No, it was never a big deal. It was always just rumor and innuendo. That Hunter might have had a laptop with emails in it is not a big deal and never was.
You fell for right wing disinformation bullshit. And you’re still falling for it! So forgive us for mocking you and calling you foolish for falling for this bullshit, over and over and over, even when we point out your mistakes again and again.
Sure, you can whine and moan about how you’re always insulted and attacked. Or you could recognize good advice, and consider following it - and here it is: The Hunter Biden laptop story was always tabloid nonsense. It was tainted from the beginning. No facts (beyond the existence of a laptop), no correlation, nothing but rumor and innuendo.
And while I wouldn’t put the following in the category of “not coming clean”, because AFAIK nobody’s ever specifically asked him to revisit it in light of more recent developments, I don’t think Sam’s voluntarily addressed the massive, colossal wrongness of his sneering minimization and “bothsidesing” the deliberate malevolence of the January 6 insurrection attempt. According to Sam, just a big fuss about nothing to create “theater” so that Democrats can maintain deployed troops (which Sam persistently miscalled a “standing army”) and other Deep State nefariousness in DC, a whole three or four months after January 6:
A free society cannot survive if malevolent manipulators and gullible dumbasses keep deliberately drowning out information with misinformation and lies, either. It seems reasonable to have at least one SDMB forum where posters don’t have to maintain a polite demeanor towards misinformation and lies masquerading as “free expression and debate”.
…which, in non-pit threads, can be sometimes be a gigantic ask to contend with, and possiblly leading to warnings for setting the record straight “retaliations”. Sealioning and shit can be good n’curbstomped on, only here.
Hence why I characterized the refusal to debate here as cowardice. He wants to hide behind those tactics.
I want to clarify one thing… I don’t see Sam as malevolent. I think he’s gullible and when confronted with how he was wrong he doubles down or ignores it. He’s the “useful idiot” often spoken about.
Now he latches onto any right wing conspiracy theory that fits his world view and holds onto it like a dog with a bone.
For example, with the Michael Sussmann indictment he fell hook line and sinker for the completely unsupported conspiracy theory that the Alfa Bank story originated with the Clinton campaign. Even at the time this was obvious bullshit and posters pointed that out to Sam. He would not be swayed by facts and assured us that the truth would come out at trial and we would see.
And we did see. We saw that there was legitimately anomalous data that did not originate with the Clinton campaign and Sussmann was right to bring this to the FBI.
And yet after the trial Sam is still making posts like this…
I agree. Sam seems like a good guy, but completely fooled into thinking he’s a fact based critical thinker by right-wing sources. I would love for him to realize that he’s being lied to and spread his intellectual wings. Sadly, I don’t think it will happen.
Yeah, that’s the particularly aggravating part. What Sam claims is a good-faith instance of “hoping to start debate” is often just a pigheaded assertion of his own preferred interpretation of reality, regardless of how drastically it may exaggerate or pre-judge or misrepresent the actual facts.
To be fair—since you voluntarily espoused an unPitly concern for fairness here and I might as well try to keep up—that first linked thread does contain an instance of Sam voluntarily admitting he was wrong about a specific misreading of energy-use statistics that I pointed out to him. But that doesn’t affect my basic point about his tendency toward forensic well-poisoning in general.
Sam could easily get a lot more of the multi-viewpointed “rational debate” and “free expression” that he claims to want around here if he would just be a bit less arrogant and dismissive in his sounding-off about highly complex issues whose current implications are by no means definitively resolved. If he could ease up a bit on his baseline assumption that Anything I Consider Plausibly True Or Probable May Be Asserted As Though It’s A Self-Evident Fact.
But he doesn’t, and so his overconfident assertions often subsequently blow up on him, and he conveniently ignores it. And then when other posters make fun of his gratuitously showing his ass like that, he gets all huffy about their “personal attacks”.
This is typical “conservative snowflake” thinking: “I don’t have to be accurate or fair in my aggressive denunciations of policies or positions that you support, but you have to be courteous and welcoming towards my participation while you do the work of rationally rebutting my inaccuracy and unfairness. Because FREEEEE SPEEEEEECH.”
From my perspective, the pit is good for one thing - to remind me how much hatred some peoole carry towards those who are not ideologically in step with them.
Maybe the laptop is the greatest work of disinformation in history, and I fell for it. Apparently so has the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and CNN who are now reporting on it as real.
And by the way, I said right from the beginning that even if the laptop is real and has real, damaging info on it, it could still be ‘salted’ with disinformation that’s even more damaging. All I ever said was that the laptop seems real, and a significant amount of information on it had been validated. And that’s true.
And in any event, personally attacking and insulting someone over an honest difference of opinion over a disputed fact is an obnoxious thing to do, and those who engage in it should be ashamed of themselves. It says a lot about your character.
Congrats, it’s quite the coup to be proven right about the least important aspect of the Hunter Biden Laptop scandal, the fact that he owned a laptop. Who would have expected that twist? It’s shocking that the MSM ignored the man’s ownership of a computer for so long, and why hasn’t he been arrested?
What, did you miss the part where I said a lot of damaging info found on it has been validated? That part wasn’t important enough to snark at?
When I say the laptop was real, you know what I meant. The laptop in the story, left by Hunter Biden at a repair shop and never picked up, was not fake. It wasn’t Russian disinformation. It wasn’t a lie. It really was his, and at least the huge store of data on it that has been validated was actually Hunter’s.
BTW, the NYT forensic evaluation of it turned up no hint of Russian disinformation… Some documents on it have yet to be validated, but tens of thousands were.
I used up my free views on the NYT so I can’t quote that part now. But the Daily Mail also hired a forensics team, and this is what they found:
Boy, they sure spent a lot of effort on an imaginary laptop.
By the way, this was what I said in the very first thread on this in October 2020:
That seems pretty fair. Since I posted that, a huge amount of the data on the drive HAS been validated. For example, checking emails by going to the recipients and validating that they had copies of the same email, or checking for copies of legal documents found on the drive.
Yes, I do. It’s a newspaper considered to be ‘right wing’, I suppose. But they name the firm and the credentials of the people who did the audit.
But if that’s not good enough for you, I assume there is something similar here:
It’s paywalled for me, so perhaps you could summarize what they found. Maybe it completely debunks it all - I haven’t read it. This is your chance to prove to me that the laptop was fake, and the story Russian Disinformation. After all, that’s what the people calling me ‘gullible’ have been claiming for two years.
Hey if you’re not too busy could I trouble you to address this nonsense.
This isn’t true and it was obvious it wasn’t true when right wing media misinterpreted a Durham filing, yet you are still posting this even after it was immediately debunked before the trial even started, and months later after the conclusion of the trial that laid the facts bare.