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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Trump is saying that military intelligence indicates that it's a bomb:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tPvH-CqH7Q8

Edit: why am I being downvoted. I am not agreeing with him or saying he is right. Just stating what was said. It seems noteworthy that the president of the US commented on it regardless of accuracy or trustworthiness.

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Unnamed defence officials are contradicting it say they have no idea what he is talking about.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/politics/defense-official...

When I was trying to get as much information as I could (I'm a Lebanese abroad) I automatically mentally filtered out/skipped what trump was saying. Literally not worth the time. Anything officials say unofficially has more value to me.

Unverified and likely false information (fake news) is downvoted. If you question the accuracy of the information it's better, still not good, but you didn't before your edit.

> On the flip side, perhaps knowing that you are off the hook for paying for the expense of many children would increase the desire to reproduce?

Prosperity, and strong social safety nets in particular, have been shown to lead to decreased propensity to reproduce. The less one relies on family for old age, disability, unemployment, etc., support, the smaller families people have.

It is literally true that Trump said it was a military attack, as OP stated. This is verifiable.

That Trump's statement is false and dangerously irresponsible is not OP's fault.

Generally other people's misinformation should not be shared without some kind of disclaimer that it isn't true

I agree with your sentiment. There are videos that appear to depict the main explosion resulting from a missile strike, the folk filming react to it as it enters the frame immediately prior to detonation.

It's wrong to classify something false with certainty when it is just conjecture and likely of a political nature at that.

https://twitter.com/imranarainppp/status/1290729309301350400...

If it looks like a bird and fly like a bird, perhaps it's a bird. But perhaps a missile strike, as the leader of the worst biggest power suggested.

Trump’s statements on the matter are of no interest though. If it was possibly going to lead to some imminent executive action, then it might be. It all depends. For most topics, his statements are not worthy of posting here imho.

Trump is not a reliable source for anything. He lies/misleads more than he tells the truth whenever he's talking about something verifiable as far as I can tell.

I agree with you, just thought his statement was related and noteworthy.

Agreed. Your downvoters were categorically confused.

Disagree. I downvoted not for its obvious falsity, but because the non-consequential statements of a fraudulent buffoon are of no interest in a forum like this. Such quotes only raise the heat and noise level here.

If it was a consequential statement, that would be different.

On some matters, we must pay close attention to what he says, because it can warn us of big mistakes he is about to make. So he does make some statements that are consequential. But this determination of whether a statement is consequential or not is not dependent on whether the statement is false or not. It’s more dependent on the details of the context, and how those fit in the whole picture.

"We have a very good relationship with the people of Lebanon and we will be there to help. It looks like a terrible attack," Trump told reporters at the White House.

"I've met with some of our great generals and they just seem to feel that this was not some kind of manufacturing explosion type of an event ... They seem to think it was an attack. It was a bomb of some kind."

Why is Trump used as a source on HN? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that man say something that was useful or true.

I’m not American, mind you, so I’m certainly biased because he’s mainly in our media when he does something stupid, but everything I have ever heard him say about Europe has been so far from the truth that it’s hard to take his word on anything.

It might be worth mentioning in some context, just not necessarily in the form it was mentioned above.

> I don’t think I’ve ever seen that man say something that was useful or true.

Bashing a foreign president is easy but why don't you keep it to the facts?

No, I'm not an American either.

Well, turned out it wasn’t a bomb. So the anecdotal record holds.

You are mixing up two related issues.

Trump may be a terrible source for actual facts. You would be nuts to use his statements as advice for running your own dockyard, for example.

Nevertheless, what he thinks about this is relevant because it will shape how the US reacts.

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