Wouldn't you agree that they're worth talking about _right now_?
The post i commented on described the topic as "injustice" and argued that making the complaint is akin to asking to ignore injustice, and therefor morally wrong. I find that an eristic argument and engage it with logic, because i strongly dislike such arguments.
Please note that i have no strong opinion whether the complaint is objectively true, complete nonsense, or only the subjective understanding of the person making the complaint. I do not have such an opinion, because i have not read any one of the winning books and will not make any argument about their content or major themes based on one sentence summaries.
People constantly worried they might be exposed to “identity” are even more annoying than those who won’t stop talking about the subject. I have seen several children’s novels where the characters tangentially discussed their ancestors’ origins or took part in cultural traditions, or the book incidentally featured a disabled character or a gay character or a homeless character, and then random Amazon reviewers with a chip on their shoulder will complain about how this is all too “woke” for them.
Also, i don't particularly care about "People", you may say you have seen them, but they could all be made of straw as far as i know. If you think you can convince me by denouncing the top poster, you must have missed my entire point about eristic. I do however agree that people on all sides of every discussion can be stupefyingly annoying.
And i agree that the absolute claim seems unlikely. When looking for a counter example I would pick up the history winner about Cuba, but again i would prefer to read it first before talking about it. In a debate we could ask the one making the argument to provide detailed reviews of all the books, however we would still need to read them to verify the answer. And that doesn't work well in internet debates where it is normal for people to shout bold claims and leave.
The supposed “scandal” is that the candidate’s son tried to set up a meeting between his boss and his father, which meeting either never happened or was no more than a few minutes long, and never demonstrated any whiff of illegality or even unethical behavior by the candidate. That is hinted at by some (apparently real) emails which were obtained by an unknown method [but note the company had been hacked by Russian military intelligence in the recent past] and then placed on a hard drive by unknown actors for unknown reasons, along with a highly suspicious (and now impossible to validate, because the hard drive was handled so sloppily) story about a laptop abandoned to a legally blind repair shop owner. This hard drive eventually found its way to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.
“Unqualified relative of a powerful/famous person with mediocre talent/skills talks up his importance and connections to get a fancy job” is an everyday occurrence in the USA (and around the world). As an obvious example, look at George W. Bush’s entire pre-presidential career (or thousands of family/friends of Governors, Senators, CEOs, ...). It’s a bummer that we can’t all have a famous dad to put on our resumés, but unless some actual corrupt dealing happens, there’s nothing unusual or scandalous about this. But despite there being no serious story here, it has been repeated ad nauseam by every hack propaganda rag for the past year and a half to the point that millions of faithful conspiracy theorists are convinced of its significance.
Meanwhile the (now former) president’s son in law was having his bankrupt family business bailed out by oil sheikhs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and more recently has been put in charge of a $2 billion investment fund) as direct payback for altering US government policy to help those patrons, and nobody involved in this laptop story batted an eye. (Not to mention, the former president himself spent his whole term in office shaking down everyone he could for cash and political favors, including the US federal government and various foreign leaders.) What a joke.
> Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post. ¶ The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said.[...] ¶ Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years.
How those emails (and other materials) were originally obtained and how they made their way onto the hard drive in question is impossible to determine.
Because there isn’t really much story or scandal in the emails themselves (similar to the Blumenthal and Podesta hacked email leaks from 2016), the whole “conspiracy coverup” angle has been played up endlessly by breathless propagandists.
But even if you take a leap and assume that the laptop story is true precisely as claimed, the better explanation for the media reaction is: serious media outlets who were repeatedly burned by credulously reprinting Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon’s (later proven false) claims wised up and decided to be a bit more careful this time.
Come on man, we all know the reason the story [1] was suppressed [2] is that the establishment, rightly or not, was afraid of another four years of Trump. Then, they made up all kinds of post-facto reasons for it (policy against hacked material, etc.).
[1]: Which, as you correctly mentioned earlier, was intended to swing votes.
[2]: Not only from the mainstream media, but also from social media, to the extent you couldn't send it in DMs to others.