The Expansionist: Russia Is Sovereign, Not a Colony of the United States

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Russia Is Sovereign, Not a Colony of the United States

MSNBC's top news-talkshow anchor, Rachel Maddow, has a bugaboo about Russia "attacking" the U.S. national election of 2016. She has, indeed, in recent months become a "Janie One Note", giving over the bulk of her airtime to this one topic, of all the things going on in the Nation and world. She doesn't always make sense, and occasionally makes indefensible errors of pronunciation and grammar. Yesterday she actually said that Russians "target we the people"! Huh? "Target WE"? Is she retarded?
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Maddow was in her glory last nite when Robert Mueller, Special Counsel in the investigation of Russian actions in the 2016 U.S. elections, issued what purported to be 13 indictments of Russian nationals and 3 Russian entities for 'interference' in that election.
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Some of these unlawful pretend-indictments are of Russians IN RUSSIA. The U.S. Government cannot indict Russians IN RUSSIA! That is an attack upon the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, which nation is the exact equal of the United States in international law. Would we permit Russia to indict Americans on American soil for violations of Russian law? Mueller's asserted indictments are little short of an act of WAR.
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The United States cannot extradite Russians from Russia to face charges in the United States for things that did not take place in the United States. Only 2 of the people indicted even set foot in the U.S., and that might only have been to do research, not commit acts in contravention of U.S. law. What Russians do in Russia is NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.
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Hacking remotely into U.S. computers would not be possible if Americans would stop putting onto the Internet things that plainly do not belong on the Internet. If you put your computer online, you are essentially inviting everyone on Earth to hack into your computer. Yes, there are things like firewalls available to the general public, but governments need more protection than does the ordinary private citizen.
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Computers do not come out of the box, plugged into the Internet. You have to choose actively to PUT your computer online. There are ways to partition your activities to things that can and cannot be seen by people trying to get into your computer. There are ways to password protect and encrypt things you don't want others to see. There are ways to prevent mass password attempts, such as America Online has done very effectively, permitting, say, three attempts to log in before you are barred from further login attempts for some specified period, such as an hour or day. It is most unlikely that any robot could try thousands of passwords if the most they could try per hour or day is THREE!
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If you don't know how to do any of this, and your privacy is important to you, you should find out how to protect your information from intrusion. The onus is on YOU. To do nothing is like leaving all the doors and all the windows in your house unlocked and then being surprised that somebody came in and stole everything of value. Surprise, surprise!
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Let us return to Russia's SOVEREIGN activities that may or may NOT have affected the 2016 U.S. election. As far as I have heard, NOT ONE VOTE was changed from what a citizen cast, by Russians or any other dirty-tricks actors, within the U.S. or anywhere else on Earth. NOT ONE VOTE!
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Yes, we apparently know that Russians may have hacked into the computers of various boards of elections in various places in this country, but as far as we know from what has been reported, those Russian intruders did not change one single vote anywhere in the country, much less in key Electoral College states. NOR did Russians block from voting, anyone entitled to vote, much less EVERYone from voting. For, how could Russians know how John Smith in Kenosha, Wisconsin or Joanna Alexandropoulos in Astoria, New York would vote, if Russia did not interfere with their right to vote? (Names mentioned here are fictitious.) It was NOT Russia's intent to "attack" U.S. elections, but to tilt the outcome, and for that, you would need to know who would vote which way, and selectively block the people who would vote opposite to your preference.
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Contrary to the silly assertion I have heard on TV, we do NOT have to go to paper ballots rather than electronic voting machines. Even if we did use paper ballots, how would the results from the various polling places be conveyed to the local board of elections, and totaled with the results from other polling places, and reported to the media? Are all these numbers going to be conveyed on paper or by telephone, only?
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Neither Russia itself nor any of its governmental entities can commit a crime under U.S. law, because Russia is not SUBJECT to U.S. law, any more than the United States is subject to Russian law. It's the same as a New Jerseyan being indicted in Alabama for something that is a crime in Alabama but not in New Jersey. Would you like to be held accountable under the laws of every state in the Union and every country on Earth? Ridiculous.
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Russia enjoys SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY from U.S. laws. The United States enjoys SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY from Russian laws. Tit-for-tat, even-steven.
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Mueller is not the Czar of Earth. He is not all-powerful and cannot dictate to the entire planet. He is just some functionary within the United States, ONE country, not two, nor 193. He doesn't even have authority over Canada or the Bahamas, much less the Russian Federation, the geographically largest country on Earth, armed to the teeth with, authorities believe, some 4,300 nuclear missiles (as against our 4,000). How are you going to enforce your make-believe indictments, Mr. Muller?
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The larger question, however, about fake identities and false information put out by Russian trolls is "Why would anyone believe anyone they never heard of when they say something ridiculous?" The moral of the story is that "gatekeepers" are indispensable to sensible credibility. If 'Mark Davidson' in Podunk says one thing, that you have never heard from any well-regarded media outlet, but The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times all say the opposite, which should you believe? If idiots want to believe 'Mark Davidson' and disregard all major media, no one can stop them from letting idiocy determine their vote, because idiots will be idiots, and we don't have an IQ test for voting. Maybe we should.
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Certainly if Texas and other states can discriminate against voters on racial and other grounds (see the Wikipedia article "Voter suppression"), we can impose a minimum intelligence requirement on voters. But we should not do that, even if we could make an intelligence test part of the voter-registration process -- which we COULD do, as a matter of public policy, if we were so to choose.
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Quite the contrary, we should have MANDATORY VOTING in this country, as have various other democracies, to require everyone who is physically capable of voting to do so. Wikipedia reports, at its article "Compulsory voting", that "As of August 2013, 11 democracies — about 5% of all United Nations members — enforce compulsory voting out of 22 countries listed worldwide as having a compulsory voting system. [Emphasis added.]"
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Another thing we could and should do is offer, in every election for government officials, a "None of the Above" ("NOTA") option, so that people who claim that they don't vote because there is no one they want to vote for, will no longer have that excuse, but will be given the opportunity to register their disapproval with all the candidates by voting NO to all of them. The advantage of NOTA is that it tells the parties that they HAVE to offer better candidates, and cannot just sluff off low voter participation as an artefact of apathy or laziness. Rather, the parties would be held to account, and they would be pressured to offer better candidates.
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In short, the problems we have with our elections are not Russian "interference" or "attacks", but the gross defects of our electoral system, at all levels of society. The Electoral College must be abolished, and it's hard to understand why anyone would oppose that. After all, no other level of government has an Electoral College. The popular vote is not just the only vote that counts but is also the only vote cast, in school-board elections, elections for mayor and council, for state governor, state assembly, and state senate, and for members of the U.S. House and Senate. So why would anyone fight a simple popular vote for President? On what basis? Before we lose faith in democracy, we really should try it.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:56 AM

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