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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

taibbi.substack.com

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Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#431

Post by skinkestek »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #404
skinkestek wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? Absolutely. Many do. Look at America and their second amendment: there's no way that would fly today if it wasn't in the constitution. Luckily it is and power hungry politicians have to accept it. Same with the first amendment. Some of these are even are powerful today than before and I hope the fourth amendment will soon see a renaissance. > What is…

>Look at America and their second amendment In America the right to an abortion is more respected under our legal system than the right to a gun despite what is written in the Constitution. The law is downstream of culture, and that document only says what 5 Justices say it says.

I don't disagree with the first part. I think you are right but don't talk more about it: it brings up the ugliest discussions at this place.

For the second part they seem to be lucky to get a good judge now that will not let her own ideas interfere much with her job and instead interpret the constitution as it was written.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#432

Post by PaulAJ »

mrfusion wrote: post #191

> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz

Thus it always was. Back in the day in America there were a few big newspapers (basically, USA Today plus a couple of local city or state papers) and three TV channels. They all broadly agreed on what was important and how to present it. That was "the news", and it shaped how people saw the world.

If you were so inclined you could find some alternative points of view in the right newsagents, but mainstream mass-media generally represented a single perspective, and that was the filter through which most people saw the world.

People back then complained that the "Republocrats" were a cosy duopoly. There was no culture war because a large majority of Americans were part of a single culture. (As long as you were white, of course. If you were anything else then nobody cared what you thought).

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#433

Post by unishark »

comex wrote: post #382
rayiner wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.” Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the…

> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct wa…

> But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years?

It's hard to follow but his complaint here seems to be kind of a wonkish insider lament about the media reaction he expects to follow the NYT story, not the story itself. And in particular that his own article years earlier in Rolling Stone already told the same basic story about Trump as con man but I guess won't get any credit.

As for the list of bombshells, there a link to another story which steps through many references to news stories in turn, in a narrative style, not an enumerated list.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#434

Post by rayiner »

unishark wrote: post #433
comex wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct wa…

> But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? It's hard to follow but his complaint here seems to be kind of a wonkish insider…

No, it's a specific dig at Maddow's dropping the "bombshell" with Trump's tax returns in 2017: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/03/17/rachel-maddow-tr....

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#435

Post by barumi »

lkrubner wrote: post #400

One has to be somewhat ignorant of the mission of the IMF or World Bank to think this is somehow new: " Poroshenko was telling Joe Biden that in order to get an American aid package, he’d gone beyond even what the I.M.F. asked for and raised energy prices for ordinary Ukrainians not by 75%, but by 100%, as well as taking steps to curtail subsidized medicine prices. " Where this is good or bad, this has been common si…

> Some writers refer to this process as "neoliberalism" as the effort seemed motivated by a desire to bring back the old era of laissez faire.

Some writers refer to this as helping a country use the IMF as a political crap shield to enact necessary policies that would be otherwise politically nightmares to pull but are absolutely necessary to implement in order to get the state's finances under control.

I lived in a country that was subjected to an IMF intervention after their government bankrupted the state, and the IMF's role on the recovery was done mainly by eliminating heavy subsidies and cash transfers from the state to a few public-in-name-but-private-in-operation companies which were chronically underfinanced and politically unable to change their pricing models to allow them to cover their operational cost. So yeah, the IMF name was used to justify price hikes, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that those reforms didn't had a positive impact on the state's expenditure.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#436

Post by roenxi »

comex wrote: post #382
rayiner wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.” Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the…

> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct wa…

If your test of being "left leaning" ignoring inconvenient facts then I might suggest that your viewpoint will not do well in a debate.

There is no inconsistency between a person being left leaning and that person thinking the Democrat party have adopted bad policy/insane rhetoric or that some elements of the radical left are insane and dangerous.

I'm a solid right wing voter; and I'd happily point out that some Republican policies are horrific (their approach to deficits is not acceptable), that their rhetoric is sometimes unhinged and that the fringe elements of the right wing are dangerous lunatics. Still think they are the better of 2 options.

And on White Fragility is exactly the sort of book that would have, in the 1940s, been used to justify Hitlerian race theory. In the 1940s it would be pointing out that Jews are systematically advantaged and as a group trying to downplay race but that one can't claim to be blind to it.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#437

Post by joshuamorton »

kodah wrote: post #207
hackyhacky wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your point is that the originators of the Biden story are shocked and confused that it's being suppressed in an opaque tech cooperating agreement, they shouldn't be: the story is being suppressed because it's at best illegally obtained data, and at worst deliberately falsified; and in either case, it's now being used by bad actors in an attempt to manipulate the results of the election. There's no mystery here: Tw…

As Matt stated, and really the whole point of the article, the Biden story doesn't matter. Forget about charging Biden with any wrong-doing for a moment and see what this relationship and mechanism between law enforcement, tech companies, and media entities is for its merits: The same mechanism that autocratic governments use for control and operated in the name of "the public good".

I don't follow, are you suggesting that Tech companies and the media, in acting directly in opposition to the sitting president, are somehow forming an autocracy? Does that word continue to have a meaning?

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#438

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #436
comex wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct wa…

If your test of being "left leaning" ignoring inconvenient facts then I might suggest that your viewpoint will not do well in a debate. There is no inconsistency between a person being left leaning and that person thinking the Democrat party have adopted bad policy/insane rhetoric or that some elements of the radical left are insane and dangerous. I'm a solid right wing voter; and I'd happily point out that some Repu…

[deleted]

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#439

Post by pseudo0 »

barumi wrote: post #418
pseudo0 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic. The media and big tech…

> According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. You're just saying that a misinformation campaign aiming at manipulating the US elections quite possibly according to the whims of a totalitarian regime that aims at undermining the US from the top might not have resorted to use totally false and made-up information.

I would assume that the FBI looked into the provenance of the laptop when they subpoenaed it over a year ago. Biden's campaign has also not repudiated the repair shop owner's story of how the laptop came into his possession, and the owner has a signed receipt. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop owner the day before the New York Post published the story. This set of facts indicates to me that the laptop was probably not obtained as part of a misinformation campaign.

Fundamentally, for me the null hypothesis is that this is typical election year opposition research. Those claiming that this is an elaborate Russian conspiracy have to present a pretty compelling case to convince me otherwise, given the repeated collapse of such narratives over the past few years.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#440

Post by chrisco255 »

barumi wrote: post #430
chrisco255 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head and he was dumb enough to drop a laptop off for repair and never come back to pick it up. There is a signed receipt by Hunter. The email dates match up with secret service flight records. Hunter peddles access to his father for millions of dollars. Joe got a piece of the action.

> It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head (...) Ok you already made it quite clear that you don't care about the issue being discussed, and your focus is only on smearing by proxy an election candidate that you feel strongly against. I have no dog in the race, as I am not an US citizen nor do I live in the US. However, it's very disheartening to see a country, which a couple of decades ago was seen as the shining…

Here's Politico's Quint Forgey quoting the Director of National Intelligence that the laptop (source of the emails) is in the FBI's possession and that it is authentically Hunter's: https://twitter.com/QuintForgey/status/1318166732419235841 Here's Fox saying the same thing, quoting a Federal Law Enforcement Official: https://twitter.com/SeanLangille?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcam...

Here's a signed MacBook Repair quote from 4/2019, signed by Hunter Biden: https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/hunter%20bi...

And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:

`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`

`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`

`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`

https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden...

It's not a smear campaign. These are facts. The Biden's are political whorebags and don't deserve power.

I'm a 10th generation American. The spirit of liberty runs deep in me. But speaking truth to power is part of the democratic process. Sorry you were mistaken in believing that democracy is all sunshine and rainbows. It's not. It's very messy and imperfect. And like gardening, you have to weed out the corruption by calling it out.

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