Elections, elections...

Keeping a close eye on the American elections while clinging to blue screens in Russia is, of course, the worst form of political cuckolding. However, if a little and out of the corner of your eye, then perhaps you can. Moreover, some turns of the election race there illustrate universal things.

Here is a good text from American libertarians, where the author writes about how the American mainstream press has accepted corruption accusations against Joe Biden. There, in short, it is about the fact that when Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter entered into corrupt business deals in Ukraine and China. As a result, the whole family was enriched by billions. But the main thing is not that, but the reaction to revelations. So the Washington Post wrote that the Biden leaks should be treated "as an enemy intelligence operation, even if it is not." Some very familiar rhetoric drew in: are foreign agents criticizing respected people? The mainstream press denounced the story as "disinformation". Twitter closed the account of the New York Post, which published the leak, as part of the "fight against misinformation." Facebook did something similar.

At the same time, it can be recalled that any accusations of Trump that he is a Russian spy and twisted the elections dispersed like hot cakes in the same places. And for some reason no one was worried about the "disinformation campaign". The author gives another example: there is such a conservative activist in the United States, James O'Keeffe, who was engaged in recording videos that discredited various liberal audiences. He acted by deception and provocation - for which he (rightly) is not loved. However, not so long ago, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (aka "Borat") staged a sickly provocation: the actress, posing as a conservative journalist, brought Rudy Giuliani (the former mayor of New York, now Trump's lawyer) to the room, where Borat then burst in, shouting that he, they say, wants to fuck a 15-year-old. Giuliani seemed to be going, only the girl seduced him herself and she was 24. At the same time, the video was distributed as an advertisement for the new Borat. The case when provocations are who needs provocations.

Polarization in the ideological camps of American society has reached the point where no one cares about facts and methods. "everything is for one's own, for others it is the law." But the main public is faced with a difficult choice - two gerontocrats who drag all their families into politics with them. However, politics is such a sphere that attracts mainly such people. And even when there are happy exceptions, it is better to treat them with suspicion anyway. But the publicity of politics turns out to be a restraining mechanism - when everyone stands with their guns loaded with compromising evidence pointing at each other - then in the end everyone is forced to behave more or less decently. In this way, the public good is unintentionally achieved.

However, you inevitably experience fears for the operation of this mechanism when one of the parties gains such control over the media space that its leaks are scattered with the breeze, and leaks addressed to it are subjected to technological censorship. Therefore, of course, it is wiser for Americans to choose the one who has less media leverage of two assholes.

Mihail Pojarsky 2020-10-28