A serious question for Sam Stone on Factual Errors

The BBQ Pit
301

However, if someone repeats that “fact” over and over and over and refuses to back down, then they have created reality, and someone really did call it totally fake.

This is the kind of thinking that it’s hard for many of us to understand. We think that someone either said a thing or they did not say a thing. That there is an objective reality where one or the other actually happened.

However, there are those who think that if they can convince enough people that something happened, then it actually did happen.

These are the folks who are “lets debate about this, and the winner of the debate has determined The Truth.”

302

This is how Sam admits he’s wrong.

“Oh sure, I was wrong, but now let me expound and expound on why I wasn’t actually wrong and while I’m here, I’ll just innocently mention a laptop by some dude named Hunter and why that means all democrats are stupid.”

That’s all he ever says. With more typos and spittle.

God, I hope that’s spittle.

303

It’s never been verified that Hunter Biden owned this particular laptop, and only a tiny fraction of the emails (and an even tinier fraction of the 217 gigabytes of data) can be verified as authentic communications that were sent or received by Hunter Biden.

This appears to be shit you made up. None of that it close to verifiable. None of this even has a passing resembelance with known facts. This dogshit is the exact reason this thread exists.

In 2020 people said this laptop business looked like a Russian information operation because it looked like a Russian information operation.

And it still does in 2022.

304

Sorry to keep beating a dead horse here, but the thing is, you and Sam are talking past each other.

Your world understanding is that there is a set of actual, verifiable, factual truths. That there is a reality out there, and we can find out what it is if we examine the physical evidence and use logic to figure out what is actually going on.

For others, this is not how we find out what reality is. For them, reality is constructed out of argument and persuasion. If you can, via whatever means at your disposal, convince enough people that your story is true, then this is what reality actually is.

It’s about the story. It’s about convincing others. It’s not about a physical reality that exists outside of perception.

This is why it’s so hard to have conversations with these folks.

305

Once again, you’re moving the goalposts. Let’s move them back. It’s not whether you personally would debate them in public. Are you really incapable of understanding why someone would find defending certain propositions in a debate to be “soul-destroying”?

You seem to think that your failure of understanding is a virtue, because you, the Superior Intellect, treat everything as an academic exercise. I see it as a complete failure of empathy on your part, to not understand that these matters aren’t academic for everyone.

Well, yes, because you’re the one who said

If you’re just incapable of treating debate topics like serious business, that’s one thing, and you’d feel dandy defending the Klan’s reign of terror. But it seems like you’re really just incapable of treating things like Reaganomics as serious business.

I’m trying to figure out what, exactly, your issue is. Whether you back away from the edge cases will help.

But you gotta quit moving the goalposts.

306

Good point. The proper thing to tell @Sam_Stone is he owes it to himself to be a well-informed adult.

And yet I’m certain he isn’t and can’t be. In fact, I have grown to be convinced he has some type of mental deficit. I’m not a clinician so I can’t say what it is. He’s clearly able to spell and type in complete sentences even when he’s regurgitating Fox talking points and other lies. But let’s be honest, if there was a poster here who was equally obsessed with Canadian politics yet lived in the US or any other place in the world, wouldn’t we all think they had some cognitive issue?

Get into Saskatchewan politics or something local dude and try to be the Canadian RWR or whatever floats your boat.

307

I have said, quite often, on this site that one has the right to their opinion, but an ill-founded opinion does not have the right to not be treated with disdain (or words to that effect).

308

You have to admit, the field is nicely plowed.

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These things (I’ll stop calling them ideas because they don’t deserve the name) are defamatory statements against reality, and deserve to be treated as such.

Let’s just take your nonsense about that fucking laptop. There was never anything wrong about that laptop, there was never anything on the laptop that deserved to be a concern for anyone, anywhere, at any time. At worst it was records of some douchebag businessman doing douchebag business like these guys have been doing 10,000x a day for the last 50 years.

Whomever decided to bring this up as a scandal should have been met with a solid wall of “get this weak sauce out of my office” and sent away to yell about it on a street corner. He didn’t, and not because his story had merit and deserved discussion, but because it was seen as an opportunity to make money, or get political influence by literally pretending that there was an actual scandal.

Our country is made worse by this.

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Again, what I posted earlier in this thread:

"Actually, on your way to disparage everyone, you conveniently forgot that me and others approached this with the understanding that the laptop and emails could be real, but the reported scandals that were inside were found to be misunderstandings or gross innuendo from right wing sources of information, just like they did with the “climate gate” and Clinton emails.

Your demand here that we have to “show you that the laptop was not real” is then just a rotten to the core red herring. A just good for nothing talking point that only shows bad faith."

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And what was the answer? Because I read ALL of the Ukraine deal e-mails that referred to “the big guy”, not just the highlighted portions published by Trump friendly news outlets, and young Mr. Biden said in those e-mails that the 2014 Ukrainian elections were the most important event ever for “ the big guy”, an event that would determine “the big guy’s” professional and personal future.
Based on those e-mails, I found it likely that Hunter Biden was not referring to his almost estranged father but to his boss and the owner of Burisma.

Now, the “10% for the big guy” was in an e-mail related to a business deal in China, not Ukraine. But the Ukraine e-mail is significant because it exposes the lie that Hunter Biden consistently referred to his father as “ the big guy”.

And in the unlikely event that Hunter was actually referring to his father, so what? The deal never went through and there’s no evidence that Joe knew anything about the deal.

And Tony Bobulinski went to a meeting on the deal with Hunter and his uncle. Joe stopped by the meeting for a few minutes and made small talk, thanking him for his military service and making an offhand remark to him about “taking care of these guys”, or something. Even Bobulinski admits they did not discuss the deal in Joe’s presence. He claims, somewhat incredulously, that he was told Joe was involved in the deal but Joe had to pretend he wasn’t (even though Joe was a private citizen at the time and perfectly free to engage in business deals).

The whole “conspiracy to suppress the story” was proven to be untrue.

Michael Bender of the conservative Wall Street Journal was invited to a meeting about the laptop, and he was excited at prospect of getting a big pre-election scoop.
However, when he got to the meeting he was presented with only selected information that supported the story they wanted him to write, and he was denied not only access to the information needed to verify the laptop, but access to the complete text of all the e-mails. So he declined to write the story.

312

I was arguing with someone on another forum shortly after the 2020 election. His position was, “I don’t know that the election was stolen, but there’s too much smoke here for there not to be a fire.” By smoke, he was referring to Trump’s claims that he had mountains of evidence that would be revealed any day now. I think we had a doper here who felt the same way – that Trump wouldn’t claim to have evidence unless he actually had it.

I was, of course, unable to comprehend how an otherwise functioning adult couldn’t look at Trump’s track record and not see his claims as typical bullshit. And the obvious question – if Trump had this evidence, what was he waiting for? Was met with the bullshit response that, for some reason, it could only be released on court. And those damn liberal judges just wouldn’t give him the opportunity.

As time went on, he slowly realized that there was no evidence. And while he never came out and said he thought the election was stolen, he still thought at least some of the claims of fraud had merit, even if they couldn’t be proven. Regardless, his takeaway wasn’t, “Oh, you were right to be skeptical. I need to go reflect on why I allowed myself to be taken by a con man.” It was, rather, “My belief that Trump did have evidence of fraud was justified, and your quick dismissal of the same was motivated solely by your Orange Man Bad bias.” In other words, even though I was right, I was still wrong.

And here we have Sam. Sure, the Durham investigation was proven to be a sham. But Sam was still right in his own mind for taking it seriously, and we’re all wrong in his mind for being so darn dismissive of it. Sure, the Hunter laptop scandal hasn’t amounted to anything. But he’s still right for believing there was something there and we’re all still wrong for rejecting it outright.

I suppose, to put myself in Sam’s shoes, I could come to the same conclusion. For instance, I thought there were WMDs in Iraq. If I’d been arguing with anyone about it, I might say, “Sure, but you were basing your beliefs on conjecture, whereas I was basing my beliefs on the believable testimony of our entire intelligence community.” Ergo, my [lack] of skepticism was justified. Did I reflect after that whole fiasco? Yes. But have I dramatically changed how much I’m willing to trust information from our government? Not really.

This is being pretty generous to Sam, though. Like believing Trump’s election lies, some things are fairly obvious to anyone paying attention, even if the details eventually pan out a little different than they seem at first. The Hunter laptop story had so many red flags that, IMHO, everyone was right to dismiss it. But that blanket dismissal did, unfortunately, get things wrong. Should we reflect on that? Meh. Not much. Certainly not to the extent that Sam should be reflecting on getting something like the Durham investigation so wrong.

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“Defamatory statements against reality”? Even if I agreed with you, that is just … complete nonsense.

Including many of the Trump children/inlaws. Jared Kushner gets $2 Billion dollar “investment” from the Saudis after his Narcissist-In-Law downplays the murder of a journalist and becomes the Saudi’s idiot jester.

But. And this is a huge but. But there exists a world where there is evidence of a crime on that laptop. We know Hunter Biden is … troubled … and not necessarily the smartest tool in the chest (again, think Trump children), so it is possible, just possible, there is evidence of his tax evasion or using of his name to get influence on the laptop.

Which has next to nothing to do with Joe Biden, of course. But that won’t stop the right wing from using it to fundraise from the idiots and to smear Joe by association. That’s what they do.

But we should, at least, let law enforcement do its job before declaring the whole thing a fraud. It may be, it may be overblown (see Sam’s hilarious take on the Durham indictments), and it may be nothing. But let’s wait and see.

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Has anyone bothered to ask the obvious question about whether there was only one person Hunter ever referred to as “the big guy” or whether it was just a phrase he used for whatever important person he wanted to impress at the time?

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I thought it was a good line.

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From my perspective, neither was right or wrong. If an accusation is made, whether you initially believe it or not would naturally depend on your preexisting biases and beliefs. That’s natural and fine. Declaring that you absolutely believe or disbelieve something before much is known, that’s something I believe someone should be cautious about, but people will still do that. That’s natural.

Where I have an issue is when enough information is out that it becomes very clear that something is true or not, if you insist that your initial assumption was correct despite all evidence to the contrary, well then you are a fucking idiot. :slight_smile: (The generic “you” here, of course.)

But yes, skepticism from anyone when something is new, that should not be derided. Doing so is unfair and stupid.

Anyway, I think it’s just fair to declare that Sam is a pathological liar and dismiss him.

317

Unless you are personally handling the evidence your concept of truth is just as relative, just as reliant on trust as everyone else’s.

If Republicans could convince sources that you trust to lie (or repeat lies), be it the NYT, WaPo, your church, your parents, your friends, etc, then the lie likely becomes your truth.

~Max

318

The trouble with going down this rabbit hole, is that it leads the conspiratorial minded to dismiss anything and everything. It ends in solipsism.

Of course we cannot examine every bit of physical evidence personally. We do need to rely on others, and have some level of trust in institutions, in scientists, in investigative journalists. To dismiss these because we cannot personally view every bit of evidence ourselves would result in simply locking yourself away and denying that the outside world even exists at all.

To quote from The Role of Perception in the Mechanism of Denial:

The denying ego of the child, to quote Anna Freud for example,
“refuses to become aware of some disagreeable reality. It turns its
back on it,” so to speak, “and in imagination reverses the unwelcome facts.” In the extreme degree, in the psychotic ego of the adult, for example, or during dreams, “it severs itself from the outside world and entirely ceases to register external stimuli.” …Nunberg states that in denial “a psychological annihilation of reality takes place.”

I think this is effectively what we’re seeing with certain posters here.

319

My supervisor said to me about a month or so back that he thought my “casual relationship with reality” was in part what made me a good researcher. But he was referring to the fact that, for example, when I get an algorithm working I will sending him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ElWlUr_tw8 and when I get a result I’ll send him “Warning: Incoming Result.” (along with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTNjer6kJ-8&t=159s just to set the mood).

Not at all relevant to this discussion except your statement made me think of it.

320

It’s obviously an information operation. That people thought it was a Russian operation was due to the fact that they just didn’t know how much some American citizens truly hate their country and fellow citizens.

It’s optimistic to believe that Russia is a greater enemy to the future of our country than our fellow countrymen, but that optimism may well be misplaced.