If the dictator promised to round up these CEOs and send them to El Salvador without a trial, that would be one thing... but the opposite is true, and I think the electorate understood that well enough.
If people could pull their heads out of their partisan asses they'd see this. The color of the dictator may as well be the result of a coin toss. This is the result of a long term trend.
That seems disingenuous. Obama: "Vote for me and I'll bring you hope and change and healthcare and all this other stuff." Trump: "Vote for me and you won't have to bother voting again."
There is simply no room for BSAB rationalization here.
I very very very very much doubt these were the same people
But also, you might be surprised. Elections aren't decided by the bulk of partisan voters who show up to always vote for the same party and then cancel each other out. They're decided by the much smaller number of people willing to vote for a candidate instead of a party, and therefore move votes from one column to the other.
Some people voted for Obama because he made them hope for a better future. Some people voted for Trump because he promised them hell for other people. They are nothing alike.
I'm not saying I agree with their voting decision, but I can, in part, understand their frustration.
Look at Trump’s talking points. It’s all about immigrants, foreigners and wokeism that are coming to get what you have.
The US is a wealthy, prosperous nation, and I think even lower income segments of the US population are aware they’re night and day better off than people in the same economic segment in the countries immigrants come from. Wanting more is part of it, but it’s mainly about not sharing what Americans have, even though it’s not actually under threat. That doesn’t matter, people still feel threatened.
I’m a Brit. My mother is a wealthy middle class retired woman in a safe idyllic bit of countryside, but she is utterly obsessed with foreigners coming to rape and steal and destroy British society. They’re all coming to get us. She reads in the papers (The Daily Mail) and sees it on TV (GB News) every day.
In my country which was targeted to the max by Russian propaganda, they are using the same playbook as in the US right now.
1. take any real complicated issue and blow it out of proportion so people think that it is a life and death situation.
2. heavily promote the most unfit person for the job
3. blame the worsen outcome to the predecessor
Rinse and repeat and you'll see the country drown in chaos and everyone blames everyone.
You can always argue that it is the real people, but if you look really close to the systems of promoting the divisive content - the powerhouse of it is always bot networks only followed by real people.
I think that the most of the division in western societies have to be studied from the perspective of foreign influence.
Score voting is simple: It's the voting system the judges use in the Olympics. Voters give each candidate a score. Highest average (i.e. the one who would get the gold) gets the seat.
The flaw in first past the post is that it gives any viable third party the powerful incentive to merge with the major party they're most similar to, because otherwise they split the vote and both lose. So you get a two party system. Score voting doesn't have that, you don't have to change any other part of the system to make it work, and then the two party system everybody hates goes away.
PR puts the party instead of the voters in control of who gets the seats or otherwise requires the voters to support a party when they want to support a specific candidate.
Score voting also thwarts gerrymandering because you can't make two 55% districts for your party and one 90% district for the other party or the districts for "your" party would go to a moderate party instead.
For example I see on the Irish social media the misplaced efforts of Russian propaganda which doesn't make much traction because of the lack of deeper understanding of the issues and just copy-pasting the rage baits from other countries.
However, I expect that it is temporary, until more budget is allocated to it.
I would encourage everyone to study what is open from the Russian KGB archives to understand that it has a century of experience of influence, supercharged by social media, access to paid influencers and now AI.
KGB failed to prevent catastrophic dissolution of USSR and you suggest that they are some sort of masterminds who excelled in propaganda. That’s quite an exaggeration. Since 1990s both the West and Russia have lost their expertise in each other’s affairs. Russia may still have some influence in Central and Eastern Europe, but their conservative ideological drift limits significantly what they can achieve. A lot of local political mess there is basically local politicians shooting in the leg.
It is a massive amount of information and it is studied rigorously by a lot of researchers. Unfortunately, most of the information I consumed are in Ukrainian. For example there is a book in Ukrainian released just few years ago from one of those [0]. But basically any researcher can get access to the whole archive and domestic ones wrote a lot of material. I am sure that it will get more popular on the west as well, while people will get understanding of the systems at work.
As far as I know Timothy Snyder is well known for his researches into Russia in his books such as [1]. However I've read only excerpts from it as we have better material in Ukrainian.
West generally doesn't understand Russia, it overestimates its military power and underestimates its propaganda influence. It also completely misunderstands its culture. Also west have a history to dismiss the voices of countries who do know Russia very well. But it is changing bit by bit.
[0] https://www.yakaboo.ua/ua/arhivi-kgb-nevygadani-istorii.html
First, the assumption that Russian propaganda works on the West. There are no signs of that.
Second, that Russia does have those capabilities. Their main problem is that they don’t understand the modern West and still think in categories and definitions of XX century.
Third, that West is vulnerable. Western domestic propaganda is much more powerful and it’s budgets are much bigger.
Wow, that is the statement. I would say that Russian propaganda is the mainstream now in conservative media and among republicans. Half of Joe Rogan's talking points is spreading russia propaganda, half of Lex Fridman opinions - is russia propaganda. Elon Musk retweets and amplifies russia propaganda all day every day.
The problem is - you just don't know when you hear it since you don't have a frame of reference.
It is the same as I don't recognise Chinese or North Korean propaganda. Sometimes I see an obvious example of it on reddit, but in general, I cannot immediately recognise it when I hear it (since half of the top reddit commends are bots - I have problem to sometimes understand what their goals are).
I don't know whether they understand the west or not, but my intuition is that the understanding is not required. With modern social media you have enough feedback to perform complex information operations and have the desired outcomes.
This is a great achievement of the American media environment: people vote for the status quo fully believing they’re voting against it. And somebody ending up in a prison in El Salvador is the sacrificial lamb that is needed to make this equation work.
..and frankly they’re not wrong. No unjust system can maintain itself in the long term, the choice is “personal sacrifice” or “destroy everything” and it’s quite easy to make
Not necessarily? That’s hardly within the traditional American notion of the scope of government. Core american principles focus on protecting people from the government, not the government protecting people from each other.
What part of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" do you think doesn't involve protecting people from each other?
To a certain extent, that’s a baseline function of every government, sure. But there is a tension between “a government big enough to protect people from each other” and a “government big enough to deprive citizens of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The founding American principles draw the line between those two in a different place than other traditions.
That's literally the purpose of both criminal and civil laws.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson
We wrote out a detailed plan for jumping off a cliff, took several slow but steady and large steps toward the edge of the cliff, inched our shoes right over the edge, grabbed the railing, leaaaaaned way over, a little farther, a little farther, released finger go, then another, then completely let go. We're in free fall, the decades in which anyone could have stopped it are all in the past. There's nothing to grab, no path to turn around on, we're just falling now.
That doesn’t align with what I saw. Can you provide evidence? Because it was pretty clear to me that it would go exactly as it has, which is pretty terribly for Ukraine.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Trump%E2%80%93Zelenskyy...