Nobody here misinterpreted it except the purists who did it intentionally to troll, show off and talk down to people.
StJohnMcCrae
Tell that to northern Ireland, Scotland, Gibraltar, French Guiana or Polynesia.
Both countries still have overseas territories all over the world. It doesn't matter how hard you, they or anyone else tries to legitimize those colonies, that's still what they are.
Why were the French using the Polynesian islands as nuclear testing grounds up through 1996? Would the French government be so lax with testing in their own country? No - that's why they did it in a colony with 200,000 brown people instead.
No I understand what en masse means. I just don't subscribe to your inflexible interpretation.
Language is a tool for communication. It's for the masses, not something to be gate kept or preserved by the priests of lingual orthodoxy. If the words you use convey the intended meaning to the listener, then the wording is adequate.
If everyone's use of language was as rigid as the people insisting we can only use the phrases as they existed when they were imported to an English court by a Norman conqueror a thousand years ago, then we'd all still be communicating by banging rocks together and grunting. The English language evolves every day. It's alive.
It's his hand. You can find other angles of it in the same article. It seems to me that the ms-13 edited onto his digits is meant to be a translation of the symbology of his tattoos:
Marijuana leaf = M
Smiley face = S
Cross = 1
Skull = 3
Is that an accurate representation of what his tattoos mean? I have no idea, I'm not an expert on gang symbology. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The presence of a gang tattoo is something that could be submitted as evidence in court - which is a right the accused was never afforded.
What I am sure of, is that trump intentionally presented this information in such a vague manner so as to muddy the waters so he can come back later and claim his claims were misrepresented by the "lying, dishonest media" - which is itself dishonest.
It's an inkblot test. His detractors will take the claim at face value, and his supporters will dig in and claim we're stupid for not immediately taking his claims as gospel. He doesn't care if his claims hold up in court. He only cares about the court of public opinion, and right now, he's defining that conversation.
Free speech that the mods agree with that is. I was perma banned for c/Europe for privately objecting when a moderator removed this image I posted in a reply decrying antisemitic conspiracy theories in their forum. The mods left the libelous post up, and deleted my sarcastic, but otherwise civil response.
Maybe my opinion was wrong, but it certainly wasn't dangerous, hateful, threatening or intentionally misleading, as the original post was. Lemmy has a lot going for it, but let's not pretend that free speech on this site is anything other than window dressing. The Mods are still judge, jury and executioner inside their fiefdoms.
It just hasn't become a problem for the majority of users, because we're a relatively small, ideologically homogeneous community. If the fediverse ever becomes mainstream, you'll start seeing that freedom of speech disappear as moderators sort out the dissenters, and authoritarians work their way into positions of authority.
Ok.