U.S. Politics

[ml1dch]

25 minutes ago, villakram said:

One can argue about the ethics of releasing private material, but this story was censored by twitter and widely suppressed.

 

Yes, that Twitter link that you provided to the story is pretty firm evidence of the worst kind of Twitter censorship. 

Edited December 10, 2020 by ml1dch

[villakram]

3 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

An alt-right version of Twitter was started because a year and a half after it was created, a newspaper outlet chose not to print a potentially libellous story about the son of a senator?

Have you really thought this through properly?

"potentially"

This is what laws are for. Now, TV networks have long done the same thing, e.g., "damn" is banned on US daytime TV due to ostensibly religious/moral reasons.

We must be very careful going down the censorship path. The consolidation of speech power in the hands of private corporations is not a healthy development. This is not a protecting Nazi's right to march argument, because a much more sensible line can be drawn way before the need to invoke such edge cases.

[bickster]

7 minutes ago, villakram said:

No primary source has come out and denied the veracity of the material.

This is a nonsense. You release someone else's "data" into the wild, it's down to the person doing the leaking to prove the voracity of that leak.

ALso the leakers story was so full of holes, it spoke volumes.

No-one needed to deny anything, it was up to the leaker to prove it and he failed. It wasn't worthy of comment from the Biden camp

[ml1dch]

Just now, villakram said:

"potentially"

This is what laws are for. Now, TV networks have long done the same thing, e.g., "damn" is banned on US daytime TV due to ostensibly religious/moral reasons.

We must be very careful going down the censorship path. The consolidation of speech power in the hands of private corporations is not a healthy development. This is not a protecting Nazi's right to march argument, because a much more sensible line can be drawn way before the need to invoke such edge cases.

So you are claiming that Parler was created in 2018 to preemptively protest about this story that nobody had heard of?

[TheAuthority]

1 minute ago, ml1dch said:

So you are claiming that Parler was created in 2018 to preemptively protest about this story that nobody had heard of?

Don't bother. It's WUMMING at it's finest.

[MessiWillSignForVilla]

30 minutes ago, villakram said:

Dubios how?

No primary source has come out and denied the veracity of the material.

One can argue about the ethics of releasing private material, but this story was censored by twitter and widely suppressed.

The story in which:

- Biden's foreign policy advisor said he had never even heard of the guy Biden supposedly met through Hunter. (Pozharskyi)

- A State Department advisor named in the emails said the same thing, and also had all of her records subpoenaed by a GOP-led investigation, which found no mention of Pozharskyi.

- Authenticity of the documents and origin could not be determined

- Some reporters at the NYP refused to add their byline to the story over doubts about it's credibility. Of the two reporters credited on the article, one said she did not know she was attached until the story was published.

- The report said Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor that was investigating Burisma, despite there being no such investigation.

- The NYP also said Hunter introduced Biden to Pozharskyi, despite the emails only mentioning an "opportunity" and there being no evidence a meeting actually happened.

- The emails were supposedly obtained when Hunter Biden flew from California, to drop his laptop off at a hardware store in Delaware (that just so happened to be owned by someone close to Guiliani), left it to be repaired for water damage, left no contact information and never returned or paid for it despite the potentially damaging material on it. Oh, and the guy who took the laptop can't be sure who actually dropped it off because he has face blindness or something.

- The FBI had known about and subpoenaed these documents a year ago. To investigate Russian disinformation efforts against Biden...

- Material similar to the hard drive contents had been circulating Ukraine in 2019, with the express purpose of being sold to allies of Donald Trump for $5m. A former advisor to the Ukrainian president has said this type of Kompromat has been very active the last year or two in reaction to US political events, especially when Guiliani specifically called for damging material on the Biden's, saying the materials available were "extremely hard to verify, yet very easy to fake".

 

Think I got most of the dodgy details about that story, is that enough to claim it's dubious?

 

Edit: I forgot to add that Fox, one of Trump's biggest supporters, refused to touch the story because it lacked credibility.

Edited December 10, 2020 by MessiWillSignForVilla

[sidcow]

But Biden. 

[AXD]

48 minutes ago, villakram said:

Ok, but this is a little too close to the argumentative tactic the religious use when claiming the existence of a single specific god. Once the claim is made, I can do whatever I damn well please, but I can't definitively prove that the specific god does not exist.

Except in he real world, they have reports, phone records,...

i’m not saying it definitely happened, but you said it was debunked which it clearly wasn’t, or to quote republican lead investigator,’ 

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,”

[StefanAVFC]

'Something something Hunter Biden, reported by Greenwald it's 100% true'

2 secs later 

'Russia is throughly debunked'

The cognitive dissonance is staggering. 

[Rolta]

This has been the one-guy-clutching-at-straws thread for about four weeks as far as I can tell. Oh well, at least the rest of the world gets to move on.

Edited December 10, 2020 by Rolta

[LondonLax]

12 minutes ago, Rolta said:

This has been the one-guy-clutching-at-straws thread for about four weeks as far as I can tell. Oh well, at least the rest of the world gets to move on.

It’s kind of funny how fast Trump has been dropped from the news cycle to focus on more immediate stories (at least in these parts). Fame is a fickle game.  

[sharkyvilla]

10 hours ago, bobzy said:

Trump rushing through getting executions done is pretty grim. 
 

For such a wealthy and powerful nation, the United States sure is a **** backwards country in many ways. 

I've just been reading about that, how utterly depressing.  

[Awol]

Looking at Biden’s key foreign policy picks, particularly Blinken & Sullivan (but Austin at SecDef too), it seems likely this administration is trying to pick up where Obama left off in 2016. 

Unfortunately the world has changed a lot since then, China really is a massive problem, the Middle East would be best left to sort itself out (but won’t be), and even the West isn’t buying the American exceptionalism routine anymore. 

Trump is gone, but the underlying pathologies* are still alive and well.

Edit: * for the reading community interested in this stuff, I highly recommend ‘The False Promise of Liberal Order’ by Patrick Porter, as a stocking filler to yourself. Easily the best book I’ve read this year.

Edited December 10, 2020 by Awol

[villakram]

3 hours ago, ml1dch said:

So you are claiming that Parler was created in 2018 to preemptively protest about this story that nobody had heard of?

That's a rather interesting reading of that particular comment, which was very general.

[sidcow]

24 minutes ago, Awol said:

Looking at Biden’s key foreign policy picks, particularly Blinken & Sullivan (but Austin at SecDef too), it seems likely this administration is trying to pick up where Obama left off in 2016. 

Unfortunately the world has changed a lot since then, China really is a massive problem, the Middle East would be best left to sort itself out (but won’t be), and even the West isn’t buying the American exceptionalism routine anymore. 

Trump is gone, but the underlying pathologies* are still alive and well.

Edit: * for the reading community interested in this stuff, I highly recommend ‘The False Promise of Liberal Order’ by Patrick Porter, as a stocking filler to yourself. Easily the best book I’ve read this year.

Thanks for the update @villakram

[Awol]

3 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Thanks for the update @villakram

Feeling like I should have caught up on the thread before posting... 

[ml1dch]

6 minutes ago, villakram said:

That's a rather interesting reading of that particular comment, which was very general.

Not really.  You said that it was set up as a reaction to "censorship". The example that you provided when asked for context, was something that was alleged a long time after the platform was developed. An example by definition, isn't "very general".

If that wasn't evidence of the censorship that caused Parler's development then why offer it?

Don't complain at me because you picked terrible evidence. 

Edited December 10, 2020 by ml1dch

[villakram]

27 minutes ago, Awol said:

Looking at Biden’s key foreign policy picks, particularly Blinken & Sullivan (but Austin at SecDef too), it seems likely this administration is trying to pick up where Obama left off in 2016. 

Unfortunately the world has changed a lot since then, China really is a massive problem, the Middle East would be best left to sort itself out (but won’t be), and even the West isn’t buying the American exceptionalism routine anymore. 

Trump is gone, but the underlying pathologies* are still alive and well.

Edit: * for the reading community interested in this stuff, I highly recommend ‘The False Promise of Liberal Order’ by Patrick Porter, as a stocking filler to yourself. Easily the best book I’ve read this year.

Don't forget Rice being parked where congress can't get at her.

Supposedly Mayor Pete is slated as the next Chinese ambassador too. Wreaks of back to business as usual rather than looking forward. Biden has a rather immediate decisions w.r.t. weapons sales to Taiwan coming right up. Lovely sales pitch running on Reuters right now.

[Awol]

4 minutes ago, villakram said:

Don't forget Rice being parked where congress can't get at her.

Supposedly Mayor Pete is slated as the next Chinese ambassador too. Wreaks of back to business as usual rather than looking forward. Biden has a rather immediate decisions w.r.t. weapons sales to Taiwan coming right up. Lovely sales pitch running on Reuters right now.

I’d give them nukes and then let China decide whether to invade. But yes, plunging back into the Middle East and ignoring China seems the likely face-palm-tastic route. 

Edit: Also see Trump got the arms sales to UAE through the Senate. China & Russia getting the lowdown on F35 in 3...2...1... 

Edited December 10, 2020 by Awol

[villakram]

1 minute ago, ml1dch said:

Not really.  You said that it was set up as a reaction to "censorship". The example that you provided when asked for context, was something that was alleged a long time after the platform was developed. 

If that wasn't evidence of the censorship that caused Parler's development then why offer it?

Don't complain at me because you picked terrible evidence. 

You asked for examples, I am not aware of working for you, so I suggested reading the tweet already posted. Efficiency and all that. You complained, I complained and don't we all feel better now. 

Parler was developed due to the increasingly active censorship taking place on Twitter. Much of which has a distinct political leaning. In my opinion, we should be very wary of such developments. E.g., were Twitter a British company, how do you imagine the whole Brexit business would be reported given the goings on at the BBC, which are bad enough.