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Notes -
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.
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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.
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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.
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