Technobarbarian <technobarbarian-ztopzpam@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/19/2022 7:01 AM, "Jerry Osage"@osage.com wrote:
>>
>> More than 120,000 emails from the notorious Hunter Biden laptop have
>> been published on a searchable online database anyone can access.
>>
>> The site, called https://bidenlaptopemails.com/, allows users the option
>> to download all 128,00 plus emails from Hunter’s hard drive onto their
>> own computer.
>>
>> I'm sure that in a few days all the best ones will be published online.
>>
>> What I'm waiting for is next January. I wonder if Brandon's impeachment
>> trial will be televised live and if any of the emails will come into
>> play? Or, will he retire for medical reasons before then?
>
> Yeah, that will probably happen right after the orange idiot
> finally comes up with some faint wiff of proof that the election was
> stolen and they finally lock Hillary up, after how many years and and
> how many investigations? Enjoy the show, because that's about all you're
> going to get. More performances for the boob tube.
>
> "Why Hunter Biden’s Laptop Will Never Go Away
> Could anything that happens with this laptop bring us closure?
>
> By Kaitlyn Tiffany
> A stylized image of a laptop with Hunter Biden’s face on the front. A
> cigarette is in his mouth.
> The Atlantic
> APRIL 28, 2022
>
> A year and a half ago, less than three weeks before the presidential
> election, the New York Post published a story about the recovery of a
> laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, and a trove of personal
> emails and photographs allegedly found on it. Many were embarrassing; a
> few were interesting enough to become memes. (The most indelible—the
> authenticity of which I have not personally verified—is of Hunter
> smoking a cigarette in a bathtub.) The meat of the article was the claim
> that the younger Biden had traded inappropriately on his family name, up
> to the point of arranging meetings between his Ukrainian business
> associates and his father, while the latter was vice president.
>
> President Donald Trump’s camp made the story out to be more than it
> was—Hunter Biden was already well known for invoking his family’s
> political fame to help him make money, and he denied the specific
> allegations of wrongdoing (though a broader investigation into his
> affairs has been ongoing for years, led by federal prosecutors in
> Delaware, working with the FBI and the IRS). The story’s claims about
> Joe Biden’s participation were weak (at best). It quickly came out that
> some of the Post’s own staff did not think that the paper had done
> enough to confirm the authenticity of the laptop. But the story was a
> lit match, and the national mood at the time was kerosene.
>
> Trump was actively undermining democracy and pushing his supporters
> toward hysteria about online censorship. His party was gripped by QAnon,
> which holds at the center of its belief system the idea that the
> Democratic elite are sleazy and corrupt. The laptop was a gift to the
> paranoid and the disingenuous. Meanwhile, the other half of the country
> was gripped by the memory of 2016. What if voters were faced with an
> eleventh-hour red herring, another disaster like the James Comey letter?
> What if reporters fell for another trick from zany upstart “citizen
> journalists” with enormous follower counts—or, worse, Russia? And
> journalists who had spent four years telling themselves that they were
> the nation’s last defense against tyranny were, to put it as politely as
> I can, starting to appear a bit hysterical. By the way, there was still
> a pandemic. Enter flames.
>
> To many members of the media and tech industries, the timing of the
> story felt suspicious, as did the fact that it came from Rudy Giuliani,
> a MAGA operative and one of the oddest people alive. Reporters recoiled
> from the story; columnists blasted the Post for publishing personally
> embarrassing information that was of tenuous public interest.
> Social-media companies also reacted instantly. Facebook limited the
> spread of the story while third-party fact-checkers reviewed it (but
> removed the limitation after a week). Twitter took the more dramatic
> action of blocking new shares of the link altogether, arguing that the
> story, which contained screenshots with unobscured email addresses and
> phone numbers, constituted a violation of its policy on doxxing (it
> reversed course after two days).
>
> Some of the story turned out to be true, but not right away. The New
> York Times and The Washington Post were only recently able to verify
> many of the emails. And in the intervening months, many of the details
> about why journalists and tech companies acted the way they did have
> been forgotten, leaving behind only the impression, mostly on the right,
> that they “colluded” to keep Americans away from an authentic news story
> with political implications. The truth was more boring and possibly grimmer.
>
> If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: This single water-damaged laptop
> represented an end point. Americans no longer had a method for coming to
> agreement about what was—in the most basic sense—going on. Eighteen
> months later, there’s nothing anyone could ever say about this laptop
> that would bring Americans into alignment about its significance and
> meaning, or about the culpability and agendas of those who have
> previously expressed opinions on it. In fact, if anything, things have
> gotten worse.
>
> Earlier this month, The Atlantic co-hosted a conference with the
> University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, called “Disinformation
> and the Erosion of Democracy,” at which Hunter Biden’s laptop was a star
> of the show.
>
> It came up in the very first Q&A session of the conference. A University
> of Chicago freshman and a senior editor of the campus’s right-wing
> publication (tagline: “Outthink the mob”) asked my colleague Anne
> Applebaum whether “the media acted inappropriately when they instantly
> dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.” The student
> was unsatisfied with Applebaum’s answer—that she didn’t think the laptop
> qualified as a major news story, disinformation or no—and later appeared
> on Fox News to say so. His tweet about the exchange, which incorrectly
> stated that Appelebaum had failed to answer the question, went viral.
> This kicked off a vitriolic and widespread campaign against Applebaum
> from the right, pushed by influencers including Jack Posobiec, Mike
> Cernovich, and multiple Fox News hosts; she was subjected to weeks of
> personal threats.
>
> The laptop came up again the next day, first thing in the morning. A
> panel discussion titled “Politics as Usual or an Insidious Attack on Our
> Democracy?” took its premise from a November 2021 column by Ben Smith,
> then of The New York Times, in which he used the Biden laptop story to
> demonstrate how confusing the conversation about misinformation and
> disinformation had become. In dealing with the laptop, reporters were
> understandably wary of repeating the mistakes made regarding the
> WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation before the 2016 election, which led to
> over-coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which was ultimately
> inconsequential. That’s why many of them dismissed the story, or labeled
> it a new front in the information war. But many presidential election
> cycles have unearthed confusing, scandalous revelations requiring
> investigative journalism to verify or debunk them, Smith argued.
> Labeling this a problem of the social-media age, and focusing on mis- or
> disinformation as phenomena that can be corrected, hidden, or blocked at
> the platform level, is “a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as
> much about politics as technology,” he wrote. He reiterated much of this
> during the panel, saying that the laptop story had been mishandled by
> reporters and, “most disturbingly,” by social-media companies.
>
> I heard this opinion repeatedly in casual conversations and from the
> speakers onstage. Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Dispatch,
> argued during the panel that the “disinformation” label can backfire by
> feeding into the idea that the “powers that be” are forbidding people
> from looking at information that they consider illegitimate. He
> illustrated his point with Biden’s laptop too. Twitter and Facebook
> treated it like disinformation before the truth could be determined.
> “Whether you think that was smart in the heat of the moment or not, [it]
> has backfired enormously,” he said. “Because now it seems like it was
> all conspiratorial.”
>
> I was a little surprised by how often the laptop came up, but I
> shouldn’t have been. Its aura has grown ever more powerful as the story
> around it has cohered. After a short period during which Fox News also
> considered the laptop story suspect, the network has been covering it
> even more intensely than it did the leaked Democratic National Committee
> emails in 2016. In December 2020, when I was interviewing users of the
> alternative social-media platform Parler, almost everybody I spoke with
> brought it up. A cool, anonymous Substack writer beloved by New York
> City’s art set has also made frequent disapproving reference to
> Twitter’s and Facebook’s actions around the laptop story. Angry online
> chatter about it never truly went away, but now it’s back with a
> vengeance. All of my friends know that something went wrong with the
> laptop. Many of them do not care, but they still know. This week, hours
> after the news broke that Elon Musk would be acquiring Twitter, he
> replied to a tweet in which Twitter’s chief legal officer and general
> counsel Vijaya Gadde was referred to as the company’s top “censorship
> advocate,” writing, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news
> organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly
> inappropriate.”
>
> That cursed computer, otherwise known as “the laptop from hell,” as
> Donald Trump has called it, is an icon of our information ecosystem’s
> dysfunction. Some journalists relied prematurely and too much on popular
> frameworks when covering it. The story really was suppressed by tech
> giants. But it also really was complicated, and required time and
> resources to investigate. Finding the truth takes time and effort and a
> willingness to be surprised. It also requires some grace on the part of
> the public—journalists need to be able to publish facts bit by bit, as
> they learn them, doing their work in front of an audience that is
> receptive to the idea that knowledge shifts and that coherent drama that
> blazes forth all at once is rare. This is, the laptop makes clear, no
> longer possible. By the time reporters put in the work to verify parts
> of the story, it was too late—the corrupt “media” was a monolith with an
> agenda.
>
> Facebook and Twitter really did make sloppy decisions. They and other
> tech platforms had spent the past several years struggling with how to
> fact-check a pandemic and when to interfere with election interference;
> the laptop undermined that work by illustrating just how bizarre—and
> dangerous—it would be to centralize the responsibility for discerning
> truth. Twitter has apologized for its handling of the story and made
> changes to its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. Facebook
> has elaborated on its decision-making process, which was informed by the
> FBI’s warning to watch for hack-and-leak operations carried out by
> foreign actors. And if federal prosecutors indict Hunter Biden for
> possible financial crimes, it will not be solely on the basis of the
> man’s laptop, so the case could be made that the thing doesn’t matter
> much anymore. Yet it isn’t going anywhere. Why would it? It’s perfect!
>
> “This is arguably the most well-known story the New York Post has ever
> published and it endures as a story because it was initially suppressed
> by social media companies and jeered by politicians and pundits alike,”
> Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media,
> Politics, and Public Policy and a speaker at the conference, told me in
> an email. The laptop is now shorthand, and it makes an easy point. For
> example, after another panel at the conference, a University of Chicago
> student asked CNN’s Brian Stelter a question to which there was
> undoubtedly no satisfying answer: Invoking the Biden laptop, he asked,
> “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than
> apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally
> declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer
> operative?” Stelter’s response was polite, if a bit meandering, and he
> offered to speak with the student one-on-one after the event, which he
> apparently did.
>
> Even though this sequence of events was a bit dry, it was useful all the
> same. A video of the exchange was viewed millions of times on Twitter
> that Thursday, under the caption “Brian Stelter just got destroyed by a
> college freshman!” It was featured two days later on Tucker Carlson’s
> Fox News show, and Carlson was giddy while describing it. “There are
> still a couple of kids at the University of Chicago who are awake enough
> to say, ‘Wait a second, what are you talking about? Disinformation?’”
> After playing the video, he cracked himself up.
>
> Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic."
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/tech-companies-suppressed-biden-laptop/629680/
>
> Because Americans in general have absolutely no real idea of their
> own history, we are, of course, doomed to repeat it. Only now we're
> repeating our history at warp speed.
>
> TB
>

As hard as it may be to believe, your posts are getting more ridiculous by
the day.

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