Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started

Now remember the lack of sleep for a week before the election, and imagine a possible bug where your client code somehow fails to put up that big TEST DATA message that you thought was there.

It happens. Happened to me. :-)

But I can imagine myself in the place of a PR person who doesn't fully understand the technical issues. And somehow it sounds better in the moment to say "that was real data from a few years ago" rather than "that was fake data that we just made up!"

Of course I don't know what actually happened in Azerbaijan, but I can sure relate to the possible scenarios.

I suppose I was just ranting in sympathy with the poor programmers who have to try to do their best to keep up with all this.

Its the difference between "the pope is secretly a Jew!" and "the wall is there to keep the jealous westerners out of our communist worker's paradise".

Sit back and realise that somebody is probably going to be murdered for pushing to the wrong database.

`git reset --hard origin/despotism` would be more accurate, since it over-writes any commits not yet pushed.

If you have freedom of speech, then you can grumble about being prohibited from traveling. But you are highly unlikely to have the influence to get the law changed.

Of course, we also have random number generation to populate the fields with junk if we can't get real data (personally identifiable information). In that case, it's just junk that looks like real numbers. This scenario from the article isn't that far outside of what a normal business might do.

Politics would be an article arguing why it's unfair that the President rigged the election. They mention the background political information because THAT'S GOOD JOURNALISM. You need to have that background information about the political climate to understand what's the importance of what's happening.

It's propaganda and nothing more. It's useful both for distraction and dehumanization.

We are strongly encouraged by our newspapers to be irate about random human rights abuses on other continents. Recall the dehumanization propaganda used by the Nazis. Casting inhabitants of foreign countries as hapless victims is simply a softer version of the same propaganda technique.

Once we view them as sufficiently dehumanized (they mistreat their women, they lack voting rights, they have ballot corruption, they utilize child labor, have beliefs based solely on religious dogma, etc. etc.) it becomes significantly easier to launch missiles at them. This propaganda strategy is broadly applied to entire swaths of the world.

Note the similarity with the backstory behind all of our recent military aggression.

The standard American exceptionalist narrative is that much of the rest of the world consists of people who are victims of illegitimate regimes. We should pity them (emphasis on humanitarian sentiment) but then we should feel morally superior and allow our indignation to lead to military strikes intended to help them.

Bottom line: Military strikes, the projection of power into remote corners of the world, are simply acts of aggression no matter how they are spun. They are designed to threaten and intimidate the rest of the world in a way that aids American interests, not to help people.