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We Need to Destroy the Election-Rigging Industry Before It Destroys Us

posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the legal-but-immoral dept.

canopic jug writes:

Companies learning to flip elections perfected their tactics in smaller or emerging countries, such as Latvia, Trinidad, or Nigeria, before turning to markets involving elections in developed nations. Paul Mason suggests that while at the moment there is a lot of angst from people being reminded of how their harvested data is used, it is really the union of private espionage, cracking, and "black ops" capabilities that should be setting off alarms.

Disturbingly, both CA and SCL have high-level contracts with governments, giving them access to secret intelligence both in the US and the UK. SCL is on List X, which allows it to hold British secret intelligence at its facilities.

It now appears that techniques they used in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to counteract Russian influence, and against Islamist terrorism in the Middle East, were then used to influence elections in the heart of Western democracy itself.

Let's be clear about what we're facing. A mixture of free market dogmatism plus constraints imposed by the rule of law has led, over the past decades, to the creation of an alternative, private, secret state.

When it was only focused on the enemies and rivals of the West, or hapless politicians in the global south, nobody minded. Now it is being used as a weapon to tear apart democracy in Britain and the US we care — and rightly so.

From New Statesman: We need to destroy the election-rigging industry before it destroys us

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:03AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:03AM (#659437) Journal
    To add to my previous post, there is a lot more criticism where the two linked articles came from. Much of it is of the form, take an assertion from the book, trace it back to its original quote, and see that the quote in context has little to nothing to do with the assertion.

    The reason I'm aware of this particular book is because I read up on criticism of it back last year and found myself interested in the psychology of the author. Why would she assault some dead academic? It seems so bizarre. It's also a glaring example of recent historical revisionism (would be my principle example of SJW run amok). There seem to be two sorts of reviews. The first group speaks of how well-written and stirring it is. The second group did some actual fact checking and determined that the thing is a load of crap.

    I now steer you to the definitive critic of her work, Phil Magness [philmagness.com], who wrote several articles on his blog analyzing this particular book and the claims it made. For example [philmagness.com]:

    One of the most inflammatory charges of Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains holds that James M. Buchanan, and by extension his department and research center at the University of Virginia, served as something of an intellectual buttress to the segregationist forces of 1950s and 1960s Virginia politics after Brown v. Board. MacLean has very little direct evidence for this charge – in fact she’s even conceded in a couple of interviews that she has no direct documentation of Buchanan ever writing anything in favor of segregation. Her footnotes are similarly flimsy on this point and she resorts to misreading and misrepresenting Buchanan’s work on school choice to make her argument (Steve Horwitz documents the issues here [don't have time to link -khallow]).

    To bolster her non-existent case, MacLean resorts to playing a game of six degrees of separation in which she deploys a heavy stream of innuendo and unfounded supposition to write Buchanan into the pro-segregation political apparatus of Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. and a Richmond newspaper editor. As I’ve documented in my previous posts, she also fabricates claims out of thin air that allege Buchanan’s intellectual debts to the pro-segregation Vanderbilt Agrarians and to the 19th century pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. Remarkably, there’s almost no evidence for any of these claims – just a fanciful tale that is increasingly taking on conspiratorial overtones in the way that MacLean has mounted her defense.

    Plenty more where that came from. My view is that all she needs to do is sex it up a little more and she'll have the next Secret History [wikipedia.org] or Protocol of the Elders of Zion [wikipedia.org]. Maybe Buchanan showed his demonic form on occasion or drank more than the usual amount of blood of the newborn. These details matter.

    Very quickly, I became interested merely because of the psychology of the author. It seems to be a straightforward case of a budding con artist mixing with a very gullible audience. In addition to the book itself, we then had bizarre behavior from the author, MacLean such as a Koch-driven conspiracy [washingtonpost.com] (note how she gives a very different story to the linked NPR interview than she had on her Facebook page) to discredit her and the keen, unprompted observation that libertarianism appeals to autistic people [reason.com].

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:38PM (#659760)

    and the keen, unprompted observation that libertarianism appeals to autistic people [reason.com].

    A bit too close to home, eh, khallow? Khallow? Khallow!!!! Damn autistics! Never look you in the eye when they are lying.