“Trump blew Clinton” led to it talking about how he “blew Clinton away at the polls in 2016.” Every additional layer of specifity leads to another slight diversion. Adding “Bill Clinton” caused it to recognize that this is in the news right now, but it’s definitely not true because Bubba isn’t Bill Clinton. Telling it that Bubba is Bill’s known nickname caused it to agree that this is true, but Epstein said that “Bubba doesn’t refer to Bill Clinton.” (Epstein is commenting on these emails post-mortem? Maybe I missed something here.) Telling it that Epstein is a known pedophile sex trafficker with ties to these men and reason to lie caused it to admit that Epstein isn’t a reliable source for this, and it tried to dismiss the validity of the emails altogether as “contextually untrustworthy.” I then told it that a known pedophile discussing his practices in a believed to be private email thread is a reasonable context to consider the validity of his statements, but it was tired of me, and went “here are some more links on the subject. Any additional messages with start a new conversation.” This could normal after being 5-6 messages deep with this AI; I had literally never used it before to know, but it felt weird to me.

It is weirdly defensive about the possibility that this had taken place, actively omitting details to bias weird takes.

For extra fun, try posing the statement to Google’s AI mode and watch it try to pretend this isn’t in the news right now, and then make up lies to protect Trump, until it realizes it can’t a suddenly kills the conversation.

I’m not convinced it is obviously a joke. It would explain a LOT.

“All brown people are terrorists” is probably not the take to pull voters from Mamdani. The racists already weren’t voting for him.

You either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself become a hero.

…wait a second.

God, this timeline is fucking weird.

Why the fuck is Trump saying anything? Doesn’t he have a job to do? A golf course to play? A pussy to grab? When’s the last time a president was the primary source of information on a school shooting incident?

I mean, I’m not “thrilled.” Taking out the trash isn’t something to celebrate. You just do it, and then you move on with a cleaner home.

And just like that, gun ownership required a mental health check, and transsexuality was labelled a mental health issue.

Believing police in the USA are anything near well trained or disciplined is naive at best.

Correct, which is why it’s not an opinion I expressed.

My statement was that giving untrained, undisciplined people weapons is a bad thing. The point was to address the whataboutism of “they’re out there shooting us right now,” not to defend the absolute joke that is police in the United States.

Now that I’ve discovered the rest of the article beyond the wall of ads, I agree. I had partial information, and wrongly believed it was all the information, as the blob of ads on my mobile device was a whole screen. That, combined with being on the way out the door in the morning, led me to believe I had read everything and everyone in this thread is insane. Thenn, someone made a specific reference to something I hadn’t read and I was prompted to go look, discovering there is much more article beyond our corporate sponsored break.

I legit thought they scared a dude with a rifle into fleeing, and then shot at him instead of letting him get away.

The dude with the rifle was running. That whole argument is fine when someone is draw weapons and making threats, but they shot at someone trying to flee the scene after causing no harm and killed an innocent. Everything else is imaginary justification.

EDIT: Wondering where the hell everyone else got so much more information, I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text, which makes clear that the dude with the rifle pulled his gun into a firing position on the crowd. Fair enough, I was wrong and the citizen was right to have taken the shot. I blame the ad wall for convincing me that the news article was over.

Sorry, how many protesters were shot and killed by law enforcement this weekend?

Listen, I take your point, but the killing of random civilians isn’t better.

Exactly. The level of cultural brainwashing in this thread is insane. You don’t just let any random volunteer perform jobs like this.

Volunteers were told not to carry a weapon because of outcomes like this. They’re not trained professionals, and they’re definitely not action heroes. And now someone has to explain to a child, a parent, a partner, etc., that the civillian death here was just an unfortunate outcome of a wonderful American citizen protecting his country. It’s actually fucking despicible.

I did miss that bit in the full article, so fair enough. It certainly could be more clear though: they’re burying the lede pretty badly by opening with the wording that insinuates we don’t know.

No, I am responding based on the whole article.

What the fuck does “believed to be” mean in this sentence? Why do we not know? Were they hired protection? Are they a trained professional? Or are they an idiot with a gun who thinks they’re an action hero?

The article is very unclear on this front.

EDIT: Ha, no I wasn’t. Ad space is pervasive, and I had believed I had read the whole article when I had only read like a fifth of it.

Wait, so, trying to follow this: someone pulled a rifle on protestors, so a “concerned citizen” pulled a gun on that person, shot, missed, killed a bystander, and then shot again? Am I following this right? And the person being held accountable for the death is the guy who initially pulled the rifle, not the random citizen firing a weapon into a crowd?

Is this that “American exceptionalism” I keep hearing about?

EDIT - Nevermind, there’s a lot more detail after the wall of ads that convinced me the article was done.

I might have misread a b as an m.

Well, I can be wrong, and they can still be fuckwits.

So DOGE’s cuts saved just over $150 million (apparently I can’t read), and we’ve already burned through most of those saving mobilizing the national guard to tear gas people foolish enough to claim Trump isn’t king? Fantastic. I am so tired of all this “winning.”

Edit: I misread some stuff but the essence of the absurdity I am directing my anger at remains the same. Fuck fascism.

Don’t get me wrong, the gap is huge, but this graph is designed to misrepresent the information.

The scale starts at 45% and tops out at 60%. Even the bottom of the scale is only JUST below half, and the top is only 10% above it. The midway point is not the 50% mark, which one would expect to be the case for a graph showing percentages. So that low point is not the low point the graph insinuates, and the gap is only 15%, not the like 95% differential the graph insinuated until you start looking more closely.

The message is ultimately factual, but misrepresenting data to misrepresent vibes is still misinformation.

I’d challenge the word “illegal” in the Republican strategy, but I’m with the spirit of your post.