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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/us/politics/ashley-biden-...
Heavy handed but no pity in this case, these people are vile and discredit the honor of real journalists.
It's one thing to be passionate about one's beliefs and act on them, but lying and actively distorting the truth to for the sole intention of character assassination to win over the voters is slimy.
And at least within my social circle, there's zero loyalty to party over country. As this is about the Biden family, it's generally agreed that if crimes occurred they should be investigated and tried.
The key problem is that the detractors don't care about any crimes, they only seem to care that their political enemies are destroyed. tl,dr: the fomented outrage is purely political theater.
Project Veritas is not a journalist endeavor -- it's a political black-ops organization that operates in bad faith.
The sad thing is that it very well may be that you believe it is true. That doesn't make it true however.
If the idea of democracy is to have a "marketplace of ideas" let's definitely do that. Let's examine policy and the data supporting or refuting it. But counterfeit data should not be part of it.
> And democracy where the information is controlled by the politicians is not a democracy at all - it's just a simulacrum.
I'm not sure where this comes into play. We are awash in information and now suffering from disinformation campaigns (straight out of KGB, comrade). The government doesn't seem to be stopping you from consuming Fox, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, etc.
Only if you call editing the videos - which literally every other news outlet does, nobody publishes full unedited raw footage in the reports, it's just not how it is done - "altering material". Otherwise, Veritas publishes exactly what their subjects said or wrote or otherwise did.
> But counterfeit data should not be part of it.
Except Veritas didn't counterfeit anything. On the contrary, as we now know, the diary that FBI attacked them over was entirely genuine - and they still didn't use it, btw. On the other hand, only in the recent years we have witnessed a number of cases where false (and as we now know, with the advance knowledge of their falsity) statements were published about the veracity of certain data, and various accusations of foreign interference and such were thrown around, including by very prominent mass media, and so far I did not hear anybody even apologizing for that, let alone excluded from the "marketplace of ideas", despite those acts of counterfeiting. I wonder why is that. Maybe because the exclusion power is wielded by their friends, and their counterfeits help those friends stay in power?
> We are awash in information and now suffering from disinformation campaigns (straight out of KGB, comrade)
And the same people who are managing these disinformation campaigns are claiming people who trying to get information past them are illegitimate, not real journalists and thus deserve suppression at the hands of law enforcement (because the First Amendment has the little known "y'all folks realize this all is only for real journalists, right?" clause). They are the ones who purport to "fight disinformation" and claim extraordinary powers of speech control to do that. A regime where such powers exist are not democracy - at least not any that is worth of the name.
> The government doesn't seem to be stopping you from consuming Fox, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, etc.
They are trying (so far by pressuring social networks and other distribution channels to suppress them) but so far they are failing. The First Amendment is pretty strong still, thanks Founding Fathers. But nothing is impossible in politics, and with enough effort it can be - and is being - eroded and ultimately destroyed. In countries where there's no such strong protections, it is plausible that we will witness this within a decade or sooner.
Really? Do they care about the crime itself or just who committed it? Do they think that crimes don't matter when their side does it?
I'm fine with prosecuting Biden(s) for any legitimate crimes. I'm also more than fine with doing the same for his predecessor and every one else in office. Can you say the same?
Do you only care if it's Joe Biden as the accused or do you care about the corruption implied by it?
> Do you only care if it's Joe Biden as the accused or do you care about the corruption implied by it?
I care about both, naturally. So should everybody. I care that a person committed crimes of corruption, and I care that the same person has been occupying the post of VP of the United States, and now occupies the post of the President of the United States (of course, for persons that did not occupy such posts, I still care for the former, the latter just makes it so much worse). Of course, the detail that his name begins with "Bi" and ends with "den" is purely coincidental, neither me nor anybody else (including maybe his personal enemies?) cares about this. To the measure that anybody cares, his personality is completely irrelevant, his position and his crimes are both relevant. And the combination of the position and the crimes enhances this relevancy - it's one thing when a night guard on a used tire recycling plant is corrupt, another thing when it's the President.
My point is that I'm for the laws to be applied evenly. It's clear that Hunter was trading on the appearance of access to his father (which is slimy but not necessarily illegal if the elder Biden did not engage at that level.
All those words and no acknowledgement of who else might be worthy of investigation, because that's the whole point of this affair -- whataboutism and misdirection.
Continuing this dialog with you is no different than trying to reason with an anti-vaxxer or a religious zealot, so we'll leave it at this and you can walk away "winning" the discussion because I forfeit this game. Congratulations!
It’s socially conservative. Why the hyperbolic language? It’s only “extreme” when juxtaposed with the political expressions of “polite society”, not America at large, which skews conservative on social issues.
> propaganda
Everything is propaganda, as everything is political. We just call things propaganda when it’s the kind we disagree with.
> directly participated in multiple criminal conspiracies
I’m sure the police in this town would say the same of the newspaper in question.
> never produced anything even vaguely resembling journalism
Well that’s not true on its face. I find a lot of it cringy, but even when I find that they don’t merit the conclusions that PV comes to (which is quite often), they are quite transparent.
AfD is a far, far right political party, not journalists. They've been raided for various things apparently, one being the overthrow of the government.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-far-right-afd-and-the-reichsb...