No one says it's Normal... they say it works.

Nothing is Normal when it comes down to it, reality is what you can get away with.

If that makes you uncomfortable, then buckle up because reality is what THEY can get away with.

Please stop telling me to stop saying things that I did not say. The word "all" is not even in my comment.

"'Any' video of politicians being confronted"

The only difference between this statement and "all politicians do this" is the politicians who are not confronted about bad behavior. It's a pretty big overlap and sufficient to assert you are coming across as normalizing this behavior.

"any video of politicians being confronted (...), they will almost always (...)"

So not "all" who are confronted, but "almost" all. Not a very big difference, but that's still not "all".

I didn't say "all".

You said:

> The only difference between this statement and "all politicians do this" is the politicians who are not confronted about bad behavior.

That means that in your view, phito's comment was essentially saying that "all politicians do this" (your words), unless they're not confronted. My point was that it's incorrect, because of "they will almost always say" in phito's comment - so the correct reading of that comment would be that almost all politicians do this when confronted, not all.

> "all politicians do this" (your words), unless they're not confronted.

Right. I arrived at "not all" and you arrived at "not all" for different reasons. The combination of our assessments is correct. Both of us are incorrect if you decide that we have to show all our work, correct in that they draw the correct conclusion.

This is HN-tier pedantry that is immaterial to the question of whether or not the above comment is normalizing something not normal.

That's indeed what I meant. English is not my native language so I probably could have worded that better.

Stop worrying about the use of words, none of this ridiculous exchange will change who does what.

I wasn't the one worried about it.

At least in Germany they do it when they have done something that's potentially illegal. You can't fuck up by saying you don't remember and nobody can prove otherwise.

Oliver North had famously poor memory during the Iran-contra hearings. But it was amazingly effective at deflecting accountability, he still appears as a 'expert' on fox news to this day.

Which is a joke, since there had to be a paper trail so his very unreliable memory wasn't the main evidence.

calling out lies only matters if there is accountability and punishment.

ollie north was also lying on behalf of the establishment who wanted to fund anti-communist partisans (the contras, a term only known to most millennials as a nintendo game)