US fuckups like Iraq were accidents, aka unplanned. Overwhelming majority of civilian victims is work of their opponents, like Iraqi religious insurgents, suicide bombers or ISIS.
You can be outraged at what happened to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba and all that. I think you should be! And at the same time you can realize that was some time ago and if you don't believe in eternal collective punishment (everyone in Mongolia must suffer for what Genghis Khan did!), then it is relevant that the US is behaving better now and Russia isn't.
And regardless of all this, whataboutism is a counsel of despair: no good can ever be done by anyone because everyone's nation has done bad at some point. Everyone should silently take the abuse. If you truly believe there is such a thing as bad behavior, you don't silence criticism of one act by pointing to another act. You criticize both acts. And your criticism is proportional to the relevance of the act. It sucks that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove out the Britons, but that isn't the top problem to solve anymore.
Now there's nation-wide protests, calls for military intervention, election denialism with some rather convincing evidence, blatant censorship of anyone who's so much as asking if this is going to be investigated.
CIA person "urging" a president of a soverign country to stop doubting voting machines? Calling his doubts "baseless"? I mean, the USA has paper ballots to this day because of the exact same "baseless" doubts. It's essentially world wide consensus that voting machines are a bad idea, some countries straight up declared them unconstitutional. But these USA officials pressured our president not to question the system of his own country. A CIA guy at that, from a country known for compromising the world's security and spying on everyone.
I'm sorry but there's so much wrong with that it's not even funny. If that's not interference I don't know what is. The more I research these elections the uglier it gets.
> If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.
Right now it doesn't seem like this election legitimitized either government. The unprecedented censorship is not inspiring confidence. I wonder what will happen now...
Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims.
In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
This isn't what he was doing though. He wanted the voting machines to have a printer function so that an auditable paper trail was established. I've seen highly voted comments arguing for this exact same thing here on HN not even a week ago.
> and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims
I did doubt those claims. At first.
Some serious evidence has surfaced though: discrepancies in the election data set showing older less thoroughly audited voting machines clearly favoring the winning candidate by as much as 15%.
I was still skeptical, tried to reproduce the results on my own dataset... Then I watched the government's election website go down for hours, then come back up with the data set modified. Then I watched a supreme court judge censor anyone asking questions about this on Twitter.
It's not exactly inspiring confidence.
> In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
The 2020 voting machine models seem to have been thoroughly audited. However, we're still using older models and I don't think they were audited recently. There were discrepancies in the voting patterns of the 2020 model and older models and nobody has been able to refute that at this time.
edit: oh, I spaced out, you're asking about the last three decades? I thought you were asking about the last few years.
If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
Obviously.
> But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
Of course not. I have some real reasons for doubting the results.
Three days ago, an argentinian man streamed a video where he analyzed our election's official data set. He found that the older models of our voting machines, less thoroughly audited, displayed a clear advantage to the winning left-wing candidate, something between 8% and 15%.
After I watched this, I went to the government website and downloaded the entire election dataset and attempted to reproduce his analysis.
Then I saw the website go down for hours.
An API for data set changes notifications remained up though. I monitored that API and saw them pushing changes to the 2022 and 2018 elections datasets. I saved that data too.
Then I witnessed that API go down.
Next day, it was back up, the data was modified and there was a bullshit note on the website explaining it went down due maintenance.
Then this supreme court judge started censoring everyone who even so much as asked if he was going to investigate any of this. Last weekend I counted at least 10 influential people censored, including a doctor in economics, elected politicians and policemen. It got to the point people on Twitter got Elon Musk to look at it.
I'm very worried about this. If it's so false, why can't they just refute it? It seems to me like they're all in damage control mode. Media is pretending nothing's going on.
If I understood correctly, they were compared to other machines in the same electoral zone. Each zone can have 2020 models and pre-2020 models. The older models had more votes compared to 2020 models even in the same geographical locations.
> I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.
Look I honestly don't know anymore. Can you help me make sense of it? It was published here:
https://brazilwasstolen.com/en/
Attempting to discuss this anywhere else, I was met with censorship and heavily biased political discourse. I know the electoral court has not made any statements regarding it, they're just censoring everything. I've never seen anything like this in my country before.
The argentinian man made a video presentation but I don't have access to it anymore due to censorship.
If voting preference is at all correlated to income, and what models of voting machines used at a polling place are correlated to the wealth of that district, then you will likely find a correlation between voting machine model and voter preference, with the older/cheaper model showing a preference for the candidate more favored by poorer people.
It’s not a sign there was fraud. Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?
What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?
The machines look the same to the voter and we can't choose which machine to vote on. Each citizen is assigned an electoral zone and a section within that zone. One voting machine captures the votes of every section. In my neighborhood, for example, the voting took place at a school and every classroom had a different voting machine, one for each section.
It'd be extremely suspicious if it turned out that the people voting one room away from me showed statistically significant differences from the other sections.
> Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?
Looks like Bolsonaro wins if only 2020 models are evaluated.
> What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?
Clearly we'd be having the same election denialism problems we're having now...
So saying that you will "accept the results of an election" is just a chant or a ritual that doesn't mean anything, because you can still declare the election was not fair after the results come in?