Yekaterina Duntsova, a former journalist and city councillor campaigning for peace and "democratic processes", was rejected by the Russian Central Electoral Committee as a potential candidate due to "errors in documents".
The law / constitution requires that elections be held. You can’t break the law without a lot of people noticing. But you can bend it sufficiently to ensure you win.
Ah, I see. In my country the party in power will do whatever they can get away with to improve their chances of winning. So we have elections, but they aren’t really ‘fair’.
There are gradations. Most likely in your country the elections are more real than in Russia.
I’m talking about the reason that ritual even exists, and the effect it has.
Instead of imprisoning people it’s more efficient to allow them to imprison themselves.
Some random Russian middle-age school teacher just goes on with their not particularly happy life because 1) they think they should limit themselves and everybody is doing that and 2) they think they’ve taken an obligation, as imperfect as the process may be.
Medieval monarchs had their subjects swear oaths for a reason, even though the supporting layer would be jails and gallows.
Humans are not rational beings. We do not act on universal principles. We act on instincts.
All this is intended to persuade “subjects” to control themselves and “sheriffs” (which are a crowd too, state apparatus is too big a thing to be attributed conscious goals at ruling a country) to think that their position is safe.
I was very unhappy until I realized this, in many areas of life.
The law / constitution requires that elections be held. You can’t break the law without a lot of people noticing. But you can bend it sufficiently to ensure you win.
It’s not about noticing, it’s about magical thinking.
Voters feel as if the government has some strength if they voted for somebody or “chose not to vote”.
That government feels that even if there’s no intrigue at all, having a vote makes them somehow popular.
Source - live in Russia, know this shit.
Ah, I see. In my country the party in power will do whatever they can get away with to improve their chances of winning. So we have elections, but they aren’t really ‘fair’.
There are gradations. Most likely in your country the elections are more real than in Russia.
I’m talking about the reason that ritual even exists, and the effect it has.
Instead of imprisoning people it’s more efficient to allow them to imprison themselves.
Some random Russian middle-age school teacher just goes on with their not particularly happy life because 1) they think they should limit themselves and everybody is doing that and 2) they think they’ve taken an obligation, as imperfect as the process may be.
Medieval monarchs had their subjects swear oaths for a reason, even though the supporting layer would be jails and gallows.
Humans are not rational beings. We do not act on universal principles. We act on instincts.
All this is intended to persuade “subjects” to control themselves and “sheriffs” (which are a crowd too, state apparatus is too big a thing to be attributed conscious goals at ruling a country) to think that their position is safe.
I was very unhappy until I realized this, in many areas of life.