Hamartia

And us, can we with any certainty claim the same?

I could swear I heard that whole ACER laptop angle a couple of months ago on someone else's podcast. I don't want to say verbatim but I was having severe dejayvu. It wasn't a Doctorow podcast that much I'm sure.

It should reduce flooding further downstream in the long term. Something that's been an issue in Wales.

This should be a surprise to no one. Torys have controlled the political content of the BBC News for decades.

I grew up in the country side. And I don't mind silage at all. Smells a bit like sweet fermented grass to me. Pig farms on the hand, omg that odor travels for miles.

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.

What is happening is the consequence of private aggregations of wealth, at a scale possible to distabilise democracies, wrestling for power. Waning is their fear of the masses, so now they turn on each other. Democracy is now sufficiently captured. Through idividualised propaganda they can mold the zeitgeist in the minds in a significantly sized block of the electorate against any movement to rebalance society.

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.

It's like a chest burster for rocks