> 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).

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”.

No, I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro in ‘deep research’ mode to give me an estimate.