Following our debate last night on the alleged superiority of British over American sports, and the ascent of cricket. I made the point that cricket has the potential to be as big as or bigger than the NFL
Just found this in the NYT
“Both men, then, are quite familiar with what a billion-dollar business looks like. The sport where they see the biggest upside these days, though, might be a surprise.
“When we first started looking at cricket, we were by no means experts,” Scheiner said. “But the more we studied it, the more we realized it felt like the N.F.L. did 20 years ago.””
Just as it wouldbe a shame if they titted about with the T20 blast to layer another, pointlessly tweaked and less good version on top of it, it would be a shame if American money came in and titted about with Indian cricket, or indeed cricket in general. Cricket is as close to perfect as any sport in the world. The only improvement I could make would be another handful of nations playing it. And another thing - look at that photo of cricketers. Smiling cheekily. Not glowering like footballers trying to suggest they're hard in a way which makes you want to wish both teams could lose.
American money can’t change Indian cricket because the IPL doesn’t need the money. As the whole article (££) makes clear, the IPL is already overflowing with cash, and it will only grow from here. The Americans are trying (and often failing) to get a foothold
The sums are incredible. Billions. In 5 years IPL will probably overtake NFL as the richest sports league in the world. It might one day threaten EPL as the most-watched
This money will, I am sure, attract other nations to play the game. It’s irresistible. Add in south Asian diasporas worldwide…
Cricket’s future is rosy. It just won’t be Test cricket. Which is a shame, but hey Ho
I like the fact you can usually turn up at Lords on the final day of a test match and get in for about £20. If the long form of the game suddenly became too popular that might change, so in a funny sort of way I don't want it to.
Even cheaper if it's the last day of a Middx county match. You sit there, Lords almost to yourself, watching things move to a conclusion. It's very enjoyable but at the same time you know the format is dying.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Re. boat immigrants, is this deal with France likely to change anything? It does not seem likely to me.
Seems unlikely. The government is terrified of providing genuine routes to claim asylum overseas as too many of the buggers will claim asylum. For instance, a processing centre in Calais would be seen as a huge draw for migrants and would just increase the problem. I suspect the money would be best spent hugely increasing the processing capacity so that no one waits more than a few weeks to be either granted refugee status and thus able to live, work and pay tax in the U.K. or gets removed. Coupled with some positive advertising of the genuine cases.
And ultimately the globe needs to re-examine how refugee and asylum works in the modern world. It does not see right to many people that refugees/asylum seekers in Calais, an entirely safe country, do not claim asylum there. Or in Germany. Or Italy, or any of the other safe countries that they have crossed to get there. Now they have their reasons - language, family etc, but it diminishes the sympathy of people in the U.K.
Of course in reality most *do* claim asylum in those other countries. Hence our number being so much smaller than theirs. People *think* we are swamped because the right wing media / certain MPs openly lie to them. Having voters ignorant and turned prejudiced suits their interests apparently.
Exactly. Anyone familiar with the refugee camps in countries bordering the Middle East would laugh at the idea that we have a special problem. But I'd go further. In my view it's a disgrace to address the global refugee problem by hiding behind an accident of geography. If the main source of refugees was hundreds of thousands coming from Ireland, would we cheerfully accept that they should all come here instead of being shared out across Europe?
There are two fundamental issues, both essentially global. One is the periodic eruption of conflict or disaster (cf. Ukraine), which creates a huge number of "genuine" refugees by any reasonable definition. The other is the huge inequalities of opportunity and prosperity around the world. If Britain's response to these is to say "bugger off" to the former and "let's cut overseas aid" to the latter, we are failing in what is quite a natural human instinct - to help people in desperate circumstances.
But that is addressed by the fact we can, and we do, make exceptions on a case-by-case basis where this commands strong popular support: look at our generosity to Hong Kong or Ukraine.
The issue here is whether it should be a standing right in law that is immutable.
I say, no.
If every country did that then people fleeing war and persecution would have nowhere to go and would die. If we did it and other countries didn't then you'd have to ask why are we shirking our responsibilities? Is it because we are facing a bigger influx than other countries (no) or because our economy is so weak that we don't have the resources to help (no). And shirking our responsibilities would certainly carry a cost in terms of our global reputation and our international relationships. The reality is that we live in a dangerous world where conflicts erupt and people get displaced. We need to play our part in managing those population flows instead of thinking that we can simply close our eyes to it or pretend that we have no responsibilities. We benefit hugely from a stable global order and we need to face the relatively small costs associated with helping to manage that.
I'm not sure you read my post properly.
Try engaging with what I actually said, rather than what you inferred I must have meant.
Er, you said we shouldn't have a standing right to claim asylum in our laws, per the international norm, and I was saying that we should. Apologies if I misunderstood what you were saying.
For wars and major conflict, yes, or a leading political dissident, but not just because you're gay and it's illegal in some countries, or the country is a cr*phole/corrupt and it's hard to get on unless you're friends with the regime.
@LostPassword summed up my views very well, last week.
What I am finding increasingly frustrating, if all too familiar, is how long the US takes to count its votes. In the last 5 days I think a single House seat has been determined moving Fox's analysis from 204/211 to 204/212. We still don't know for sure who is going to control the House although with only 6 to go the GOP are clear favourites.
I think that this makes the question asked in the thread header a little difficult. It is remarkable that the GOP seems to be at risk of being -1 in the Senate and lose dual control of committees etc. It would be a humiliation almost beyond belief if they failed to take the House too. This would not only destroy the current GOP leadership, it would drive the GOP to look beyond Trump for a winner, De Santis being the obvious exemplar of that. If, on the other hand, the GOP do end up taking the House reasonably comfortably the damage to Trump will be less severe and he remains in the game to a greater extent.
California always take ages to count votes. I remember doing the presidential spreadsheet in 2012, having to check individual county websites after the news organisations lost interest in updating the numbers.
Maybe they've got one guy with arthritis and poor eyesight doing it all, and he has to go for a pee every 30 minutes.
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
People get far too ideological and misty-eyed about the UN and leading international aid charities.
Like FIFA or the WHO, they are rackets and subject to much corrupt influence and abuse of self-interest.
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
People get far too ideological and misty-eyed about the UN and leading international aid charities.
Like FIFA or the WHO, they are rackets and subject to much corrupt influence and abuse of self-interest.
Quite unlike the dear old British Empire, then, Gawd bless it.
@SawyerMerritt @elonmusk: “My kids were basically educated by Reddit & YouTube; Let’s just get a bunch of content creators that we think are cool on YouTube & say, “Hey, would you consider putting your content on Twitter, & we’ll pay you 10% more than YouTube & see how it goes?” Let’s do that”
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
Labour did lose the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections in the UK to UKIP.
Though note the Democrats did hold the Senate against the GOP last week and still have not lost the House, even if that does eventually go
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
What you wrote isn't at all inconsistent with what Leon wrote. Deliberately suppressed (you called it artificially suppressed - same difference) and labelled as fake news.
Twitter was much worse, of course.
And it was done deliberately to help Biden beat Trump - d'ya think the same thing would have happened if it had been about Don Junior?
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
Remarkable that our Putinist apologist for Germany standing in the way of aiding Ukraine is now banging on about a couple of year old story about Hunter Biden's Laptop and Ukraine. What are the odds of that?
And "how incredibly badly Democrats are doing" ... ???
Back in the real world, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm election results in many decades for a first time incumbent party in the White House. Not since 2002 in the rally to the flag aftermath of 9/11 have midterms gone so well, if you exclude 9/11-related 2002 you'd have to look much further back to see any party doing as well as the Democrats have this year in their first midterms with the Oval Office.
Won't clog up with the workings but here's my assessment of WH24 chances:
Biden 25% DeSantis 20% Trump 5% NOTA 50%
I don't particularly enjoy continually shouting to all and sundry that DONALD TRUMP IS THE LAY OF MY LIFE but that is about the long and short of it. Or to be precise the short and short of it.
I've come round to this point of view.
Fairly clearly Rep nominee will probably be De Santis. It's the "if not Biden" question for Dem Nominee that plays on my mind.
Don't think it'll be Buttigieg. Too Met.
Transport Secretary Buttigieg was Mayor of South Bend Indiana, hardly New York or LA or Chicago!
Re. boat immigrants, is this deal with France likely to change anything? It does not seem likely to me.
Seems unlikely. The government is terrified of providing genuine routes to claim asylum overseas as too many of the buggers will claim asylum. For instance, a processing centre in Calais would be seen as a huge draw for migrants and would just increase the problem. I suspect the money would be best spent hugely increasing the processing capacity so that no one waits more than a few weeks to be either granted refugee status and thus able to live, work and pay tax in the U.K. or gets removed. Coupled with some positive advertising of the genuine cases.
And ultimately the globe needs to re-examine how refugee and asylum works in the modern world. It does not see right to many people that refugees/asylum seekers in Calais, an entirely safe country, do not claim asylum there. Or in Germany. Or Italy, or any of the other safe countries that they have crossed to get there. Now they have their reasons - language, family etc, but it diminishes the sympathy of people in the U.K.
Of course in reality most *do* claim asylum in those other countries. Hence our number being so much smaller than theirs. People *think* we are swamped because the right wing media / certain MPs openly lie to them. Having voters ignorant and turned prejudiced suits their interests apparently.
Exactly. Anyone familiar with the refugee camps in countries bordering the Middle East would laugh at the idea that we have a special problem. But I'd go further. In my view it's a disgrace to address the global refugee problem by hiding behind an accident of geography. If the main source of refugees was hundreds of thousands coming from Ireland, would we cheerfully accept that they should all come here instead of being shared out across Europe?
There are two fundamental issues, both essentially global. One is the periodic eruption of conflict or disaster (cf. Ukraine), which creates a huge number of "genuine" refugees by any reasonable definition. The other is the huge inequalities of opportunity and prosperity around the world. If Britain's response to these is to say "bugger off" to the former and "let's cut overseas aid" to the latter, we are failing in what is quite a natural human instinct - to help people in desperate circumstances.
But that is addressed by the fact we can, and we do, make exceptions on a case-by-case basis where this commands strong popular support: look at our generosity to Hong Kong or Ukraine.
The issue here is whether it should be a standing right in law that is immutable.
I say, no.
How were we generous to Ukraine? All our neighbours threw their doors open. We made them apply for a visa, including the stupidity of sending them from pillar to post in Calais to find the URL to a form which was broken.
Boris *claimed* we were generous. We were not.
How many have we accepted from Ukraine? Wiki suggests 65,000. Thats not bad, but we could have done more. I think it was not done for malice, but for bureaucracy, ever the issue with the British civil service. We have certainly not been the most 'generous' in that sense - naturally the closer nations such as Poland and the Baltics have taken more. I We have been helping the Ukrainian army for years however and continue to do so.
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
For a more balanced view try listening to the BBC podcast.
The conclusions seem to be:
-Emails, including one that implicates Hunter in getting access for someone from Burisma to his father, are probably genuine.
-The story wasn't properly covered before the 2020 election in the "MSM" . (partly because "MSM" organisations asked Steve Bannon for a copy of the hard drive that the rightwing news had been given, and he refused).
-The FBI may have been less than honest in the warnings about Russian interference that they gave to Facebook, with the effect of protecting the Bidens.
Lavrov did arrive in Bali over 22h ago (unlike Sunak who’s arriving in about 10 minutes) so it’s entirely possible he’s been to hospital in that time. Who has a motivation to lie, the Indonesians or the Russians?
Dunno but I can't see that sort of question gets us very far. If Lavrov was taken ill, surely a doctor could have been flown out from Moscow? Whoever you believe, he was not so ill he needed to be kept in. And this is the problem, you can go on asking "plausibility" questions but they don't provide the answer.
Following our debate last night on the alleged superiority of British over American sports, and the ascent of cricket. I made the point that cricket has the potential to be as big as or bigger than the NFL
Just found this in the NYT
“Both men, then, are quite familiar with what a billion-dollar business looks like. The sport where they see the biggest upside these days, though, might be a surprise.
“When we first started looking at cricket, we were by no means experts,” Scheiner said. “But the more we studied it, the more we realized it felt like the N.F.L. did 20 years ago.””
Just as it wouldbe a shame if they titted about with the T20 blast to layer another, pointlessly tweaked and less good version on top of it, it would be a shame if American money came in and titted about with Indian cricket, or indeed cricket in general. Cricket is as close to perfect as any sport in the world. The only improvement I could make would be another handful of nations playing it. And another thing - look at that photo of cricketers. Smiling cheekily. Not glowering like footballers trying to suggest they're hard in a way which makes you want to wish both teams could lose.
American money can’t change Indian cricket because the IPL doesn’t need the money. As the whole article (££) makes clear, the IPL is already overflowing with cash, and it will only grow from here. The Americans are trying (and often failing) to get a foothold
The sums are incredible. Billions. In 5 years IPL will probably overtake NFL as the richest sports league in the world. It might one day threaten EPL as the most-watched
This money will, I am sure, attract other nations to play the game. It’s irresistible. Add in south Asian diasporas worldwide…
Cricket’s future is rosy. It just won’t be Test cricket. Which is a shame, but hey Ho
I like the fact you can usually turn up at Lords on the final day of a test match and get in for about £20. If the long form of the game suddenly became too popular that might change, so in a funny sort of way I don't want it to.
Even cheaper if it's the last day of a Middx county match. You sit there, Lords almost to yourself, watching things move to a conclusion. It's very enjoyable but at the same time you know the format is dying.
Do you mean Test cricket or four day county cricket? I think rumours of the death of both are constant and wrong. Yes there is a threat from the shorter form of the game, but the answer isn't to make more shorter form tournaments (thanks ECB). If the ECB wanted exciting cricket on TV they should have insisted the T20 blast was free to air, played on friday nights through the summer. Four day games to start on Sunday and play through. Find a window of two weeks for the 50 over tournament (useful if nothing else than training players for the one day international scene).
Won't clog up with the workings but here's my assessment of WH24 chances:
Biden 25% DeSantis 20% Trump 5% NOTA 50%
I don't particularly enjoy continually shouting to all and sundry that DONALD TRUMP IS THE LAY OF MY LIFE but that is about the long and short of it. Or to be precise the short and short of it.
I've come round to this point of view.
Fairly clearly Rep nominee will probably be De Santis. It's the "if not Biden" question for Dem Nominee that plays on my mind.
Don't think it'll be Buttigieg. Too Met.
I'm not sure that's the case. What for certain is that he's a better media performer than anyone else on the party.
Good evening from Bali! Rishi Sunak has just landed after a 17 hour flight from London for the G20 summit. A troop of Indonesian dancers are here to welcome the PM.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
Any evidence the FBI told Facebook "this Hunter Biden laptop story is fake please prohibit sharing of it"?
Afaik Zuckerberg testified that they were given a general warning about Russian misinformation.
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
It is a common regret. I really wish I had spent more time with my dad as an adult.
The Donald Trump of Islington North? Trouble is, if Corbyn is forced out, he could plausibly stand for and win Mayor of London, just as Ken Livingstone did.
I hope he runs - the ultimate test of personal vote vs party vote. And in doing so he ensures the proscription of Momentum and the removal of what's left of the foaming loon end of the party.
Remember that I say such things as a firm advocate of a voting system which would allow all our mainstream parties to cleft themselves into separate parties who can say what they actually believe. I want a broader spread of political voices, not a narrow centrist perspective like my own.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
I listened to it. Disappointingly sensationalist garbage from the BBC, with very little indeed in the way of actual serious content.
So far, just another contribution to "flooding the zone with shit".
Re. boat immigrants, is this deal with France likely to change anything? It does not seem likely to me.
Seems unlikely. The government is terrified of providing genuine routes to claim asylum overseas as too many of the buggers will claim asylum. For instance, a processing centre in Calais would be seen as a huge draw for migrants and would just increase the problem. I suspect the money would be best spent hugely increasing the processing capacity so that no one waits more than a few weeks to be either granted refugee status and thus able to live, work and pay tax in the U.K. or gets removed. Coupled with some positive advertising of the genuine cases.
And ultimately the globe needs to re-examine how refugee and asylum works in the modern world. It does not see right to many people that refugees/asylum seekers in Calais, an entirely safe country, do not claim asylum there. Or in Germany. Or Italy, or any of the other safe countries that they have crossed to get there. Now they have their reasons - language, family etc, but it diminishes the sympathy of people in the U.K.
Of course in reality most *do* claim asylum in those other countries. Hence our number being so much smaller than theirs. People *think* we are swamped because the right wing media / certain MPs openly lie to them. Having voters ignorant and turned prejudiced suits their interests apparently.
Exactly. Anyone familiar with the refugee camps in countries bordering the Middle East would laugh at the idea that we have a special problem. But I'd go further. In my view it's a disgrace to address the global refugee problem by hiding behind an accident of geography. If the main source of refugees was hundreds of thousands coming from Ireland, would we cheerfully accept that they should all come here instead of being shared out across Europe?
There are two fundamental issues, both essentially global. One is the periodic eruption of conflict or disaster (cf. Ukraine), which creates a huge number of "genuine" refugees by any reasonable definition. The other is the huge inequalities of opportunity and prosperity around the world. If Britain's response to these is to say "bugger off" to the former and "let's cut overseas aid" to the latter, we are failing in what is quite a natural human instinct - to help people in desperate circumstances.
But that is addressed by the fact we can, and we do, make exceptions on a case-by-case basis where this commands strong popular support: look at our generosity to Hong Kong or Ukraine.
The issue here is whether it should be a standing right in law that is immutable.
I say, no.
How were we generous to Ukraine? All our neighbours threw their doors open. We made them apply for a visa, including the stupidity of sending them from pillar to post in Calais to find the URL to a form which was broken.
Boris *claimed* we were generous. We were not.
How many have we accepted from Ukraine? Wiki suggests 65,000. Thats not bad, but we could have done more. I think it was not done for malice, but for bureaucracy, ever the issue with the British civil service. We have certainly not been the most 'generous' in that sense - naturally the closer nations such as Poland and the Baltics have taken more. I We have been helping the Ukrainian army for years however and continue to do so.
Furthermore Poland was previously criticised for refusing to accept people from countries with very different cultures, but the same logic facilitated their ability to welcome Ukrainians in such large numbers.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
Good evening from Bali! Rishi Sunak has just landed after a 17 hour flight from London for the G20 summit. A troop of Indonesian dancers are here to welcome the PM.
Putin not being there is interesting. Wonder if he thought it might be a dangerous time to be out of Moscow. Lavrov going despite being ill suggests that was a high priority for Putin.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
Remarkable that our Putinist apologist for Germany standing in the way of aiding Ukraine is now banging on about a couple of year old story about Hunter Biden's Laptop and Ukraine. What are the odds of that?
And "how incredibly badly Democrats are doing" ... ???
Back in the real world, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm election results in many decades for a first time incumbent party in the White House. Not since 2002 in the rally to the flag aftermath of 9/11 have midterms gone so well, if you exclude 9/11-related 2002 you'd have to look much further back to see any party doing as well as the Democrats have this year in their first midterms with the Oval Office.
Putin apologist?
If you were capable of elementary reading comprehension you would realise the mystery of the timing of my comment about Hunter Biden is linked to the fact that BBC has just broadcast a podcast on the subject.
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
The term “reparations” (which seems to be creeping into international parlance more and more) is such an unhelpful and counterproductive term.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
OT I've just been emailed a scam electricity bill. Trouble is, I fear it is probably genuine but made to look like a scam, which in some ways is worse because it trains the vulnerable to drop their guards against actual scams. I'll quarantine it.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
Ivory towers and all that. That Silicon Valley comedy show was really a documentary wasn't it e.g. when the workers demanded they had to have their dogs be allowed into the office.
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
It is a common regret. I really wish I had spent more time with my dad as an adult.
My dad is still with us, though increasingly frail and with what appears to be a severe case of old man body mass loss. I know that when he has gone I will regret my visceral dislike of him and how our relationship has deteriorated over time. I do try, but then he acts in a way which is profoundly selfish and ignorant and I sit there fuming again. Realistically I should have given him both barrels years ago and see if that made him change his ways. Too late now.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
See also Hillary's emails. Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
The term “reparations” (which seems to be creeping into international parlance more and more) is such an unhelpful and counterproductive term.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
The problem with that is the NGOs that promote the term do believe that the West is guilty and should be punished.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
It will be fascinating to see a DeSantis run for president. He just ran for Governor of Florida with a campaign video describing him as God's chosen warrior on earth and thus those opposing him being in league with Satan.
That may work in shitkicker states. Are there enough Sons of Jacob elsewhere to propel him into power? The GOP attack on women appears to have backfired heavily, yet now their heir apparent if Trump departs is a religious lunatic.
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
Ivory towers and all that.
What are you talking about?
Elon has cancelled the free food programme, because he claims they are spending $13 million a year feeding just one office. And the (former) workers are having a hissy fit claiming but it was $25 worth of food, to which he explained because all the remote working, it was actually more like $400 per meal (because the labour cost is fixed).
But regardless of exact costing, how entitled do you sound having a meltdown over your free lunch being taken away when you earn in the top 1% and the economy is on hard times and the company you work for loses money most years.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
If "so what", why did Big Tech censor it?
Aside from 'censor' being a rather inaccurate description, see my comment about the Hillary emails.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
The term “reparations” (which seems to be creeping into international parlance more and more) is such an unhelpful and counterproductive term.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
Quite. When I hear "reparations" I think Treaty of Versailles. Worst possible way of getting money out of people, and my best guess is the term is pushed by the hardline race theorists as it implies that the first world whiteys are 1. war criminals and 2. losers, which is worth more to them than the money.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
I agree that's it's completely uncalled for to call you a troll.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
I listened to it. Disappointingly sensationalist garbage from the BBC, with very little indeed in the way of actual serious content.
So far, just another contribution to "flooding the zone with shit".
What did you learn from it ?
Well, as this was a story that I hadn't followed at all up til now (assuming it was just more flooding with shit), quite a lot. -eg that it really it the hard drive Hunter Biden's laptop -that there was an email implying Hunter had got access to his father for a Burisma executive -that forensics had decided the emails are genuine -that the FBI warned Facebook over an upcoming Russian misinformation dump, while they already had possession of Hunter's laptop
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
I support open platforms that nobody can censor if they try.
But I think your description of what Twitter did is a bit wonky. What they were presented with was a claim about a laptop, that the media weren't allowed to examine, which ultimately turned out to contain some genuine emails, and also signs that it had later been tampered with. There was a reasonable suspicion that the emails had been hacked as part of Russian efforts to affect the election (and we now know these efforts existed), so initially they blocked the New York Post story under their hacked materials policy, which isn't a crazy policy to have. (Incidentally the claims the New York Post made about what the laptop contained were false, however that's not Twitter's justification for blocking it.) They then reverse-ferretted and unbanned the story, resulting in a massive Streisland Effect, the net effect being way more exposure than if they'd left it alone.
They didn't ban discussion of the laptop, and the work by Robert Graham that verified that some of the emails were genuine (by checking the DKIM signatures) was done on Twitter.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
If "so what", why did Big Tech censor it?
Aside from 'censor' being a rather inaccurate description, see my comment about the Hillary emails.
They were afraid if it were published, Trump would win again? Well, yes. That wasn't their call to make.
If Trump were less thick and wanted to cast doubt on the 2020 election, he should have been focused on this kind of thing, not the actual counting of the votes.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
I listened to it. Disappointingly sensationalist garbage from the BBC, with very little indeed in the way of actual serious content.
So far, just another contribution to "flooding the zone with shit".
What did you learn from it ?
Well, as this was a story that I hadn't followed at all up til now (assuming it was just more flooding with shit), quite a lot. -eg that it really it the hard drive Hunter Biden's laptop -that there was an email implying Hunter had got access to his father for a Burisma executive -that forensics had decided the emails are genuine -that the FBI warned Facebook over an upcoming Russian misinformation dump, while they already had possession of Hunter's laptop
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
I don't disagree, I support open platforms that technically can't be censored.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
I support open platforms that nobody can censor if they try.
But I think your description of what Twitter did is a bit wonky. What they were presented with was a claim about a laptop, that the media weren't allowed to examine, which ultimately turned out to contain some genuine emails, and also signs that it had later been tampered with. There was a reasonable suspicion that the emails had been hacked, so initially they blocked the New York Post story under their hacked materials policy, which isn't a crazy policy to have. (Incidentally the claims the New York Post made about what the laptop contained were false, however that's not Twitter's justification for blocking it.) They then reverse-ferretted and unbanned the story, resulting in a massive Streisland Effect, the net effect being way more exposure than if they'd left it alone.
They didn't ban discussion of the laptop, and the work by Robert Graham that verified that some of the emails were genuine (by checking the DKIM signatures) was done on Twitter.
There are two fundamental issues, both essentially global. One is the periodic eruption of conflict or disaster (cf. Ukraine), which creates a huge number of "genuine" refugees by any reasonable definition. The other is the huge inequalities of opportunity and prosperity around the world. If Britain's response to these is to say "bugger off" to the former and "let's cut overseas aid" to the latter, we are failing in what is quite a natural human instinct - to help people in desperate circumstances.
Which is easy to say from a comfortable warm middle-class house, but less so when choosing between heating and eating after a shitty 12 hour shift as an under paid nurse.
Yes, quite (though as you're personalising it a bit, I'm not sure you'd describe my one-bed rented flat as a comfortable middle-class house). But it's not a sufficient answer to "let's do X" to say "But what about underpaid nurses?" Any government needs to make choices and set priorities, and I'd expect a decent government to prioritise underpaid nurses AND keeping up our end of the more global issue. Governments will differ on how to pay for it, but the basic desirability should not be in doubt.
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
Ivory towers and all that.
What are you talking about?
Elon has cancelled the free food programme, because he claims they are spending $13 million a year feeding just one office. And the (former) workers are having a hissy fit claiming but it was $25 worth of food, to which he explained because all the remote working, it was actually more like $400 (because the labour cost is fixed).
But regardless, how entitled do you sound having a meltdown over your free lunch being taken away when you earn in the top 1% and the economy is on hard times and the company you work for loses money most years.
True, although cynics might suggest this is management (viz Musk) degrading conditions in the hope people will resign, thus saving redundancy costs. The same cynics would suggest that free food was only supplied in the first place so employees would spend 10 minutes eating a sandwich rather than taking an hour for a round trip to McDonalds.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
@kamski has all year been a Putin apologist whose been an apologist for Germany and others standing in the way of providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to firstly defend itself and secondly liberate its occupied territory. Its being utterly transparent here.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
Ivory towers and all that.
What are you talking about?
Elon has cancelled the free food programme, because he claims they are spending $13 million a year feeding just one office. And the (former) workers are having a hissy fit claiming but it was $25 worth of food, to which he explained because all the remote working, it was actually more like $400 per meal (because the labour cost is fixed).
But regardless of exact costing, how entitled do you sound having a meltdown over your free lunch being taken away when you earn in the top 1% and the economy is on hard times and the company you work for loses money most years.
It's not something I would be publicly complaining about in public, but it would be enough to get me to look at working elsewhere where my time may be better appreciated.
And twitter has probably managed to lose enough core staff that keeping things operating correctly is going to be nigh on impossible (I've already seen people commenting and demonstrating that some things aren't working correctly).
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
The term “reparations” (which seems to be creeping into international parlance more and more) is such an unhelpful and counterproductive term.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
They do it for a reason; there are plenty of bleeding hearts in the West who respond to that language.
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
Ivory towers and all that.
What are you talking about?
Elon has cancelled the free food programme, because he claims they are spending $13 million a year feeding just one office. And the (former) workers are having a hissy fit claiming but it was $25 worth of food, to which he explained because all the remote working, it was actually more like $400 (because the labour cost is fixed).
But regardless, how entitled do you sound having a meltdown over your free lunch being taken away when you earn in the top 1% and the economy is on hard times and the company you work for loses money most years.
True, although cynics might suggest this is management (viz Musk) degrading conditions in the hope people will resign, thus saving redundancy costs. The same cynics would suggest that free food was only supplied in the first place so employees would spend 10 minutes eating a sandwich rather than taking an hour for a round trip to McDonalds.
The free food, laundry, sports etc on the big tech campus was never about time saving of 30 mins for the trip to a sandwich shop (as they take that to go to the canteen where the free food is), it was about keeping them from as early as possible until as late as possible by making sure you didn't have that reason to be late in the morning or go home at night e.g. I need to head out the office at 5pm as I have a racket ball game across town at 7pm, or I need to do my laundry this evening. Instead, take your hour racket ball game here at 7pm, and perhaps get an extra hour or two of work in after that.
But they have found at twitter culture isn't arriving early or staying late in the way say early Googlers were living at the the office.
Also, there is of course now UberEats etc who will just deliver your McDonalds etc to the office.
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
The term “reparations” (which seems to be creeping into international parlance more and more) is such an unhelpful and counterproductive term.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
The problem with that is the NGOs that promote the term do believe that the West is guilty and should be punished.
Indeed and they need to be called out on this rhetoric more often. It is not about guilt and punishment. Whenever that has been tried against nation states in international relations, it has nearly always had a negative result. Drawing lines and working together, being aware of the disparity in resources, to address issues is the way forwards.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
I listened to it. Disappointingly sensationalist garbage from the BBC, with very little indeed in the way of actual serious content.
So far, just another contribution to "flooding the zone with shit".
What did you learn from it ?
Well, as this was a story that I hadn't followed at all up til now (assuming it was just more flooding with shit), quite a lot. -eg that it really it the hard drive Hunter Biden's laptop -that there was an email implying Hunter had got access to his father for a Burisma executive -that forensics had decided the emails are genuine -that the FBI warned Facebook over an upcoming Russian misinformation dump, while they already had possession of Hunter's laptop
What exactly did you find "sensationalist"?
The presentation of those already known and not particularly remarkable facts; that they gave so much airtime to the guy who clearly is a Republican troll, and his excitement about Hunter's self made porn (again, who cares ?); that they kept repeating "bombshell", when whatever it was they were talking about was nothing of the sort.
I'll listen to the next episode later this week, and see if it remains as bad tabloid as the first.
I don't have any problem at all with the BBC reporting this - apart form anything else, I'd hope that would save me hours of wading through this deck to find out what all the fuss is about - but the first episode was piss poor journalism from someone who is usually a bit better than that.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
If "so what", why did Big Tech censor it?
Aside from 'censor' being a rather inaccurate description, see my comment about the Hillary emails.
They were afraid if it were published, Trump would win again? Well, yes. That wasn't their call to make.
If Trump were less thick and wanted to cast doubt on the 2020 election, he should have been focused on this kind of thing, not the actual counting of the votes.
Who is "they"? The FBI whose clumsy intervention four years earlier helped Trump? Or Big Tech, in which case how did they persuade the FBI to make the request?
In any case, is there anything there to implicate Joe Biden, as opposed to Hunter, or is this at the level of Middle East billionaires bailing out Trump's son-in-law? Embarrassing but no smoking gun?
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
It is a common regret. I really wish I had spent more time with my dad as an adult.
My dad is still with us, though increasingly frail and with what appears to be a severe case of old man body mass loss. I know that when he has gone I will regret my visceral dislike of him and how our relationship has deteriorated over time. I do try, but then he acts in a way which is profoundly selfish and ignorant and I sit there fuming again. Realistically I should have given him both barrels years ago and see if that made him change his ways. Too late now.
Wow sorry to hear that. There is usually a reason why people are as they are, whether fear, regret, pain, etc.
I try to look for such mitigations for what comes out of peoples' mouths.
But of course it's your father whom no one knows as well as you.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
@kamski has all year been a Putin apologist whose been an apologist for Germany and others standing in the way of providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to firstly defend itself and secondly liberate its occupied territory. Its being utterly transparent here.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
If you honestly think I’m “banging on” about Hunter Biden because of something happening in the war you’re even crazier than I supposed. Which is impressive, as I already have you down as 110% Box Of Frogs
There is a clear pattern of the American establishment and social media manipulating news stories to benefit Biden and disbenefit Trump. They did it with this story and they did it with lab leak. There might be others. Denying it is futile
It is arguable that what they did is justified. Russia was already manipulating the news and Trump was and is a real menace to American society. It’s a close call
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
See also Hillary's emails. Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
Well, I don't disagree - especially about Hillary's email scandal, which reflected badly on her character, but was really not much of a story. And scepticism about the laptop was certainly understandable.
But what about the supposed email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi that said "'Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together." Is that really nothing?
And for me, just the fact of Hunter getting an extremely well-paid job with a dodgy Ukrainian company is already a kind of corruption, and creates conflicts of interest.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
You need to remember how absolutely pants on head ridiculous the story was around the provenance of the data from the laptop. The shop owner, upon whom the whole thing rested, kept changing his story.
It was so bad that Fox News passed on the story. Multiple people inside the NY Post thought they hadn't done enough to vet the data. Guiliani says he gave it to the Post because he was worried other journalists would fact check it before publishing.
As I said at the time if the data is real and revealed nefarious activities by Joe Biden then it doesn't matter how the data was obtained. But the story around the acquisition of the data is so busted that no data could be trusted without extensive fact checking.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
@kamski has all year been a Putin apologist whose been an apologist for Germany and others standing in the way of providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to firstly defend itself and secondly liberate its occupied territory. Its being utterly transparent here.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
Can you back that up with some actual quotes from me?
Have to chuckle at the entitledness of the twerps or tweeps or whatever they call themselves...no fair, no more free lunches....I only earn $250k a year basic and they are taking away my $25 free lunch....
Ivory towers and all that.
What are you talking about?
Elon has cancelled the free food programme, because he claims they are spending $13 million a year feeding just one office. And the (former) workers are having a hissy fit claiming but it was $25 worth of food, to which he explained because all the remote working, it was actually more like $400 per meal (because the labour cost is fixed).
But regardless of exact costing, how entitled do you sound having a meltdown over your free lunch being taken away when you earn in the top 1% and the economy is on hard times and the company you work for loses money most years.
It's not something I would be publicly complaining about in public, but it would be enough to get me to look at working elsewhere where my time may be better appreciated.
And twitter has probably managed to lose enough core staff that keeping things operating correctly is going to be nigh on impossible (I've already seen people commenting and demonstrating that some things aren't working correctly).
Of course perks play some part in every bodies decisions. I once worked for a great company who had flexi time before it was cool and a fully stocked kitchen including booze, and all social /sports activities were played for. But the job itself was actually meh and the shiny free stuff and nice work environment isn't as shiny after a while if your job is boring (and I could get much better pay elsewhere).
Also, given the layoffs happening across the industry, I think the free lunch programme would be way down the list of concerns. You only have to look at the state Meta is in with its stupid amount of money hosed at Metaverse play. Having a public big hissy fit over the new boss cutting your free lunch, when across the industry job losses are happening (and world economy isn't exactly going well) and you on big bucks where $20 is literally nothing to you, gives some indication of how entitled some of these people are.
Following our debate last night on the alleged superiority of British over American sports, and the ascent of cricket. I made the point that cricket has the potential to be as big as or bigger than the NFL
Just found this in the NYT
“Both men, then, are quite familiar with what a billion-dollar business looks like. The sport where they see the biggest upside these days, though, might be a surprise.
“When we first started looking at cricket, we were by no means experts,” Scheiner said. “But the more we studied it, the more we realized it felt like the N.F.L. did 20 years ago.””
Just as it wouldbe a shame if they titted about with the T20 blast to layer another, pointlessly tweaked and less good version on top of it, it would be a shame if American money came in and titted about with Indian cricket, or indeed cricket in general. Cricket is as close to perfect as any sport in the world. The only improvement I could make would be another handful of nations playing it. And another thing - look at that photo of cricketers. Smiling cheekily. Not glowering like footballers trying to suggest they're hard in a way which makes you want to wish both teams could lose.
American money can’t change Indian cricket because the IPL doesn’t need the money. As the whole article (££) makes clear, the IPL is already overflowing with cash, and it will only grow from here. The Americans are trying (and often failing) to get a foothold
The sums are incredible. Billions. In 5 years IPL will probably overtake NFL as the richest sports league in the world. It might one day threaten EPL as the most-watched
This money will, I am sure, attract other nations to play the game. It’s irresistible. Add in south Asian diasporas worldwide…
Cricket’s future is rosy. It just won’t be Test cricket. Which is a shame, but hey Ho
I like the fact you can usually turn up at Lords on the final day of a test match and get in for about £20. If the long form of the game suddenly became too popular that might change, so in a funny sort of way I don't want it to.
Even cheaper if it's the last day of a Middx county match. You sit there, Lords almost to yourself, watching things move to a conclusion. It's very enjoyable but at the same time you know the format is dying.
Do you mean Test cricket or four day county cricket? I think rumours of the death of both are constant and wrong. Yes there is a threat from the shorter form of the game, but the answer isn't to make more shorter form tournaments (thanks ECB). If the ECB wanted exciting cricket on TV they should have insisted the T20 blast was free to air, played on friday nights through the summer. Four day games to start on Sunday and play through. Find a window of two weeks for the 50 over tournament (useful if nothing else than training players for the one day international scene).
I'm talking about Middx county championship games specifically. The crowds are pitiful in my experience. Test cricket is a different story. Lords is still packed and electric for that.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
It was mildly suppressed by Facebook AT THE BEHEST OF THE FBI
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
I support open platforms that nobody can censor if they try.
But I think your description of what Twitter did is a bit wonky. What they were presented with was a claim about a laptop, that the media weren't allowed to examine, which ultimately turned out to contain some genuine emails, and also signs that it had later been tampered with. There was a reasonable suspicion that the emails had been hacked as part of Russian efforts to affect the election (and we now know these efforts existed), so initially they blocked the New York Post story under their hacked materials policy, which isn't a crazy policy to have. (Incidentally the claims the New York Post made about what the laptop contained were false, however that's not Twitter's justification for blocking it.) They then reverse-ferretted and unbanned the story, resulting in a massive Streisland Effect, the net effect being way more exposure than if they'd left it alone.
They didn't ban discussion of the laptop, and the work by Robert Graham that verified that some of the emails were genuine (by checking the DKIM signatures) was done on Twitter.
This is rather a good article which considers what Twitter is, and isn't.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
If "so what", why did Big Tech censor it?
Aside from 'censor' being a rather inaccurate description, see my comment about the Hillary emails.
They were afraid if it were published, Trump would win again? Well, yes. That wasn't their call to make.
If Trump were less thick and wanted to cast doubt on the 2020 election, he should have been focused on this kind of thing, not the actual counting of the votes.
Who is "they"? The FBI whose clumsy intervention four years earlier helped Trump? Or Big Tech, in which case how did they persuade the FBI to make the request?
In any case, is there anything there to implicate Joe Biden, as opposed to Hunter, or is this at the level of Middle East billionaires bailing out Trump's son-in-law? Embarrassing but no smoking gun?
"They" is Big Tech.
Was there actually a sepcific FBI request? Other commenters in this thread have said they didn't, just a general warning about Russian disinformation, which Big Tech may opr may not have used as an excuse to censor this story.
I tend to agree that it shouldn't be a story - I'm very much against judging people by what their relatives do - but certainly Big Tech thought it might stand in the way of their guy beating evil Trump and they acted accordingly.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
It will be fascinating to see a DeSantis run for president. He just ran for Governor of Florida with a campaign video describing him as God's chosen warrior on earth and thus those opposing him being in league with Satan.
That may work in shitkicker states. Are there enough Sons of Jacob elsewhere to propel him into power? The GOP attack on women appears to have backfired heavily, yet now their heir apparent if Trump departs is a religious lunatic.
Yes, I'm not so sure that DeSantis is the panacea for all the GOP's problems that most people seem to think he is. His main selling point thus far seems to be that he has been sent by God to win the War on Woke. I'm not sure that has sufficiently broad appeal to make him a shoo-in either as GOP candidate or, if he wins that, POTUS.
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
I’ve had that experience too of wishing I’d got to know an uncle better. This one married my dad’s oldest sister and they were together for 62 years. He was a taciturn working class bloke, but not in a brooding way, his presence was always benign and solid and reassuring. I liked him a lot but somehow over all those gatherings over all the years we never talked seriously – just banter - and when he died this is what suddenly struck me. I didn’t know him at all. Never made the effort. When chatting about him after the funeral I found myself wittering on about what a good driver he was, telling people that once when I was in a car following him I noticed how the gap between him and the kerb remained tight and constant the whole time. “Well that was great” I lambasted myself afterwards - beloved family member passes away and all you can say in tribute is he could drive in a straight line.
Like many internal "rights", slavery reparations, climate change reparations, 'safe and legal' routes, these are fundamentally driven by a socialist viewpoint in international aid organisations, charities and institutions that is driven by a motivation to reduce global wealth and inequality, overriding national government's as necessary, and not the issues they purport to be addressing.
Voters are smart enough to sniff this out.
Indeed, see Rishi's record speed u-turn on climate reparations. At a time when the UK is being forced to raise tax and cut domestic spending to bring borrowing under control the idea that we should open the door to anything like reparations is idiotic.
The most stupid part of that idea was the bargaining side was the G77, a group of nations that includes China who would have benefited from climate reparations paid by the west. It was a completely mental idea and happily the door has been closed on it for good.
The term “reparations” (which seems to be creeping into international parlance more and more) is such an unhelpful and counterproductive term.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
They do it for a reason; there are plenty of bleeding hearts in the West who respond to that language.
I think the more intelligent view is actually that it is net unproductive and hostility-provoking, but they do it anyway.
What you need to take on board is this: the British Empire was just an empire. There have been lots of them. They are a fact of life and there is no point in condemning them as evil, but they invariably entail a lot of individual very, very evil acts because invading other countries always does. See Ukraine. The British contribution to the genre includes the putting down of the Indian mutiny, the system of local prostitution for troops in India, and the slave trade. If you think it makes you look well 'ard to think that to condemn those things as a "bleeding heart" response, good for you. It produces rather a different impression, actually. And the "good" it thought it was exporting to the empire was a repressive, homophobic, misogynistic Christianity probably more damaging than trade gin.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
I listened to it. Disappointingly sensationalist garbage from the BBC, with very little indeed in the way of actual serious content.
So far, just another contribution to "flooding the zone with shit".
What did you learn from it ?
Well, as this was a story that I hadn't followed at all up til now (assuming it was just more flooding with shit), quite a lot. -eg that it really it the hard drive Hunter Biden's laptop -that there was an email implying Hunter had got access to his father for a Burisma executive -that forensics had decided the emails are genuine -that the FBI warned Facebook over an upcoming Russian misinformation dump, while they already had possession of Hunter's laptop
What exactly did you find "sensationalist"?
The presentation of those already known and not particularly remarkable facts; that they gave so much airtime to the guy who clearly is a Republican troll, and his excitement about Hunter's self made porn (again, who cares ?); that they kept repeating "bombshell", when whatever it was they were talking about was nothing of the sort.
I'll listen to the next episode later this week, and see if it remains as bad tabloid as the first.
I don't have any problem at all with the BBC reporting this - apart form anything else, I'd hope that would save me hours of wading through this deck to find out what all the fuss is about - but the first episode was piss poor journalism from someone who is usually a bit better than that.
Well, I understood the program, and the whole previous series, as trying to understand what they see as an important movement in American politics, so they are bound to give loads of airtime to lots of Republican trolls. Just dismissing it all as nonsense wouln't get them very far!
The party that encourages and uses this kind of stuff, whether trolling or not, just got (I assume) a plurality, and nearly 50% of the votes in a national election. Which I find kind of shocking.
And, like I said, most of the story was entirely new to me.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
See also Hillary's emails. Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
Well, I don't disagree - especially about Hillary's email scandal, which reflected badly on her character, but was really not much of a story. And scepticism about the laptop was certainly understandable.
But what about the supposed email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi that said "'Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together." Is that really nothing?
And for me, just the fact of Hunter getting an extremely well-paid job with a dodgy Ukrainian company is already a kind of corruption, and creates conflicts of interest.
The meeting ought not to have happened. But if it is the only thing which touches Biden himself, which appears to be the case, then the entire story is a big nothing, politically.
Hunter is a deeply sleazy character, no question. But again from his father's point of view, and that of the rest of us, so what ?
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
See also Hillary's emails. Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
Well, I don't disagree - especially about Hillary's email scandal, which reflected badly on her character, but was really not much of a story. And scepticism about the laptop was certainly understandable.
But what about the supposed email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi that said "'Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together." Is that really nothing?
And for me, just the fact of Hunter getting an extremely well-paid job with a dodgy Ukrainian company is already a kind of corruption, and creates conflicts of interest.
The meeting ought not to have happened. But if it is the only thing which touches Biden himself, which appears to be the case, then the entire story is a big nothing, politically.
Hunter is a deeply sleazy character, no question. But again from his father's point of view, and that of the rest of us, so what ?
In that case, it probably comes down to Joe Biden's attitude to the conflicts of interest here, which he doesn't seem to have taken a clear line on. I'm not sure I would be just shrugging if it was Trump's family (though for sure they have done worse).
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
The bigger scandal, by far, is that the Hunter Biden laptop story was deliberately suppressed and labelled as Trumpite Fake News, on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
Have you actually read these stories or just the headlines fed to you by your right wing outrage feed?
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
There's no there, there.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
If "so what", why did Big Tech censor it?
Aside from 'censor' being a rather inaccurate description, see my comment about the Hillary emails.
They were afraid if it were published, Trump would win again? Well, yes. That wasn't their call to make.
If Trump were less thick and wanted to cast doubt on the 2020 election, he should have been focused on this kind of thing, not the actual counting of the votes.
Who is "they"? The FBI whose clumsy intervention four years earlier helped Trump? Or Big Tech, in which case how did they persuade the FBI to make the request?
In any case, is there anything there to implicate Joe Biden, as opposed to Hunter, or is this at the level of Middle East billionaires bailing out Trump's son-in-law? Embarrassing but no smoking gun?
Kushner was an official adviser to the President. Hunter Biden was merely a close family member.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Nobody has you down as Putinist or a Troll, let alone the both.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Nobody has you down as Putinist or a Troll, let alone the both.
I have him down as a Putin apologist who has defended obstructing weapons being sent to Ukraine.
If he's prepared to say, without equivocation, that we should be arming Ukraine to defend themselves and to aid them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine including Crimea then I will humbly apologise and admit I made a mistake.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Nobody has you down as Putinist or a Troll, let alone the both.
I have him down as a Putin apologist who has defended obstructing weapons being sent to Ukraine.
If he's prepared to say, without equivocation, that we should be arming Ukraine to defend themselves and to aid them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine including Crimea then I will humbly apologise and admit I made a mistake.
So basically, anyone who doesn't agree with you completely (including on Crimea) is a Putin apologist?
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
@kamski has all year been a Putin apologist whose been an apologist for Germany and others standing in the way of providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to firstly defend itself and secondly liberate its occupied territory. Its being utterly transparent here.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
Can you back that up with some actual quotes from me?
From memory earlier in the year you were defending Germany blocking weapons being sent to Ukraine and you were defending the fact that even British weapons being sent to Ukraine were being messed around with by having to go around German airspace.
I don't have a link to the exact quotes.
If my memory is wrong, then I apologise, but you coming online today banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop and demanding that Biden steps down seems absolutely par for the course for a Putin apologist trying to move on the conversation from Kherson, the GOPs failure etc.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Nobody has you down as Putinist or a Troll, let alone the both.
I have him down as a Putin apologist who has defended obstructing weapons being sent to Ukraine.
If he's prepared to say, without equivocation, that we should be arming Ukraine to defend themselves and to aid them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine including Crimea then I will humbly apologise and admit I made a mistake.
So basically, anyone who doesn't agree with you completely (including on Crimea) is a Putin apologist?
Anyone who doesn't agree that Ukraine has a right to defend and liberate their own land is a Putin apologist, yes.
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
I’ve had that experience too of wishing I’d got to know an uncle better. This one married my dad’s oldest sister and they were together for 62 years. He was a taciturn working class bloke, but not in a brooding way, his presence was always benign and solid and reassuring. I liked him a lot but somehow over all those gatherings over all the years we never talked seriously – just banter - and when he died this is what suddenly struck me. I didn’t know him at all. Never made the effort. When chatting about him after the funeral I found myself wittering on about what a good driver he was, telling people that once when I was in a car following him I noticed how the gap between him and the kerb remained tight and constant the whole time. “Well that was great” I lambasted myself afterwards - beloved family member passes away and all you can say in tribute is he could drive in a straight line.
That really is damning by the faintest of faint praise.
People are either conflict embracers or conflict avoiders. My wife's family are conflict embracers. It's an invigorating way to live, but you do get to know people. Nobody hides their oddities. Mine tend to be conflict avoiders: we rub along very harmoniously, but often at the expense of actually knowing anything about what anybody thinks about anything.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
@kamski has all year been a Putin apologist whose been an apologist for Germany and others standing in the way of providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to firstly defend itself and secondly liberate its occupied territory. Its being utterly transparent here.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
Failing to jump all over Germany for not switching its Russia policy overnight from pacifist engagement to "isolate and destroy" doesn't make someone a Putin apologist.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
I generally don’t agree with @kamski but I’ve never seen him/her as a “Putin apologist”
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a “Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
@kamski has all year been a Putin apologist whose been an apologist for Germany and others standing in the way of providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to firstly defend itself and secondly liberate its occupied territory. Its being utterly transparent here.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
Failing to jump all over Germany for not switching its Russia policy overnight from pacifist engagement to "isolate and destroy" doesn't make someone a Putin apologist.
When Putin is invading countries in Europe, yes it does.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
See also Hillary's emails. Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
Well, I don't disagree - especially about Hillary's email scandal, which reflected badly on her character, but was really not much of a story. And scepticism about the laptop was certainly understandable.
But what about the supposed email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi that said "'Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together." Is that really nothing?
And for me, just the fact of Hunter getting an extremely well-paid job with a dodgy Ukrainian company is already a kind of corruption, and creates conflicts of interest.
Yes, possibly, but you can't win here. What you gonna do, create a post of Possibly First Son of the US and pay him a squillion dollars a year to stay out of the labour market ( a problem we have with junior royals)? set up a senate committee to assess whether any job he is offered is commensurate with his actual abilities? Forbid him from introducing anyone to his dad?
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
It will be fascinating to see a DeSantis run for president. He just ran for Governor of Florida with a campaign video describing him as God's chosen warrior on earth and thus those opposing him being in league with Satan.
That may work in shitkicker states. Are there enough Sons of Jacob elsewhere to propel him into power? The GOP attack on women appears to have backfired heavily, yet now their heir apparent if Trump departs is a religious lunatic.
Yes, I'm not so sure that DeSantis is the panacea for all the GOP's problems that most people seem to think he is. His main selling point thus far seems to be that he has been sent by God to win the War on Woke. I'm not sure that has sufficiently broad appeal to make him a shoo-in either as GOP candidate or, if he wins that, POTUS.
There is so much about America which is familiar and comfortable - food, entertainment, the language. And there is so much which is alien - all three of the same plus the God thing. American Christians seem to worship the old Testament God or vengeance and punishment. I'm sure DeSantis and many like him really do think God wants them to do all the awful things they do in His name.
My hope is that there are enough sane people to pull them back from the precipice they have been standing on seemingly set on descending into religious fundamentalism. Yet the attack on women has galvanised the population to stop them in the mid-terms. So maybe the ones who are mad like DeSantis won't win out.
W Bush did the God thing. And the hokey thing. Yet despite the shitkicker projection was genuinely intelligent and well balanced. Since he left office, the party has been taken over by people who appear to be genuinely unhinged.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Nobody has you down as Putinist or a Troll, let alone the both.
I have him down as a Putin apologist who has defended obstructing weapons being sent to Ukraine.
If he's prepared to say, without equivocation, that we should be arming Ukraine to defend themselves and to aid them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine including Crimea then I will humbly apologise and admit I made a mistake.
Yes well I have you down as a bellicose anglocentric right winger with a German hang up.
I happen to pretty much agree with you on Ukraine but you manage to express it such that I don't.
Democrats need to force Biden to announce he won't run again. They need to be able to take the moral high ground, find a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. I don't believe it's fair to blame a parent for the misdemeanours of a son or daughter. But, at the very least, Joe Biden has turned a blind eye to Hunter making lots of money out of his connection to his father. It's a form of corruption, it stinks, and Democrats going along with it is disappointing AND electorally stupid AND terrible for US democracy.
There's no such thing as a candidate who is unquestionably not corrupt. You can always raise *questions*, even if they're not actually corrupt. This is even truer if the *family* of the candidate has to be unquestionably not corrupt as well as the candidate themselves.
On the scale of US political corruption making money off the name of your famous father is as low as you can get. The voters got to hear about it, they (IMHO sensibly) decided that it wasn't a deal-breaker. You don't know if this will be true of whatever they dredge up on whoever would replace Biden, so getting rid of him *over this* would be astonishingly dumb.
There's a difference between making money from the name of a famous father (which could cover fairly irrelevant stuff), and inexplicably being paid 50k a month by a corrupt Ukrainian firm at a time when his father had a say in US policy to Ukraine.
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
Also if you listen to the podcast there is a big question mark over the statement "the voters got to hear about it". There's also a question mark over your assumption that "they decided it wasn't a deal-breaker". There's no doubt millions of voters that this does affect who they vote for, or whether they bother voting at all. Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
See also Hillary's emails. Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
Well, I don't disagree - especially about Hillary's email scandal, which reflected badly on her character, but was really not much of a story. And scepticism about the laptop was certainly understandable.
But what about the supposed email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi that said "'Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together." Is that really nothing?
And for me, just the fact of Hunter getting an extremely well-paid job with a dodgy Ukrainian company is already a kind of corruption, and creates conflicts of interest.
The meeting ought not to have happened. But if it is the only thing which touches Biden himself, which appears to be the case, then the entire story is a big nothing, politically.
Hunter is a deeply sleazy character, no question. But again from his father's point of view, and that of the rest of us, so what ?
The meeting didn't happen. There was lots of media followup, it didn't check out.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
You are the obviously the troll here. Try engaging your brain before posting your moronic kneejerk responses.
Nobody has you down as Putinist or a Troll, let alone the both.
I have him down as a Putin apologist who has defended obstructing weapons being sent to Ukraine.
If he's prepared to say, without equivocation, that we should be arming Ukraine to defend themselves and to aid them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine including Crimea then I will humbly apologise and admit I made a mistake.
So basically, anyone who doesn't agree with you completely (including on Crimea) is a Putin apologist?
Anyone who doesn't agree that Ukraine has a right to defend and liberate their own land is a Putin apologist, yes.
You are the obvious Putinist troll, it makes sense now. How much do the Kremlin pay you to constantly try and stir up division with Germany (a country you obviously know nothing about - probably because you are posting from Russia, even the average toddler in the UK is better-informed), the most steadfastly pro-Ukrainian major continental West European country, the continental European country that has provided by far the most military aid, and the one that has moved the most, since this year's invasion of Ukraine.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
It will be fascinating to see a DeSantis run for president. He just ran for Governor of Florida with a campaign video describing him as God's chosen warrior on earth and thus those opposing him being in league with Satan.
That may work in shitkicker states. Are there enough Sons of Jacob elsewhere to propel him into power? The GOP attack on women appears to have backfired heavily, yet now their heir apparent if Trump departs is a religious lunatic.
Yes, I'm not so sure that DeSantis is the panacea for all the GOP's problems that most people seem to think he is. His main selling point thus far seems to be that he has been sent by God to win the War on Woke. I'm not sure that has sufficiently broad appeal to make him a shoo-in either as GOP candidate or, if he wins that, POTUS.
He’s certainly not a panacea.
One thing the midterms have shown is is that if Trump runs again the Democrats under Biden are pretty likely to win 2024. They have built up a strategy to help beat him in the states that matter.
DeSantis is the GOPs better option, but in between now and the primaries he’s going to have to take some time to prepare his stall, vision and strategy. He can’t run an exclusively southern strategy - GOP wins in NV, AZ and GA wouldn’t get them to 270 on their own, assuming the other states don’t change hands. If he won the Nebraska district and Maine district I calculate he’d be on 269, which would probably make him President but isn’t an outcome anyone should be aiming for tactically.
So he needs to find a way through the rust belt and NH. Will anti-woke stuff be enough to deliver him any of those states? I don’t believe so. He’s going to need to come up with a credible economic offering as well. His economic policy in Florida seems to have won him plaudits but from what I can see it’s all cut spending/small state stuff which I’m not sure is going to chime that much.
In short, he’s a much better candidate than Trump would be but there’s plenty of gaps that need to be filled in his offering before the primaries.
Off thread - but I spent some time at the weekend going through the collection of books amassed by my late uncle. His political sympathies are enjoyably difficult to infer. In the part of his library that you could broadly categorise as political, he had books by the likes of Will Hutton, Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt; he had short works and pamphlets published by the Bruges Group (among whom, I think, he had friends); he had a biography of Marx, a history of radical ideas from the civil war; a book making the case for British republicanism. Oh, and a quite surprising number of language textbooks. The picture painted is of someone quite left wing and internationalist who was averse to the EU for largely economic reasons. Which is entertainingly at odds from the impression (admittedly we rarely talked politics) I always got of him when he was alive: mysteriously (given the rest of my family) posh and 'something in the city'. He was always something of an enigma. I wish I'd got to know him better.
I’ve had that experience too of wishing I’d got to know an uncle better. This one married my dad’s oldest sister and they were together for 62 years. He was a taciturn working class bloke, but not in a brooding way, his presence was always benign and solid and reassuring. I liked him a lot but somehow over all those gatherings over all the years we never talked seriously – just banter - and when he died this is what suddenly struck me. I didn’t know him at all. Never made the effort. When chatting about him after the funeral I found myself wittering on about what a good driver he was, telling people that once when I was in a car following him I noticed how the gap between him and the kerb remained tight and constant the whole time. “Well that was great” I lambasted myself afterwards - beloved family member passes away and all you can say in tribute is he could drive in a straight line.
That really is damning by the faintest of faint praise.
People are either conflict embracers or conflict avoiders. My wife's family are conflict embracers. It's an invigorating way to live, but you do get to know people. Nobody hides their oddities. Mine tend to be conflict avoiders: we rub along very harmoniously, but often at the expense of actually knowing anything about what anybody thinks about anything.
Yes, our wider family are (largely) avoiders. The plus - we all get along. The minus - we don't really know each other. This Christmas will be a test though. There's a close cousin who's gone down the Trump maga wormhole and last year he started emitting. I kept it light, with an enormous effort, leaving the room when necessary, and we got away with it. But can we pull that off a second time? I'm not sure. It might blow.
In the past week the people who've had a very bad week are:
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson. The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate. Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are: Ukraine - Liberating Kherson. The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office. Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
It will be fascinating to see a DeSantis run for president. He just ran for Governor of Florida with a campaign video describing him as God's chosen warrior on earth and thus those opposing him being in league with Satan.
That may work in shitkicker states. Are there enough Sons of Jacob elsewhere to propel him into power? The GOP attack on women appears to have backfired heavily, yet now their heir apparent if Trump departs is a religious lunatic.
Yes, I'm not so sure that DeSantis is the panacea for all the GOP's problems that most people seem to think he is. His main selling point thus far seems to be that he has been sent by God to win the War on Woke. I'm not sure that has sufficiently broad appeal to make him a shoo-in either as GOP candidate or, if he wins that, POTUS.
There is so much about America which is familiar and comfortable - food, entertainment, the language. And there is so much which is alien - all three of the same plus the God thing. American Christians seem to worship the old Testament God or vengeance and punishment. I'm sure DeSantis and many like him really do think God wants them to do all the awful things they do in His name.
My hope is that there are enough sane people to pull them back from the precipice they have been standing on seemingly set on descending into religious fundamentalism. Yet the attack on women has galvanised the population to stop them in the mid-terms. So maybe the ones who are mad like DeSantis won't win out.
W Bush did the God thing. And the hokey thing. Yet despite the shitkicker projection was genuinely intelligent and well balanced. Since he left office, the party has been taken over by people who appear to be genuinely unhinged.
Depends which US Christian denomination, US Episcopalians, Lutherans and Unitarians are more liberal than the Church of England even if most Protestant evangelicals are more hardline but that is the same for most Pentecostals and Baptists in the UK too.
Roman Catholic clergy the world over are socially very conservative, even if their congregations western Catholics aren't always the same
Comments
Just like “lab leak”
“Washington(CNN Business) House Republicans want Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hand over a vast array of additional records pertaining to the company's handling of a 2020 New York Post article containing allegations about Hunter Biden, after Zuckerberg indicated last week that an FBI warning about Russian propaganda contributed to the article's temporary suppression on Facebook at the time.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/tech/hunter-biden-house-fbi-comms/index.html
It is astonishingly dumb not to think this stinks to hell. And certainly makes complaints about Trump (+family) conflicts of interest sound incredibly hypocritical.
@LostPassword summed up my views very well, last week.
Like FIFA or the WHO, they are rackets and subject to much corrupt influence and abuse of self-interest.
@elonmusk: “My kids were basically educated by Reddit & YouTube; Let’s just get a bunch of content creators that we think are cool on YouTube & say, “Hey, would you consider putting your content on Twitter, & we’ll pay you 10% more than YouTube & see how it goes?” Let’s do that”
@elonmusk
Replying to @SawyerMerritt
Something tells me this would work 🧠
https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1592020899829780481
The story was freely shareable on Facebook.
For one week it was artificially suppressed by "The Algorithm" so it didn't appear as a suggestion in people's feeds - however if it was actively shared nothing was done to stop it appearing.
And Zuckerbeg already testified about all of this in 2020.
Look at how incredibly badly Democrats are doing against a party that fields so many obviously fruitcake candidates. It's like the Labour Party losing a general election to UKIP.
Though note the Democrats did hold the Senate against the GOP last week and still have not lost the House, even if that does eventually go
Twitter was much worse, of course.
And it was done deliberately to help Biden beat Trump - d'ya think the same thing would have happened if it had been about Don Junior?
And "how incredibly badly Democrats are doing" ... ???
Back in the real world, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm election results in many decades for a first time incumbent party in the White House. Not since 2002 in the rally to the flag aftermath of 9/11 have midterms gone so well, if you exclude 9/11-related 2002 you'd have to look much further back to see any party doing as well as the Democrats have this year in their first midterms with the Oval Office.
It was vigorously suppressed by Twitter
“Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover”
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-exec-who-censored-hunter-biden-laptop-story-resigns-after-musk-takeover/
To realise the absurdity of your position, imagine if there was a story that was deeply embarrassing to Trump, yet true
Imagine if, a few weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the FBI had gone to Facebook and Twitter and said “this Trump story is fake, please prohibit sharing of it” (even tho it’s true). And imagine that social media then obeyed, in part or in whole. Suppressing the story that damaged Trump
Would that all be totes fine and acceptable? Would you be airily dismissing it? Or would you actually be rightly angry over a blatant interference in democracy?
The conclusions seem to be:
-Emails, including one that implicates Hunter in getting access for someone from Burisma to his father, are probably genuine.
-The story wasn't properly covered before the 2020 election in the "MSM" . (partly because "MSM" organisations asked Steve Bannon for a copy of the hard drive that the rightwing news had been given, and he refused).
-The FBI may have been less than honest in the warnings about Russian interference that they gave to Facebook, with the effect of protecting the Bidens.
NEW: Jeremy Corbyn will never stand for Labour again, senior party figures tell @alethaadu @jessicaelgot & me.
https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1592083933134573570
What for certain is that he's a better media performer than anyone else on the party.
https://twitter.com/sebastianepayne/status/1592111394413215744
Afaik Zuckerberg testified that they were given a general warning about Russian misinformation.
Remember that I say such things as a firm advocate of a voting system which would allow all our mainstream parties to cleft themselves into separate parties who can say what they actually believe. I want a broader spread of political voices, not a narrow centrist perspective like my own.
Disappointingly sensationalist garbage from the BBC, with very little indeed in the way of actual serious content.
So far, just another contribution to "flooding the zone with shit".
What did you learn from it ?
Russia - humiliated into losing Kherson.
The GOP - Terrible midterms and went backwards in the Senate.
Trump and his acolytes - His candidates did worse than non-Trump GOP candidates.
Having a good week are:
Ukraine - Liberating Kherson.
The Democrats - Best midterms in decades for a party newly holding the Oval Office.
Ron de Santis - Had a great result against the run of poor results for other GOP candidates. Firm non-Trump frontrunner now for the GOP nomination.
So up come the Putinist trolls and apologists banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop. Couldn't be more transparent if they tried.
The contents of the hard drive have been shared around right wing media for years now, and pretty well zip. It's massively embarrassing to Hunter Biden, but so what ?
If you were capable of elementary reading comprehension you would realise the mystery of the timing of my comment about Hunter Biden is linked to the fact that BBC has just broadcast a podcast on the subject.
It denotes fault and finger pointing. It feeds into this idea that people have to feel guilt about the accident of the place of their birth. Some kind of inherited shame.
If you rephrased the question - do richer countries have a moral obligation to help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change, through properly targeted support - then I think people are much more willing to acknowledge this and agree.
I wish more were able to see that moving on from the past and looking to a more equitable future is a much greater way of getting change, rather than fighting old battles.
Ivory towers and all that. That Silicon Valley comedy show was really a documentary wasn't it e.g. when the workers demanded they had to have their dogs be allowed into the office.
Ought that to have decided the Presidential election ? Given that also proved to be wildly exaggerated by he media just days before the election.
In that context, the scepticism about the (as it turned out to be nothing) story of the laptop was entirely justified.
That may work in shitkicker states. Are there enough Sons of Jacob elsewhere to propel him into power? The GOP attack on women appears to have backfired heavily, yet now their heir apparent if Trump departs is a religious lunatic.
But regardless of exact costing, how entitled do you sound having a meltdown over your free lunch being taken away when you earn in the top 1% and the economy is on hard times and the company you work for loses money most years.
But then, you think that anyone who doesn’t want to march on Moscow, violently demolish the Kremlin and install Gareth Southgate as Russian leader is a
“Putin apologist”
The hunter Biden laptop story is relevant now because the Feds are close to bringing charges against him, after he has been protected for so long
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-tax-gun-purchase-evidence-fbi-us-attorney/
So what did you learn from the podcast ?
-eg that it really it the hard drive Hunter Biden's laptop
-that there was an email implying Hunter had got access to his father for a Burisma executive
-that forensics had decided the emails are genuine
-that the FBI warned Facebook over an upcoming Russian misinformation dump, while they already had possession of Hunter's laptop
What exactly did you find "sensationalist"?
But I think your description of what Twitter did is a bit wonky. What they were presented with was a claim about a laptop, that the media weren't allowed to examine, which ultimately turned out to contain some genuine emails, and also signs that it had later been tampered with. There was a reasonable suspicion that the emails had been hacked as part of Russian efforts to affect the election (and we now know these efforts existed), so initially they blocked the New York Post story under their hacked materials policy, which isn't a crazy policy to have. (Incidentally the claims the New York Post made about what the laptop contained were false, however that's not Twitter's justification for blocking it.) They then reverse-ferretted and unbanned the story, resulting in a massive Streisland Effect, the net effect being way more exposure than if they'd left it alone.
They didn't ban discussion of the laptop, and the work by Robert Graham that verified that some of the emails were genuine (by checking the DKIM signatures) was done on Twitter.
If Trump were less thick and wanted to cast doubt on the 2020 election, he should have been focused on this kind of thing, not the actual counting of the votes.
Yes, quite (though as you're personalising it a bit, I'm not sure you'd describe my one-bed rented flat as a comfortable middle-class house). But it's not a sufficient answer to "let's do X" to say "But what about underpaid nurses?" Any government needs to make choices and set priorities, and I'd expect a decent government to prioritise underpaid nurses AND keeping up our end of the more global issue. Governments will differ on how to pay for it, but the basic desirability should not be in doubt.
No need to march on Moscow or demolish the Kremlin. Quite happy just to see Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and any other Ukrainian territory liberated, international boundaries respected and Moscow agree to pay reparations to Ukraine for what they have done. I wonder if you and kamski and anyone whose been equivocal about sending arms to Ukraine and are now suddenly muttering on about Hunter Biden's Laptop can say the same?
@TpyxaNews
Ukraine will return Crimea without a fight against the backdrop of internal struggle in Russia, - Defence Minister Reznikov
https://twitter.com/TpyxaNews/status/1592110501202481152
And twitter has probably managed to lose enough core staff that keeping things operating correctly is going to be nigh on impossible (I've already seen people commenting and demonstrating that some things aren't working correctly).
But they have found at twitter culture isn't arriving early or staying late in the way say early Googlers were living at the the office.
Also, there is of course now UberEats etc who will just deliver your McDonalds etc to the office.
I'll listen to the next episode later this week, and see if it remains as bad tabloid as the first.
I don't have any problem at all with the BBC reporting this - apart form anything else, I'd hope that would save me hours of wading through this deck to find out what all the fuss is about - but the first episode was piss poor journalism from someone who is usually a bit better than that.
In any case, is there anything there to implicate Joe Biden, as opposed to Hunter, or is this at the level of Middle East billionaires bailing out Trump's son-in-law? Embarrassing but no smoking gun?
I try to look for such mitigations for what comes out of peoples' mouths.
But of course it's your father whom no one knows as well as you.
If you honestly think I’m “banging on” about Hunter Biden because of something happening in the war you’re even crazier than I supposed. Which is impressive, as I already have you down as 110% Box Of Frogs
There is a clear pattern of the American establishment and social media manipulating news stories to benefit Biden and disbenefit Trump. They did it with this story and they did it with lab leak. There might be others. Denying it is futile
It is arguable that what they did is justified. Russia was already manipulating the news and Trump was and is a real menace to American society. It’s a close call
But they did it, yes
But what about the supposed email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi that said "'Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together."
Is that really nothing?
And for me, just the fact of Hunter getting an extremely well-paid job with a dodgy Ukrainian company is already a kind of corruption, and creates conflicts of interest.
It was so bad that Fox News passed on the story. Multiple people inside the NY Post thought they hadn't done enough to vet the data. Guiliani says he gave it to the Post because he was worried other journalists would fact check it before publishing.
As I said at the time if the data is real and revealed nefarious activities by Joe Biden then it doesn't matter how the data was obtained. But the story around the acquisition of the data is so busted that no data could be trusted without extensive fact checking.
EDIT: Contemporary post by me - https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3075345/#Comment_3075345
Also, given the layoffs happening across the industry, I think the free lunch programme would be way down the list of concerns. You only have to look at the state Meta is in with its stupid amount of money hosed at Metaverse play. Having a public big hissy fit over the new boss cutting your free lunch, when across the industry job losses are happening (and world economy isn't exactly going well) and you on big bucks where $20 is literally nothing to you, gives some indication of how entitled some of these people are.
So Much for Comedy on Twitter
Elon Musk can’t seem to figure out what his platform actually is.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/elon-musk-twitter-comedy-public-square/672088/
Was there actually a sepcific FBI request? Other commenters in this thread have said they didn't, just a general warning about Russian disinformation, which Big Tech may opr may not have used as an excuse to censor this story.
I tend to agree that it shouldn't be a story - I'm very much against judging people by what their relatives do - but certainly Big Tech thought it might stand in the way of their guy beating evil Trump and they acted accordingly.
What you need to take on board is this: the British Empire was just an empire. There have been lots of them. They are a fact of life and there is no point in condemning them as evil, but they invariably entail a lot of individual very, very evil acts because invading other countries always does. See Ukraine. The British contribution to the genre includes the putting down of the Indian mutiny, the system of local prostitution for troops in India, and the slave trade. If you think it makes you look well 'ard to think that to condemn those things as a "bleeding heart" response, good for you. It produces rather a different impression, actually. And the "good" it thought it was exporting to the empire was a repressive, homophobic, misogynistic Christianity probably more damaging than trade gin.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/pensions-retirement/news/triple-lock-unsustainable-dont-know-why-become-sacrosanct/
Mind you,
"Mr Stradling added that he did not personally need the money."
The party that encourages and uses this kind of stuff, whether trolling or not, just got (I assume) a plurality, and nearly 50% of the votes in a national election. Which I find kind of shocking.
And, like I said, most of the story was entirely new to me.
Hunter is a deeply sleazy character, no question. But again from his father's point of view, and that of the rest of us, so what ?
Hunter Biden was merely a close family member.
If he's prepared to say, without equivocation, that we should be arming Ukraine to defend themselves and to aid them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine including Crimea then I will humbly apologise and admit I made a mistake.
I don't have a link to the exact quotes.
If my memory is wrong, then I apologise, but you coming online today banging on about Hunter Biden's Laptop and demanding that Biden steps down seems absolutely par for the course for a Putin apologist trying to move on the conversation from Kherson, the GOPs failure etc.
People are either conflict embracers or conflict avoiders. My wife's family are conflict embracers. It's an invigorating way to live, but you do get to know people. Nobody hides their oddities. Mine tend to be conflict avoiders: we rub along very harmoniously, but often at the expense of actually knowing anything about what anybody thinks about anything.
My hope is that there are enough sane people to pull them back from the precipice they have been standing on seemingly set on descending into religious fundamentalism. Yet the attack on women has galvanised the population to stop them in the mid-terms. So maybe the ones who are mad like DeSantis won't win out.
W Bush did the God thing. And the hokey thing. Yet despite the shitkicker projection was genuinely intelligent and well balanced. Since he left office, the party has been taken over by people who appear to be genuinely unhinged.
("This thread has been Trumped"?)
I happen to pretty much agree with you on Ukraine but you manage to express it such that I don't.
noo thread
One thing the midterms have shown is is that if Trump runs again the Democrats under Biden are pretty likely to win 2024. They have built up a strategy to help beat him in the states that matter.
DeSantis is the GOPs better option, but in between now and the primaries he’s going to have to take some time to prepare his stall, vision and strategy. He can’t run an exclusively southern strategy - GOP wins in NV, AZ and GA wouldn’t get them to 270 on their own, assuming the other states don’t change hands. If he won the Nebraska district and Maine district I calculate he’d be on 269, which would probably make him President but isn’t an outcome anyone should be aiming for tactically.
So he needs to find a way through the rust belt and NH. Will anti-woke stuff be enough to deliver him any of those states? I don’t believe so. He’s going to need to come up with a credible economic offering as well. His economic policy in Florida seems to have won him plaudits but from what I can see it’s all cut spending/small state stuff which I’m not sure is going to chime that much.
In short, he’s a much better candidate than Trump would be but there’s plenty of gaps that need to be filled in his offering before the primaries.
Lutherans and Unitarians are more liberal than the Church of England even if most Protestant evangelicals are more hardline but that is the same for most Pentecostals and Baptists in the UK too.
Roman Catholic clergy the world over are socially very conservative, even if their congregations western Catholics aren't always the same