TheTechnician27

• I’ve shown you how The Guardian has quoted a statement from the police about the Tesla incendiary to the exact same effect. So “it sure does feel like a pattern” sure feels a lot like bullshit you made up with no evidence.
• After an FBI statement called it an “intentional act of terrorism”, the Guardian article now references this three separate times (I think this was changed like a few hours after you wrote your comment).
• You’re making up a ridiculous strawman about colloquial versus technical terminology, where in reality domestic terrorism’s legal definition is how it’s used colloquially. You did read what I linked, right? Four hours after the bombing, where was the evidence the police were supposed to present showing it was terrorism in the colloquial sense? That it happened at a fertility clinic? Did you play Ace Attorney and think “Now that’s how we should do detective work”?
• “be[ing] very carefully precise with language” is 1) exactly what the police should be doing and consequently 2) exactly what any reputable newspaper should be reporting in the immediate aftermath absent additional sources, and 3) not even what was happening here; if you think not throwing around “terrorism” in the immediate aftermath of a bombing where the perpetrator is dead is “very carefully precise”, then I hope high school essays and forum posts are the extent of your writing. If you want sensationalist bullshit, don’t rag on good outlets; go to Newsweek and consume your slop.
• Not at all what sealioning is.

I don’t know what you want except to make yourself look like a jackass who can’t learn from their mistake when gracefully given the opportunity.

I’m not going to rag on NJSpradlin or tburkhol; I tried to debunk what they said on a factual, dispassionate basis. Their comments to me are examples of what happens when one side is never held to account for and is constantly rewarded for taking the easy path and spreading disinformation that makes them feel better, while the other side is punished with more lies to correct and is never rewarded for enduring the other side’s firehose of falsehoods, tediously researching their points, and speaking up for truth. These well-meaning comments are made by victims of their environment.

Now more than ever, everyone needs to be a vanguard of the facts, but it’s not hard to see why that’s become so difficult.

Didn’t this just happen less than four hours ago? And ostensibly the perpetrator is dead? The police aren’t lawyers and have more leeway with what they accuse people of (let alone a dead(?) person), but domestic terrorism has a specific criminal definition. In four hours, the police have responded, gotten people to safety, made sure the attacker was dead(?) and there were no others, and started to investigate the scene. And you surmise that during that investigation, they’ve so far found compelling evidence this person whose corpse(?) may not even be identified yet was motivated by one of the intentions in Criterion B?

Also, who’s “they” who very actively came out with terrorism first? Trump and Musk? Because literally of course the fascists did. I’d like to see what the police said in the first few hours of those attacks. Moreover, why do you want to whataboutism to alleged bad police behavior elsewhere to explain why the police should behave badly here?

Edit: here’s how The Guardian covered a story about an incendiary device at a Tesla dealership two months ago. Notice how it’s fascist Trump mouthpiece Pam Bondi talking about “terrorism” so immediately, while the police statement mentions nothing of the sort.

“On Monday, March 24, 2025, at approximately 8.04am, Austin police department (APD) officers responded to a found/abandoned hazardous call at the Tesla dealership located at 12845 N US 183 Hwy SVRD NB,” Austin police department said in a statement shared with CBS Austin.

“When officers arrived on scene, they located suspicious devices and called the APD bomb squad to investigate. The devices, which were determined to be incendiary, were taken into police custody without incident. This is an open and ongoing investigation, and there is no further information available for release at this time.”

They’re happy to call it an intentional act of violence, so they’ve ruled out a lot of the explanations for an exploding car.

That’s Criterion A and the first part of Criterion B* of domestic terrorism. There are three criteria, and the second part of Criterion B is the hardest.

The bar for “terrorism” is pretty low - they charged an Atlanta student with is for tossing bottles of water and dry ice out his window.

The bar for terrorism is as defined in what I just linked, and specifically Criterion B is where most of the uncertainty would lie.

Regardless, it’s definitely a journalistic choice whether to quote the police lieutenant’s very careful, and possibly technical statement, or to quote the business owner (Musk) or US President speculating.

The Guardian is a UK-based center-left newspaper with a generally good track record of journalistic integrity. Yes, quoting the police lieutenant is a choice here, because it’s the correct one. They currently have the most information about the situation. This isn’t rhetorical, I genuinely don’t understand: do you want them quoting Trump’s unhinged rant about this bombing that I don’t think he’s even put out yet?

And maybe it just turns out that it’s carefully ethical journalists reporting on potential right-wing violence, and usually unethical hacks reporting on possible attacks on the corporatocracy, but it sure does feel like a pattern.

Dude, it’s The Guardian. Here’s how they recently covered Tesla dealerships if you care to explain how it’s biased compared to this story.

* By “first part of”, I mean the phrase “appears to be intended”. What it appears to be intended to do is the hard part.

Something tells me you never visited the article itself and only read the first four paragraphs OP posted on Lemmy. If you had, you would’ve seen this:

“Everything is in question, whether this is an act of terrorism,” Palm Springs police lieutenant William Hutchinson told the Desert Sun newspaper.

They’re not suspiciously avoiding anything; they may literally not know yet, and immediately jumping definitively to terrorism while they work out what happened is irresponsible, because “terrorism” isn’t just an epithet: it’s a real, actual, specific crime.

Uhh… yeah, goddamn. The Daily Beast citing the Daily Mail as their source is really something. Not only do we not use them as a source on Wikipedia, and not only was this the first source ever to be deprecated there in this way because of how egregious they are, but we don’t even allow their online historical archives because they’ve been caught faking those too.

The Daily Mail isn’t a rag; it’s sewage. It single-handedly motivated the idea that there are sources bad enough that Wikipedia just prohibits their usage everywhere (except in rare cases in an about-self fashion, but I don’t know if editors would even trust that anymore). The Daily Beast isn’t the pinnacle of credible journalism, but it isn’t abysmal either.

Edit: sorry, here’s a source instead of just “my source is that I made it the fuck up.”

blame will still be placed on the war.

Yes, it will, and to a large extent rightly so. I’d hope you understand that this insane fucking whiplash means the following:

1. Logistics have been made more complicated and therefore expensive.
2. Some companies have probably already made expensive changes based on this that can no longer be turned back.
3. Companies (especially small businesses) now feel like they have to “make hay while the Sun shines”, i.e. make money while Trump isn’t tarrifing our biggest source of imports at a gajillity-billion percent. This way they don’t go bankrupt the next time Trump decides to collapse the economy from his phone on the toilet. (EDIT: And to be clear, Trump himself is explicitly saying he will 90 days from now. No remotely stable business is going to say "oh, okay, we’ll just make all of our financial decisions based on this three-month window of quasi-normalcy and not account for the indefinite period of fuckery that’s all but certain to follow.)
4. Consumers (correctly) being worried over this means they’re (correctly) less likely to buy product. If businesses want to stay in business, they either need to downsize or sell each item for more.
5. EDIT: China also isn’t our only trading partner. Exorbitant new tariffs on other countries still exist and still massively impact prices.

I’m 100% certain there are things I’m failing to consider here. Trump moved past the point on the curve where deformation can be considered elastic.

The original AP article so you don’t have to use the slop site it’s syndicated to.