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I did contest what he said!
I said that I can not find any even semi decent evidence the claims of the X user he cites as his argument are real.
How about instead of having a meta conversation, we have the actual conversation where someone finally provides semi decent evidence for their claims a guy was charged for bruising and officers fists while blocking beyond "guy on X said so".
It all seems like a way to dodge that maybe said evidence might not actually exist. I couldn't find any! You double checked and didn't find it. So where is it?
Where in the photo does it back the claim the guy was charged for injuring an officer while defending himself? Seriously, go look at the photo and tell me how I can glean "This guy was later charged for blocking punches".
There isn't any way. It does not back up the claims at all.
Ok, timeout: is English your second language? I don't mean that as an insult -- obviously your English is very, very good; I've assumed you're a native speaker until now. But I have a vague lingering memory that you're Swiss (?), so it seems possible that English is a second language for you; and the comment that you just made is compatible with either (1) a native speaker being blatantly dishonest; or (2) a non-native speaker understandably mixing up two things.
Because if it's the latter: please pay more attention to what people are saying. I don't think this is a likely explanation -- I'm more like 70% sure that you know exactly what's going on, and you don't care. But if you're a non-native speaker repeatedly making honest mistakes, please notice! This is why people are accusing you of bad faith; this is why you view other people as horses that can't be led to water -- they're not saying what you think they're saying!
I said:
You replied:
These aren't the same thing. "contesting that you lied" is not the same thing as "contesting what he said". You keep making "mistakes" like this. Until now, I've assumed these are deliberate lies. I still think that's the more likely explanation, but this specific one made me go: "Huh, is this a language barrier?" I can somewhat understand mistaking these two things if you're speaking a second language, and not recognising that you're failing to actually read what people are saying.
If English is your first language, then obviously none of this is relevant.
Yes! You're welcome to continue having that conversation with FMC. Don't let me stop you. Personally, I'm not at all interested in that argument, which is why I haven't made any comments on it.
Again, I haven't participated in that argument! You don't even know what my position is -- I might even agree with you!
So no, it's not a way to "dodge" anything. I'm not even a participant in the imagined fight you're having. The thing I care about is you saying untrue things about other people on the Motte; for me, that's the object level.
The language thing notwithstanding: you are lying, again. I did not "double check". I copy-pasted a thing from ChatGPT to show that your standard of "checking" with AI is nonsense. That was my entire point, as I've now explained to you infinity billion + 1 times. Why are you still pretending otherwise?
No idea! Don't care. Not a thing I've actually claimed, though, is it?
Again, please learn to read what people are actually saying. I'm not going to defend a position that I've never held; pretending that I've held that position is dishonest.
That's fine. I'd appreciate you possibly engaging with the actual words in my comment, not some imagined alternative version. My comments have been about you lying; it's hard to see how I could've been clearer.
I didn't lie about what he said, I addressed his specific claims. There has yet been no evidence presented that the guy was charged for bruising a cop's knuckles while blocking. But even if that was the case and he was charged for it, there's also no evidence it's the only thing he was charged for.
Perhaps he flashed a weapon. Perhaps he threatened to hurt one of the cops. Or something else like that. Maybe he did something that the cops rightfully thought needed subduing, and he was charged with flashing a weapon + resisting arrest or whatever. I don't know, no one has presented a single thing about the case beyond "guy on X said so".
The idea that he was unfairly abused from the picture is unsubstantiated then. Cops are supposed to subdue potential threats, and police doing their jobs properly is ridiculously more common than the extreme police brutality alleged.
Whether their behavior is appropriate is highly conditional on the suspect's actions. A photo of a cop rightfully subduing an apparant threat can look very similar to one of unfair abuse.
You might not have intended to but you did double check. You asked if it had any knowledge about the case and it did not. That's a double check. If it was real then it might have known about it and told you.
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These are different claims, and the former is the one you were originally called out for.
Those claims are related since saying the cops response was unfair is conditional. After all cops subduing someone they believe to be dangerous is expected and desired behavior from cops.
If the only charge is "they bruised a cop's knuckles when blocking" then it would probably be unfair. But there has been no evidence presented that is the case. Why did the cops do that? Why specifically him? Like most accusations of police brutality, it's probably because he actually did something that the police rightfully thought needed subduing.
It is possible to be unfairly assaulted by cops and not be charged for bruising the cops' knuckles, or indeed charged at all. It is also possible to be reasonably beaten down by cops and be charged for bruising the cops' knuckles (though I'd argue that the charge would not be especially reasonable).
Being hit by cops is a physical action in the conflict, and its fairness is a moral judgement. Being charged for dubious reasons is a legal action after the conflict. There is no relation between these things. Both, either or neither could be true for all I know, but half of the reason you're catching so much flak is that you keep arguing against the photo demonstrating the latter when your original claim was that the photo provides no evidence for the former (and a photo of someone being hit by police is significant Bayesian evidence of him being hit unfairly, since if real it rules out that he was not hit at all, whereas it is nigh-completely irrelevant to the question of what charges were or were not brought).
The other half is that you keep saying that he "double-checked" your use of ChatGPT and are using that as evidence. What he was demonstrating there was that ChatGPT contradicted itself (it told you that the claim was false, but later told him that it doesn't know whether it's true or not) and thus its opinion should be accorded zero weight (the explanation for the contradiction, incidentally, is that chatbots are shameless liars and sycophants).
...In case @stoatherd's second explanation is correct, and you are very confused about the meaning of some of these words: the verb "charge" has multiple meanings. The meaning of "charged" assumed in the context of "charged for bruising the officer's knuckles" is meaning 6 ("someone formally accused him of a crime"), not meaning 12 ("someone ran at him with the intent of attacking him in close combat").
It obviously has no evidence for the latter claim. But also without surrounding context, it doesn't really have evidence for the former either.
Imagine if a suspect says "I have a gun and I am going to shoot up all the cops here". The cops obviously rush him down and try to subdue them. They believe he is resisting (maybe he is actually resisting or maybe he is just frantically trying to block their efforts but the movements look like resisting in the heat of the moment) so they're hitting at him trying to get him to stop.
Could one call this unfair? No.
Those are functionally the same thing under it. If someone says "there is a panda outside" and you look and find no panda, you can reasonably conclude the claim as false. But if someone asks "there is a panda outside, do you know if this is true?" then you can't say you know for sure until you have a check.
And that check is the real difference. I went and used both my wording triggers it to search the internet. His wording does not trigger the search. ChatGPT does not look out the window for a panda with his wording.
If you add just three words before his wording, "search the net", ChatGPT says it can not be verified as true and is a meme wording.
It looks outside and can't find a panda.
Yes I understand that, why do you think I said court documents would suffice as evidence.
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