Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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I have an inverse story from yours.

I'm a citizen and former resident of the UK, the UK for many reasons has a very loving relationship to the US, our young people are fashioned by the image of Television, and more than half of all English speaking entertaining media is american.

We like America/Americans, by default before we learn politics.

I travelled to the US in 2013, and to Russia the same year.

What I saw was not "good" vs "evil" or, "propaganda" vs "truth".

What I saw was exactly the same shit, I spoke to natives in both places, I travelled around.

Russia has it's side of the story and America has theirs, America is good at spreading it's propaganda outside of it's borders and fostering the image of "the beacon of light and purity of the world" but those who actually take a sceptical or inquisitive eye to America see an insidious underbelly which is only parabled by that in Russia.

Russia is guilty of being no more evil than the US government, if anything they're more honest with their intentions.

The differing factor is that we bought the kool-aid.

Ah "America does it" strawman, there must be a handbook on internet trolling or something made back in the old country now. Every single time, every single time, same crap gets regurgitated.

"Why are we invading yet another country? Oh because America did it too!"

"Why are our rights being eroded? Oh because America does it!"

and so on...

I been back to Russia and crisscrossed the US over the last decade, I would pick the US for all its problems over Russia any day as a place to live. Anyways I am quite happy here in Europe for now.

Well, it's fine if you call out Russia on principle, as long as that principle applies to the US as well.

But you seem to suggest that the US is a nicer place to live, so it's fine that they've waged aggressive wars all over the globe for more than half a century?

Seem to suggest? SEEM TO SUGGEST! fuuuuu....

Look my grandparents died a few years ago in a small tiny village by the Volga, once you travel outside of Moscow and Leningrad(StPetersburg nowadays) you may as well be time travelling into the past. The place had no paved roads leading to it had to travel couple of says on grotty trains to get there. The farming being done is subsistence with remnants of old Soviet coop in the village, alcoholism is rampant so is depression. It is understandable how one who might never has left Moscow doesn't realise how truly and incredibly poor the rest of the country is

Now rural US or UK may as well be on a different planet when compared to that.

This is all from personal experience, what has happened and is happening in Russia is beyond tragic.

Now go ahead and come up with another "But but the US"

US and Europe have all sorts of issues and are not perfect and no one claims they are, but they are damned better places for my kids to grow up in.

My reply was ambiguous. The point was that you seem to be suggesting the US is always right because it's a nicer place to live, or that Russia is wrong because it is not such a nice place to live.

I lived in the West for a long time and returned with my children to eastern Europe. Sure it's poorer and less developed and plagued with problems. There are many frustrating things, but to categorically suggest it is impossible to live there (or Russia I guess) would be an insult to everyone who does.

You've found your happiness in Europe and that's great.

The US is, without question, a nicer place to live than Russia. If you think otherwise, you've either never been to the US or you haven't seen the level of poverty that is widespread outside Russia's major cities. There are small pockets of prosperity in Russia, outside of those, nobody acclimated to western standards of living would consider them equatable.

I didn't say otherwise. In general, for the average Joe (or Dmitri), the US is a nicer place to live. That doesn't excuse the behavior of it's government or serve as an argument why Russia is wrong and the US is right.

Can a 3rd party call Russia out on something if USA do it too, or should we all shut up?

Because right now the discussion looks like this:

  - Help! This thieve has stolen my bag!
  - Shut up, others do it all the time.

I am in no way suggesting people should not express their opinions.

I'd like to know whether those opinions are formed as a result of propaganda. In this case, whether any anti-russian opinions are out of principle (e.g. pacifist principles) or on the basis of consumed propaganda.

May I add yet another story to this thread?

I was a member of municipal polling board during last Putin's election. Honestly I did my best to prevent fraud, and yet the voting protocol (a paper where all ballots are summed up, it goes to an higher-level board) was rewritten right under my nose (+25% to a leading candidate, guess which one), with police covering it up. I tried to warn a friendly member of higher-level board, just to learn that all independent members of the board were escorted out of building by our SWAT analogue.

Voting and vote counting were all recorded on much-hyped state-wise CCTV system, so I thought "right, I'll go to a public prosecutor, they will retrieve the record and the fraud would be obvious". Guess what — there were no interest at all, my complaint was routed into the same higher-level board.

It wasn't an isolated event. In fact, the huge part of polling boards in Saint-Petersburg had their protocols rewritten. It was widely publicized in a local independent press, but all court cases were ultimately lost and no one were held accountable. Similar stories took place in other Russian cities.

This was a huge, centrally orchestrated fraud, with those in power getting away with it (as always). Voting is an institute of critical importance to any liberal democracy out there, and it is completely and systematically destroyed by Putin and his team. I can't see how on Earth the country where it's normal can be even compared to US; it's like comparing North Korea and US with a straight face.

And yes, given that it's HN, let me also mention that all cellular and Internet operators in Russia are legally and openly obliged to pay for wiretapping equipment and install it with no regulatory oversight on how it's used. It's so amusing when people somehow combine any degree of support for Snowden AND for Russian government.

This is very suspect and very hard to believe. I've been on polling boards in a much (much) smaller country, and it would be logistically impossible to carry out fraud on that scale (25%) without it being widely documented.

The suggestion that there are enough police (including SWAT none the less) to watch over tens of thousands of polling stations and enforce this is even stranger. And this is from a miniscule country compared to Russia (size mentioned because of the logistics challenge of such an endeavour). There were such stories in my country as well, previously, but were generally propaganda from the opposition at the time.

>This is very suspect and very hard to believe

Here is my blog post on that elections [1]. It's in Russian, so please use Google Translate to make sense of it.

>without it being widely documented

It is widely documented. Now what? There is no such thing as "class action lawsuit" in Russia. The only two entities that can file a lawsuit are candidates (because they are directly harmed by fraud) or public prosecutors. The former are filtered [2], and the latter one don't care. So what exactly can be done with the documented fraud?

>The suggestion that there are enough police to watch over tens of thousands of polling stations

All polling station have at least one policeman during voting day in Russia (at least in big cities). There are about 700 000 policemen in Russia, so there are more than enough to handle this.

>logistics challenge of such an endeavour

What do you consider a logistic challenge? There are a lot of police stations in Russia, it's not like they're all concentrated in a few places. If you mean the logistic challenge of the fraud itself, it's also pretty straightforward: the biggest part of county's funding comes from Moscow, and it depends on election results. Incentives for local authorities are here, combine them with deteriorated social institutes and all branches of authority fused together and you get widespread fraud without much coordination.

Heck, just look up Chechnya's voting results, with 99.59% turnout and 99.89% of votes for Putin [3]. It's just plain impossible in any electoral situation. Nothing is done about it, guess why.

[1]: http://si14.livejournal.com/23943.html

[2]: you need to get an absurd amount of signatures to become a presidential candidate, and even if you manage to collect them, they can be easily dismissed by some anonymous expert as "forged" ones

[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/europe/fraudulent-vo...

  I've been on polling boards in a much (much) smaller country

A different country. Different culture. Different people. Cannot extrapolate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...

Look, even this article is titled "controversy". I personally have a videofile from my own polling station, where you can hear loud and clear true results of the voting, and then look up "official" results with 20%+ difference. It's not even a controversy here, it's a wide scale fraud in broad daylight, and not even one official was persecuted for this.

I understand an attraction of reiterating how corrupt America is, but it's not even close here.

We're different. Part of American foreign policy is that "truth is the best propaganda" not the only propaganda, mind you, but the best.

The West also does have a policy of expanding liberal democracies and integrating them into a world trade frame work. Cases where we don't follow this policy is in areas where we're afraid of a counter weight emerging.

For example, the Middle Eastern policy is one where we foster instability to keep the Arab / Muslim world from unifying. Yes of course the war in Iraq is a travesty, but in America and the West in general we know when we get into tragic wars. To the point where even Jeb Bush has admitted that the war was a mistake.

The Russian mindset is different. It's more... brutal? I'm struggling for the right word. But if you look at Russian war doctrine during the cold war and (especially) World War 2, you see this apparatus that is 100% ok with using logic that ends with millions of suffering countrymen. Where propaganda and killing political opponents is acceptable. Where sending a man into space even though your scientists tell you he won't make it back alive.

The West doesn't stand for this. We have our (sometimes blatant) propaganda like the rest of them, and we make mistakes, but our jails cells look nothing like those in most of the rest of the world and our press isn't nearly as controlled.

> The Russian mindset is different. It's more... brutal? I'm struggling for the right word.

Severe is the word I use. If I were permitted to generalize the Russian people, I would generalize them as severe. Extremely warm and loyal people, but quick to swing to the opposite end of the spectrum when disturbed.

I'm married to a Russian and spend lots of time with Russians. My wife tells a joke about a westerner hanging out with some Russian friends. The Russians spend the night joking around telling him shit about Russians, being heavy drinkers, quick to violence, as if it were a competition to see which culture drank more. The westerner disagrees and says no, you are a great and warm people. And they continue to try to convince him with their stories, saying "we're all friends here". At the end of the night he finally agrees, "OK, you're right, maybe you guys are heavy drinkers". So they beat him up.

That is a much better word. Thank you.

A handful of conversations and a couple months of travel will not give a Westerner an understanding of Russia. The vast majority USSR emigrants under a certain age (that is, people truly familiar with both systems) would disagree with you in the strongest possible terms. I'm one of them. There is no moral equivalence.

I agree, but I think you mean "above a certain age".

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