When you make insane claims like “the US has 900 military bases close to China”, you discredit yourself and your entire body of work.

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mark_l_watson 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Please quote me correctly. I said:

“” If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.””

I intended to say 900 in the entire world, but I corrected that in a comment to 750-900.

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4fterd4rk 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They didn't say that. Your reading comprehension is poor.

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abtinf 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.

I would grant them the benefit of the doubt if English wasn’t their native language, but they’d identified as a US citizen elsewhere in the thread and their name strongly implies native speakership.

In the US, this conversational construction in this context is most reasonably interpreted as the second sentence completing the thought in the first.

If a manager asks an employee “how many dents are on the bumber?” A response of “I think the total number is close to 900”, that would be in reference to just the dents on the bumper, not all over the car.

Also, elsewhere in the thread, they’ve acknowledged they simply made the number up (by just repeating what a GPT said).

	▲	layer8 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The sentence starts with “If you look at a map of our military bases”, which refers to all US military bases, not just the ones bordering China. The second sentence refers to that totality of bases. I’d grant that there is a bit of ambiguity, but insinuating an “insane claim” is jumping the gun on a misreading that should have been fairly obvious in light of the “insanity”.
	▲	mark_l_watson 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro in ‘deep research’ mode to give me an estimate.

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infecto 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Perhaps English is not your native language. It at best comes across that many of the 900 are surrounding China and at worst that the 900 is referring to China.

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keybored 6 days ago | parent [-]

> > Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China.

“Many” could be dozens or hundreds or over half. It’s poorly phrased to the point of being meaningless.

> > I think our total number is close to 900.

Total in the world.

	▲	infecto 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Glad you read it that way. The OP wrote it with a narrative of China which is already perplexing since we are mostly talking about Korean and Japanese bases but framing it as around China. You could read it either way. It’s poorly worded and click baity.

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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