*I haven't taken the time to understand the situation.

Obligatory chapo trap house segment on Hunter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MEs5pqTiEQ

I'm interested to know more about the son of the president of the USA who is also a crackhead who also has allegedly had relationships in Ukraine.

Biden is tainted where Ukraine is concerned. His family is connected to Ukrainian commercial interests through corruption plain and simple. Anyone who denies this or denies that this is one of the reasons that Putin thought invasion was a good idea is fucking deluded.

I do. This is a big deal.

It is? It differs from typical US cronyism?

Yeah can you explain?
Not trying to make you justify your position - just interested in thoughts.

That the Hunter Biden laptop story is true means that the Trumpist nutters were actually right. Media outlets, Big Tech, and "respectable" commentators lined up to bury the story so it wouldn't hurt Joe Biden's election campaign. Twitter literally banned the NY Post for posting its investigation, citing a "fake news" policy.

The story revealed that the Bidens were balls deep in energy-industry corruption in Ukraine, which makes President Biden hopelessly compromised in dealing with the Putin invasion. Is he supporting Ukraine to keep his business interests afloat? Is he staying out so Putin's missiles will eliminate the evidence? Who knows? Whatever the truth actually is, no-one will believe it.

Can you please post a link to back this up? Wikipedia says the story is "unconfirmed".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%...spiracy_theory

When a talentless crack addict who fucks hookers on camera gets a seat on the board of an energy company, it ain’t because of his thought leadership.

I dunno; honestly it just seems like more of the same shit coming out of the USA.

Secondarily; it's no surprise that it originally got buried. The red party over there cries wolf so often, what would they think would happen when a wolf actually turns up.
Lol their info source is even called FOX news.

Not saying it's great that it got buried. America has serious information issues that are starting to infect the rest of the west.

As to it's relevance to the current situation in Ukraine; I'm unconvinced.

It absolutely undermines any USA based efforts, and becomes an instant conflict of interest. It legitimizes conspiracy theories, and it becomes too easy for opponents to point at the topic and claim that some facet of that is the reason why the US is doing X action, or not doing Y action.

If it happened anywhere else, everyone involved would be marched out before the ink dried.

My point is it's pretty much the status quo in the US.
Their entire interface between capitalism and politics is corrupt to the core.
Did you really think that didn't extend to any other west aligned country they do business in?

I'm pretty sure anyone who is able to get elected in their current system is going to be full of conflicts of interest.

So yeah I don't feel it's really news.
Newsflash: America is America.

It's not great - but it ain't some revelation - and it's certainly one hell of a lot better than the last guy by a country mile.

It certainly doesn't come anywhere close to justifying war - ascribing it as some kind of causal factor for Putin doing what he has done is patently wrong on so many levels.
Putin is an imperialist despot. Only he is to blame for his actions.
Blaming USA having business interests in Ukraine, however marred by it's foul corruption, is like blaming a girl for dressing nice rather than the rapist.

My 2c, IANA international relations specialist, worth what you paid for this.

2 main root causes: Putin sees himself as the guy who is going to re-establish the Russian Empire, and Putin has been so powerful for so long that he's now a real actual tyrant.

The first bit explains why he has invaded Ukraine and the second explains why he thinks he can.

One of the reasons why he's done it now is that the USA is not what it was. It's confused, tribal, and weak. Yes, that's partly because Putin has been making it that way by manipulating social media and running disinformation campaigns for decades, but anyone who has ever studied the history of Russia knows that's standard operating procedure. It's a tactic invented by Tsarist state security during the Empire that Putin's trying to rebuild.

Another reason that Putin sees weakness right now in relation to the thing that Putin is doing right now, a thing that Putin would be happy to continue doing without American interference, is the Biden family's strange entanglement in the energy industry in the country that he's invading.

The only reason that Hunter Biden, a talentless crack addict with no apparent qualifications or skills other than the ability to fuck hookers on camera, got a powerful seat on the board of a privately-owned Ukrainian energy company was because his father was the Vice President of the United States and the Obama administration's main spokesman on US-Ukrainian affairs. That's corruption.

When that talentless crack addict's father becomes the Commander-in-Chief of the forces that can, if they choose to, stop the invasion of the country that the Bidens have this strange corrupt entanglement in, that's weakness.

When it transpires that details of the ways that the talentless crack addict influenced his father were deliberately silenced in order to protect the father's presidential ambitions, and the half of the US political community that has gone insane gets proven right about something, that's weakness.

The laptop story is so fucking implausible and so perfect for Russia that Russia must have made it happen. There is just no way that was an accident. This is what Russia does and has always done.

Make that 4c :)

The only thing I will add is that whomever was elected POTUS in place of Biden, I think we would be able to have an analogous conversation regarding corruption and weakness, just swapping the specific details.

Yeah whether or not it turned out to be true it should have been buried if at the time it was unsubstantiated and so indistinguishable from the usual shit flinging.

Which is why I don't pay attention.

The laptop story isn't the significant one. The corruption that exists in the world, with all that it enables, that's what's significant. The laptop story is just a footnote.

While we tolerate it, people are going to keep on exploiting it to try and gain maximum power.

By the time it gets here, it's going to feel like we deserve the serious arse kicking climate change has for us.

That's what I feel also;
The disingenuity is rampant to the point it is basically expected; so getting hooked into any specific instance of it just feels like being used by those who are trying to amplify and leverage it for some kind of agenda.

Being so bombarded with untruth that you give up on caring is a Russian information strategy. That we all feel this way is a reflection of just how effective Putin has been at manipulating the media channels of the Western world.

It'd be nice if our corruption was all to do with Russia, wouldn't it? Then we could just beat them and go back to enjoying our corruption free lives.

But it's not that, is it? Russia is just exploiting the ways we've made ourselves vulnerable in the stampede to make bank.

Their success criteria is making you think "It's all so confusing I don't care what the truth is anymore."

I care about truth. I am not confused.
I have not given up caring about anything or been beaten into inaction.

The modern age requires information filtering. I pay attention to things I deem worth paying attention to, or that I have some chance of having an influence on.

What is not worth paying attention to is sensationalist finger pointing at corruption that everyone knows exists, likely for political gain or the gain of some other third party.

Putin, whilst he has taken advantage of information warfare brilliantly, cannot claim to be the causal factor in how fucked up American culture, politics, corruption, and the general information landscape has become.

I think you are right that it's an issue of choice paralysis and information overload.
I don't think paying MORE attention to all the possible "truths" out there is
the answer at all.
It's paying LESS attention - being careful with ones attention.

I guess a broad swath of people don't have the faculties or stamina to be that careful with their attention and hence your comment.

That's one response you can have. Another is "It's all so confusing, I need to be very careful what I consider to be the truth and ever cognisant of my limited ability to know what the truth is."

If I don't care, it's because I've got limited capacity for attention and I'm attending to a higher priority.

Agreed on both points. You're coming to the same conclusion I have, that it's not about trying to absorb every piece of information, it's about trusting fewer, more subjectively reliable sources.
The issue is that all of the people that we disagree with have also come to the same conclusion.
Hence the information/political tribalism that has become one of the key issues of the 21st century so far. I'm right, my sources are right. You're wrong and your sources are wrong, and there's very little you could say or do that would change my mind.

I know it's wrong. But listening to a blatant hypocrite even when they are right is still very hard thing to do.

Russia had kompromat from hacked icloud from ages ago, the laptop was just a vessel for delivery of said stuff.

Why the fuck else would you give the laptop to Rudy... I mean, the writers are not even trying here.

8 Joe Biden Scandals from Hunter's laptop

Here's a quick summary if you're short of attention but still realize the world is unstable right now as a result of this corruption.

There are many out there adept at exploiting our lack of time, the response to the lack of robust information is not to then consider less robust sources.

There are plenty in line for the trough. Just because you're hearing about corruption, it doesn't mean those you're hearing it from want it to end.

"2000 Mules" by Dinesh D'souza is pretty good. I downloaded it from The Pirate Bay - shitty quality (360p) video, but the content remains the same.

TLDW: A group bought cellphone tracking data, analyzed it with geofencing, and identified anomalies of unique identifiers visiting multiple ballot boxes - far more than a normal person would, and also reported to non-profits that appear to be the distribution centers for ballots.

Far-right conspiracy theorist. No thanks.

D'souza is a grifter. He's a convicted felon who peddles "Obama wasn't born in the USA", "the Clintons had their opponents murdered" conspiracies for money from the gullible MAGA audience.

A bit like this?

Looks like he found his audience though. Unsurprisingly, they're all Trump's crowd in his club. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...ovies-00032530

Have you watched it yet?

Nope, not interested in conspiracy theorists and their crap.

-

I wouldn't call Fox News impartial, really - or actually based on fact, these days.
Aside: Trump's own Attorney General even said 2000 Mules was a load of debunked crap:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2...credits-2000-/
Dinesh has been complaining that right wing news outlets (like Fox) don't want to talk to him about it. Maybe because it is a load of debunked crap?