Far-right candidate takes shock lead in Romania presidential election
Far-right candidate takes shock lead in Romania presidential election
Calin Georgescu, a critic of the EU and Nato, looks set to face the pro-Europe prime minister in the second round.
I was reading the comments on this on /r/europe and there were Romainians commenting how they were shocked as this as they'd literally never heard of him. He wasn't in any TV debates or any of the usual media election circus. Friends, family - nobody had heard of him.
I know people live in "bubbles", but for a candiate to suddenly be in the lead where people who are politically active have never heard of him is wild.
43here in czechia, one of our new europarliament representatives is guy named filip turek, former car racer and current nazi. in the past, he had nothing to do with politics whatsover, i had no idea such person exists until after the elections.
his whole "campaign" on tiktok was "green deal woke, combustion engine good". his adhoc party motoriste sobe (car owners united) in coalition with one more seemingly insignificant party got 10,2% of votes.
we are entering the era of real unfiltered democracy and it is fucking terrifying.
25Sounds super sus which is likely, given russia
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The strong showing of Georgescu, who has no party of his own, and campaigned largely on the social media platform TikTok, came as the biggest surprise of the election.
this is just a fucking disaster. turns out that democracy is not so great system when majority of the people is bunch of idiots. the good old world with media elite being the gatekeeper to public discourse looks pretty nice in retrospect.
41My (conspiracy?) theory I've had for the last few years is that the world is at large shaped by a misalignment of various ML algorithms, that have been given a goal "Maximize the time user spends scrolling at our platform" several years ago, and it has turned out that if you turn someone into a conspiracy nutjob/radicalize them or in general turn him into a piece of shit, it rapidly increases his engagement with the platform. It makes sense to me, because it probably ostracizes you from the people around you, and your nutjob social bubble that validates your new opinions is only on the platform, making you spend a lot more time there. Turns out, a lot of far-right and facist ideologies are pretty comforting, you have someone to blame and you can just be a dick to people you don't like, which is a lot easier than being nice to others, dealing with stuff you are not comfortable with, and accepting that you might be a problem. This shit sells, and ML algorithms have probably figured out that it's the thing that sells the most.
It was my reason why I started avoiding any kind of content delivered by personalized algorithm. I kind of suspected this even before the LLM craze, but seeing how extremely good can a ML algorithm get at one task (turn text into image, for instance) if given enough data, it is horrifying to think what would an algorithm trained on literally billions of users giving their whole life, conservations and behavior as training data be able to accomplish, given the task "here is everything about the user, what do I show to him to keep him on my platform?".
I wager the answer is "tell him that it's OK to be a facist and hate everything that scares you" for quite a lot of people.
That shit is super scary, because even if you know this is happening, the ML algo has hundreds of thousands of people like you and already had several years of feedback loop to figure out what will work on you (which, probably isn't the same thing as for others, but something probably exists). And the only way how to avoid it is to never use any kind of personalized content - most importantly, personalized search.
And then you also have a lot of nation state threat actors who are actively using this to push an agenda. The world is fucked.
34It makes sense to me, because it probably ostracizes you from the people around you, and your nutjob social bubble that validates your new opinions is only on the platform, making you spend a lot more time there.
Seems quite accurate to me. A former friend who drifted into one of these right wing bubbles posted a poll from Germany where we‘re both based, that showed that around 80% of Germans would have voted for Harris and he claimed he doesn’t know a single one of them and that the poll is fake.
Of course the poll was relatively accurate and he is simply only exposed to these 10% of the population bubble of Trump fans but does not realize this.
12This was proven true by every analysis of the 'algorithms' of social networks.
Capitalism is a cancer.
9Hey, thanks for sharing this.
You said something that hits really close to home about one of my most important relationships — a relationship that is starting to experience value drift as they get sucked deep into social media.
I’ve been feeling like a conversation needs to happen, but haven’t had the ability to characterize my thoughts as well as I’d like. Your comment helped me a lot to get closer to what I’d like to express about it to them.3
Turnout was 51%, similar to the figure five years ago.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when your ass doesn't show up to elections.
28It's sad, yes. But, he doesn't have nearly enough votes to win in the second round. Especially since the votes were super split among a bunch of guys. Most people will just vote for his opposition, Lasconi and Romania will have the first female president. Who is also only the 2nd or 3rd worst option, which is better than I expected. All in all, feels like a win to me.
6It’s sad, yes. But, he doesn’t have nearly enough votes to win in the second round.
yeah, don't count on that. this is result of the first round of presidential elections in czechia in 2018.
guy in the first place, milos zeman, is fucking pro-kremlin, pro-peking traitor, alcoholic and immoral asshole. he was going for his second term, so there was no doubt whatsoever about what he is and how he would act in the office.
the five guys behind him were all center-right liberal democratic candidates. we also thought "just add their votes together, there is no way the fucking moron will win".
this is result of the second round:
he got ~1,9 million votes in the first round and 2,8 in the second one. it is not as easy as just counting the votes for his opposition.
we got another 5 years of the pro-kremlin traitor, who almost vomited into our crown jewels, after arriving there straight from ww2-end-celebration party at the russian embassy to prague :
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The Western world really needs to start doing something about Russian propaganda and money in our politics. Or it is going to eat us from the inside out.
I think you start by arresting anybody who takes Russian money to influence elections for treason. Grab a few high profile folks like that, and the house of cards starts to crumble.
25Yes only home grown rich fascists should be allowed to influence politics with money.
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Far-right taking the lead fails to shock me anymore.
23Yeah its entirely expected. Its a global trend and its not gonna stop.
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This is what the tech billionaires want for all of us. Just wall-to-wall regressive fasho shitshows so we’re too busy fighting each other to see who’s hand is in the till.
16Fuck putler, fuck his dumb war, and fuck his puppets.
11Hold on I think I've heard this one before
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