figure, then mentioned the AJC letter. Where is the causative relationship between that and the decision taken by the Romanian court?

You are free to draw your own conclusions, my conclusion is that the political pressures mentioned in the Reuters article are more relevant to the actual snap decision than Russian influence in TikTok. Mostly because the latter has no basis to support it, they were pulled out of thin air after the authorities did not like the results of the first round of elections.

And if you accept these elections were shut down in order to anti-democratically put an obstacle for the growth of the Right Wing in Romania/Europe, then the Reuters article and AJC letter are revelatory for where the real concerns are coming from and the actual tactics that they are using to repress right wing influence in Europe.

But you are free to believe that the elections were cancelled because Russia interfered by influencing TikTok and not for those other reasons, if you want to believe that!

I think the elections were cancelled because Romanian pro-EU elites and businesspeople didn’t want this guy to win and are (clearly) powerful enough to prevent him from doing so. I don’t think antisemitism factored into their motivation to any non-negligible extent.

Oh it's the businesspeople of course. I think "pro-EU elites" is getting closer and that is certainly part of it.

Do you admit that one of the main reasons for consternation over European Nationalism and growth of right-wing parties is anti-semitism among the "pro-EU elites?" Do you not believe them when they essentially outright say "we can't have a right wing because of the Holocaust?"

What's so amazing is that you don't even take the "pro-EU elites" at their own word that they are very concerned about anti-semitism, or at least that is an excuse they use to clamp down on those parties with increasingly anti-democratic measures. You don't even believe them when they say it directly.

Upwards of 85 million people died in WW-II, the fact we're cancelling Democratic elections in 2024, and underneath the veneer of psyopping the West into thinking it's because of Russian interference in TikTok, under the hood the, um, responsible decision makers are citing his praise for Antonescu, is outrageous. Citing the fact that Jews died in shootings or resettlement in WW-II should not even remotely justify this act by Western Democracy (TM). I don't think I misrepresented at all, I think your representation is actually worse than mine was as mine had slightly more detail than what you are mentioning.

It's just such a Jewish-centric view of the world, we can cancel elections if someone praises a leader who got Jews killed during WW-II, a war in which tens of millions were purposefully killed by world leaders on all sides? Are we able to cancel elections if a candidate praises a world leader or national hero who was responsible for getting white people killed in WWII, or getting Romanians killed under Communism? Are Jews just that special?

Antonescu is not even accused of being involved in the alleged operation to gas millions of people inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and @Stefferi apparently considers it illegal Holocaust Denial to praise someone who died before WW-II even started, based on the fact that person was an "anti-semite." Can we take notice now that Democracy is just being cancelled now and these Holocaust Study institutes are just officially being delegated as EU censors?

I do not think him praising a mass murderer is grounds for overturning a democratic election.

I didn't say anything about anything being illegal or Holocaust denial, I just noted it was quite misleading to state that Georgescu was only being criticized for praising Antonescu when your own sources also mentioned Codreanu.

This is unfortunately characteristic of all your posts on this topic.

"Some Jews happened to die during a war, and now anyone who might have somehow been involved with a Jew dying during the war is cause for cancelling elections. Holocaust grifters are pretending that Jews dying during a war is worse than anyone else dying during a war. Yeah, there were some resettlements and shootings, but that's just stuff that happens in war."

Well, gosh, yes, that would be pretty outrageous, wouldn't it?

Your responses are bad and disingenuous, and I have pointed out before that you don't engage in good faith or honestly, not because I disagree with your premises (which I do), but because you intentionally obfuscate and cloud the actual issue you are arguing.

Your core belief is that the Holocaust didn't happen, and if it did the Jews deserved it, and nothing exceptionally bad ever happens to Jews and if it does they deserve it. Of course if you presented it that bluntly, you'd turn off even a lot of the Jew-critical readers. So instead you post things like this, arguing as if people are (at the instigation of paranoid manipulative Jews) criticizing some guy who admires some other guy who might incidentally have been involved in a few Jews dying along with lots of other civilians during the war. But unless you can handwave away all Jew-slaughter as conveniently as you would like to, the charges against Antonescu are considerably more than "some shit happened during a war."

Now this is not an invitation to go through your entire Holocaust denial tap dance one more time to explain how being an anti-Semite is irrelevant and anyways anti-Semitism is good actually because Jews are bad. You single-issue posting about Da Joos is annoying; dropping the Joo-posts into every single thread that you can possible make about Jews is even more annoying. What grinds my gears personally is when you engage in this level of disingenuous, which offends me because I dislike sleazy argumentation. If you said "Antonescu wasn't responsible for any massacres because those didn't happen," I'd disagree but at least you'd be arguing honestly. Likewise if you said "Antonescu participated in the slaughter of Jews because they had it coming and he was doing a good thing." I am honestly not sure which of those two statements is closest to your actual belief, but "Antonescu dindu nuffin" is surely not something even you are niave enough to actually believe.

This is unfortunately characteristic of all your replies to me, you just grandstand with irrelevant jabs and don't even engage the point I'm making.

Can you Amadan, parse for me why a Romanian Nationalist praising a Romanian Nationalist leader constitutes Holocaust Revisionism? That's a serious question I expect you to answer. You just take the double-speak in stride and don't even think to question it.

Sadly you devolve to the same baseless accusations of dishonesty even though I'm extremely upfront about what I believe. The core controversies surrounding Holocaust Revisionism are not directly even related to the WW-II narrative surrounding Antonescu, so why would I bring them up? Your accusation that I'm being dishonest by not mentioning those other matters is just another of many examples of you being extremely uncharitable instead of engaging my argument.

Can you Amadan, parse for me why a Romanian Nationalist praising a Romanian Nationalist leader constitutes Holocaust Revisionism?

I didn't say it was. But much of the objection to this Romanian nationalist was because of (a) his own anti-Semitism (which, again, you just claim doesn't exist and is also a good thing) and (b) the involvement of the leader he's praising in the Holocaust (which you... well, see (a)).

Note I am not claiming this in itself is reason to overturn an election; I don't even know all the nuances of the Romanian political situation. I'll bet you don't either. If a candidate who was legitimately elected had his election overturned just because he's an anti-Semite, well I'd object to that on principal (again, without knowing what Romanian law says). But I don't think that's the case and it doesn't seem to have much to do with what happened. It just so happens that a right wing candidate appears to also be anti-Semitic, so you are again trying to shoehorn your ZOG conspiracy into events, because everything is always about Jews.

Feel free to keep wasting your time grandstanding, I'm just going to ask you the same question again:

Can you Amadan, parse for me why a Romanian Nationalist praising a Romanian Nationalist leader constitutes Holocaust Revisionism?

Why would the Rabbi from the AJC make this claim? Explain that to me, and if you decide to continue whining about me talking about "da Joos" I'm just going to ask this same question again in response.

Can you Amadan, parse for me why a Romanian Nationalist praising a Romanian Nationalist leader constitutes Holocaust Revisionism?

I answered you directly above, and @spiky_fungus responded below.

and if you decide to continue whining about me talking about "da Joos" I'm just going to ask this same question again in response.

If you actually start posting about something other than Da Joos, I will stop pointing out that you do nothing but Joo-post. You would like to post about Jews Jews Jews constantly and you've been told not to. You haven't actually been modded for it recently because we let people have a long, long leash about their hobby horses, because it is somewhat subjective at what point someone is going on about something "too much," but if you are declaring your intention to single-issue post over and over, that will make our decision easier.

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Can you Amadan, parse for me why a Romanian Nationalist praising a Romanian Nationalist leader constitutes Holocaust Revisionism?

this was answered, you are doing your usual dance again of wasting time of others...

In

Western-aligned media focused on maligning the Antonescu administration due to deporting Jews to the East in Transnistria without the proper supplies, doing mass reprisal shootings in response to partisan attacks and other stuff, grossly exaggerating the intentions behind it.

you lied as pointed out in

This is...a severe misrepresentation of Antonescu's involvement in the Holocaust, enough that it got me to stop being a lurker just to say this so people reading your comment do not take it at face value. He encouraged and later did nothing to stop the murder of thousands of Jews, and for those who were not killed, he was complicit in them being rounded up and stuffed in trains that would go in circles, stopping periodically to offload the dead.

also you manipulated as pointed out by

Not only that, but it's pretty odd to say "Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" when it's followed by a quote indicating that Georgescu also praised Corneliu Codreanu, whose antisemitism was absolutely under zero doubt by any standards.

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You know, this ‘the ADL uses Russian/Chinese influence concerns as a fig leaf to go after TikTok because it boosts anti Zionism’ is a well evidenced enough take that I didn’t realize where you were going with it until you got to Ion Antonescu, who regardless of his other merits as a leader was definitely a willing and enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust even when compared to other axis leaders like Horthy and Tiso who collaborated in such matters.

In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.

Things became so bad that the local Nazi representative, German noble Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to the Third Reich’s own efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.

(Slate Star Codex, Review of Eichmann In Jerusalem, January 2017.)

Not only that, but it's pretty odd to say "Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" when it's followed by a quote indicating that Georgescu also praised Corneliu Codreanu, whose antisemitism was absolutely under zero doubt by any standards.

As a wise man once said: if they don’t want to be seen as an international conspiracy to subvert and destroy anything that goes against their ethno-religious interests, then they should probably stop conspiring internationally to subvert and destroy anything that goes against their ethno-religious interests

And if the Nations didn't want Jewish people to conspire internationally to blah blah blah, maybe don't try to wipe them out every time you're looking for a scapegoat.

(I don't believe there is any international Jewish conspiracy¹, but if there were, I'm not sure I'd blame them.)

¹"I can swear to you, there is no Jewish banking conspiracy. Do you know why? Jews can't agree with other Jews on where to go for dinner! There's no way we control the banks! We couldn't even get that meeting started! 'Alright, Saul, Morris, everybody sit down, we're gonna start the meeting to control the banks.' 'Oh sure, who died and left you king? No, sure, start the meeting, I'll sit over here, I'm nobody, I'm nothing, I got no opinions.'" -- Jon Stewart

Do you really believe that? Isn't the huge over-representation of jews in positions of power due to an in-group bias? This in-group bias doesn't even surprise me, Indians have it too. I actually think it's weird that only whites (particularly on the left) seem so negatively biased towards their own. The idea that jews can't cooperate in general doesn't seem to coexist well with this observation.

If you're disliked everywhere you go, by the way, I'd say that would call for self-reflection.

This doesn't seem like an unfair take to have, and keep in mind that I'm not like other people you've seen talk negatively about the jews. I barely know any history, it doesn't interest me. I don't know much about WW2, and I'm not using any information relating to WW2 in my conclusions. If I must say what I dislike about jews, and why I think others might dislike them, it's that they use feminine methods of obtaining power. Women can usually get away with methods like this (the victim mentality, for instance) because they're good at making things look appealing. Grabbing power through social manipulation without having the skills to make it look appealing, will frankly make people hate you over time.

I wouldn't even say I dislike jews in general, but many things that I dislike, because they're dishonest (like the media) has a very large ratio of jews working there, at the very least. But I will dislike anyone who I think uses dirty means to achieve things.

Do you really believe whites don’t engage in nepotism? It happens to not be mediated by ethnicity, but white people do lots of nepotism on the basis of alumni networks, family connections, religion, etc.

A very big percentage of the Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power is HBD. You’ll notice how much of it is specifically Ashkenazi.

A very big percentage of the Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power is HBD. You’ll notice how much of it is specifically Ashkenazi.

Do you have an actual number on this? I'd be interested in seeing a rigorous, good faith investigation into how much of that overrepresentation is HBD as opposed to nepotism.

This is a fair point, but the stereotype is definitely Ashkenazi and the early life check is usually something along the lines of ‘name ends in -stein’. And Jews are more overrepresented in fields with high verbal IQ(lawyer etc) than in fields with high mathematical IQ(engineer etc), so how much of it is merit is inherently harder to measure.

I’m comfortable saying a big chunk of it is almost certainly HBD without knowing, specifically, how much, and it would shock me if there weren’t nepotism networks that may or may not be available to the average Jew but are definitely not available to gentiles. These things exist all the time- historically Jewish fraternities I’m sure offer fantastically good networking opportunities, like their gentile counterparts. But these types of things are all over the place for all kinds of groups- there’s veterans networking, there’s indians networking, etc, etc.

As far as things like the ADL, or Jewish ‘charities’ that really just redirect money from gentiles to Jews, I’m not a fan, and distinguishing these from nepotism that Jews simply happen to be better at is reasonable, but I suspect they’re rather minor contributors to Jewish success.

I can appreciate the reply and understand your point, but I was gesturing towards a more numerical approach. With IQ distribution plots and demographic numbers we can work out what proportion of a given IQ range is gentile as opposed to ashkenazim, and compare the actual observed numbers with what the IQ distribution statistics would suggest. Obviously it isn't a perfect measure, but I think it beats just going on vibes.

Whites on the right might, but I think it's less than other races tend to. Left-leaning whites seem to have a negative bias towards themselves. I found a picture which seems to reveal this: https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/883104fdaad1810c8dbbb2a6df5a4b6ed7d5036f-2560x1138.jpg

HBD

I'm not sure thats an explain all of it, but Jordan Peterson did write a good argument towards this. However, given not only who is in power, but how it's used, I think it's fairly certain to say that whoever is in power finds some sort of joy in the destruction of Christianity, white people, masculinity, family values, identity, and so on. While there's a lot of psychopaths in power, I can't see why other white people would destroy their own, unless they're brainwashed (which makes them a separate group from those doing the brainwashing, who are also more intelligent).

I also don't think intelligence necessarily correlates with evil in white people. Nikola Tesla was good to a fault, and died poor and alone. Unlikely highly intelligent non-jews, which tend autistic, intelligent jews seem to be wordcels with good social skills and communication abilities. And if the success of jews is genetic, then couldn't a desire for money or power be stronger in jewish genetics as well?

feminine methods of obtaining power.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by 'feminine' vs. 'masculine' means of obtaining power?

Feminine: Using indirect methods, using cunning and deception, appealing to feelings and morality rather than logic, hypocritical. Masculine: Bold, simple, direct, not afraid of direct conflict because it's stronger and thus able to win while playing fair. Uses logic or power. Will say the truth even when its unpleasant. Admits its own faults without shame.

But what I mean by "feminism" clusters with oversocialization (Ted's criticism of left-wing mentality), moralization (Robert Greene), mental weakness (used in comparisons like "good times result in weak men" and insults like "snowflake". It's to my understanding that progrssive beliefs correlate with mental illness, including depression and anxiety, so I don't think this criticism is entirely unfair), and "Slave morality" (Nietzsche).

If you compare how women and men compete for social power, there should be some overlap with what I wrote above.

If you're disliked everywhere you go, by the way, I'd say that would call for self-reflection.

How can non-existent people self-reflect about why they are hated in places they don't go to?

Many of the places with the most Jew-hatred have basically no proximal Jews to hate. The Arab states basically ethnically cleansed themselves of Jews last century, and yet Jewish spy animals is practically a genre of comedic international media. These do not happen because the locals have some well informed awareness of Jews, or any sort of significant exposure to Jews from which to make an informed opinion.

Many have never actually met or had a real interpersonal relationship with a Jew at all, positive or negative, to have an opinion about. They have never had a Jew apply feminine power against them, because they have never met a Jewish man or woman.

And by extension, this means that no Jew has met them.

They have never had a Jew apply feminine power against them

Not directly, but indirectly. If you see some powerful people do some terrible things, and these people just happen by sheer coincidence, to be jewish about half the time (despite only 2% of the population being jewish), who could blame you for associating the two? Many people have hated "old white men" because most powerful people in the world have been old white men. But at least you can explain this by "well, the country was like 99% white when these people started solidifying their power". And that it's men, rather than women, who are powerful, can be explained by the statistical distribution of personality traits. Some groups also hate "The rich", "The government" or "The elite", so it seems that most people just agree that the top is rotten and filled with terrible people, and that we merely disagree on which trait to identify them by (money, gender, religion, race). You're correct that I have never met any of the powerful people who are actively making life worse for me. They're just jewish at surprisingly high ratios. And the non-jews which I hate still have a distinct feminine way of thinking and acting. It may be that society has lost enough good taste that what I'm calling feminine is simply the dominant strategy.

And it makes sense to distrust the elite, and even to hate them, for they know the consequences of their actions. Countless books (some dating back over 100 years) warn against what's currently happening in society.

Not directly, but indirectly. If you see some powerful people do some terrible things, and these people just happen by sheer coincidence, to be jewish about half the time (despite only 2% of the population being jewish), who could blame you for associating the two?

Anyone with the statistical literacy, which is why I asked the question you have tried to avoid.

Again-

How can non-existent people self-reflect about why they are hated in places they don't go to?

You're correct that I have never met any of the powerful people who are actively making life worse for me. They're just jewish at surprisingly high ratios.

If you have never met any of the people who are actively making worse for you, why do you believe you know who they are well enough to determine their relative ethnic distribution?

Moreover, if you have never met any powerful jews who actively made life worse for you, then how could the number of jews you have met who were not powerful jews actively making life worse for you provide a personal experience to believe that the jews as a collective are actively making life worse for you?

By your own statistics, you'd have a 0 encounter rate of powerful jews who actively make life worse for you, versus a X number of Jews who are not powerful and making life worse for you, where X is the number of Jews you have met in your lifetime. Unless you have personally known 0 jews, 100% of all jews you would personally know would be lived experience evidence against powerful jews being responsible for your misfortunes.

And it makes sense to distrust the elite, and even to hate them, for they know the consequences of their actions. Countless books (some dating back over 100 years) warn against what's currently happening in society.

Prejudice and scapegoating on the basis of historical ignorance are among the things the venerable classics warn against. On the other hand, there are countless old books filled with nonsense, including conspiracy theories and prejudicial scapegoating that other books warn against.

Your question had the premise that jews don't exist, so I just decided to refute that (and to refute the idea that you need to be harmed directly and in person)

And I'm no good at history, I don't know of many of the instances in which jews were "kicked out", but you can't kick out what isn't there, and if a country has built resentment towards a certain group of people, then it would be weird if said group hadn't been involved in something controversial in the country at the time. It would be even weirder if this had happened over 100 times, in many countries, across more than 1000 years of history.

why do you believe you know who they are well enough to determine their relative ethnic distribution?

I don't need to know people personally to know their religion. I also don't need to meet every jew to know what ratio of the population is jewish?

to believe that the jews as a collective are actively making life worse for you?

I don't know if regular jews, outside of elite institutions and rich families, fit known stereotypes. I don't know if they support the plans of powerful people who make life worse for me. I don't even know if they tend left-wing. Lets ask Google: "The AJC survey found that 61 percent of American Jews said they would vote for Joe Biden, while 23 percent said they would vote for Donald Trump". Seems that they do. I also don't know what ratio of these people support feminism and its nonsense.

I don't even know if I've ever met any jews in person. I don't ask people about their religion or race.

On the other hand, there are countless old books filled with nonsense, including conspiracy theories I meant books like 1984. It warned against something that we could see happening in real time.

What do you think about this quote? "Media: lords of public opinion The American media is a willing recipient of Soviet subversion. I know this, because I worked with American journalists and correspondents in Moscow while on the Soviet side, and after my defection to the West. People habitually refer to the American media as ‘free’, ignoring the obvious and commonly known fact that most of the most powerful media in the USA, is already monopolized both financially and ideologically by what are referred to as ‘liberals’. American media ‘chains’ belong to fewer and fewer owners, who, do not seem to mind that the media is being almost totally ‘liberalized’. Liberalism, in its old classical sense, means above all, respect to individual opinion and tolerance to opposing views."

It was published 40 years ago. The idea that American media is left-learning, that it's owned by a few elites, and that modern "liberty" is different from classic liberty (that is, becoming pretty much it's opposite) is not exactly new, but to call it obvious as long as 40 years ago is impressive to me.

What about this one? "Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 per cent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic." Written by Jung in 1957

I don't think it would be right to dismiss these warnings as conspiracy theories since the consequences they warned about have manifested themselves almost as predicted, and since the idea that these predictions are "mere conspiracy theories" is much newer idea (it seems like the attempt to discredit ideas retroactively and to establish the current consensus as correct in a timeless sense)

And we were warned about this, too, in 1883: "‘Formerly the whole world was insane’ – the finest ones say, blinking." This describes how anti-traditionalists speak about the past. They essentially go "Everyone was evil, the past is immoral and wrong, but now we're enlightened by science and know what's good and proper!" and then they try to rewrite history exactly how "1984" said they would.

I don't dislike Jews because of Nietzsche, and while he has written many things about them (including my claims here, that they subverted values and made them more feminine), his overall description of jews seems positive to me. I'm aware that this reply doesn't respond to what you meant by your statement, but I feel like I'd explain my views better.

Finally - is there no group that you think badly about, that you haven't met in person? And isn't your life influenced by a lot of powerful people who your voice is hopeless to ever reach?

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An interesting tidbit is that voting had already started when this decision by the Supreme/Constitutional Court (CCR) came out.

Unfortunately, this is just the culmination of a series of events, which could maybe be traced as far back as the December 1989 revolution in Romania if I had the motivation for an effortpost. The joke being, Romanians haven't met a thing they couldn't steal, and these elections aren't even close to being the first.

For context, Romania's presidential election goes into a runoff second round with the top two candidates if no one has the majority of votes in the first.

After the first round results came out in favor of the far-right independent Georgescu and the opposition USR candidate Lasconi, I remember writing to a friend "no worries boss, this is Romania. Who do you want to win? We'll fix it, 'se rezolva.'" I wish my cynicism would have been slapped down just this one time, but you'll never be wrong being a cynic about Romanian politics.

The accusations against Georgescu are paper thin; the intelligence report declassified by the sitting president Klaus Iohannis (of the center-left PNL currently ruling in a coalition with center-right PSD) mentions such ominous things as old accounts reactivating, some VPN usage, and no IP address sharing between the pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts -- which just proves how sophisticated and malicious those darn Russians are. Also, Georgescu maintains that he hasn't spent any funds on his campaign, but someone has been paying TikTokers for posting/reposting his videos. And that's it. That's all it takes to redo the elections. Yes, there's Democracy, but within limits.

This charade follows a recount of the first round of voting based on another weak claim of miscounting some votes (no such claims were accepted by the court for the parliamentary elections where much more solid proof of fraud was provided -- but then again PSD-PNL won those elections so no biggie). Unfortunately the recount did not provide satisfactory results, so we have come to this.

As you'd expect, the current Supreme court is composed of all PSD appointees, since they have in one form or another been in power for 95% of the time since the 1989 revolution. Now, of course Georgescu is very pro-Russian, and may even have been supported by them. But I doubt any future elections will be restarted if evidence came out that Russians paid off some influencers to post videos of the PSD-PNL candidates.

All this makes me glad to have left that place. "Romania is a beautiful country; it's just too bad it's inhabited."

Edit TL;DR: the incumbent coalition didn't make it to the second round, so to save democracy from the Russians they had to restart elections. Next time make sure to vote better

If there was a round of voting left, why not trust voters to Make The Right Decision and vote for the non-TikTok runoff candidate if Georgescu is such an obvious threat to democracy for checks notes foreigners making him trend on social media? Can't all the angry Romanian protestors just vote for Lasconi as the "fix" for this "problem?"

Current President's term ends on Dec. 21, but the next election isn't until March. Current president exceeding his term is a constitutional issue.

Why not indeed. Cynically, because they expect they'll get away with it. Legally because they declared the elections to have been vitiated/corrupted, and there's no other real recourse. I also saw some posts about how the court had secret information that Georgescu might have won if the election continued, so they just had to act to save Romania (and give their buddies another go at it, but that's just incidental :)

Unfortunately for her, Lasconi may have walked into a trap. After the first round of results was validated (by the same supreme court which now decided there was fraud lol) she aligned with PSD-PNL in a pro-European coalition. Now that Georgescu will probably be barred from running again, all the anti-system people might vote for Simion (from the far-right AUR) who backed Georgescu. Simion may or may not be controlled opposition, but is the preferred candidate for PSD's Ciulacu to go against in the second round. It seems quite possible that Lasconi will not make it to the second round again, especially if one believes the reports of PSD funneling some of their votes towards Simion previously.

The law on the President's term is quite self-contradictory. It could be argued that the current president's term ends when the new president is appointed.

only that Georgescu's campaign recieved improper (illegal?) assistance from Russian media operations.

The legal cause for the cancellation seems to be undeclared campaign funding.

At least that's what I'm getting at this point.

Is there proof that Georgescu knew that money was being spent on social media campaigns on his behalf and didn't chase down the exact amounts to report it properly? Because tbh it just kind of seems like he didn't think he was gonna win, either.

Do campaign finance statutes include provisions for cancelling elections if money is underreported? Here it's generally fines and such, not undoing the election itself.

Is there any evidence the current ruling party knew about the social media campaigning but didn't do anything about it because Georgescu is a partiless nobody and they thought he would just leech some votes off the far-right party?

Is there proof that Georgescu knew ...

If I'm reading it right, it doesn't matter if he knew or not. The law in question seems to be https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/73672, in particular Chapter IV (Capitolul IV).

Do campaign finance statutes include provisions for cancelling elections if money is underreported?

The brief statement mentioned an article from the constitution which says basically "the elections must be held according to the law" and the law (above) says "blah blah blah prohibited". Looks like there are no specific provisions for this particular case, and it's up to the court to figure out what to do now.

My understanding is that the court decided that the election was not held according to the law, and therefore doesn't count as a valid election, and the country needs a valid election to elect a president. With no explicit shortcuts, the country now has to go through the full election procedure. Again, that's just my reading of the situation so far. The full statement from the court should, I guess, state the logic of the decision, maybe. Shrug emote.

Because tbh it just kind of seems like he didn't think he was gonna win, either.

Seems to be so, yeah.

I have not seen any credible accusations that votes themselves were fraudulently cast

Reuters:

The intelligence service also said access data for official Romanian election websites was published on Russian cyber crime platforms. The access data was probably procured by targeting legitimate users or by exploiting the legitimate training server, the agency said.

It added that it had identified over 85,000 cyber attacks which aimed to exploit system vulnerabilities.

So the election systems may have been hacked.

Romania, like most of of the world, does voting by paper ballots only. I don’t see how hacking any “election systems” would be material for the election results that would warrant wholesale cancellation.

I presume vast majority of the "cyber attacks" are the kind where the attacker doesn't care is the target the election official's laptop or their dishwasher (both can join the botnet for reasons not related to election at all).

Theoretically, hacking an digitized election system enables interference in the election outcome despite the paper ballots. If precincts use computerized system to track who is in the rolls, you can DDoS the precincts with unfavorable demographics; as queues mount, some of the voters will be turned off. If you want to stuff ballot boxes without too many accomplices among election officials, hack the system to see who did not vote, plant a false vote and flip the variable next to non-voter name claiming they voted. After the election, if done successfully, the numbers will match and the fraud will be difficult to reveal.

The problem is, there has not been news about computer problems during Romanian elections. The version that circulated around reddit was about governing socialist party making a miscalculation: they instructed the mid-level party bosses to campaign for Georgescu in order to split the votes of the opposition, hoping to face an easy opponent in the run-off. They didn't realize Georgescu was popular for unrelated reasons, and overshot. All of this is naturally internet rumors.

I am not Romanian, but we do have paper ballots in Slovakia. And I theorized with my friends for how to possibly influence elections and it seems impossible to me. Some counterpoints to yours based on my own experience in voting comittee:

If you want to stuff ballot boxes without too many accomplices among election officials, hack the system to see who did not vote, plant a false vote and flip the variable next to non-voter name claiming they voted.

This is impossible. The elections are very decentralized, where election rooms are mostly at schools in specific classrooms with election committee consisting of people from various political parties. All eligible voters are automatically registered against their residency and are assigned their specific voting room. All voting is paper based and ballots are handed out against signature. All voting is limited to one day, often Saturday or Sunday with voting rooms closing at 10PM.

What happens next is that all ballots are manually counted with all voting committee members present and having full access to ballots to check them and count them on their own. Final tally is then phoned to central committee, ballot box is then sealed with signatures of all local voting committee participants and relocated by policemen. All participants can take photo of the final tally and they can find it on official government website after elections to check if there was something shady going on.

I am not sure if you are US citizen, but I cannot stress how fucking ridiculous and unsafe your elections are. I dare you to find some way of how to falsify Slovak parliamentary elections just to understand how stupid the voting in US is. The only thing I thought of was some psyop - like planting some free ballot boxes somewhere or maybe bribing some people to declare their own tally did not match in order to attack trust in the voting mechanism or maybe arson of couple of ballot boxes during election day. But I could not think of much more than that.

Seems like cassus belli to "liberate our Romanian bretheren". Not a good sign for the stability of Europe.

On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad [1]. On the other, throwing out election results based on foreign social media posts seems liable to create a valid threat of a denial of service for elections absent something like The Great Firewall (which is itself a potential threat to open society).

I see why both sides would presumably be frustrated by this, but I don't have a real Platonic ideal of an alternative to suggest. Governance, at least good/fair/democratic governance, is hard.

  1. For some value of bad that is pretty nebulous. For all the allegations in the US in 2016, the actual posts entered into evidence in followup investigations were IMO almost embarrassingly bad and not really shown to be effective.

There's also the reality of the diaspora. There's no way to avoid foreign thought in elections when so many voters live abroad. There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.

There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.

What percentage of that diaspora is gypsies, though? I observe that at least here in America, if you hear that somebody is “Romanian” — and in America, this is almost always in the context of learning that law enforcement has broken up some ring of professional thieves comprised of “Romanian immigrants — Romanian nearly always means “Roma” and not ethnic Romanian-speakers. My understanding is that this is mostly true throughout Western Europe, although I have no doubt that some reasonable number of actual Romanians also emigrated, particularly during the Ceaucescu years.

There's a lot of actual Romanians who've immigrated. You don't notice them because like eastern european immigrants in general, they're largely functional educated middle class people, and most Americans just think they're some kind of slav(they are not). I've met plenty of people from Romania, who identify as Romanian, would find a confusion with gypsies very offensive and often insist that roma be referred to as gypsies to avoid confusion.

In Western Europe they're a bit more visible because Romanian immigrants to Western Europe are more likely to be working class, although still usually non-criminal. There are a lot of them. Romanian immigration(and my understanding was that this is actual Romanians who took normal working class jobs from normal working class brits) was one of the complaints from the Brexiteers. Again, you're more likely to see a news story about a specific "Romanian" or group of "Romanians" who are actually gypsies, but that's because gypsies are all criminals that no sane person wants in their country, so they get arrested a lot.

Why shouldn’t I be able to vote based on rhetoric from Russian bots? What if they make better arguments than the domestic media? Why is my vote illegitimate because I’ve internalized a truth that came from a source you don’t like?

“Sounds like someone controlled by an oligarch to me…” (sarcasm)

But seriously, this is a major shift in Cthulhu swimming leftwards and making people go insane. If every right-wing win is de facto evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed.

de facto

Did you mean to say ipso facto (by itself/automatically)? De facto is used more like "essentially" or "more or less", which, while it works here, seems a bit unidiomatic.

If every right-wing win is de facto evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed.

Why? Right-wing movements in many places have come to oppose American globalist hegemony recently, and "rules-based world order" has always been politics speak for "obey the American globalist hegemony". If the people internalise what you said and consider anti-$thing wins to be tantamount to [enemy action] and pro-$thing wins to be tantamount to [cluster of positive affect], this seems pretty good for $thing.

De facto - Means "in fact" or "in effect". It describes practices that exist in reality, even if they are not officially recognized by laws. For example, a de facto leader is someone who has authority over a country, but their legitimacy is widely rejected.

De jure - Means "according to the law". It describes practices that are legally recognized, regardless of whether they exist in reality. For example, a de jure leader has a legal right to authority, even if they are unable to exercise it.

I was speaking in a right-wing dialect, with brevity, and with the contrast between the two definitions above in mind. You're right that I was not clear because de facto is probably the worse usage here. I'll restate it: "If every right-wing win is assumed to be evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is declared a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed because WWIII is inevitable."

and "rules-based world order" has always been politics speak for "obey the American globalist hegemony".

...?

The phrase 'rules-based international order' grew in prominence in international affairs literature as a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq, where it was a form of criticism of the US (for not relying on UN Security Council approval). It was later adopted by the Obama administration during the American-European post-Bush reconciliation to distinguish itself from its predecessors, and later was repurposed against Obama's successor as a condemnation of Trump's willingness to break with various institutions, including the WTO, the Paris Climate Accords, and the JPCOA.

In so much that 'rules-based order' is used in regards to Americans, it has consistently been an anti-hegemonist critique of the Americans, not a hegemonist call to obedience to the Americans.

There's no visible spike in ngrams around 2003; in fact it starts growing around 2000 and grinds to a halt around 2006. You could maybe argue that the later growth was due to the Obama administration's use against Bush as you posit, though it seems that the graph starts growing a bit late for that. A search for opinions on its usage in the wild before Russia/Ukraine mostly brings up references to Australia using it with respect to China (example). I also tried to search for the phrase filtering for things up to 1/1/2014, and the top results that were dated correctly are about the ICC ("only for Africa and thugs like Putin"), a paper that flat out only has the phrase "American liberal hegemonic order" in its non-paywalled part, and a Clinton speech referring to the US as the cornerstone of "rules-based international order".

I think the problem is not so much how the term "rules-based international order" is used with respect to the US, but that the term is basically not used with respect to the US at all, except by a few low-agreeableness cranks who can't read the room. German newspapers can barely publish a single article about what Russia or China do in their neighbourhood without referring to the "rules-based order" or adjacent terminology such as "war of aggression" ("Angriffskrieg", a German favourite), but either of those things is hardly ever mentioned when discussion the wars of the US or Israel at all. The other "rules" are evidently also only for Africa and thugs like Putin.

If someone creates a set of rules for you to follow (and the ones that created them were American institutions, which many of these articles are not shy to brag about) but does not need to follow the rules themselves, to follow the rules is to accept their sovereignty over you.

One way to put this is that it's an example of the classic political debate "must the King obey the law?" In a "rules-based world order", the hegemon can still make the law, but they also have to obey it. This is, of course, good for the nobility (State Department, UN, Davoisie, etc.) and bad for a maverick King (Bush, Trump, etc., though one was too hawkish and one is too dovish), so one's position on the issue tends to be defined by who you support in that power struggle. Very few people in high places want a revolution that breaks both the Crown and the Court, but that sort of multipolarity is popular with outsider critics.

The issue with this metaphor is that the nature of international law is that it quite often isn't.

As a project, international law theorists spent a good part of the 90s/early 2000s trying to build / impose an expectation of abiding by certain premise that others hadn't agreed to, and then using the non-compliance as a lever against those who had never consented, even though on a legal level international law rests on the consent of the states who choose to take part in elements of it. Sometimes states are agreeing to things they don't consider an objection at the time- see UN charter law- and sometimes violation of laws they have agreed to is a worthy tool- see nuclear non-proliferation violations- but in other cases international laws are used by select in-group members as a diplomatic cudgel against those who never consented to them in the first place.

The Rules-Based-Order rhetoric regularly invokes the later category, which tends to be more obvious whenever international law institutions like the International Criminal Court are invoked against non-members. It's not that the law was made but its makers refuse to follow it- it's that laws are made by and for some groups who then go on to demand that others must obey, or that customs that aren't common laws are insisted as universally applying as a matter of law.

So in this metaphor, this is more akin to the nobility of one Kingdom, let's call it Aporue, writing laws to govern the conduct the kings of Acirfa and Acirema. Some of these laws even give them the right to try and imprison the kings and nobles of these distant lands. If those other Kingdoms agree to adopt such laws... great! Fine and dandy, assuming all other things are fair. But if they don't, and Aporue tries to impose them regardless, this is less a political debate about the King following their own laws and more an attempt at a political imposition against the laws of the other Kingdoms.

That actually fits even better into a feudal metaphor - a potpourri of overlapping contracts and privileges, such that the Bishop of Israel cannot be tried in a lay court, that the Free City of Moldova may have elections free from the meddling of the Duke of Russia, that the Emperor is obliged to varying yearly gifts of aid, that the Peace of God obtains here and here, but not here, and so on. Rule over a feudal realm and over a world-system looks pretty similar, because they both come out of attempts to realistically and multilaterally negotiate in a state of anarchy.

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What does "Subvert" mean.

People can learn things and share opinions with those they talk to. That's how we arrive at decisions about who to vote for. Without a great firewall no election can truly be safe from foreign influence, because individuals will always internalize the influence of their foreign friends.

I think that means I agree that this is a tough nut to crack. I'm not sure there's a hard line, we might have to choose somewhere on the gradient and draw one.

Hopefully we'll all arrive at some agreeable middle ground. "rules of honorable culture war"... Perhaps something where you're allowed to influence online friends but to do so with a government backed media campaign is a culture war crime? (this is just a spitball in the direction of the vibe... I doubt the UN would actually pass this.)

Of course I say "we"... but I'm not Romainian. I merely say "we" because... its a nut America has yet to crack as well. It's something every country needs to figure out.

It’s not a line that should be drawn. Theres no way any government should be allowed to simply set aside election results. It just opens the door to a government deciding that Theres interference any time that they don’t happen to like the results. And given that such things would be hard to prove or prevent, there’s no way to 100% defend a fair election from those kinds of accusations. Maybe people wanted Trump, or maybe it was secretly Russia! And since it was secretly Russians the vote would be set aside.

I... think I agree with this. Though I'm not certain. It might be possible to come up with a plan that would convince me otherwise. No, I don't think we should simply set aside election results. Ideally whatever method we use is entirely prior to voting, (as a great firewall would be) without being... the great firewall. I can't think of a solution I fully endorse.

It's a bit of a paradox under my value system in the first place. Reconciling the need for shared values and the need for individual liberties I mean. Coordination of wills and individuation of wills trade off closely with one another.

Even this would be fairly dangerous, because you essentially have to curb free speech during an election, as it’s unlikely that you’re going to be dealing with a manipulation scheme that is stupid enough to not VPN at minimum and probably at least be able to spoof IPs in the country if not create a network of servers in the country to post from. It’s unlikely that you can thus tell the difference between native crime-thinkers and a network of agents from Kazakhstan trying to influence the election. And even if you could, again the temptation to simply label messages that go against the doctrine of the cathedral as “interference”, “misinformation”, or “disinformation”, not because they’re false, but because it’s an easy win. You get to hobble your opponent by blocking messages in his favor while you can get your message out easily.

Again, these types of decisions are effectively attacks on democratic principles because it allows for the ruling party to simply declare the other side to be cheating, and thus put a strong thumb on the scale in favor of the ruling party.

There is no way such a rule would be backed by the Western countries unless they could get reassurance that it would never be applied against them in the court of public opinion. A quick search reveals USAID spent $63 billion in 2024, and this is not counting other allied financial moves like the EU's offer of more than 10% of Moldova's GDP as a loan to help the pro-EU candidate. (Imagine the pandemonium if Georgescu's campaign had a promise of a $35B loan from Russia attached to it if they leave NATO!) Then, there is the circumstance that Western culture is "Universal Culture". The West out-spends and out-memes its adversaries on its periphery regularly; losing one rare match is not a good reason to throw a tantrum and quit the game.

The EU financed and even gave weapons to the revolutionaries that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014, installing an EU-friendly government instead of the previous government, which was oriented towards Russia. That kicked off the current Ukraine situation.

There isn't even a veneer of fair play and there hasn't been in a long while. To be fair, I would not expect fair play from Putin. But the EU as an institution is converging towards the same kind of thing, in the name of "defending democracy" to boot. I don't like either, but I have to live in the EU and Putin is far away, so one of them I hate theoretically but the other one I by now hate viscerally.

One might have imagined that the Russian-advocated attempted self-coup the preceeded the culmination of Maidan (and, of course, the reversal of the EU association agreement that preceded the Maidan political crisis) might have had something more to do with kicking off the current Ukraine situation, but I am glad to see a non-American attribution for once.

I agree with you. So I'm not sure how things will be resolved.

Personally I never liked this game though. Win or lose the culture war is emotional hell on earth.

On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad

From the POV of western empire it's hard to argue this though. With examples like Georgia where earlier this year they voted to limit and track foreign NGO funding and this was met by western backed protests. Now that a non western government got elected the west is full tilt on propaganda and encouragement for violent protests and overthrowing the elected government.

Had something similar in Hungary as well where they tried to limit foreign NGO funding and this was met by mass tantrums from the EU who said it was contrary to European values. So apparently European values are that they get to influence others thinking and no one else does.

So apparently European values are that they get to influence others thinking and no one else does.

Looks at last few thousand years of history. The answer has pretty clearly been yes until maybe 1945. And even then, I'm not completely sure whether that was a change in values or just the rhetoric used to express them in polite company.

If the American people weren’t so aggressive and well-armed they definitely would have done that in 2016, regardless of how ineffective the influence campaign really was.

On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad

Is there a steelman for simultaneously believing that a) we should have relatively porous borders and lax immigration controls, and b) foreign interference in domestic elections in the form of social media posts is a bad thing? Because surely there are many individuals who have expressed support for both positions.

If the Russians first crossed the southern border illegally and then started trying to drum up support for right wing populism, would that be ok and democratic? Now they're just undocumented residents instead of foreign nationals, right? You could say "no that's still election interference", but then it just seems like you're saying "advocating for the side I don't like is election interference", which is a bad look.

We also don't have any jurisprudence I'm aware of on how rules for "foreign propaganda" mesh with the First Amendment. Could FDR ban publishing Der Stürmer by German sympathizers in 1942? That looks a lot like an act of Congress restricting the press, but honestly you'd have trouble getting me to march in support of the publishers. What about in less-declared conflicts? Did the Soviets ever try to just publish Pravda above-board in America?

We actually just had a minor development that is sort of on this front in the DC Circuit with the TikTok divestiture case. I haven't yet actually read the case, just some excerpts from Volokh, but it's likely to be influential.

Uh, FDR did a lot of stuff like that. He may not have banned Der Stürmer but he wouldn’t have been stopped from it by constitutional concerns.

Could FDR ban publishing Der Stürmer by German sympathizers in 1942?

FDR wiped his ass with the Constitution. I don't think he cared one bit what it did or did not allow him to do.

Could FDR? yes... Of course he could. The constitution wouldn't matter.

He had the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Office of Censorship and the public trusted him. Had he told them we were banning publishing Der Stürmer the courts likely would have deferred to him during wartime.

Note that the internment of the Japanese Americans involved:

  • Forcible removal from homes, businesses, and communities.
  • Incarceration in remote camps without due process.
  • No evidence of wrongdoing against the vast majority of internees.

This wasn't just a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments but an assault on the very concept of equality under the law. The Supreme Court upheld internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944).

And FDR just unilaterally did it. With an Executive order.

Long story short, constitutional rights can be expected to become elastic during wartime.

Pretty much, and this is the reminder to the American audience that many Europeans feel they are in a war context due to the nature (and the justifications) of the Russian war in Ukraine. One can disagree with it, but the European geopolitics is reflecting the sort of balances and compromises that come with significant geopolitical insecurity.

In a way, this is what the birth of a more strategically autonomous, multipolar Europe looks like. The Europeans are following in the footsteps of the American policy transition of the early cold war, when covert actions and interference rose as way to address concerning developments near home and further abroad.

Pretty much, and this is the reminder to the American audience that many Europeans feel they are in a war context due to the nature (and the justifications) of the Russian war in Ukraine.

Where are you getting this from? I never heard anyone say this, so while there might be some people believing it, I wouldn't call it "many". In any case canceling elections due to a "war context" without a formal declaration of war seems like shameless authoritarianism.

...from various European diplomatic and government reporting, many of which have been posted in The Motte over the years, as well as personal engagements?

I call it a war-context rather than simply war because while there are no direct European Union/NATO-member involvement in combat operations, it's not exactly hard to find acknowledgements of the contextual perceptions on views of the Ukraine War (explicitly noted as a reopening a war in Europe to change territorial borders) with demands for reshaping the European security order (with pre-war terms that would only be achieved by war), reasonings for why supporting Ukraine is important for more than moral reasons,, the Russian gas cutoff that accompanied (the fulfillment of long warned/disbelieved geopolitical hostage taking and an understood consequence of a war), Russian-associated sabotage efforts (of which there was just a naval vessel standoff in the Baltic), the perceived role and purpose of Russian information activities (to influence election results) and political-ally cultivation in European politics (including support for Russia-amiable leaders like Orban who then go on to develop their own more authoritarian shifts), beliefs that Russia has attempted direct coups of European community members (especially Moldova), the reasons why Trump's NATO non-support threats are so concerning (because the perceived need for NATO has overwritten nearly two decades of increasing NATO skepticism), and various others.

If you do not believe many Europeans view themselves in a major geopolitical conflict with Russia which includes stakes of state and governmental survival, we will have to disagree. If you think that this conflict is unfair to be described as a war-context despite much of it happening in the context of the Ukraine War, I am open to other terms. I would support some varient of 'Cold War,' but the cold war was a war context in many ways, so that would confudle the distinction.

I would still maintain the point that many Europeans do not share an American-centric perspective of Russia as a not-really-significant threat, and view the Ukraine conflict's greater context (as in, the context that led to the Ukraine conflict rather than Ukraine itself specifically) with far greater concern. This greater concern, in turn, drives decision making and value-compromising that would not occur in less concerning geopolitical contexts.

In any case canceling elections due to a "war context" without a formal declaration of war seems like shameless authoritarianism.

And I am not trying to dissuade you from that perception. Instead, I am trying to make a point that the lack of shame is driven due to the perception of necessity in geopolitical conflict.

'We are afraid of Russia' is not a mere figleaf excuse insincerely held to justify self-interest by people who are not afraid of Russia.

Geopolitical fears, in turn, drive the substitution of value/rule-prioritizing deontological ethics in decision makers with more utilitarian/consequentialist models, particularly due to increasing the dependence on institutions biased towards more consequentialist professional ethics (i.e. military and intelligence services) and partly because the raising of stakes can lead to belief that failure will see the losses of action occur regardless. (i.e. the cold war fear that letting a Communist foothold solidify would lead to a different authoritarian of worse geopolitical effects than your own supported strongman).

What we are seeing by and from the Europeans is sad, but very much consistent with shifts from when stakes are perceived to be low (and thus deontological consistency has lower costs) to a higher-stakes competition perception. We know that the EU leadership elite has a capacity to accept the elections of governments that they strongly dislike- see the Poland PIS and Orban- and we are now seeing differences in behavior that correspond in differences to attribution.

This is a perception difference that creates a gap with many Americans, who do not view the stakes of the Russia conflict as particularly high-stakes outside of nuclear escalation risk, which itself is a reason to de-prioritize the other elements of the conflict. Which, in turn, feeds into European leadership perception on the need to act for themselves, contributing to the cycle.

The consequence of fear-driven actions, however, is that much as it's hard to make someone understand that their paycheck depends on them not understanding, it's hard to find shame in people who believe what they are doing is necessary to avoid worse outcomes. Shame for these sort of things comes later, when the sense of urgency has faded (and often retroactive information consideration makes past dilemmas seem obvious), or from outside, by people who didn't share the context-perception in the first place.

Some Europeans, especially in Eastern Europe, are genuinely concerned by Russia. Others (including many politicians and newspaper writers I read) are blowhards who switch seamlessly between "Ukraine is losing, we must send missiles so they can resist" and "Ukraine is winning, we must send missiles so they can finish the job" depending on the latest reports. The idea that Russia is about to sweep Europe is ridiculous.

Personally, I think there is a pretty sizeable contingent of Europeans whose performative fear of Russia is driven by the usefulness of being able to suppress dissident parties and call local dissent 'Russian misinformation'. It may well be that they have convinced themselves, of course. But in my personal circle (UK) anti-Putin sentiment is driven far more by disgust than fear.

We know that the EU leadership elite has a capacity to accept the elections of governments that they strongly dislike- see the Poland PIS and Orban-

They most certainly do not.

and we are now seeing differences in behavior that correspond in differences to attribution.

We are now seeing increasingly bald authoritarianism due to their failures to destroy right-wing governments in more subtle fashion - financially and procedurally. Plus the looming threat of populism in their own countries driven by their absolute failure and arrogant incompetence.

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