alt Hacker News>The president of the United States was friends with the alleged ring leader of a large pedophile network.
You're making some leaps logic here here. If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile? Surely not, given that pedophilia is considered taboo, we'd expect them to hide it, and therefore at least some friends might not be in the know. That's not to say there's no conspirators, but "he was friends with a pedophile therefore he's a pedophile too" is just guilt by association. What you need to prove is that he knew, or ought to have known that his friend was a pedophile. A conviction works decently for this, because it's presumably public knowledge, although even that's questionable because most people don't do a background check on people they met. In the case of Epstien he also hired reputation management firms to suppress his conviction from showing up in the results, which weakens the case even more.
> You're making some leaps logic here here.
No, you’re just shifting the goalposts.
The original claim was “The president of the United States was friends with the supposed leader of a pedophile ring.”
Your response to that was to imply that over time, they had a falling out. To which my point was, so what? It doesn’t materially change the original claim you challenged.
A falling out in NO way changes that the original statement was correct, the current president of the United States, Donald J Trump, was good friends with the alleged leader of a large scale pedophile network.
> If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile?
If a given friend had their own history of acting like a creepy sex pest when it comes to young women, had a known and close relationship with the alleged leader of a pedophile network AND knew about “the girls”, would I assume them also to be a pedophile? At a minimum, I may in fact conclude that the odds they are also a pedophile are significantly higher than that of the average individual. Birds of a feather and all…
It’s not to say they are of course and it may in fact be as simple as they are nothing more than a creepy sex pest with a bad taste in friends, but NOT a pedophile. I gotta be honest but, me personally, I’d rather be neither.