So the title should say that right wing and centrist sources are less factual than left wing ones.

My partner would have been haggling that vendor down to a £1.

They’d just ‘devide’ up their businesses into a chain of symbiotic entities defined by paygrade. Then the executive level can enrich itself insulated from us front line grunts.

Devide

verb

Obsolete form of divide.

This is a bit of context from the Dec 6th edition of Private Eye.

Statistics can help decern impact. But I think there’s always going this be some measure of subjectivity no matter which way you try to call it.

Intensity isn’t a specific enough criteria. It has to be impact.

There needs to be a reasonable degree to which interference with an election should be weathered (not ignored but the process to continue). Elections are very costly and disruptive. It would be insane to redo an entire election because you found that one person voted twice. The point at which you do redo it needs to be cognizant of the degree of disruption caused.

Conclusion The CCR’s decision is a last resort attempt to prevent a further decline in the rule of law in Romania. Yet, its modalities, timing and face value are such as to shoot Romanian democracy in the foot. The gravity of the interference in Romania’s elections surely implied a need to intervene quickly, and to do something to protect democracy. The Court’s intervention however may more easily be seen as counter-productive in the long run. Once again, Romanian democracy stands on a shaky ground.

Not sure I entirely agree with this conclusion.

Their argument boils down to propriety. If the interference was spotted over both elections then both should be rerun not just the one in which the interference had material effect. This dissonance is amplified, they argue, when the election that is to be rerun is the one in which the incumbent (pro-EU) government was losing.

If we look first at the decision to rerun just the election that was effected we can easily understand it in terms of efficiency and momentum.

For an analogy let’s look at soccer: If a striker is bearing down on goal, in the penalty box, and he is cynically fouled the game is stopped, the offender sent off, a penalty awarded, then the game resumes.

However, if in the same scenario, a midfielder is fouled off the ball the play continues to allow the striker the opportunity to score. Once the ball is out of play the ref can return to the foul and dispense justice.

The penalty kick is a rerun of play, or the election in this analogy. It’s only necessary when the result of the game is heavily effected. If we stopped the game whilst a striker has a very good chance to score a goal when someone off the ball is fouled then it would incentivise bad faith teams fouling random players any time there was a clearcut chance.

This decision making takes into account the difficulty of creating a clear cut chance on goal in a game of football and doesn’t allow play to be disrupted. Foreign interference in elections has a wide range of desired outcomes but generally throwing a spanner into the engine of healthy democracies is what they are about. So if possible allow the play to continue. If play has been materially compromised then rerun.

The second aspect is the public perception. To which we can look to the US and see countless examples of the democrats hamstringing themselves by obsessing with playing by the rules and the republicans ignoring rules and precedent when it suits them. This happens because they don’t have a free press they have a bought press. I don’t know the makeup of media ownership in Romania but a democratic government has to be able to navigate a path to getting things done under the constant flack of belligerent entities. Sometimes it needs to have the metal to weather reputational trolling.

Got that Lord Percy from Blackadder II energy.

Tired and hungry reply.

I let them get under my skin and pulled you into the firing range too. I think I was hoping for some recognition of how they were off the mark with their intolerant twist on the nazi bar parable. They weren’t asking for obvious nazi to be censored but .ml and anyone who spoke up for them.

My sincerest apologies.

Are you trolling? You’ve consistantly avoided making any qualative evaluation of either of our posts. Every response you have made is losely supportive of their demands for toxic authoritarian censorship.

Their logic is the same as the racist complaining that all african americans are criminals and rapists and you’re wringing your hands while presenting tabloid clippings of crimes african americans have been found guilty, without comment.

It’s highly ironic that either of you think that this is how you fight facism.

They should be banned. No one was arguing otherwise.

Their offensive McCarthyite screed wasn’t based on protecting victimised minorities from facists it was trying to protect the orthodoxy of establishment inculcation.

The nazi bar parable doesn’t have a horseshoe theory (Which is a sectarian cant that misrepresents socialism as the clothes it wears and not the body inside) component because it’s specifically focused on the tolerance paradox. If someone comes into your bar that while otherwise comporting themselves in a civil manner yet it is crystal clear they hold aggressively contemptful and intolerent views you should kick them out regardless. Everyone else deserves at least a base level of respect.

What it doesn’t say is people advocating for tolerance of normal people are secret nazis. It doesn’t say that because one biker gang from Berlin came in with nazi tattoos you should ban everyone from Berlin because that is text book closed minded intolerance.

This is all patent nonsense.

It makes sense.

Not everyone on .ml wants to eat your dog. Just as not everyone on .world is Trolleyman.

I’d say that the majority of people on the fediverse are capable of having a civil conversation on most topics. Some might have a handful issues that they dig their heels in over but can be civil if you comport yourself respectfully. And then there are a tiny minority of narcissistic zealot idiologues that try to maintain a narrow normative pressure on permissable opinions.

It’s a reasonable argument for giving you tools for tailoring your own feed but not for censoring entire groups out.

That whole argument was painful to read. By the end he was so frustrated he became very obnoxious. Not cool.

I didn’t get the sense of someone deliberately sowing misinformation however. Being misinformed isn’t a dealbreaker nor is a poor rhetorical style.

I think it is important to continue forward with users with a wide range of sources. None of us have a monopoly on the truth and all of our ‘trusted’ sources palter and decontextualise their facts to some degree.

I know it’s probably an unrealistic expectation but I’d rather mods, in general, had higher standards for curating civility in discussions.

I haven’t really had that experience with anyone from .ml yet. There are a handful of actual tankies there but for the most part, from want I have seen, it’s mostly various forms of far left opinion which no one should be afraid of.

Some people here do spend an unseemly amount of time complaining about them. Which is more toxic than anything they’re usually complaining about.