Guest post: Evening up
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Both sides.
In hockey (and other sports too, of course), there’s a well-established and documented tendency for referees to try to “even up” the penalties called during a game. So if the home team has taken three penalties in a row, barring an absolute murder on the ice the next one is going to be called on the visitors.
I was explaining this to a neophyte fan one time, and he asked “but what if one team is just dirtier than the other?”
And yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s no reason to assume that two teams are equally likely to commit fouls, but the referees act as if that were the case. They don’t want to be seen as determining the outcome, even though of course you’re also influencing the outcome if you let one team get away with infractions that the other team can’t.
Republicans have spent decades “working the refs” by complaining about liberal media bias, precisely to create this kind of false equivalence. Trump just took advantage of that by moving the Overton Window: if you start telling more and more outrageous lies, the media’s desperate striving for “balance” will lead it to ignore your ordinary lies, while blowing up the opposition’s minor evasions into huge scandals.
You only have to compare how Clinton’s email server dominated media coverage in 2016, but the many many instances of terrible information security by the Trump administration got mentioned on the electronic equivalent of page 10. Neither voters nor the press really gave a damn about IT protocols, they just needed to nail Clinton with something to offset Trump’s fraudulent businesses, blatant lies, racism, and confessed sexual assaults.
I think that’s exactly what this Hunter Biden’s Laptop is all about, too, getting “back at the libs” for pointing out the corruption of the Trump kids.
I read the story in the Post when it first came out, and the only way that anybody could believe that flimsy claim is if they want to. Who takes in a laptop for repairs and then doesn’t make sure they have a written agreement of some sort on what they want done, leaving their name, and then never comes back in to pick it up?
And who would take a laptop with incriminating information on it to be repaired without scrubbing it of the incriminating information? My computer guru comes to my house to do repair, so I can watch what he is doing, but I remove sensitive things if I take my laptop in. (Depending on who is doing the work, that might even mean my history of visiting this site…I’m not ashamed of it, but I do not have the strength to deal with abuse.) I also remove any manuscripts of unpublished work.
You often see the same thing with childhood bullying. Don’t want to single out one child as the “bad” one, do we? So the child that gets all the bullying must also get at least half the blame…
@1 and 2,
I can’t remember which piece it was or where I read it, but a few months ago I read what seemed like a pretty fair and thorough story on the so-called “laptop from hell,” and my impressions were:
(1) the repair guy’s story is definitely fishy;
(2) but it probably really is Hunter’s laptop, though;
(3) but it’s been through so many hands at this point that the authenticity of any particularly email/file can’t be easily ascertained — it would be easy for a ratfucking operation to insert some fakes amid the real stuff;
(4) even if everything on the laptop is genuine, it doesn’t amount to much more than that Hunter was a very badly messed up guy who tried to trade on his father’s name. The closest it comes to implicating Joe is some references to “the Big Guy” or whatever, but there’s nothing to indicate that the then-vice president had ever actually granted any favors much less taken anything in consideration for them.
I think the House GOP’s planned investigation is going to be a clown show and a waste of time, but unlike some other GOP clown shows that victimized innocent people, I don’t have a ton of sympathy for Hunter. He seems like someone who has been shamelessly trading on his father’s position, even if it’s only the impression/hope that he’s connected than any actual wrongdoing. Up to and including the recent purchases of his artwork at strangely high prices. So if he gets a microscope shoved up his ass about his business dealings and possible influence peddling, it doesn’t seem unmerited.
Of course, his activities seem to pale in comparison to the actions of the Trump family that were expressly condoned and encouraged by the president, so again we’re back to a false equivalency.
I think that this problem might have been solved by the early Mediaeval theologians. They saw the world as being populated by angels, archangels, guardian angels and devils of various degrees: hobgoblins, imps and the ghosts of the dead inclined to haunt houses, demons who ‘possessed’ the mentally ill, and with a certain limted amount of traffic between Heaven, Earth, Purgatory, Limbo and Hell. Thus the Apostles’ Creed, still recited today, has Christ ‘descending into Hell’ between his crucifixion and his ascension, then ‘arising’ on the third day, appearing to various people up here on Earth, before ascending into Heaven in a most glorious manner. Any of us can do the same as long as we attend church and confession regularly and donate at least a tenth of our income to the clergy, who will obligingly remember us in their prayers.
“Some theologians, such as St. Augustine in the 4th–5th century, stated that angels, who have ethereal bodies, may be able to assume material bodies. This problem, however, has not been solved to the satisfaction of later theologians.” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/angel-religion/Types-of-angels-and-demons)
As a bush theologian, I reckon I might give it a go. You gotta be in it to win it.
And @#4:
So the traffic between Hell, Earth and Heaven would presumably include laptops, eyephones, etc, etc. The photography generated by those devices could be interesting.
And rape – the rape victim must be blamed at least in part, sometimes totally. After all, if she didn’t exist, he wouldn’t have raped her, right?
Screechy, that’s a great dissection; thanks. I did know that about the information being usable, because I used that sort of thing in one of my novels, and I visited with computer geeks about whether something could be done, and then with lawyers about the legal stuff.
I agree about the clown show. I think it will be right up there with the Bill Clinton clown show, where they didn’t actually look at things where he might have committed wrongdoing (probably because most of them weren’t clean, either). They waste taxpayer money and time on something that is less than what we see in other politicians to punish the Dems for daring to win an election. I’m sort of surprised they didn’t try something with Obama.
iknklast,
They tried with Obama. I think most notably they ginned up that IRS “scandal” where they tried to claim that the IRS was targeting conservative groups (in truth, the IRS was telling staff to be on the lookout for phony political groups of all ideologies), though they never had any luck tying that to Obama personally.
They spent Obama’s second term doing umpteen investigations of Benghazi, and it paid off for them with the Clinton email server stuff, which maybe swung the 2016 election for them. So you can bet they’re hoping for similar luck this time — even if they can’t prove their claims about Joe being the mastermind behind some bribery plot, they’ll hope to dig up something else to smear him with.
Oh, yeah, I forgot about Benghazi. How could I forget that? I guess the past six years have just caused my brain to become mush.
Was it this piece by New York magazine? I think I had similar impressions. As I understand it, NY magazine isn’t known for the same biases/slant as the post, but please correct me on that.
Curses! Foiled by moderation. :-P
I might have messed up some " or "e; tags or perhaps it was the link?
I guess it was the link – it went into spam instead of being held, which is odd. Sorry!
I attempted to write a joke about the vast liberal media/big-tech conspiracy to suppress stories about the laptop extending to the WordPress anti-spam plugin… but it seemed ambivalent between too outrageous to be true (therefore funny) and depressingly plausible.