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Russian Websites Critical of Elections Targeted In DDoS Attack
theshowmecanuck submits this news from Russia, where "Websites which exposed violations in Russia's parliamentary elections were inaccessible Sunday in a hacking attack they said was aimed at preventing them revealing the extent of election day fraud." Further, says the linked article, "Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose United Russia party is expected to win Sunday's polls but with a reduced majority, has denounced non-governmental organisations like Golos, comparing them to the disciple Judas who betrayed Jesus. Russia has seen an upsurge in Internet penetration since the last elections in 2007, and analysts have said the explosion of critical material on the web poses one of the biggest challenges to United Russia's grip on power."
"United Russia", the party of Putin has dropped from 64% of the votes to 48.5%.
Don't post any "In Soviet Russia ..." jokes here, please. This submission is strictly for serious discussion.
Most of the websites are up by now. And probably some of the DDoS attacks can be explained by surge in the number of viewers.
Well, the good news is that Putin's party has lost constitutional majority in the Parliament (constitutional majority is required to be able to modify some parts of the Constitution of the Russian Federation). The bad news is that they still get majority in the parliament. And Internet has been instrumental in that - it's about the only remaining independent source of information in Russia.
The Russian Internet meme "United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves" got so popular that it has even jumped into official United Russia propaganda.
United Russia is a mafia party, literally, it's full of mafia bosses, it's a criminal syndicate that took over the country and destroyed the democracy in its infancy, plunged the country into the age of corruption.
Of-course it doesn't help that Russia has too many people that are made dependent upon the government for survival, that's how a criminal party takes hold and doesn't let go - the bosses literally gather people in the meetings and tell them that they will dole out money based on voting participation and the voting outcome, they also want people to prove their voting record (illegally obviously), the votes are bought and voters are intimidated.
US and the rest should take notice - once most of your businesses are just a few large ones, and the small/medium sized businesses disappear and are constantly under pressure to pay huge 'fines'/bribes to local 'politicians' and often the businesses are destroyed - illegally taken over with police force from their owners and just handed over to local mafia/United Russia party bosses, then you build a huge dependent class of people, who don't have jobs, they can't have jobs because the largest (oil/gas/metal/wood/whatever raw material) companies only need so many workers and the service sector is all monopolized.
Without a thriving middle class (and I mean BUSINESS class) the economy only allows 3 classes of people: bottom dolers, top mafia bosses and owners and monopolists in every business sector, very few monopolists that run every business.
Then you the country can't get out of this predicament - the people are poor and they don't know how NOT to be poor anymore, their only way of living depends on being fully subsidized by the government and they can't afford any change of government and any instability carries a promise of hunger.
Of-course Russia still has some protesters from the middle class and students, but right now it seems to be irrelevant, the special forces there don't hesitate to apply massive amounts of damage to the protesters. Beating somebody and even killing them is really not a big deal - people who live off the dole are really just insects in a system like that.
That's why you don't want socialism or communism or totalitarianism or dictatorship or any kind. You want many independent individual capable of taking care of themselves and by proxy of the economy by doing creative stuff, providing products and jobs and investment opportunities. But a large number of people like that not only improve the economy, but they are too independent to be held in shackles of oppression, they don't want a large parasite mafia class above them taking everything from them and deciding for them what kind of a country they will live in.
You can't handle the truth.
In soviet russia, voters elect representatives.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Of the three major parties, United Russia (while authoritarian and vaguely socialistic) is probably the most moderate. The Liberal Democrats are led by a leader who has said he wants to completely seal the borders, institute a police state, use nuclear weapons in the Caucasus, and reconquer Eastern Europe; the Communists are the kind of Communists that venerate Stalin and long for a return to the 1930's.
From my observations as an American it seems they have a choice between being run by a corporate mafia or run by a communist party. Pick the one that works better for you, I suppose.
Well, that's one more choice than Americans have got.
You want to hear something interesting? The United Nations uses exit polls to judge the fairness of elections worldwide. If the "official" results differ from the exit polls substantially, it cannot be certified as a fair election.
In the US, official results have been deviating from exit polls to a greater extent in every election starting in 2000. Of course, we are told that this just means that exit polling just isn't that good.
You decide.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A significant proportion of communist vote on these elections is, effectively, protest vote against United Russia. We used to have "none of the above" on the ballot ages ago, it was scrapped under Putin. Then people started to ignore elections altogether, in hopes that, if enough do, they don't get the voter turnout needed to elect anyone - the government has responded by removing the requirement for minimum voter turnout. So right now the only way to vote against the party in power is to vote for some other party, and for preference many people vote for the second biggest one to maximize the effect.
This election is being won by United Russia because of a large-scale electoral fraud - voting for people who didn't come to vote, tampering with ballots, injecting prefilled ballots in ballot boxes, sending people to shove in more than one ballot when they vote, driving people around on buses to vote several times etc.
Under Capitalism, man oppresses man. Under Communism, it's exactly the opposite.
- Woody Allen
Turns out it greatly exacerbates the peasants' lust for democracy. But we didn't know! We were just trying to build a more robust military communication system. May god forgive us.
Here you can see a nice statistical graph that clearly demonstrates election fraud (in Russian; the blue curve is for United Russia):
http://podmoskovnik.livejournal.com/129632.html
Plotted here is the number of votes cast for each party as a function of voter turnout. There is only one party whose peak is abnormally widened to the right with a huge second near 100% - and this is the United Russia.
Sure beats a single-party one. And it's a realistic, achievable goal at this stage.
Besides, the point of this exercise is to make a break from the past 12 years and to force the votes to actually be counted in a way that is prominently visible. A huge staple of United Russia's propaganda is that "everyone is for us" - basically, an appeal to citizens to vote same as everyone else. But this hinges on them actually having that popular support. Every person that didn't vote for them on this election will bring another person who won't on the next one.
Also, strange as it may sound, commies are actually one of the saner parties in this election. Alternatives include e.g. the guy who became famous by saying things like "Russian soldiers shall wash their boots in the Indian ocean".
In a democratic society with a long-standing culture of openness and freedom, most people don't hide their political beliefs, and will happily tell you which way they had voted. If people are willing to lie in exit polls in sufficient numbers that it skews the result, it indicates that something's very wrong with democracy in the country.
I know it sounds eerily familiar to you Americans. Difference is, your parties juggle a few percent back and forth. In our case, it was the very real difference between having United Russia get 66% and a constitutional majority (Russian constitution can be amended by 2/3 of both upper and lower house of the parliament - they've already used it to extend presidential term to 6 years), or having it get 50%, even if that means that commies also get 25%. At least, with commies there, they'll be at each other's throats most of the time, which can be subverted from within the parties (like Tea Party did to Republicans).
It's far from perfect, but it's a step ahead from what we had before, and it's a step that could actually be made.